Prateek Dayal

Airtel Mobile Office basically helps you connect your mobile to laptop and browse the internet. They have two plans, one for Rs 20 a day and other for Rs 99 a week with unlimited browsing in both plans. I have been using it for 3 weeks now and here are the pros and cons

Pros

• Browsing speed is ok. Like old dial up days. You cannot stream media but pretty much browse other stuff
• Works on roaming pretty much across India. I could browse in the train too most times.
• Its not all that expensive given the daily and weekly price and if you compare it with other data cards available in the market

Cons

• The daily plan stops working at 10 AM the next day no matter when you activate it the previous day.
• I once activated the weekly pack and I was charged but the pack never worked. On calling the customer care (at STD rates from Delhi) they told me to activate daily pack.  Effectively I lost around 100 bucks
• The customer service sucks. Don’t expect them to be able to help you with anything at all

I think the cons are not really specific to airtel. They are true with all big companies in India. The attitude is “screw you .. we will treat you whatever way we want and you can’t do anything about it”. Lately I have experienced it with a lot of companies and no matter how much we tweet or blog about our experience the big companies just don’t give a shit about your experience.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Nithya and I attended proto.in, the startup event on 18th and 19th July. It was a very interesting experience. A lot of things I loved .. a lot of things that I found very wierd :)

However before I begin, I would like to mention that the organizing team works very hard at making this event a success. A great thing I noticed was that the organizing team was trying to help every presenting company and I could never see/hear them talk about any startup  with any bias (good or bad). I think thats a really difficult but great thing to do.

Day 1

Proto is a two day event. Day 1 is different for presenting startups. After the keynote you spend most of the day in rehearsals fine tuning your presentation with feedback from the panel. This is fun and useful but the downside is that you miss most of the other talks going on in parallel. However as proto allocates 6 mins for presentation, its good to generally get a feel of timing on stage. The stage is pretty massive and can overwhelm noobies (I swear) so its good to go through the rehearsals. We got some feedback on our presentation but mostly it went fine. Unlike some of the other startups, we had a walk through and no ppt. I think eventually turned out to be good as the response to the demo was very encouraging.

There was an alumni dinner at the end of day one in Gourmet Gallery (hosted by proto) where we got  to catch up with some of the earlier presenters. In particular it was greating chatting with Ankit and Nandini of instablogs. They have built an awesome community of citizen journalists from across the world and they told us about their experiences and challenges. Incidentally, they happen to be a couple as well.

Day 2

The second day of proto is the more exciting one. The day started with an introduction to proto and a video on where the companies that presented in previous proto editions stand. I liked the fact that proto mentioned that 3 companies have shut shop. I think its great to see that failure is no longer considered a bad thing. There was also a Proto for Dummies video which was pretty well done. I think the videos will be up on youtube pretty soon.

After the videos, the presentations started. We were the 6th company to present and the presentation was pretty well received in general. I think we were the only company that finished before time, a fact that WatBlog mentioned on their blog in our company profile! After the presentations the companies were given a stall where they could interact with interested customers/investors or press. I think this is where most of the business cards were swapped. At the end of the day there was an invite only networking dinner at Radisson. However I did not find many VCs there and so ended up hanging out other friends. I think a few people were sort of disappointed by the lack of VCs. I could spot the CEO of Indiatimes there but by the time I could get to him, he disappered. I think it was disappointing to see that most of the high profile people were hanging out amongst themselves and it was sort of difficult to approach them. The mindshare that we thought would happen, did not really happen.

General Observations

I did however talk to a couple of investors during the course of the 2nd day and to quite a few entrepreneurs/ CEOs. It was in fact pretty good talking to the investors. I had always heard that talking to investors gives you a good perspective and I think its true. I had also heard that there are quite a few senior startuppy people who give a lot of gyaan and try to pull you down and I think that is true too. In general its not very hard to find a few people in proto who look like they have come down there just to feel important by giving gyaan to clueless entrepreneurs like me. A lot of times having been in the US helps all the more in exuding superiority. There are also people like BharatMatrimony founder who talk quite modestly and sound very encouraging.

Blogosphere is buzzing with blogs about the companies that presented so I would not write about them. The companies I found most impressive were Lipikaar, Blink, PicPorta and Eko. I would add LifeBlob to the list but then I did not discover them in proto.

