Prateek Dayal

Here is a mail I received from The Smart Techie magazine, that can help you get there. Remember that this is the same company that organizes the startup city event every year.

Dear Sir/Madam.,

How are you doing?

Greetings from The Smarttechie-SiliconIndia.

The May 2009 edition of The SmartTechie will be on the top 25 Emerging technology companies. We are looking at what exciting technologies companies are working for and prodigy of leadership team and investors of private companies. A few of these companies will be profiled in the magazine. We are talking to several startups to see who are the Best 25 we can feature in the magazine. A panel of analysts, Venture Capitalists and our editorial team will select the companies.

It will be good idea to feature your company as one of the 25 Emerging Companies.  There is a nominal sponsorship cost, which I have indicated below. This package is specially worked out for smaller enterprises. If you can review the same and let me know by end of today, we could plan the next steps.

COST: Rs 30,000 – Top 25 Nomination.

We would be offering you:

1. Inclusion in the Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies list.
2. One page of Company Profile
3. One full page ad in the SmartTechie at a later date.
4. The company Profile will be displayed on the online magazine page too: www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine

COST: Rs 15,000 – Only Advertisement.

We would be offering you:

1. One Page Advertisment in the issue of Top 25 Emerging Technology Companies.
2. Online banner ad on : www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine
3. 1 Page Coverage

Please do let me know how we can take this forward. It will be nice to close this loop asap so that we get things rolling.

We can look at a mutual relationship so that your company gets more visibility. Let me know what you think.

If you have anything else on your mind, I shall be open for ideas.

If you need the contact, contact me and I will pass it on to you :)

Popularity: 24% [?]

In a few days, another year will be over. This has been one hell of a year. So much learning, so many changes in life and so many new people I have met and interacted with. I wanted to write down a few things here just to record them somewhere and look back at them later. I also never wrote some of the events (of 2008) in my blog due to lack of time or motivation and I figured this should be a good place to note them all down. Lets see

Muziboo

First half of 2008 mostly went in figuring out what won’t work for Muziboo. Ofcourse it did not look that way when we started trying some of the things but then there is no better way to learn. We realized that sometimes what most people say may not be entirely correct. However a few good things happened. We launched a new design and some useful features like online recording and stats that helped us serve a lot of people in ways some other sites were not serving. We also launched Pro Account, our main revenue stream till date. We presented in Proto, worked with an awesome intern and got some good press coverage. There are some things I wish we did better. For example better music recommendations and some more features for listeners (multiple playlists etc) which can help make muziboo a better indie music destination. Nevertheless, this has been the year where we finally found some direction (towards the end of the year though). How that will turn out in the long run, only time will tell but atleast for now, we do have a plan for growing Muziboo.

Other Professional Stuff

As I wrote before, this happens to be the first full year with no job. I did some consulting gigs, mostly working with Elina Network and Circle Souce for the first few months of 2008. After that I decided to focus fulltime on Muziboo. I realized that keeping a balance between consulting and your startup is not easy. Consulting is not a substitute for the income from a job. The only substitute is to cut down costs and focus on building your startup.

Personal Stuff

We moved into a new house at the starting of the year and took some time to settle down. If you have lived in Indiranagar, Bangalore for few years and move to South Bangalore, things feel very different. The traffic is lesser, localities more residential and fewer places to eat out (which actually is better when you are bootstrapping as I later found out). On the personal front, this year we had to cut down on a lot of stuff like trips and travel, shopping, photography etc. Some due to lack of time and some due to lack of disposable income. However, we did make one trip to The Valley of Flowers after Proto which turned out to be more tiring than we had expected. I also attended PAN IIT 2008 in chennai towards the end of the year which was a good break from work.  One good development was joining the gym and trying to get back in shape. Nithya made sure that I was disciplined enough with it and its been quite good to hit the gym to burn out calories and stress :)

Overall 2008 has been a very different year. I realized for the first time what it is to be on your own and what it is to try and grow a business. I also blogged more this year, met with more people than I have ever met in my life before and formed some real long lasting friendships. I will also remember 2008 as the year I lost my best friend. There have been some real highs this year and some real lows and I expect 2009 to be not much different. Goodbye 2008!

PS: We listened to one song a lot this year and there is a version of it on Muziboo that I really like.

Sound of Silence at Muziboo

Popularity: 16% [?]

I got reliance wimax connection about a month and a half back and I would say its pretty good in terms of speed (I am on the Rs 750/-, 4 GB download plan) but bad in some other ways and nightmarish in some actually. Technically speaking the service goes down for like a day almost every week. This is very frustrating as it comes back predictably in the evening.

Another big issue is with their billing. I got a call today saying that my last bill is about Rs 2100. This came as a shock to me as I am on the Rs 750 a month plan with 4 GB download free in that. Now I am pretty sure that I have not crossed the 4 GB download limit. Now this portal reliancebroadband.co.in is pretty unusable because most things don’t work very well. Half the time it says your usage details cannot be shown as system is going upgradatation !!!! (They can bill me for that usage but cannot show it ..)

I go back and check the usage for the 1 month and it shows me for the first 15 days … Here is a snapshot of one of the screens

As you can see in the screen on 27th I have used around 397000+ MBs which is around 400 GB. With this kind of billing sofware, they have sent me a bill of 2k+. I check my unbilled usage (for about a week and it says 3 GB! and after I complained it started showing as 1.2 GB .. great !)

Now comes the worst part: I register a complaint by emailing them (The guy on call won’t take the complaint). I get acknowledged for the email with a complaint number and next day my internet connection is disconnected. I call up and the guy says I should pay my bill and he cannot give me more details. I send another email and after sometime a guy calls me to say that please go to a webworld and pay Rs 3k . Now this is ridiculous .. My due date for bill is 13th September and I am being asked to pay the last bill and some more already on 6th September. There is no email or call before disconnecting my internet. I had paid my last bill before the due date so there is no justification for this. As an ISP you cannot cut my internet connection whenever you want without any notice and before even the due date for the payment is passed.

I am still waiting for the resolution for this but I wanted to write about it so that people can read and think and then go for this connection. I am sure a few thousand per month is a lot of money for internet connection in India.

Popularity: 59% [?]