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Rebranding an existing brand for any reason is one of the toughest thing a business goes through. Airtel recently spent obscene amount of money to rebrand itself with a different logo and tune. There was a huge uproar in the blogger community regarding this move(here). Various tweets were floating around about how AR Rehman has lost it, and how funny and stupid the logo looks. But all said and done there is a lesson of fine execution to be learnt from Airtel. ...

My younger brother says that everyone wanting to run a startup should do sales atleast for a year. Having done sales for most of his working life and running a 2 person Legal BPO for more than a year, I think he walk’s that talk when he says that. Running a startup makes you do all kind of things, some of which you think you were ^not made to do^. Even when you are doing everything right, invariably your customers are going to be too slow for you. When your customers start dropping your calls and ignores your emails, you know the fun has just started. How many times have we received an unsolicited cold calls selling us something and we have shouted back at the person? Hey, they are just doing their job, everytime someone rejects them, it either makes them stronger or leave their job earlier. Both of which are good for him. ...

My first public presentation at the first barcamp that I attended ##Deploying Rails App View more presentations from mayank78.

Roma delivered a sweet baby girl yesterday and now we are proud parents of two little angels.

</object> EO is a unique entertainment capsule which provides a true private home theater experience. You can watch movies or play incredible 3D games in a unique experience. Sachin (my co-brother) has created this and it is live in lower ground floor Mantri Square. Do experience it when you are there and share your thoughts. More information at Sacona

Once in a Raina gets in a mood to dance whereever and whatever she likes. This one was captured while we were having dinner at a local pizza hut.

Got this scary screen on my gmail today morning. Very thoughtful of google to have mapped my access pattern and brought this anomaly to my attention. I very well may have lost my gmail account, or worse would have been subjected to a proxy attack.

Paul Grahm’s articles never cease to amaze me with their powerful insights. It’s because they connect with me at a meta level where I am not able to verbalize my own thoughts. And when I read his essay, it’s like that’s what I was meaning to say !! I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. from Paul Grahm's essay Our startup Revu is almost two months old. The first month (June) was very productive and I was amazed at my own speed of getting it up. But since it got mentioned in pluggd.in, Suddenly the focus shifted from development to a lot of distracting meetings. The meetings by themselves did not take a lot of time, but it shifted the top idea from my mind. Every idle moment I was thinking about these VC meetings and less on product development. And that actually showed on the development. ...

Ever since I broke a thermometer when I was about 5 years old and got severely reprimanded for it, I always wanted to break one and play around with mercury drops coagulating and breaking on its own. But the grown up side of me always stopped me from doing it whenever I got hold of a thermometer. Today morning my daughter presented me that opportunity by breaking one. Ofcourse it was her turn to be reprimanded, but after scolding her, both of us got down to play with those little droplets. ...

The startup ecosystem in india is quite interestingly poised today. Fred Wilson has written a good post which explains quite succinctly how a startup ecosystem evolves in a certain geography. You can roughly set the age of startup ecosystem in India to 10 years (starting from 2000 - IT revolution). During this first decade there have been quite a few successful startups created and exited. Two interesting things happened during this time. First, it created a lot of second time entrepreneurs (referred as STE’s henceforth) who have learnt from success or failure of their earlier ventures and are now more seasoned to start a new venture, and second, it created a lot of HNI’s either through successful exits or those high paying MBA jobs. This I would say has set us into second decade of the startup evolution. We now have seasoned entrepreneurs (STE’s) and a lot of money to be invested in. Ofcourse a lot of VC’s have also started focusing in India, but that is only natural thing to happen not dramatic (HNI’s looking to invest in startup is dramatic). ...