Prateek Dayal

I recently got to know on twitter about minefield. Its basically Firefox 3.1 beta release and its awesome. I use gentoo linux 2008.0 (AMD 64 bit version) and I had been using a 32 bit firefox (2.0.0.14) on it so I can use flash. I had also installed a flock 2.0 beta to use firefox 3 like features. I could never however get firefox 3.0 working on my system. There would always be some .so file missing.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised when the tarball for minefield just worked. Flash works though other plugins and extensions (such as firebug) don’t. However the browser has a very smooth finish, is very fast and a pleasure to use. There is some problem with fonts on few pages sometimes (size not correct etc) but thats expected in a beta release. However I have been using minefield as my primary browser for about a week and its been great so far.

Do give it a try and let me know what you think. Remember, its a beta and not a stable release.

Popularity: 16% [?]

One of the hardest thing when doing a startup is to know how well you are doing in an absolute sense. You can look at your stats, your metrics (signups/day etc) but its generally hard to find how you are doing compared to other people in your industry vertical.

Google Analytics offers a benchmarking service that allows you to compare your analytics data, such as visits, time spent per visit, bounce rate etc to industry benchmark. You can chose your industry vertical and you are then compared against websites in your category and similar size. You cannot see benchmarking data for websites that are different size segment.

They build the benchmarking data with the help of anonymous data contribution. So you can enable data sharing in your account and contribute your data to the benchmarking service. The contribution is anonymous (all identifiable information is removed) and the data is typically mixed with hundreds of other website. In fact to be able to use the benchmarking service you have to contribute data to it.

So go ahead and enable the service for your website if you don’t mind sharing your traffic data and see how you are doing compared to others in the same space.

Popularity: 14% [?]

One of the tools that I use everyday to stay productive while working out of home is assembla. Its a svn+trac hosting provider and they had a very generous free plan till about a day or two back. However recently they decided to shut down the free plan and have only paid plans. They have certainly kept the pricing for their paid plans very low but its nevertheless much more than zero that people expect on the internet.

The result is what you would expect on the internet. There are abuses flying all over the place, as you can see in the comments to the blog post. Some people are upset about assembla not communicating all this properly but for most part, people don’t want to pay. However Andy from Assembla has some very valid points to make in comments (and another blog post)

• They have 50k developers using assembla out of which about 5k are paid
• The free subscriptions are increasing at 8x per year
• They currently spend $5K a month to support free plans. However next year the same would cost 40K a month
• Assembla is not venture capital backed company
• Advertising won’t work for them as page views are very small (as expected since most people access assembla using desktop clients)
• Most people on the free plan never upgrade and a lot of these people are VC funded firms having millions of dollars

I agree that there is no way assembla can keep offering the free plan and still make profits. I think free is for most part unsustainable on the internet. You can offer it for sometime out of your savings or for a little longer if you are funded but it can’t stay forever. I however think that assembla should have let existing users stay on the current plans and stop the free plans for new signups. However its their product and their choice.

On a final note, I want to point out that in the comments to the blog posts, no one has complained about their service and most people have in fact mentioned how they love it. However they still have trouble making those people pay a little sum of money. Its this expectation that makes it very hard for smaller companies/startups to innovate. A great product does not mean people will buy it. They would however use it for free. Such is the internet!

What am I doing? I have some archived projects which I would take offline and continue using assembla for Muziboo. I think its just $2.3 a month currently which is nothing compared to what they offer.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I recently lost my glasses and had to go out and get a new pair done. I had almost the similar experience that I have had many times before at stores in Bangalore (and I think elsewhere). You walk into a chain (like GKB opticians) and you can see the disinterested look in the sellers there. Its the same for a lot of malls like More, Foodworld etc. The sellers (or sales people) there do not own the store (or a part of it) and therefore seem to have no vested interest in selling. They would be clueless about the basic stuff and would never persuade you into buying something.

Original Image

Compare this to a traditional store where the owner is the salesman (or atleast there in the store). They would always be very keen on selling you. They have a vested interest in selling you stuff and it shows. They would never mind if you are not satisfied with 10 things they have shown you already. They would show you 10 more and hope you buy one of them. I am sure a lot of chains in Bangalore can learn something from this.

There are also some chains like Big Bazaar who have enthusiastic salesmen. I think that is one of the main reason (besides cost) why people go and shop there. Its so easy to find something there by asking the sales guy. If you have a store (or a startup), you need to make sure someone is selling hard or you would be losing out on a lot of business.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Today was google’s first developer day in India at Chancery Pavilion, Bangalore. I had registered a couple of weeks back and could get into the otherwise sold out event. Here is a brief of the event.

