Prateek Dayal

I have been in Ho Chi Minh City for the last two weeks and I am hoping to document my experience in this and (hopefully) few more blog posts. Basically it all started when I met Lawrence Sinclair last month in Bangalore and we talked about Ruby on Rails and East Agile (his company in Vietnam). I told Lawrence how both Nithya and I love traveling and would love to come over to Vietnam sometime and he offered me a two week consulting assignment in Vietnam. I accepted it and on 2nd August arrived in Ho Chi Minh (more on the journey and emmigration/immigration experience in another blog post).

I was expecting to see something like Bangalore but I was in for a total surprise (and a pleasant one at that). The city is big, not as crowded as Bangalore and hundred percent fun. First thing that you notice is that the cabs are very efficient here (if you follow this advice and get a good one) and as a result its very easy to get from anywhere to anywhere any time of the day. I have used the cabs as late as 4 AM and I have always had a very pleasant experience. Another thing that I loved about the city is the different kinds of cuisines that you can sample here. So far, I have tasted Vietnames, Korean and Japanese food and desserts and everything has been really good and reasonably priced. I never thought I would say this but the vegetarian food here is exceptionally good. Here are a few pictures from MoF (Ministry of Food), a japanese dining and desserts place

This place has a great night life and a lots of live music. A lot of restaurants have live music and there are some great places for rock lovers. Most places are open till 2 AM. There are a lot of cafes and clubs which are open all night and you can get some great food all through the night. Here is a picture of a place called Q-Bar which serves coffee and drinks till about 3 AM in the morning.

Thats all for now. I will post more pictures and updates/info in another blog post. So long!

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Last month I finally  bought an iPhone (3GS). So far I have absolutely loved using it and even though its a bit expensive I think it’s totally worth having. Here are a few things that I really like

Camera

The iPhone camera is only 3 MegaPixel but it takes great pictures. I have not played around with the video recording much but here is one shot that I took using the iPhone

App Ecosystem

I downloaded a few apps and was blown away by the number of apps available on the platform. There is an app available for every need. Here are some of the apps that I use almost daily now

• Twitter for iPhone
• Google’s App (for muziboo mail, google reader)
• Notes (comes bundled with iPhone)
• Clock (comes bundled with iPhone. You can add clocks for different timezones and see them at once)
• Safari (comes bundled)
• Facebook

I also downloaded and tried out a few racing games. Even though I am not a gaming freak, I was very impressed by the games available on the iPhone. The responsive accelerometer makes most games on the iPhone a lot of fun.

SMS/Push Notifications

I liked the fact that you don’t have to unlock your iphone to view short sms and push notifications from apps like Facebook and Mail. It’s very handy and saves a lot of time if you are a heavy messaging user (who isn’t?)

The not so great things

To keep it fair, there are somethings I did not like about the iPhone.

• Even though there is 16GB built in storage, you cannot use iPhone as a USB drive (something I could do with Nokia 5800)
• Slide to answer call
• Need to use iTunes to transfer music and videos
• The not so great battery life (its better w/o wifi but still not as great)
• Some apps which don’t change orientation, forcing me to type on the smaller keyboard (Gmail for example)
• A common cable for usb and the charger, forcing you to buy an expensive accessory or unplug the cable from your computer everytime you wanna use the wall charger

Overall its a great phone and a great investment. I think the iOS4 update should make it an even better phone.

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Deepan has started a Facebook Developers Meetup Group and the first meet is happening on 7th March 2010. You can find the details on upcoming.

I will be giving a presentation on basics of Facebook Connect and a small tutorial on developing a simple application using FB Connect. This is the same talk that I gave earlier in ACM’s compute event. However, unlike the ACM event, this event is free to attend.

See you there!

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Facebook Connect is a powerful set of APIs for developers that lets users bring their identity and connections everywhere. – Facebook Connect Page at Facebook Developer site

In simple terms, Facebook Connect lets you provide a ‘Login with Facebook’ functionality on your website. Once users login with their Facebook credentials, you can help them post the activity they perform on your website back as news feeds on Facebook. You can see Facebook Connect in action at Muziboo. In fact, our implementation was the winner in Facbook Developer Contest India.

