An ambulance siren and an innocent observation triggered my train of thought this morning about the Doppler effect. It eventually got to the point where the geek in me HAD to know the Doppler formula, and the keyboard being more convenient and handy than pen and paper, I went online to find it. Which is when I stumbled across this totally cool, awesome website.
Bernoulli's equation and the Venturi Flowmeter were the next perfectly logical stops to my mind, and to my delight, found those too! The geek in me totally revels in the content on this website, and wishes it had been there when I was swotting for yet another final exam. It would've been a great entrepreneurial idea back then.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Travel's more convenient these days, with Virgin leading the way
I came across an announcement about Virgin's new charter service on Techcrunch. I also learned this factoid:
"Twenty-five years ago, stuck in Puerto Rico after a canceled flight to the Virgin Islands, Branson found a charter plane and went around the airport with a blackboard that advertised a charter flight for $39 per person. He filled all 50 seats, and that is how he started Virgin Atlantic."
Pretty cool! Now there's a website that connects the consumer with charter flight operators, and importantly, allows leverage of this information by offering "Hot Deals". "Hot Deals" are basically flights that were chartered for one way trips and will be flying back empty to their home base, therefore any revenue generating passenger is better than none.
I was even more encouraged when I came across this operator. I would definitely consider flying from Dubai to NYC on a private charter aircraft, with all business class seats and fully flat beds, checking in 30 minutes before the flight at a private terminal with no serpentine security check lines for less than 4200 USD, round trip.
Now, I am looking for a company that will let me combine different modes of travel to optimize my travel by time or cost or convenience (child friendly would be great!). For instance, instead of flying San Francisco to London Heathrow and connecting at Heathrow to Rome like we did recently, a more sensible itinerary would've been to fly non-stop from San Francisco to London, and connect by train/chunnel to mainland Europe and onwards by Eurail to Italy. I even explored booking this itinerary but was put off by the complexity of figuring out flight/train/shuttle departures, connecting logistics across foreign geographies and the realization that I will be completely on my own trying to figure out Plan B in a foreign country with linguistic barriers, if my Plan A doesn't execute perfectly. Perhaps it's time to build another start-up....
"Twenty-five years ago, stuck in Puerto Rico after a canceled flight to the Virgin Islands, Branson found a charter plane and went around the airport with a blackboard that advertised a charter flight for $39 per person. He filled all 50 seats, and that is how he started Virgin Atlantic."
Pretty cool! Now there's a website that connects the consumer with charter flight operators, and importantly, allows leverage of this information by offering "Hot Deals". "Hot Deals" are basically flights that were chartered for one way trips and will be flying back empty to their home base, therefore any revenue generating passenger is better than none.
I was even more encouraged when I came across this operator. I would definitely consider flying from Dubai to NYC on a private charter aircraft, with all business class seats and fully flat beds, checking in 30 minutes before the flight at a private terminal with no serpentine security check lines for less than 4200 USD, round trip.
Now, I am looking for a company that will let me combine different modes of travel to optimize my travel by time or cost or convenience (child friendly would be great!). For instance, instead of flying San Francisco to London Heathrow and connecting at Heathrow to Rome like we did recently, a more sensible itinerary would've been to fly non-stop from San Francisco to London, and connect by train/chunnel to mainland Europe and onwards by Eurail to Italy. I even explored booking this itinerary but was put off by the complexity of figuring out flight/train/shuttle departures, connecting logistics across foreign geographies and the realization that I will be completely on my own trying to figure out Plan B in a foreign country with linguistic barriers, if my Plan A doesn't execute perfectly. Perhaps it's time to build another start-up....
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Made in India - Software as a product company
It came as a breath of fresh air to read about an entrepreneur who has successfully built a software product out of India for the global market, and is competing with household names elsewhere. Even more impressive were the following facts:
- This is a 100% bootstrapped effort, with no outside funding.
- Some of the "engineers" who are coding this software are high school graduates with 9 months of training. Without this job, the prognosis for the future of these individuals is not particularly encouraging. I applaud this social element which Mr. Vembu has successfully combined with the financial success of his venture.
More about Mr. Vembu and his venture can be found here.
Ms. Mitra has published an interview with him on her blog.
I first stumbled across Zoho at the Web 2.0 expo held in San Francisco from April 15 through 18th last year. It piqued my curiosity since Google had not rolled out the spreadsheet functionality completely, whereas Zoho had a spreadsheet program I could use. I played with it for a while and though I liked it, found Google more convenient since I am already a Gmail user. I returned to their website recently after reading the Forbes article and found that they have introduced a whole slew of applications since. I am sufficiently intrigued to check out "Zoho show" and will post a review soon.
