You are your brand !

You have to live and love your brand ! You need to eat, sleep, drink and breathe it through the thousands of cells in your body....and thats just a beginning ! your customers will start giving a second look and start recognizing it soon.

To begin with, if you are start up company, the first thing everybody you are trying to sell is gonna do is check if he has "heard" about your "brand". So give a name to your product / service. Take time to make a neat logo that expresses your spirit of business (joyful or professional or whatever the spirit is) This is probably the first thing you must do. Make something that people can easily remember and associate you with.

Then go head over heels to promote it ! Your passion and love for your brand should be the fire that ignites other matchsticks, that is your first few loyal customers. Yep, get them excited about using your product. Give away compliments etched with your brand name. Of course don't do a direct marketing - find the best occasion in their life to do it and give your compliment with even a simple "Best wishes from (Your brand)" written on it.

Take your brand everywhere you go and let the customers do the same.

Wanna know how much we love thiray ? Oh..we go crazy with thiray ! Our team attended the International Film Festival in Goa. There were some computers in the lobby for the delegates to check their emails. We promptly set the default homepage of all the browsers in all the computers to www.thriay.com, so that everybody who stops to check their email sees our landing page first !

Will your business really make you rich ?

When these two things happen without any push from your side, you can be assured that your startup / business is moving in the right direction to make you rich !

1. Your customers tell you directly what they don't like about your Product / Service
2. Your customers tell their friends about what they like about your Product / Service

Techie anecdotes

Very often we come across people who are the end users of technologies like email, smart phones, digital cameras etc. And if they do not happen to know your software engineering background, it could be your rendezvous with ignorance which you can laugh about later. Here are some of mine...

A famous Eyecare chain here created an online record of my issues and generated a patient ID. The next time I happened to visit one of their other centers and I promptly took the ID card with me. But to my surpise, these guys had no clue of my records and wanted me to register again. When I asked why, the young girl replied "Our records are different Sir"

I took my mom's old black and white photograph to get it scanned in my native town. The guy who owns the famous photo studio / lab there quoted an exorbitant price to scan and make a blow up print of the photo. I was in no mood to argue, but did raise my concern in vain. Later, the lady technician who actually did the scan whispered generously "Don't worry I have made 2 copies of the photograph in your memory stick for the same price" !!

Govt. websites need some serious changes in design patterns. My login credentials wasn't working for service tax website. When I called the toll free help desk they said you I'll have to contact my local range officer to reset the password, for whatever reason ! When I went there, this guy finds that they had no record of my business and so he can't access it !! I was in a different region when I started my business and I had moved since then. But what is the point of going "cloud" if a particular regional office can't access(even view) info. about other regional records ? I had to unnecessarily travel some 20km today because of this.


I got an email from the HR of a potential employer asking me to send scanned copies of my documents for verification. As I went through the list I saw the last item was "2 passport size photographs". I called the young lady to confirm if she wanted a soft copy or hard copies. I told her what the last item was and she said "Oh thats ok, just send us 2 soft copies of your photo, that'll do" !!??

Share your anecdotes too...

5 steps to a succesful start up

1. Be formal: Even if you are an IT guy with the next BIG idea and are working out of a garage, don't present yourself that way. Get your start up registered formally and take care of the legal issues first, even if this takes time and money. Get a bunch of decent looking business cards printed and use them when you make contacts. People will take you seriously only if you take yourself seriously.

2. Get bottom dollar: While getting business cards is necessary, don't spend a fortune on the perfect design. Get a good but quick design. Bargain on every penny you spend and maintain books. When we wanted a small number of  T-shirts for Thiray, we figured the cost were sky-rocketing unless we order thousands. We found an artist and got the few painted with fabric paint instead.

3. Build a team: This is probably the most vital and difficult step. You need to find able people and delegate things, you can't do everything by yourself. Get people for their skill and attitude not for experience, references. Every member of the team should feel something very important is at stake for him/her in the startup.

