Prateek Dayal

I have been following NEN and RadioVerve for quite sometime now. Today RadioVerve was listed as one of the nominees for the NEN hottest startup awards. I have to admit that I was a big fan of radioverve’s music (yea i don’t care enuf to capitalize some characters) since they were called infinity radio. Good two hour show and quite enthu from what I remember. Then they morphed into radioverve sometime last year and started calling themselves a startup (yeah!). When we launched Muziboo, one of the first few emails I sent out was to Atul Chitnis (he plays a big role in RadioVerve) as I had been following his blog for sometime and knew that he is really passionate about music. Guess what? No reply! I had written to him once before about this thing called simputer that he loves to talk about and I got a reply in like few hours and almost got a mention on his blog!

Now coming back to radioverve. These guys do an awesome job and they were the first one to do it but I have hard time understanding how they are a startup. Everyone is employed and has a fulltime job, the site sees less than one change every three months, no way to know when new music is added to the site and generally nothing feels very startuppy other than the presentations they make about Radioverve and the interviews they do. According to them, radioverve has received over a million hits some months and has had hundreds of listeners. Their main channel’s status page (they use icecast which has a standard status page; we use it too) says something else. As I write, it says server started on Sun, 27 Jul 2008, peak listeners 7 (max ever at any point since server was started a month ago) and current listeners 0. If you are a little creative, you can check for their other channels too. Their alexa says a completely different story with their alexa rank being 1,623,724 worldwide 114,550 in India. Guys how can this be after a more than a million hits per month. I know that alexa sucks but then its some indicator. Atleast google trends is?

Now here is what I find most interesting. Gaurav Vaz, the co-founder Radioverve and also the founder of Mediaverve and the head of Onstage foundation happens to be the bass guitarist for the awesome Raghu Dixit Project (which is commercial and released by a L-A-B-E-L not radioverve .. not under creative common’s license) and from what I can see is a fairly successful musician. He still holds his day job at Citrix and Radioverve claims in their podcast and elsewhere that they are helping other musicians make money and a living through radioverve. Now here is a guy who is one of the most successful musician in Bangalore, heads an entertainment company, has been the music entrepreneur of the year but has still not quit his software job telling other musicians that Radioverve is gonna help them monetize and now there is an alternative. You gotta be kidding me!

Btw .. guys from NEN if you are reading, I think your default entry in Entrepreneur’s Details is Former employee and Former designation. For quite a few of your startups, the founders are still holding a job. You may wanna have a category that says still in job. Also one small edit in Radioverve’s entry in the ’source of funding’. Its personal savings + Rs 80,000/- from Geodesic and donations from fans. Also fans of radioverve, if you ever donated to them to help them keep it running, you are also helping them run their personal websites and the Raghu Dixit Project’s website as they are running on the same server that you donate money for. Go here and type radioverve.com if you wanna try this amazing tool too! Your donations help them keep 8 of their websites running.

Now why this sudden rant. What has changed you will ask. Why this act of throwing dirt at someone. In the entry for radioverve, you can also see that in their competitors they list Muziboo and then they go out and say that they have

• More Content
• Better Presentation
• Varied Genres

Now Geez … I don’t mind any of the above. Your way to run your ’startup’ and your way to project how well you are doing and why you need donations. What infuriates me is the fact that we f**king slog in the night and grow our service and these guys go out and make such tall fake claims that tiny real startup like ours find hard to match. First of all. here is our alexa rank and here are our indexed pages in God Google. We have about 3000 songs, quite a few of which are originals out of which some are posted here, content in 10 indian languages and atleast 5 foreign languages spanning all the possible genres. We enable fans to get in touch with artists and express their appreciation even if they found the artist after 6 years of search. We have enabled many many collaborations. We have built a place that has made people record their first song ever and share with family as much as it has helped bands discover the value of their music and find appreciation from all over the globe. Also am sure our designer’s heart would ache when he would read that radioverve scores over us on presentation.

I find it hard to believe that we are not in NEN startup awards but they are, even though we have more users, more reach, better revenues and more credible ways of proving our claims. But then so many deserving startups are missing from that list that we can’t really complain. Wait for the second part where I rant about NEN. I have had a more personal experience with them and I think they have failed miserably at what they set out to achieve. They have made the whole startup and entrepreneurial thing a joke in colleges in the name of events and the so called e-week. Man I already feel so much better!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Printo is a Seedfund and Sequoia funded company and according to their website they are

Printo provides businesses with world-class printing solutions. We are:

• India’s first and fastest growing network of print and document shops.
• India’s first branded retail chain that provides services of international standard.
• A professional, board-managed company co-founded by experts from the document printing and the IT services industries.

