Desinerd

I was thinking about the book *The long tail* , its a great read even if it is  bit old. The ideas are very much relevant in today’s businesses and will continue to be as long as the Gaussian bells are around. After some discussions with my friends i chanced upon this interesting idea that using the *long tail model* you can effectively change the consumer usage patterns, much like the Heisenberg principle in physics. Lets take a simple example to show this :

Not too many people want to watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon, so imagine X (a company which rents out movies) keeps this following the *long tail* concept. Some how it gets picked up by some movie person , who recommends it …. this will create a network growth effect which can potentially skew the graphs on which the theory is based (conclusion : rashomon may become a *super* rental movie for X).

A movie which was relatively lesser know gets watched more because its niche and with time it skews the initial movie rental graphs in its favor.  So the curve changes because the movie gets stocked, so the ability to predict the number of copies for a certain movie becomes way more difficult with time.

Relevant links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

Hmmm, unlike what most people have to say I have started to feel that Indians working in “outsourced” development teams are getting a real bad deal. In my recent experience, i have felt that in spite of all the big talk on how India has become costlier blah blah …. its my firm belief that there is very good quality of work being done here ….

So quality development work on cutting edge platforms is still termed as outsourcing, that was a rude shock to a guy like me :). I have seen some great stuff coming out, the only point is that few people realize that the work is being done by Indians ….. maybe when that changes we will be a better appreciated lot …. I was talking to some person who made me understand that nobody had any idea about what the team had contributed to slideshare.net, and how my bosses have done a great job …. I was really perplexed, but then the realization dawned upon me that conceptualization / abstract talk is way higher up the value chain (i think thats all bull crap … but then again i am an engineer he he) …..

To be honest, some of the implementation details were awesomely creative …. and a lot of thought went behind them. Slideshare has been built in India, not implemented …. even if we all don’t know of the *names* behind them that is something the world should know about.

So this post is devoted to my conception of a startup and the differences (or at least perceived ones) it has from a big firm. (Warning: These are very subjective differences)

1. Startups are built *for* people who are ambitious and driven , thus this gives them the momentum going forward even if resources are scarce.
2. From the above point it can be agreed easily that people who work at such places are to some extent *different*. Some will be motivated by money , some by thirst for knowledge etc etc.
3. The critical aspect of all this is that like artists at work, most developers have their zen moments (or aha moment as vikas would say), i believe they need care and nurturing from their patrons (aka managers).
4. Startups start with the vision of changing the world, and that feeling is necessary for exponential(to some extent non-human … non-linear ) growth pattern.

These differences are what make a startup a temple to learn and grow in as compared to big corporations where you cannot have the same effect as an individual. I think that now-a-days the term start-up is thrown around rather randomly … maybe there is a need for some certification on that end.

Lately i have been in the market, and trying to understand how it all works. After reading some decent books about how to play the game, i have finally entered it wit a testing capital of about 10000 rps (~$250). Till now i have got back 4000 rps ($100) on the initial inverstment. But till now the ride has not be all smooth actually, getting one of these online buying / selling interfaces is definitely a hassle. I have tried out 3 different vendors
1. Reliance money
2. HDFC securities
3. IndiaBulls (Waiting for the welcome kit)
I have been unable to perform intra-day trading on any of these, and IndiaBulls looks the the best of them by far. To be dead honest Reliance has not delivered and i plan to shift all my stock into the IndiaBulls account. The worst has been HDFC, it takes 3 days for any transaction to get through, which is unbelievable.

All in all, the Sensex / Nifty is on a high and it doesnt look like it is going to slow down any soon. One way or the other it is a learning experience of the highest order.
Tips :
I was trying to buy Idea cellular, the net interface crashed on me … looks like a good buy

The web is currently obsessed with this concept of virality, how can a site grow exponentially in terms of traffic, user registrations and ten thousand other metrics. This reminds me of some sort of a gold rush, very little analysis behind what is right or wrong … people seem to be blinded by success and attempt to replicate it rather blindly.

With the advent of web 2.0, the metrics for measuring the success of an application has been the number of users in the system, how the social network evolves …. etc etc. I saw it very specifically in a video at googleplex by the founders of billmonk.com , the first thing they listed was about their user registration growth rates blah … even facebook founder at f8 convention displayed some crappy “extrapolated” user growth graphs …. the funniest part is … these guys forget that the growth rate is bounded in effect by the slow pace of internet growth in US and europe.

I am perplexed at how simple math can really skew up people’s attitude towards products. facebook is like crazy big, or is it ? Alexa still puts Myspace.com as the king … what say to that …. hyper Virality has been achieved by applications which are really useful and keep users in the system (widgets play an important role in such applications).

We all think that fooling the user into registration may work, but stickiness seems to play an important role for a brand to succeed. To get that one needs a real utility, look at hotornot.com simple concept … but it has been really taken to the next level in terms of utility …. ego massaging with social networking … works for most people … simplicity really played the key role for HoN.  I really feel portals need to assess their proposition to the user before looking at hyper viral tactics

This is going to be a series of article about the facebook application platform, my story with it started a month back. Till now I have put in a lot of effort on this for SlideShare (Which has a sizeable audience now) . To add to it I am working on a new set of applications which will be released soon. i would love to share the experiences I had with this evolving platform till now, to strart off I would like to list out some important things before starting :

1. You should understand how this facebook application set-up works. It is best explained in the wiki.
2. Decide how the app should work (iframe or FBML) , this choice will decide a lot of things about your application.
3. Remember you cannot save any meta information (except for photos) about the user in this facebook setup.
4. You should also keep in mind that uploading files has to be done outside the facebook canvas page in an iframe. (This is an very important point for a file sharing based application)
5. Last be not the least, have lots of fun while trying to build the application … thats the way to make it real viral (coz if ya enjoi it other people would for sure)
6. Some facebook applications have millions of users, you cant miss out on this platform ….

So as my apps start showing up I will keep throwing out source code, hope this helps some guys out there.

Alert:
If anyone needs to build a facebook application and needs help , dont be scared to contact me at dipankarsarkar[at] gmail [dot] com.

Relevant links:

Facebook application homepage
Developers section
Developers Wiki (The best FBML reference)

There is this concept of a search plugin, something which most browsers have now-a-days (Post Mozilla .. Netscape Navigator) , look at the top right corner , right next to the URL bar. I had little idea how you created this so-called search plugin. After a bit of googling , I came across the following links:

1. Creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox
2. Search plugins for firefox/IE7

The first site has this very nerdy approach of explaining how this opensearch plugin works, to keep it very simple its an XML file defining the following :

Most of this is very simple to fill actually depending upon the search URl you have on your website.

To easily generate a search plugin for your website / blog / portal ... just goto http://www.searchplugins.net and get an Opensearch XML generated. Its as simple as that. I created two .. one for http://www.slideshare.net and another for http://www.desinerd.com .... So you can check them out here .... You should check out first link to figure out how the search plugin can be auto-discovered from the above link .... You will notice that my site search plugin has been auto-discovered in your Firefox / IE 7 browser.

http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx?q=desinerd&mode=title
http://www.searchplugins.net/pluginlist.aspx?q=slideshare&mode=title
So why wait , get your site up on firefox/IE7 with a small piece of code eh

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Although 156-215 is not that hard but people still avoid doing it when they are going for 1Y0-259. However a better way to go about this is attempting 1z0-042 before 220-602.