Startup

The other day I wrote a blog post about how Olacabs is going about ensuring a good customer service. Little did I know how well Olacabs would respond to that simple gesture of sharing my insights. Olacabs turns 2 years old today. And they decided to celebrate it a little differently. They chose about 5 customers each from Delhi/Bangalore/Mumbai who have shown some love to them in the last couple of months, Personally visited their home, delivered a fine custom made OlaCake and brought a nice smile to us and our families. My daughter in particular had a fab time cutting and finishing the cake right then and there. ...

I join Amagi today. Amagi is a wonderful startup (a second one) by Baskar, Vidhya and Kas. The trio had earlier successfully sold their first startup Impulsesoft to SiRF. I was part of their first startup. I am quite excited to join my old friends. The company itself is rocking and making a lot of good noise in the startup space. It is doing good business in Indian market and is poised to start offering in International markets. ...

Leaving a company is never easy. Particulary when you have nurtured it with your blood and sweat. But sometimes, Time just runs out. Nirvana seems just around the corner, but you realize that personally you cannot survive til then. And so with a heavy heart you call it quits. I leave ONZE today, but will never leave the amazing Sud, Ever optimist Rahul and other folks at ONZE.

Location is something I am quite passionate about. I have worked for sometime at a GPS semiconductor company and for 2 years I worked at ONZE developing and running a SMS direction service. This is the time when we came up with Lokasi. A unique, India specefic way of representing location that is understood by everyone. Cartonama provided me an opportunity to showcase Lokasi. This was also my second opportunity at public speaking. It apparently went quite well. ...

When you realize that you have hit on a very innovative method to retrieve real time information without the need of internet right on your mobile phone, your imagination runs wild. cricket scores, santa-banta jokes, train/bus status lookup come to your mind. One category that emerged in my mind out of this noise was stock quotes lookup. ...

The third mobile phone based idea, code named Cacofonix centered around classifieds. What really appealed to me about using mobile phone for classifieds is that the size of the classifieds is invariably around 160 characters. ...

Operation Botanix started of as a corollary to operation Asterix. Again the idea was quite simple. ##Idea I remember in my childhood days, Pepsi used to come out with a full page newspaper advertisement with half a page of coupon. You were supposed to tear the coupon, take it to the shop and claim your free pepsi (7UP I think it was). Fast forward to today. I see an advertisement which promises me an inviting offer. But to claim the offer, instead of tearing the advertisement, I just have to send a SMS, say “EZEE 7UP” to a regular 10 digit mobile number (9243000111). And I get the coupon on my mobile phone as a SMS. ...

Even before I was introduced to the term ‘code repository’ or cvs in my college, I was using names of characters to represent the version of my assignment codes. They will start with Alice, Betty etc.. Somehow I find it quite amusing to name a project (in this case an idea) with a character of my liking. It gives life to the idea and you can relate to the attributes of the idea as its characters characteristics (wow !!). So the first Idea is called Asterix - Mobile Gift Cards. ...

I have heard and lived that phrase a hundred times in the past 6 odd months. Being on my own during these times carefully juggling between a revenue positive business targeted idea to consumer focused no business model idea, I have learned a lot. However the most important lesson I have learnt is that it is impossible to run a business on your own. Yes that is a generic statement, and I am not going to support it as I feel I cannot justify it in writing. Though would love to pick up this topic on a debate and mince meat my opponent (just kidding, do drop by for a healthy debate). ...