Desinerd

http://blog.kwippy.com/2008/07/03/technology-behind-kwippy-and-scaling/

A post about how kwippy works and scaling strategies involved. Feel free to ramble and comment.

Opdrage Venture Partners are a New Delhi based boutique Management Consulting and Capital syndication firm focusing on seed and early stage ventures.

I have been the geek-in-residence for Opdrage for quite sometime and its time to talk about it a bit more. Here at Opdrage, we aim to build things that are solid and last … it does not matter what is the focus area, as long as it is a solid capitalist business. This is a very much Y-combinator approach to businesses in my view, Paul Graham would be proud :).

My mentor Kris Nair also the founder of Opdrage is very clear about his approach to it, and I have learned a lot of things from him about his experiences (NDA guy, marketing guru, and much more). A lot of coffee and crazy amounts of fun define how one becomes a part of something like Opdrage. Helping out startups to *start* *get funded* , helping people put money into the *right startups* is all that happens in a routine day here.

So if you have a killer idea (like mine here), mail in to me or Kris at opdrage (contact@opdrage.com) and make it all happen. Believe me, the next google killer is going to be in an Indian garage …. its all happening here.

Wierd title for a blog post , but its truly the start of the second phase in my rather short career. This week I have decided to move on from slideshare.net , to some other stuff. Lately I have started realizing how badly i needed to give time to my own ideas (and there are lots of them), with such short product life spans on the internet and the boom taking place interms of web valuations how can I possibly miss out on trying……

The internet is an awesome place to learn and create new things, to this end i must give a lot of credit to the last 8 months at slideshare.net where the team has done some pretty interesting stuff.  The systems team rocks, even if its pushed beyond its capacity ….. A big thanks is in order to my team mates (in random order)

• Lalit …. JS guru
• Saurabh …. Systems guru
• Kapil …. best tech lead for sure
• Mayank …. c00l dev. and stock player
• Kaa …. creative creative n more
• Yats …. the zen master
• Golak …. “bhalo” dev.
• Abhishek(*) …. one of the most motivated guys ever
• Praveen(*) …. guilt free dev. guru
• Gaurav …. n00b domain sitter
• Mohit …. thinking and analytical dev.
• bhups …. abhi mile hai, aur kya likhoon

(*) these guys left slideshare coupla months back

Had a lot of fun, should not have missed out on the trips …. I am missing in nearly all the group photographs ….. time to photoshop some of the kodak moments he he. A big thanks to Amit Ranjan and the management team for giving me an opportunity to work with one of the best teams ever …. May the slideshare alexa rank keep on rising

Note:

Frequency of blogging will resume , as i just figured the problem of my upload speed was because of the MTU size (it needed to be 1492 on the WiFi router not 1500) …..  3 cheers to that  (AIRTEL BROADBAND)

Today , after a seriously long deployment at slideshare we have released URL and email upload. These add to the exisiting means of pushing content into slideshare. Let me list the ways of pushing content into slideshare.net ..

• Normal uploads
  • Single - works on all machines
  • Bulk (multiple uploads at one go) - fails on firefox on linux.
• URL uploads
  • Bulk - basically copy a bunch of urls, which will be uploaded to slideshare
  • Using plugins - We at slideshare have made two plugins (one for firefox another for IE) which will allow the user to upload into slideshare any online presentation they like with a single click.
• Email upload - just mail a presentation and it will get uploaded to slideshare.net

So there are 3 broad ways of pushing content, the most useful among the recently introduced email upload. It will save the conference organizers a lot of headache when they give out one common email address where all the presenters can upload their presentations.  This is also useful for people on the move, fire a presentation from their handhelds to slideshare.

More when it is officially posted on http://blog.slideshare.net 

PMWiki is this really cool wiki platform, which is used all over the internet for all kinds of collaborative purposes. Today, we at slideshare have put out a “recipe” which allows you to easily embed a presentation in PMWiki

The download link for the recipe is here

You can just unzip and put the contents of this file into the cookbook/ directory of PMWiki. Then you can use the following tag to embed a slideshow

(:slideshare {presentation id}:)

Where the {presentation id} is the part of the slideshow URL after http://www.slideshare.net
For example:
http://www.slideshare.net/nmenap/machu-picchu-77777

will have the following embed code

(:slideshare nmenap/machu-picchu-77777:)

So it is that simple ehh…. So go ahead embed as many slideshows as you want ….

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7566

Checkout the Slideshare karaoke application built on top of the SlideShare API, a very cool tool which allows you to randomly pickup sideshows and have some really random fun ….

The API has been released some days back and hence the documentation is very sparse, but rest assured that with some more applications coming up there will be enough open source documentation around. This really cool piece of Javascript using the prototype library has been developed by Lalit patel , who is a specialist at JS and cross-browser issues. The code for this application has been released at google code under GNU/GPL … so you can just dive into the code eh ….

Enjoi the karaoking … and start thinking about the next big slideshare mashup eh ….

Screenshot

Checkout these links reviewing the slideshare application , the coolest presentation sharing application on the planet ….

• Worlds top ten facebook application
• UK web focus
• Another SlideShare review

These are some of the links which are talking about the Slideshare facebook application, so have you added the application yet ??? if not, go get it ….

Screenshot

Today, SlideShare has shown the way and has become the first of presentation sharing site to become developer friendly. The long-awaited API has been released and yes, I have a series of tutorials in the works for using the really cool REST API released.
There is some PHP helper code (ref: SSUtil) which allows a developer to start off using the code, that code also contains some functions which can generate a SlideShare RSS feed for you. Its not great but provides a start, if you want to develop more things using the API. So hop on … and create some really cool SlideShare mashups….

More about the API and what more cool things that can be done in part II , actually the SlideShare Facebook application was built on top of the current API , that has to say a lot about how serious SlideShare is about the developer community….

Another big development was fixing the RSS(here) to the new media standard, now the feed rocks and is much more usable than before, the slideshare namespace still exists and will be extended to include other meta information that the current RSS standard doesnt allow us to include ….
Or we could always work towards pushing the new standard to fit SlideShare feeds he he …. (The RSS compatibility issue needs a complete blog post, I hate what the internet biggies have done to the RSS standard …. the readers have also made it way worse … )

So things to checkout at SlideShare.net:

SlideShare API
Improved RSS - Sample