In general I think proto is a great place to be. You can meet a lot of interesting people/companies and have a great time besides getting some people excited about your product.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Nithya and I will be attending proto.in on 18th and 19th July in Delhi. If you are around, we would love to meet you and talk to you about Muziboo, life, universe and everything

If you are around, call me at 97410-26443 or email me (prateek AT muziboo DOT com) or sms me. Hope to see you there :)

Popularity: 10% [?]

I am leaving on a long trip soon and therefore decided to get some form of internet connectivity on the move. The most popular option seems to be a reliance or tata CDMA USB modem. The only downside is that you have to pay for a whole year if you want the card free. In any case its a lot of investment if all you want is connectivity for a month or less every year. I therefore looked at the solutions Airtel offers and all i could find out from the website was some basic info on the Mobile Office solution. On visiting the airtel office, I found out that they do have internet available for prepaid cards. They have two options to pick from

• Unlimited browsing for a day for Rs 20 (SMS ‘MO’ to 6123)
• Unlimited browsing for a week for Rs 99 (SMS ‘MO’ to 6122)

You can browse on your phone or connect it to your laptop and browse there. However the website offers no instructions on how to connect and you have to pay a visit to one of their bigger centers to get some help. I was after a lot of struggle finally able to get it working on my laptop. Here are the steps to follow on an imate windows mobile phone (I have SP5m but it should not be too different on other phones)

1. Go to Settings >> Connections >> GPRS >> Add New

2. Enter a name and enter Access Point as airtelgprs.com

3. You should at this point be able to browse the internet on the phone (download operamini for better experience though)

4. To connect using a laptop, Goto Accessories >> Modem Link

5. I use a cable to connect so select Connections as USB and enter access point name as ‘airtelgprs.com’ (though it does not really matter)

6. Click activate and connect it to your laptop

7. You can install the driver supplied with your imate phone or use the one mentioned here. Basically after this step, you should have a HTC USB modem listed in your hardware list.

8. At this point, if you call airtel service, they will ask you to create a new dialer and then enter *99***1# and all the stuff that never works.

9. Go back to step 7 and download the file mentioned in the link there. Here is a direct link. The zip file contains a dialer. Run it, select HTC USB modem and enter airtelgprs.com in the APN field. Dial in and get connected to the network!

Let me know if the instructions work for you. To resume browsing on phone again, deactive the modem (from Accessories >> Modem Link). If you are not able to connect, try browsing using internet explorer on the phone.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Last few months have been very interesting as we had been working hard on a new Muziboo that we finally launched yesterday. It was very exciting because this is the first Muziboo design where we have worked with a professional designer and there has been a lot of learning involved. This will be a series of posts where I will write about the Why, How and What of the redesign. I am hoping to turn this into a discussion and see what others think about the whole process and where we could have done better.

Starting Point

Muziboo has a lot of professional musicians and the website serves as a portfolio for a lot them. Some people have actually managed to talk to prospective clients through the website. Lately there had been many requests for 128 kbps streaming and a couple of other features like reuploading, private sharing etc which make a lot of sense for professional musicians. We therefore rolled out the pro account beta and were working towards releasing it to everyone. Before the release however we thought of polishing up the UI a bit and started looking at things we can improve from usability perspective. The research led into a lot of insights and we decided to redo the whole UI.

Analyzing the Logs

We started with google analytics to find out what we can improve. Google analytics has some pretty neat tools available to help you identify weak pages in your website. These are pages with high exit rates and bounce rates. There are some bounces that you cannot help but there are other that can be helped. To know this, we looked at the bounce/exit rates for different keywords and entry sources. On some of the pages, there were bounces for keywords that we actually serve. We also found that the referral traffic converted pretty well and came to a conclusion that people who come after reading about muziboo or by clicking on our widgets convert well. Putting these two observations together, we came to a conclusion that some of the pages were not conveying the correct picture and orienting the user well. Another interesting observation was that every page that had little or no related content had high exit rate.

Talking to the users

Next we talked to a lot of our user to know what they liked about Muziboo and what more they would wanna see. We asked them about their first impressions of the place and what made them stick on. Most of these discussions reinforced the feeling that most people value the community here the most. Another learning was that most musicians value charts a lot and that was something missing in Muziboo.

Armed with all this learning we set out to do a complete overhaul of Muziboo. We decided to work extensively on improving the usability and also the look and feel of the site. Another thing that we decided to focus on was the interaction design to make sure that as the site grows the personal feeling does not go down.

In the next post, I would be writing about the specific changes that we did to improve the usability and interaction and how eating our own dog food helped us a lot :)

Popularity: 12% [?]