If you want to implement FB Connect on your site, there are plugins available for some blogging tools and popular CMS packages. However, if you have your own platform, you need to use their Javascript library to integrate the functionality. I will be doing a hands on tutorial at the upcoming Compute 2010 conference in Bangalore on building applications using Facebook Connect. Here is what we will go through:

• What is Facebook Connect and what are the benefits of using it.
• A simple application for logging into a site using FB Connect, perform an activity and post a news feed on Facebook
• Advanced capabilities of Facebook Connect (ex. sending email to the user)
• Integrating with your login/signup mechanism
• A note on the terms and policies of FB Connect

Prerequisites: The tutorial will assume familiarity with Facebook platform and working knowledge of Ruby and Javascript.

Hope to see you there! If you are a startup, you can apply for some free passes. More information here.

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I have decided to take a break from startup related blogging and review a few gadgets that I bought in the recent past (and some services I used in last few months). Enjoy the posts.

The first one is a review of the Nokia 5800 xpress music phone that I got in August. I had an imate (windows mobile) phone before and though it had some good features, it had a very tough interface and wasn’t very usable. Also, I was not very happy with the build quality and spent a lot of time gluing the parts together every time it fell down.  Apart from decent build quality, this time I wanted to buy a phone which had the following features

• Wi-fi, Email and a decent web browser (atleast usable enough to login to some web consoles and perform admin tasks for Muziboo in case of an emergency)
• A usable music player with decent headphones  (I generally look for good bass)

I wanted to upgrade to an iphone but found it to be damn expensive (in India and US). I then ran into some reviews of 5800 and decided to buy it as it offered great features for its price. Since there are a lot of detailed spec reviews of 5800 on the net, I will just post what I personally liked and disliked after using the phone for a couple of months

The Good

• Wi-fi is very easy to setup and works great. You can easily select if you want to connect to Wi-Fi/ GPRS everytime an applications wants to access internet. The web browser is also pretty usable and supports Javascript (and more importantly flash)
• Comes with a 8 GB memory card (upto 16 GB supported)  so you can load hundreds of songs on it. It has a pretty decent music player and the video playback is great too. The bundled headphones are good quality and it supports a standard 3.5mm phone jack so you can use better desktop headphones too. The headphones come with controls for next/previous/stop/play/pause and volume so its very easy to change tracks while you are on a treadmill. It also comes with lots of preloaded music (both Hindi and English).
• There are some pretty useful apps available for symbian (such as putty)
• There is a 3.0 megapixel camera that takes decent pics. Not as great as a cybershot phone camera but good enough to capture memories. You can see a pic I took here
• It has a pretty big screen (bigger than iphone screen)
• Comes with maps and GPS (3 months free trial)
• Its currently priced at 13.5k so its pretty cheap (I got it for around 16.5k). strongly recommend checking out offersforshoppers.com for 5800’s coupons

The Bad

• Does not charge through a USB cable. You need to carry the stupid Nokia charger. I find this pretty irritating
• The touchpad is not as good as that of an iPhone (However its still pretty usable)
• There are not as many apps available for 5800. iPhone clearly is a winner here

Overall I find the phone good value for money. Let me know if you have any questions.

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I will be at BCM 6 on Oct 11 2009. If you are around, I would love to catch up. Please email me at prateek AT Muziboo dot com if you are planning to attend and wanna catch up. See you there!

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I tried importing my gmail address book into Facebook today using their friend finder and it showed me about 500 contacts that I can add as friends. I scanned the whole list and selected contacts that I know well and hit the invite button. In the summary, I was shown about thousand extra contacts (including some mailing lists, some old university addresses) that the invitation were sent to. I got some 5 invitations myself, sent to different email aliases I have. I don’t even remember seeing those email addresses (including my own aliases) in the list of contacts shown to me.

I wonder why a company like Facebook has such a misleading invitation mechanism. When Facebook says that you have X contacts that you can add as friend and shows their photo next to their names, anyone would assume that these are people already on Facebook. Turns out a lot of these people are not on Facebook and there is no separate list of contacts who are not on FB, but can be invited (which is a common two step invitation practice followed by sites like Twitter/LinkedIn etc).