The one thing that struck me as unusual is that Zoho is competing purely on price. Few companies, if any, have managed to sustain growth and profitability with pricing as their sole competitive advantage. With software in particular, once the code is written, debugged and staff salaries paid, there are no limits as to how low the price can be slashed by a competitor. Even a penny per customer is a profit in this case, unlike physical commodities where rock bottom pricing will equal lowest manufacturing cost. It remains to be seen how Zoho fares and whether the Googles of the world will bankrupt the Zohos by offering the software free, since their revenue stems from elsewhere.
- This is a 100% bootstrapped effort, with no outside funding.
- Some of the "engineers" who are coding this software are high school graduates with 9 months of training. Without this job, the prognosis for the future of these individuals is not particularly encouraging. I applaud this social element which Mr. Vembu has successfully combined with the financial success of his venture.
More about Mr. Vembu and his venture can be found here.
Ms. Mitra has published an interview with him on her blog.
I first stumbled across Zoho at the Web 2.0 expo held in San Francisco from April 15 through 18th last year. It piqued my curiosity since Google had not rolled out the spreadsheet functionality completely, whereas Zoho had a spreadsheet program I could use. I played with it for a while and though I liked it, found Google more convenient since I am already a Gmail user. I returned to their website recently after reading the Forbes article and found that they have introduced a whole slew of applications since. I am sufficiently intrigued to check out "Zoho show" and will post a review soon.
The one thing that struck me as unusual is that Zoho is competing purely on price. Few companies, if any, have managed to sustain growth and profitability with pricing as their sole competitive advantage. With software in particular, once the code is written, debugged and staff salaries paid, there are no limits as to how low the price can be slashed by a competitor. Even a penny per customer is a profit in this case, unlike physical commodities where rock bottom pricing will equal lowest manufacturing cost. It remains to be seen how Zoho fares and whether the Googles of the world will bankrupt the Zohos by offering the software free, since their revenue stems from elsewhere.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Customer Development for Start-Ups - Part 2
It's taken a while, but here's the link to Professor Blank's presentation about Customer Development for Start-ups that I alluded to in my earlier post.
TiE Silicon Valley has a digital archive of his presentation here.
TiE Silicon Valley has a digital archive of his presentation here.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Social Email Graphing (SEG)
Recently, I came across this blog post about a new concept called "Social Email Graphing" and was blown away by the idea. Imagine if your email can keep track of your social network and offer you the ability to leverage your real world social network online too - that's what Sudha is proposing! Yahoo should hire this lady before someone else snatches her up! Yahoo, are you listening?
Monday, October 22, 2007
Buzka and Anza Technology Network
It's been a while since my last post and I am back with some exciting news this time, from down under. ANZA Technology Network brings companies from Australia and New Zealand to the US and helps prepare them for success in the American market. Tomorrow is the "Gateway to the US" 2007 summit in Sunnyvale, California and will see a number of start-up debuts such as social networking site "Buzka". I am very excited to hear the pitches from the different companies live tomorrow morning.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Customer Development For Start-ups
I attended a very interesting event at the TiE conference center this week. Steve Blank of UC Berkeley spoke about "Customer Development for Start-ups". He is a very engaging speaker, full of stories and interesting anecdotes, and the hours flew by. If you get a chance, you should definitely hear him speak.
His point about customer development being an iterative process, and one that needs to happen starting very early on in the process, hit home. He pointed out the flaws in the conventional model where the focus is on FCS (First Customer Ship). The current processes tend to be very inward looking with not enough attention paid to customer discovery and development. Having made quite a few of the mistakes he mentioned with my first start-up, I found myself nodding vigorously when he talked about those and making mental notes about the mistakes he mentioned which I haven't yet made!
Steve's presentation will be available in the TiE archive soon. I will post a link when it's available.
His point about customer development being an iterative process, and one that needs to happen starting very early on in the process, hit home. He pointed out the flaws in the conventional model where the focus is on FCS (First Customer Ship). The current processes tend to be very inward looking with not enough attention paid to customer discovery and development. Having made quite a few of the mistakes he mentioned with my first start-up, I found myself nodding vigorously when he talked about those and making mental notes about the mistakes he mentioned which I haven't yet made!
Steve's presentation will be available in the TiE archive soon. I will post a link when it's available.
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