4. Sell first: There is no better way to find out whether your idea will work unless  than taking it directly  to your target customer's scrutiny. Come up with a minimum desirable product at the earliest, give it to beta customers for free trial ( selling doesn't mean making money, sell your idea first ) and get feedback / review.

5. Go Viral: Never forget to ask a satisfied customer to refer your product to his contacts. Building a network of trusted users is probably the single most important thing in business which will eventually make your cash box ring.

Why Tier II Indian cities struggle to become IT hubs ?

Yesterday, my friend with 3+ years of IT experience went for a job interview in an IT company in Coimbatore. The company whose parent group is into many industries from hospitality to entertainment has ventured into IT also almost a decade ago and has managed to get hold of a bunch of clients all over the world. Yet, the HR first wanted to know if my friend would be willing to "come down to local standards" in her salary expectation. Also, if she would be ready to get into an agreement with the company that she would stick on for 2 years at least. The work culture once you are inside an IT company in tier II cities is also not up to standards. You face a huge hierarchy, not the usual flat IT office.

The attitude of new entrants and biggies from traditional industries who want to venture into IT MUST change. The HR policies need to be overhauled in these organisations. This recent article could be a starting point for learning. Improving infrastructure and building IT parks do not solve the puzzle completely for any city that tries to become the next Bangalore.

My friend asked the HR if the company is willing to "come down to local standards" in her deliverables at work?

10 Free Filmmaking tools I use

Guerilla filmmakers can use the following tools for their work.

1. Celtex: Script writing

2. Google Sketchup: Set decoration and lighting

3. Paint.net: Image editing

4. Movie Planner: Planning and scheduling your production

5. Windows movie maker: Video editing

6. Audacity: Sound editing

7. Virtual Dub: Sound editing and effects mixing

8. Blender: Animation and graphics

9. Wax: Compositing and special effects

10. Cinecode : Video Format conversion

All the best !

Innovation

A recent news about India's Smart Grid Task Force pushed my interest in further probing about Innovation in India.

Taking or Bringing technology to the grass roots to solve problems is a great way to innovate. Business today explains how Indian companies have managed to innovate. Their recent issue also talks about a handful of independent Indians have managed to do it at their level. One hot startup ideas (next to only to social media strategising) is Innovation consulting - helping other startups and companies to innovate. Quoting BT, a few myths about innovation are

1. Innovation is expensive, demanding lots of resources... Failure to innovate is what is costly.
2. Create hundreds of ideas because of high failure rates... Fewer, bolder ideas based on your company's capabilities and unmet customer needs you discover work best.
3. Early financial analysis is key to approving concepts... Nearly always wrong—build prototypes instead.

Surprisingly, it looks like the National Knowledge Commission's (NKC) very definition and viewpoint on the topic is in contrastingly different. According to its report on innovation,

The Innovation ecosystem is a complex environment that requires the coordinated functioning of a number of diverse factors in order to function effectively. Innovation also needs to become as wide spread as possible, spreading across the entire economy, from the grassroots to the large firm level. It is felt that a comprehensive effort to address these issues would act as a critical enabling factor for India to be amongst the global leaders in Innovation.

We will have to wait and see how fast the NKC manages to do the above, considering the fact that the smart grid initiative which was launched recently was suggested years ago by a Stanford University student here

How to beat competition

I can't believe this !

I just took a very short break from working on my start up idea ( to give some time to my other passion - film making) I come back and find yet another competitor to my yet-to-be-launched business idea. And I had thought this was one of its kind, unique business idea when I started working on it. Eventually I did find "similar" ideas already floating around and the latest was the 15th. Competition is something every entrepreneur WILL face today or tomorrow. So how to take advantage of your competitors.

1. Know them first. In and out - read every piece of information you can find about your competitor to understand his strengths and weakness.

2. Know yourself ! Yeah, know your strong and weak points from the customer's perspective, not yours. Remember, perceived value of your product is always going to be different from your cost and effort.