Keynote

The keynote by Dr. Prasad talked about how google’s mission is about improving the Client, Cloud and Connectivity. There were a couple of videos about the journey of google and some demos on Chrome (Client), App Engine (Cloud) and Android (Connectivity).

Tech Tracks

I attended two tech tracks

Indic Languages

A demo of two of the indic products (both backed by API)

• Transliteration
• Translation

The code is available at http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/

Google Maps API

A demo and overview of the google maps API. Interesting statistics for why maps

• 80% of the world has never moved beyond 20 miles of their birthplace
• 80% of your expenses are local (even apart from real estate)
• You can monetize using adsense for maps (more local than regular adsense)

Use of KML (Keyhole map launguage) file. Its a sort of a DTD that lets you paint on a map. It saves development time (since you don’t have to talk to db etc) and it can be indexed by search engines. You can use KML editors like ‘My Maps’ (web based).  You can also use maplet (its like a light weight application overlayed on top of google maps). Users can overlay differenent maplets over the same map.

After the tech tracks, lunch was served. All through the day, there were beverages available outside the rooms. Post lunch there were code labs and I attended the code lab for google maps. The team demo’d a small map based game and discussed the code. Both the application and the turorial can be found at http://maps-gdd2008.appspot.com/. After this there was another code lab but I left.

It was an interesting day. Google speakers were pretty awesome and I thing that I found amazing was that they were very keen on getting feedback on their tools and api from the audience.  I also found every googler using chrome and deploying all their sample code on app engine. A true eat your own dog food environment.

Also there were lots of free goodies like a 2 GB USB drive, a free t-shirt, notepads, keyring etc to make the geeks happy :)

Popularity: 13% [?]

I use a lot of web based softwares everyday and I can almost see a pattern in the services I am in love with. They all provide very detailed statistics. Services such as Google Analytics and Gigya. Google Analytics is very well know. Gigya is a widget distribution service and you can see it in action on any of the song pages in Muziboo.

Both these services are highly configurable. For example, google analytics lets you remove your own visits from reports (using an IP address or cookie based filtering). It lets you compare reports very easily to see changes in trends or track goals (such as signup or payment). In fact analytics always plays a major role in any of the redesigning we do for our pages. Same goes for gigya. Even though its not as configurable as google analytics, its still one of the most configurable tools around. You can track embeds for a particular widget or a class of widgets (such as playlists). I think reports are important for two reasons.

However both these services lack a critical component. The ability to fetch the reports using an API. This is important if I want to share the reports with my users (for their pages or widgets). This is where analytics tools like piwik come into picture. Piwik is a hosted analytics solution that can be queried or extended using their wonderful API. This helps in organizations use it and build services over it. For small teams (esp startups) that is very useful.

So if you are building a new service and want loyal early adopters, try giving usage stats, an API to query it and let people build stuff over it. I think twitter has grown a lot thanks to its API. Imagine twitter giving stats about the number of people who clicked your link or read your tweet. I think some marketers would even pay for it. I would certainly pay for a tool like google analytics or gigya anyday.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I recently attended the Finance for Entrepreneurs course offered by NSRCEL of IIM Bangalore. The course description can be found in this doc file. The 2 day course costs 6K Rs which includes course fees, food (tea, lunch, snacks for both days) and a finance book. The course instructor is Prof Jayadev

This is the first non engineering course that I have done and in fact the first classroom course I have done after IIT Guwahati so it was quite an interesting experience for me. I had zero finance knowledge before the course and it gave me a good sense of how things like balance sheets, profit analysis, product costing, working capital management etc works. There was a booklet with lot of case studies and given to us on the first day and pretty much all concepts were explained with an example from the booklet. The last few examples included the use of excel (such as 5 year plan for a project to do feasibility study).

I think its a good course for entrepreneurs to attend, especially if you are from a non finance background. Besides the course material, it was a good networking opportunity as the participants were from different industries including food and travel!

Popularity: 8% [?]

I recently switched from apache to nginx as my webserver and since then my blog’s admin section was inaccessible. I have finally been able to crack it today and hence this quick post to celebrate :)

I think nginx rocks in general and I will soon write a more detailed post about nginx and the move including all the problems I faced on my tech blog.

Popularity: 7% [?]