Prateek Dayal

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% [?]

There were days when internet companies used to launch and not enter private alphas, public betas and other such states. Then came the concept of release early release often in the web and sites would not wait forever but release a beta and let the most enthusiastic users in. These users would brave broken functionality and help the developers test their product with some live audience. Then came gmail and orkut with their (fake) betas and redefined the meaning of the word. Suddenly it was uncool to not be beta untill you have a few million users. Kaati zone is suddenly bringing in all the web 2.0 coolness to their food joints. Erasmic ventures has invested in the company and there seems to be a lot of buzz around it mostly for the fact that Kiran Nadkarni, the founder and director has been a VC.

Impressed by all this I tried out the new Kaati Zone in Banashankari last night. We entered the joint full of smoke (not out of fire but cooking smoke). We enquired and found out that they had not (yet) installed exhaust fans. The place was extremely noisy as they had not installed any sound absorption either. The menu looked nice and we finally ordered and the long wait started. After about 30 mins .. two of the three things ordered were done. Surprisingly the parathe Nithya had ordered arrived cold. They certainly did not look like they were cooked in the last 15 minutes or so. Other stuff was average too. When everybody was done, my roll arrived and as I had expected it was quite average. Some tables had chutney and others were offered package sauce. The decor however was cool because they had put some collage with pics from Bangalore street.

I frankly have no motivation to go back to that place when they have completed it because I felt the basic reason for going there (food) is not worth it in itself. On top of that I don’t like the concept of a beta joint. May be when some other people do it and it become a cult, I will follow and appreciate how cool it is. My only suggestion to Kaati Zone would be to make sure they serve awesome food. I have had much better rolls in smaller joints that are considered quite uncool. Growth plans are cool but a chain is no good if you cannot keep up the quality.

Have you ever had a beta experience in any other offline product ?

Popularity: 10% [?]

I had written sometime back about why shared hosting is bad for your startup and recommended VPS hosting for any serious web venture. Today, as promised in that post, I am writing a review of VPSFarm.com. VPSFarm is based out of US and while researching for VPS provieders, I found them to be pretty good. I considered slicehost and other popular VPS choices as well as some cheap dedicated boxes from layeredtech.com etc. This is what I did not like about them

• Most VPS providers take some time to setup your VPS. This should be mostly fine but there is a delay nevertheless
• Providers like Slicehost etc have a waiting time before you can get your VPS. I think after signing up, it took a few weeks before I got an email.
• Cheap dedicated boxes have older processors which may be ok for you but I was not so sure about that. Another thing is that they have a regular hard drive and no RAID protection. Even with backups, I think its good to have RAID so that your server does not go down with a drive failure.
• I found the RAM being offered everywhere else to be almost half for the same price.

I did not find many reviews of VPSFarm when I was trying to signup and I already had not so great experience with two providers before so I was a little concerned. However I went through their docs online and finally ordered. Somethings that I really liked about them then were

• Xen based Virtual Private Servers (from my research I found out that xen is the preferred way)
• No setup time or fees or annual contracts (pay every month by paypal)
• Choice of operating systems (I picked debian as ubuntu was and is still missing)
• You can install/reboot/halt VPS using a web based control panel
• Bandwidth is unmetered (speed depends on your plan) and RAM/price ratio is awesome
• RAID 10 for storage

Something that may be of concern to some people are

• Only one IP address assigned. As far as I know, you cannot currently buy more. This is ok in general but not good if you want to host DNS. I however recommend outsourcing DNS and emai.
• Its not possible to move to a higher or lower plan without some kind of downtime or manually setting up the new VPS. If you are ok with downtime however, they would help you move.

So far (last 8 months) my experience with VPSFarm has been awesome. Only once my VPS went down for some 20 minutes but I got an email from them immediately and the issue was fixed. There was once a network outage but it was automatically restored in a minute. I started out with XEN 1024 plan and I am currently on XEN 2048 plan.

Do give VPSFarm a try and let us all know your experience too.

Popularity: 13% [?]

HungryBangalore.com lets you order food online in Bangalore. The website is part of the hungryzone group but online ordering is currenly available only in Bangalore. You can however find reviews and contact details of restaurents in many other cities like Bhopal, Delhi, Goa etc. I live in Bangalore and I tried the service finally yesterday and was quite impressed with the number of restaurants they have (even in not so restaurant-ish localities in bangalore like mine).

Ordering process begins by choosing your locality from the list on the main page and then you can select cuisine and/or restaurant. You can see the average cost of the meal per person and decide if its in the budget that you are looking for. I liked the fact that the menu can be looked up both in vegetarian and non veg categories as well as by food type (Soup, Starters, Rice etc). Thats how its arranged in a typical menu at restaurant but its just much easier to lookup here as once you get used to their layout, every restaurant’s menu has the same layout. :)

I live in Banashankari and ordered from Bawarchi. My food arrived pretty quickly. I think in less than 30 mins. I got an email after ordering and one more after my order was placed at the restaurant. I got a call from the restaurant before delivery to get the exact location.

All in all I found the service quite compelling and very useful. Some benefits I felt are

• You don’t need to hunt around the house for menu
• No wasting money on calls while the menu is read out to you when you finally can’t find it :)
• I think there is some kind of user loyalty program in form of points collected on every order
• I did not try it but if you want to speak and order, you can do that too. No need to order online
• You pay when you get your food, so no credit card transaction required.
• The service is free. Nothing extra is added to your bill

I think the usability of the final ordering process can be improved a bit but that should not stop you from using the website. If you are enthusiastic, you can also review the restaurant you just ordered from.

I generally don’t review too many websites. The last I reviewed was flipkart because thats another service I found to be very compelling. I hope you will give hungrybangalore a try and let me know your experience with it.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Social Networking is a very competitive space and every one believes their network is the best. But what bolder way to claim it than to have an ad on your competitors website saying you are better. Something like this caught my attention today on in.myspace.com where I saw an ad from minglebox asking the reader “Bored of myspace?” and then went on in the subject to say something like “come to minglebox, discover new friends etc … ”

Here is a screenshot below

I am not sure what more is one going to get there. I have used minglebox personally and I don’t see what can excite one there if you are bored of *any* social network

Popularity: 4% [?]