If you have received an invite to join Facebook from me, please accept my apologies and ignore it. I did not mean to send even a single invite. I have never even invited all my contacts to Muziboo, my own startup so I particularly hate being labeled as a spammer when FB spams on my behalf.  Thanks so much FB for breaching my trust!

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Nithya and I were at XtremeStartups’ Startup Morning in Bangalore on 24th May 2009.  We talked about Muziboo’s early days, our philosophy and our learnings. The discussion was moderated by Indus Khaitan and MVP Team captured the talk on video. Other speakers were Phanindra Sama of Redbus and Himanshu from LifeMojo. Here is the audio from part 1 of the talk where we talk about Muziboo. We start talking only at around 13:00. Before that, you can hear Suryanarayan talk about NSRCEL. Since this was a video capture, the audio quality is not all that great (but you can catch most part).

Muziboo @ XtremeStartups | Music Upload

If you liked this talk, you can subscribe to XtremeStartups’ RSS or iTunes feed  or visit XtremeStartup’s Muziboo page. If you have any feedback/questions on what we spoke, please leave them as comments.

On a related note, I would be very thrilled to see more events/people use Muziboo for sharing podcasts or lectures. We provide RSS/iTunes Feeds/Follow By Email along with detailed stats on usage. Pro Account holders can upload upto 30 MB per file (which is about 1 hour of 64kbps audio file).

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I was part of the panel discssion at the  xtremestartups event on Sunday and one of the topics we discussed was funding a startup by consulting on the side. I strongly believe in two things – bootstrapping and working full-time on one’s startup – but there are real costs involved in starting up that one needs to take care of. In case one doesn’t  have enough money saved up, consulting is the only feasible option (other than getting funded). It’s best to avoid even consulting (by running a lean and mean start-up) as it takes one’s focus off the start-up. But most times it is inevitable and I recommend the following tips to make the best out of your consulting stint.

Pick the right projects

Of all the things that I have learnt about consulting, this is the most important one. Here are a few guidelines that can help you pick the right projects.

• Charge by the hour and never opt for fixed budget projects however-much enticing they are. All software projects tend to get delayed. The delays don’t mean much if you are in the consulting business, but if you are trying to raise cash for your startup, every extra day lost  reduces your product development runway. If billing is by the hour, you can make sure that such delays don’t hurt you. It also makes sure that you get only relevant change requests (since the client is paying for every hour spent).
• Pick projects that you like working on and teach you things that can be applied to your own idea. For example, if you are planning to work on an e-commerce portal (or want to add a payment gateway to your existing product), you can pick up a similar project and learn relevant stuff there.
• Don’t mind dirty maintenance jobs as they are short and well-paid. As engineers, we tend to love working from scratch and hate fixing bugs in someone else’s code. End-to-end product development cannot be delivered in a few sittings unlike a well defined back end work. Also you will make big bucks  in projects that are already live, because  your contribution as a subject matter expert  is extremely important for the company in fixing its product.
• On a related note, avoid projects that involve working on the UI. These jobs involve talking to the designer, taking the CEO’s viewpoint on buttons/boxes and cross browser hell. Compare this to backend work, where you can work all by yourself, whenever you want and finish the job much more quickly. You want to avoid any sort of job that has too many stakeholders.

Don’t grow your consulting business

Once you pick up a project, there are inevitably more such project offers coming your way and most often you will be tempted to hire a couple of freshers and a manager and spin off a consulting business – an amazingly self sustained money generating machine of a business that requires minimal effort  that can keep funding your product development. If you go down that Utopian path, before long you would realize that most of your time is spent in business development, following up on payments, motivating your employees and other mundane activities. If product company is what you want to build, do not shift focus. Take up just as much  as you can do than sinking into the quagmire of a services business. The cash reserve that you build should be just enough to give a decent runway for growing your startup.

Get Paid

While this looks like the most obvious one, many people make a mistake here. As engineers, we tend to charge based on our needs and not our skill set and its value in the market. Talk to  few of your peers and figure out how much to charge before you quote. Don’t charge lesser than the market rate and make sure that you get paid. Sometimes, your clients are too busy and paying you may not be the top priority item in their to-do list. Follow up and get paid. If possible, take an advance payment before starting out and decide on milestones for remaining payment.

