Web 2.0

I get scared from the idea of negotiating with VCs to strike a fair deal between the present employees and the investors in the new startup. That's the reason I love this blog which I stumbled upon today. Venture Hacks: An entrepreneur’s guide to hacking venture capital. It's little bit scary to read real world stories of cheat and deception, but nevertheless, a learning experience. And at the end of the day, Experience is all that counts.

Remember pipes from unix world. Ah, the favorite tool for data manipulation on the fly. Freedom to view the data as you please..
old days: cat blah | grep vah | cut -d ":" -2
What if, you were given the same freedom to manipulate data over the internet. Here comes, Pipe 2.0, which is actually a webtool which allows you to aggregate, screen, whatever.. data on the net and publish in the way you like it. Introduction to pipes from O'Reilly Radar.

Yesterday I had a chance to attend the Innovative Mobile Startup conference at Accenture Labs in Palo Alto. There were product demos from four companies. Brief description follows..

Ccube.com
The focus of ccube is social networking with main essence of voice giving the personal touch. It allows users to leave a voice profile on the website and also facilitates users to call each other without requiring users to give out their personal phone numbers. There is a rating system which can be used to rate the user after each phone conversation and thus can act as public policing system.
Business Model: Targeted advertisements in the voice profiles as well
as phone system.

flurrymail.com
As the name suggests, they are in the mobile email arena. They facilitate users to access their email on their phones, no matter what kind of phone is used. It installs a Java App on the phone which would activate the features depending on the capability of the phone. Setting black & white filters for the emails on the webinterface, subscribing to the RSS feeds and news.
Business Model: Advertisements on the Web.

Dash.com
Its a neat startup bringing dynamic information to the Navigation System. This was long due and we knew that the potential for such a product would be enormous. The terminal would have two radios, GPRS as well as WiFi and download dynamic data from the central servers. The data could be traffic information, location based information. Neat addition is to send address information from personal PC to car. Possiblity of P2P in future when the cars using Dash increases. Dash works as MVNO, where they buy Wireless Bandwidth from big players.
Business Model: Contracts with the car companies, free with new car for certain time span and then subscription based service.

SoonR.com
I would define soonr as a webbased remote control for multiple machines, where the browser is running on your phone. User needs to install a soonr client on the machine (pc or a mac) and share data, which is then optimised by the soonr servers to be effectively viewed on the Mobile Webbrowser. No need to sync with outlook anymore and view all your mails/calendar events in the mobile browser itself. No installation required on the Mobile Terminal.
Business Model: Business partnership with operators and MVNOs.

As part of Churchill Club's annual event, the panel of five Silicon Valley entrepreneurs discussed the challenges and critical success factors necessary to reach the promised land. Video can be found at Google. It's quite enlightening discussion with very good points to take home. The one that I liked the most is the comment made by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linkedin, If you are not embarrassed by the first release of your product in the market, then probably, you released too late . Another interesting perspective of being a successful entrepreneur from Joe Kraus, co-founder of eXcite and jotspot was to be a trend-spotter and not trend-setter.

Finally, the template gets a face lift. Drupal was updated to the latest and greatest. For folks having problems while upgrading to newer version of drupal, follow these simple steps

1. In update.php located in root directory of your installation, replace format_name() to theme()
2. If you get error messages from xtemplate.engine page, you can get rid of the xtemplate/ directory under themes/ and your themes would fall back to phptemplate theme engine. As of 4.7, phptemplate is default anyways.

Have fun :-).

I think Google should now change their strategy of naming their products. Funny thing is all of them are marked Beta Products. Gmail Beta, Froogle Beta, Maps Beta and now Calendar Beta. Only difference between the first three and and the last one is that first three are much more stable and usable than the last one. Calendar Beta is really really a beta product. I tried using it for wedding invitations and ended up hitting my head with wall. Word of caution for wise .. (contd.)

Riding on the hype of the new firefox clone -- Flock, I gave it a shot today. It truely provides builtin feature to post directly to your blogs, but then the added functionality is not that big of a deal. On my Linux box atleast, gnome-blog-poster or BloGTK provides similar features, if not more. Also, I couldn't make it to work with this blog and one of my colleagues had similar experience. So I guess Flock developers or Flockers still have some sleepless nights ahead..

If you like to be on the bleeding edge and also want to find out what's latest in Web 2.0 Arena, then MoMB is a good place to start. Some of my likes are

Blogniscient -- Blog tracking
RemembertheMilk -- Online todo lists
Start -- Just like google startpage. This from Microsoft
Trulia -- RealEstate search
Yotophoto -- Photos that you can use under Creative License.
Meebo -- Your Inbrowser IM tool(cool)