Sushrut Bidwai

Search owned most of this decade. Information search, product search, images, news, location based and so on. New decade will mostly be around numbers, statistics. Google is already moving towards it from trends we see this year.  We should expect this market to get really competitive and to come of age in next few years.

Misc Data, google, internet

I have been using google wave for managing few discussions and thought it would be good to share it with every one else.

First a bit of context -

Most of the teams I am part of (tech/sales/business) are distributed. Some people are in different timezones and hence managing a all-hands meeting/discussion is kind of tricky. Off course most of the things are taken care of over emails, but when you are at a particular milestone, its important to organize discussions in more disciplined manner.  So far meeting organizer would publish agenda 2 days ahead of time over email, or publish it on some sort of dashboard. Everybody goes through agenda, prepare their pre-meeting notes and bullet points. Then we conduct a voice conference using conference bridge or multi-party skype call. During meeting, everybody is taking down minutes, notes and publishing them after meeting is over. Meeting organizer will gather such feedback, inputs from every one and publish it as a road-map and follow up items. So far this worked well. But Google wave just helps us to make this a bit better.

How to use Google wave? Or rather how we are using it.

We create one wave and invite all concerned people (participants, observers, boards) to that wave. Meeting organizer will put down agenda as first message. Every body puts down their pre-meeting notes, inputs and organizer will keep on refining agenda taking this feedback. Any documents, links (including links to JIRA/Basecamp/Unfuddle) are posted to this first message. During meeting, we start talking about each bullet point from agenda message one by one. Call is still organized over skype or conf-bridge, but we make sure every body has access to wave during the call, so that minutes, notes are typed right there. So once meeting begins and every body has introduced, we start creating a message for each bullet point. Every body posts their thoughts, notes as we speak to this message as a reply. Once the meeting is completed, organizer will put up a concluding message on the wave with summary. No need to collate all minutes, as they happen in real time as we are speaking.

Benefit -

Typically most of us receive about 70-80 odd emails everyday. It is pain to keep track of all of them and their replies and play them back. Play back feature of wave is just a winner on its own! Second, we can attach various things to email, but we can embed them in wave. A slight difference, but a major benefit to make sure you can put context of the document and the document itself right next to each other. Real time notes sharing reduces time required to go through all of them and summarize. Since our use of wave is still limited, its easy to search through it much faster.

Typically we conduct road-map discussions for existing projects/products we are working on. This includes business discussions + technology. We also use this for preparing for a sales meeting and also for a sales meeting itself, when ever possible.

Hope this helps.

Misc google, Organizing, Wave

Every where I have gone, be it barcamps, be it startup events, one question asked by lot of budding entrepreneurs is “What if BIG companies decide to enter my market and compete with me?”. What I generally feel is small companies, startups should not be afraid of competing with big companies. Instead big companies are always afraid that some entrepreneur is going come up with bright idea and take up market pie.

Reasons why you should not fear big companies -

1. Google factor - Google is not the only company around. Yes, it is one of the most respected, highly competitive company with great products, has tremendous market reach. But still it is not the only company. There are many big companies Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Time Warner, Facebook and others.
2. Big companies ain’t that big - So Google is around 100Bn, Microsoft is around 300Bn in market capitalization. These companies bring in few billion dollars in profit. True. That does not mean they can invest all this profit in new product. Nope. They have to pay dividends, provide market guidance, provide information about capital expenditure. If a startup is well funded i.e. backed by VC, it typically has amount of cash necessary to compete with biggies. Series A + B funding is typically the amount biggies will also invest in some new product, at least to start off with. So on cash wise you are almost as big as them.
3. Market mobilization - Once a big company enters a market, it enters huge. It mobilizes millions of users/customers. If you are smart and can position yourself well, you can take advantage of such market conditions which are in fact very conducive for your product offerings.
4. Smoother and better exit options - Say you built a new kick-ass web application. And Google decides to copy your idea and build a me-too product. Good, in fact great for you. Now every big company which is looking to compete with Google will be interested in the market and essentially looking to acquire you. These companies will be giving you much better valuations, better terms and conditions and more respect!
5. VC interest - Its very very difficult to convince VCs about competition and about market size. Once a big company enters your market, you have a case study which you can sell to VCs a little more easily than otherwise you would have.
6. Agility of management - Google CEO and co-founders might be the best in the world. I think they are. But can they be as Agile as you? How much do they have to lose if they make mistake? Billions of dollars. How much you have to lose? Probably nothing. You have only one thing to focus on. They have 100s or 1000s of things asking for attention. You are competing with, say, only them. They are competing with lot of such entrepreneurs in varied markets. So you can move much faster. Adapt to market requirements quickly. Your spiral of innovation is much more faster than theirs.  One example - It took months for Google to actually integrate Orkut and Blogger or Orkut and Picasa. Still integration is not perfect, you cant view comments on blog in Orkut. Hence, its not so easy for companies like Google to catch up with market. That’s why they acquire in the first place instead of building.

Bottom-line is don’t worry about big companies. Millions of dollars have been invested in search based startups, after the Google went public. Why? Because VCs know market is huge and they know that even Google can be defeated! Go for it.

PS: Thanks for your feedback on theme. I guess I will continue with this one for next couple of months and will review again.

Startup entrepreneurship, google, startup advice, startups

Web is changing. It will keep on changing more rapidlly henceforth. Newton’s laws of motion doesnt just limited to physics. But in which direction? Media management is becoming easier and easier. Features like photo-tagging, video-tagging are now common place. Video advertisements etc are also taking up. But I, person who spends 16 hours in front of the new idiot box and mostly doing things like sending emails, chatting, twitting, setting up meetings, skype calls, monitoring development process and some technical work, want to see few features listed below.

1. Standards. Calendar, blogs are now common place. Every tom, dick and harry who has site on web has these features. Can we standardise them? Google/Yahoo/Microsoft are you listening? Why cant I stream all my previous blogs to this blog? Same goes for micro-blogging. Web is suppose to be information-sharing platform, share it. Not just on your site but let other site integrate with you and economics of such integration can be figured out (thats what MBAs are for right?)

2. Open integrations. If you have standards integration will be piece of cake! For example what I need today is something like this, I send a email seting up a meeting to some one I have not met before in a cafe. Then Thunderbird (which I use and recommend) should have some plugin which gives me ability to publish it on my calendar and calendar of the person I am meeting and other invites if any. Along with that using my plaxo or local address book, person should be SMSed about the meeting. If I want I should be able to clip map from google Map and embed it in the e-mail. Everything should get pushed pushed to my other devices (laptop/smart phones/etc etc). 

3. Smart integrations and rule specifications. I often forget to send follow up emails after a meeting. I know its a bad bad bad habit, but . What I want is when  I send an email which is a meeting/conf call request or receive one and I accept that, then automatically my reminders should be set to send an follow up mail. And all this should happen through rules that I set using some cool visual tool and not python/perl.

4. Development tool integrations. A person check-ins a patch who reports to me, so I am suppose to review it and approve it before branches are merged. Cant I get automatic notification of check-in. Cant my to-do list be updated and reminders set.  Is there some one who can for once integration requirement analysis, use case point estimations, task management, bug management tools under on consitent GUI?

Note that all ideas are mine and if you work on any of those then you should send me this .

There are few more ideas which will follow soon.

Ideas, Startup email, google, microsoft, open integration, social media, standards, Startup, startup advice, startup idea, thunderbird, yahoo