3. Learn from other's mistakes. This is crucial since startups don't have the luxury of making costly mistakes. So learn from your competitors mistakes and work on to avoid them

4. Don't just copy your competitor's features and products. Probably, your absence is a certain space aligns with your company's vision or makes you stand out from the crowd, so think twice before jumping to work on that feature your competitor has in his product.

5. Be his customer, this helps in understanding the benefits and problems your prospective customer faces.

6. Strengthen your strong points than working on your weak ones. Make your USP stronger.

7. In a sales pitch, if a customer brings up the competitor's feature that you don't have, find out the customer's actual business and explain how your product addresses the need rather than getting into a comparison of the features.

8. Make sure you market your advantages loud and clear ! Bang on !

9. Keep a close watch on competitor's products. Competitor analysis is not a one time activity but a hygiene factor.

10. Lastly, may be having a competition is not that bad. As they say it's easier to get a decision from a customer when he has a choice between product A and product B rather than between product A and nothing.

A piece of you everywhere, for everybody

The other day my wife made a strange observation that she gets promotional messages to her mobile based on what she spoke about in her conversations. For example, in one of her phone calls, if she spoke about having a clean drinking water for us, the next day she got Ads about water purifiers. To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. Being in the contact center industry for many years, I knew this was technically possible using Speech recognizers and caller segmentation. But would TRAI, the regulator in India allow the provider to do anything of that sort?

Much has been written and talked about Facebook's recent changes, the perils of it and how to safeguard yourself against it. Welcome to the next evolution of www, this is where we are heading - what Facebook or any online company wants to know and track is what you are doing everywhere online and offline , not just in their website ! Thanks to social media, wherever online we go, we can Digg it or delicious it, tweet it. Look at this company Blippy, which wants to know what you are buying and suggests it would be easy if you just give them your credit card numbers and they would track the information for you ! Do you know that instead of having various login IDs in various sites, you can be just one unified online avatar with an open ID.

So what happens with all these information about you and why is everybody after it? Well, a whole bunch of data mining companies exist doing things like social monitoring, social media discovery and much more. Considering the fact that every company (online or in general) wants has Social Media Management as a bulk part of their IT budget you realize how this information could be used to sell you anything. I guess the day we sent our first email, we all fell into the trap and trusted a stranger with information about us. And I don't think we are ready to go switch back to postal departments.

Digging further, we figured out my wife's claim was not correct, at least for now. I  and a couple of my friends also got the same SMS Ad the next day in my phone and we had not spoken about water over the phone.

Google - Second for the first time?

Google, with the launch of its new search interface today, has probably come second or third in the search race for the first time. 

The new result interface of google looks very much similar to Yahoo! and Bing . As John Battlle explains in his book "The Search", the way Yahoo and Google handle the search intent of the user has been different historically. Google always tries to give the "objective" answers using a mixture of PageRank, downloading statistics etc. while Yahoo tries to be more "humane" and gives related and relevant results of the searched term based on what other users are searching for. Now with this latest development, is Google taking the Yahoo ! route ? Are we walking towards a consolidation in the search space ?

Funny thing, when you search for "Search" in Google, the top result is Bing and in Bing it is Yahoo ! :-)

Panorama in video

This could probably the next BIG in movie entertainment after 3D magic of  AVTAR. Check out this video to get an idea of what I'm talking about. Yellow birds don't have wings but they fly to make you experience a 3D reality.....relax that is the name of the camera which made this video possible.

Imagine the possibilities it might open for entertainment. Consider a scene where a guy and a girl is talking. Instead of an usual over the shoulder shot of the guy which you normally see today, you might be able to to just turn your view and keep looking at that hot girl he is talking to ! (Though this is unlikely to happen in the near future since the cinema halls have to keep up with this development.) It feels like you are literally in the movie, in between the actors ! That could really change the perspective writing a screenplay, nay the very basics of story narration ! Whew !

At this point of my movie career :-P, all I can do is pass the word to one tech-savy crew in India which might probably show interest, yes, it is Mr. Shankar. I scrapped one of his cameramen who happens to be my friend, hope it gets some attention.

Kosuru news : Enthiran is getting ready in 3D !!