You can’t always balance it right

One more setback which is not quite obvious on first glance is the time-sink that can happen due to continuous context switching between consulting projects and your start-up idea. Consulting is going to take your focus away for a while and your startup’s growth may suffer because of that. The idea is to accept that upfront and not let it bring you down. The last thing you wanna do is to end up demotivated. If you are working all day on consulting projects, there is no point  forcing yourself to work on your startup at night. There is only so much one can code every day and any spare time should be used to reflect upon your  start-up’s growth and strategy. If you are adventurous, you can also use this break to catch up on your reading or hang out with friends :)

In the end, figure out what works best for you and do it. Idea is to make some money, learn something new and have some fun. When you get back fulltime to your startup, you should be richer and invigorated!

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When we started Muziboo two years back, we had no idea how much money was needed to get a company off the ground. Both Nithya and I had our day jobs and we never consciously worked out the finances. We started to think about money only when we went full-time and eventually went broke. Like most people who have no entrepreneurial experience, we only thought of hosting costs (and were wrong there too!). During the course of two years, we have realized that even though its possible to bootstrap a startup cheaply, you need substantially more than $0. Here are some of the costs we have encountered on the way

Hosting & Backup Costs

Depending on how fast your site grows, you will have to get atleast a VPS server and eventually a dedicated server. Shared hosting does not work out most times for anything serious. For a VPS, you can expect to pay around $50 a month and for dedicated hosting, something around $150  a month.  You will also need to invest in backups. We backup all user data (mp3, photos) and database dumps at S3 using s3sync. You can always backup locally on your harddisk but you need to consider how much it will take for you to restore all the data over your DSL connection. You would also wanna signup for a service like pingdom to receive sms alerts if your service goes down.

Apart from hosting and backup costs, you may have to spend on code/ticket hosting. You can always host your own svn/git and trac but its always better to outsource that kind of stuff. When you are starting with a small team (1/2 people), you can expect to pay $5 – $10 a month.  Putting everything together, you can expect to pay around $200 a month on your hosting needs (once you achieve some reasonable scale).  This comes down to about $2400 a year or Rs 120,000. Overall, you can expect to spend around Rs 130K to Rs 140K a year on your hosting related needs.

Chairs & Desks

If you are gonna be working fulltime on your startup, you will have to invest in great chairs and decent desks. You cannot work on a bean bag or your dining table every day as its gonna kill your back. We got two simple desks (Rs 1000 each) and two good chairs (Rs 3500 each). So for two people, expect to pay around Rs 10,000. You may also wanna invest in a whiteboard to make sure you have a place to discuss stuff. A decent sized board would cost around 3k.

Computers & Peripherals

You will need to get two desktops (or two insanely great laptops). I personally find working on laptop for long hours very hard. Depending on what you buy, you will need to spend atleast Rs 25,000 per person. Over time, you may have to buy better monitor or better keyboard (the Rs 500 keyboard sucks if you work 8-10 hours a day). If you are buying desktops, you will need to buy a 1KVA UPS which should cost around 20k. If you are buying laptops, you still need to buy a small UPS (Rs 3500) to power up your modem and router in case of power failure. Total costs for this kind of setup should be atleast 80k.

Legal Costs

You will need to get some legal documents in place. You will need Terms and Conditions and privacy document written up by a lawyer.  Lawyer costs vary a lot so I can’t really talk about any estimates. It depends on what business you are in and how much work the lawyer will have to put in to get your documents ready.  You should still expect to spend atleast Rs 25,000 on this . You will also have to file with the copyright office in US and register a designated agent for DMCA complaints with them . This process costs $80 (one time) and more details can be found here. This is absolutely necessary if you have a site where users are going to put up content. Filing this document makes sure that you can’t be sued without being given a chance to remove the offending content from your server first.

So overall , you will need about 2.6 lakhs in the first year to get your venture off the ground. Since this does not include any salary and office rent, you would need sufficiently more. For a two people startup, working out of a house (Rs 10,000 a month) and living a very basic life (Rs 20,000 a month), you will need 6 lakhs a year. So overall, you need about 9 lakhs worth of investment to get even an internet startup off the ground.

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