I had used their service in Feb 2008 when they had just opened up a center near Jayadeva Hospital in Bangalore. We went to their store and got a card designed. Since customization costs about Rs 50 per half an hour of designer time, we picked one from the template, supplied our logo and got the card ready. We printed about 200 of these and paid Rs 300 (Rs 150 per 100 cards). We were told that soon they would be introducing the facility to reorder the same job by phone or website and a couple of months later we got a call telling us that they have introduced the facility.

Before leaving for proto.in, we wanted to get a lot of cards printed and we called up printo. The lady who picked up the call had no clue and told us that she would call us back and never called back (ofcourse). We called them again the next day and told them that we wanted to reorder our old card and they told us that the system automatically deletes files older than 3 months! Now no one ever told this to use before and I don’t even see why with the storage costs falling by the hour, a system should delete a file to free up a few MB. Remember this is not a picture of my cat uploaded to some free file sharing site. This is a file on which printo has already made money and have a good chance of making money again. Considering the storage costs on S3 are about 15 cents per GB, this file would cost printo a couple of paise a month to store. Atleast before deleting, their system can check and send an email asking the customer if they would like to replace the order.

That would be fairly easy if they had a freaking system in place. I went to their store and the lady started looking for my files. She went to a networked windows drive (yeah!) and then started looking for folders manually and tried searching for Muziboo Files. The records had no other indexing. They were not even using google desktop. After sometime she gave up and told me the same story of software deleting the files. I got mad at this point and the manager and another guy came over and told me how they delete the files for privacy concerns. So they keep the files for 3 months and then suddenly the privacy concern kicks in and they delete the file. They never ask the customers if they can save the file in the first place. After all this, I had to get the card redone again because there was no way to restore the file, wait for 2 hours and then get the cards printed. All the cards had smudged edges but thats another story.

I have a few questions to the printo management

• The store is not cheaper than regular printing press. There are no processes that are helping in cutting costs or improving the convenience of the customer. How are you redefining the offline and online printing scene?
• Regular printers keep the files for a long time and all I have to do is to call them up and they reprint my order. Why is printo so inefficient?
• Why are people who pick the calls so clueless?
• Sorry to sound like a broken record but with no processes in place where is the innovation. Your people can’t even find a file easily in one store. Leave apart integration between stores and the ability to reorder stuff online.

All in all I don’t see why printo is better than the printing press next door. They plan to start 250 stores by 2011. May be they should try to write some Software by then too that can help them manage stuff better and provide customers a better experience.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Internet Revolution has a great post on Google and its top 10 failures. Opensocial is listed at number 4 and I cannot agree more. With all the hoopla around the launch, it took orkut about 7 months to launch opensocial applications and even if we ignore for a minute the fact that developing on orkut is a nightmare, the app selection process is a complete mystery and a total turn off.

We worked on an opensocial application that allows user to add music to their orkut profile. This is ofcourse music they have uploaded on Muziboo or music they have marked as favorite on Muziboo. We worked on this application not just because we must have a presence on orkut and facebook but for two reasons

• Most of our users have presence on orkut and this feature had been requested before
• A lot of muziboo users add muziboo as their webpage in orkut and post muziboo links in their profile and community threads in orkut. Below is a screenshot showing that

The above led us to believe that we can add a lot of value to our users by enabling them to showcase their music on their orkut profile. We therefore went ahead and created a simple application where we can link up your muziboo account and application and your music and favorites start showing up on your profile page.

We tested the app for xss and cross browser functionality and submitted to orkut. There was no email confirming that the app has been submitted nor any link to track the approval process. After a week or 10 days, we got an email from orkut saying that our app has been rejected. The reason cited was that they are looking at more interactive apps like ilike app that let you do more.

Here is my question to the orkut and opensocial team. Who decides the value of the application? Is it the developers, the orkut team or the end user? If its the end user, then there is already enough evidence that this is something a lot of people will benefit from. Compare this to facebook where even the most basic apps are accepted if they work. I for example have picasa and flickr app on my profile that just displays my picasaweb and flickr images on my profile. They do nothing else and I don’t want them to do anything else and facebook does not interfere.

I think in orkut unless you crap on and slap your friends, the apps are not interactive and useful enough. I think they should really look into making the platform more democratic and letting users pick what they want.

Popularity: 12% [?]