About all things unimportant

Because we participated in the Innovation challenge last year .. i get reminder mails telling us that we should participate this year also .. deep down in the mail was a link - List of enrolled teams. I was kind of estimating that i would see about 15 teams from ISB .. To my pleasant shock .. i saw 41 teams that have registered from ISB (The deadline is still a week away). Last year we had a joke on campus that the sponsoring school ( Thunderbird last year and Darden this year ) might be subsidizing its students to ensure that they enroll the maximum number of teams.

My best wishes to all the teams from ISB. We need to have at least one team on the podium this year.

http://www.innovationchallenge.com/EnrolledTeams.jsp 

As for us .. we didnt get too far .. but we had a good time "getting creative".  

In the back drop of the TIE ISB connect, i got nostalgic and went back a year to when i was working on an idea that i called - "Chitraksh". I had a few ideas on what it would be built on, what purpose it would serve and what would be the monetization model that would allow the people backing the idea to make some money doing the same.

As i revisit those ideas, i have realized that a lot of those ideas are things that are prevelent or have been thought of by other people.

The idea behing Chitraksh was to be single larget print/paint store in India. At one level, the idea started with the intention to sell cheap reprints ( Giclee prints ) in the Indian market. There is a lot of potential given the way every is buying houses. After the research done when i was in ISB, I had figured out the print gifts market is not very huge .. with the largest player in US (www.art.com ) having revenues of $ 100 million. This is a good thumb rule to follow if you are taking an idea that you are supplanting from other geographies to the Indian market .. Think hard .. is ther market big enough to support your idea and the valuations that you are working towards. You can throw in the argument that the business idea could defy conventional growth models and revenues limitations as seen in the markets from where you are borrowing this idea ( i.e say you argue that Indians will exchange more gifts than americans, or that Indians would watch more rental movies and the cost structures in India are more favourable to allow something like www.seventymm.com to be insanely successful .. These arguments have logic .. but entrepreneurs need to know how to not fall in love with their ideas .. once they have managed to have a split personality that can help them protect their ideas against the disbelievers and also dispassionately abuse the idea when they are evaluating it .. will help the entrepreneurs strike gold.

As i look back .. i figured that community content would the only way that Chitraksh would survive .. because you dont want to spend lot fo VC money creating digitized content ( an asset that may have very little market value in case you shut down ). The solution was a mash up between a community photo site ( life flickr ) and a order fulfilling system like ( www.art.com ). The users would have a chance to monetize their image content  and we would stay on the right side of the law ( copyright protection ).

As i think through now .. some of the ideas that i had 

1) Cheap art reprints that would resemble original art - already in place .. you go to any home furnishing/ large format retailer and you will realize that 85 % of the art that they are selling is nothing but reprints

2) Community driven sites - This has been around for some time now and the glamorous name would be mash-ups. I had thought of a monetization model where we would sell reprints .. but looks like selling ads is the most accepted monetization model for new economy mash-ups.

Bottomline - The bottomline is that Ideas come cheap .. it is very easy to take a few hours off build the greatest idea since sliced bread. Net net .. Execution is all that matters .. Ideas come cheap.

I had kind of anticipated that relocating from Pune to Bangalore would be a major pain and that this pain would get accentuated when i go house hunting.

I was forced to see 22 houses (by the Real estate broker  - They are a real pain and "un"ncessary evil ) and i thought not one of those houses had rents that were fairly priced ( I tried my level best to avoid having the bias of a person searching for acco). Finally i settled on a flat that is about 5 km from office.

On the issue of relocation, Bangalore is an extremely costly place as far as flat rentals go and people wanting to relocate to Bangalore need to keep in mind that a large part of the increased compensation that they might be getting, would be offset by the high rental costs.

Now moving to part 2 of my relocation plan, I need to move my stuff from Pune to Bangalore and get broadband. A few years back i had heard the slogan - "Roti, Kapda, Makaan aur Bandwidth". It sounded like a very "cheesy" line (especially when you consider that so many people in India dont have access to acceptable quality primary education. But in this case, i do agree that this line held true in my case. I instinctively dial Airtel to check if they provide broand band in the place where i have taken up my house. This , before i have nailed down the vendor who will provide cooking gas.

Work has picked up and after the hectic 2 weeks, i have settled into a nice rythym. It feels good that i can start contributing to the Y! bottomline and possibly the top line in such a short time.

Wanted to come down to ISB for  Tie-ISB connect, but couldnt do so because of the work load. Drats .. from what i read in the Class of 2007 blogs .. you have the "consults" doing an encore of last year. You have the consults coming in batches ( one after the other ) and these consults will pick up probably 10 % of the batch and consume 60 % of the mindshare of the student body .. Result this batch will do the same stupid things that we did .. Drats .. Drats .. Folks .. Consult jobs are the not best jobs on campus .. Go figure ..

Have moved from Zensar technologies to Yahoo Bangalore. Zensar was a very good place and gave me amazing visibility and some very promising work. Too bad for me that i decided to quit and move on. From what i have seen in Yahoo Bangalore ( It is an equally amazing place ), looking forward to having fun in this place.

I have joined Yahoo Bangalore as a Product Manager. Will try to avoid posting stuff about work ( not initially at least). Need to differentiate information that is for private consumption from information that is easily searchable ( Yahoo! searchable that is ).

On other fronts, have seen Pune’s bad roads and can easily say that Bangalore is orders of magnitude better. Bangalore makes up for the relatively better roads by having one of the most congested and polluted road ways. Looking forward to figuring out if i can work partly from home.

BTW , have heard that blogs have nine lives and my blog is in its third incarnation.