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Single minded objective for 2009

January 1st, 2009

Another new year with a bunch of new wishes. This is what happens every new year - year after year.

After completing almost 70% (3.5 out of 5) last year wishes, I am feeling all charged up to touch the magical 100% wish completion this year. It has never happened with me before - but I’m a firm believer.

A quick roundup from the last year’s new year wishing post…

~~Launch ApnaBill.com on or before 31st January~~ - DONE (we showcased ApnaBill.com at Proto in July 08, Our interview by PuneTech)
~~Be back with family~~ - DONE
~~Pizza holiday in January (more months to be decided laters)~~ - DONE (more months were covered during the year)
Dedicate 1 hour, 5 days a week to fitness - jogging (gym maybe) - PARTLY DONE (2008’s fitness record was much better than 2007’s).
Play Tennis once a week atleast - keep bugging Ratish/Kapil/etc - MISSED

Owning to the very first wish that got completed on 15th June 08 when we launched ApnaBill.com to the public - the year 2008 was one of the most wackiest and busiest year in my life. I was never so focussed thoughout the year - ever! The launch was just one of the stepping stones for what is in store for the future… and that alone decided the only single objective I am going to have for the coming new year - 2009.

Objective(s) for 2009

Make Four Fractions a profitable venture.
- Bring ApnaBill.com out of Beta
- Graduate the <ff.labs/> experimental projects to Betas
- Rake in first Million Rupees (in profit) for Four Fractions
  - Start working for Four Fractions full time
  - Build a full time team
  - Convert JD 10-B as Four Fractions office.
- Outsource finance, monitor it personally

Anything that is not converging to this objective, either gets dropped or gets sidelined.

Looking forward to 2009 with open arms and a ton of new ideas!

…with dreams in my eyes
and a fire in my belly.

Happy new Year 2009.

Posted in Four Fractions, Life, Startups | Comments (4)

Celebrating a year at Four Fractions - our First Anniversary

December 20th, 2008

Four Fractions completed a full year into existence on 20th December 08.
This is the greatest milestone in my nearly 4.5 years of professional life.

For those who might not be familiar with Four Fractions, it is the company behind ApnaBill.com and other new stuff that we are working on.

The following lines by Shri Harivansh Rai Bachhan sum it up aptly…

I would like to express my special thanks to my parents (Mom, Dad & Sameer), my business partners - Sameer and Sandy and all other friends - for being there when the company needed them.

Looking forward to a hectic and eventful second year

Posted in ApnaBill, Four Fractions, Startups | Comments (0)

Home-coming!

November 23rd, 2008

Nothing beats home!

A small proof

Four Fractions had its first official team meet - though nothing official was discussed, we had a ton of fun - pure simple fun.

Chilling over coke! - Sam and myself

The pizza that we destroyed - we sure were the costliest customers that evening - costed Pizza Hut an extra 350+90+70 bucks!
As it turned out - we were served the pizza and garlic bread with onions when we specially requested them to serve it w/o onions. …and ofcourse PH paid the price - a free pitcher of Coke

All the w/o onions thing made everyone so damn hungry!

Mr. Sandy - our chief guest for the evening

- brainstorming -

Ofcourse - he is shadow practicing for the future… just in case!

Posted in Blog, Family, Friends, Life | Comments (4)

My last network access from Pune

November 16th, 2008

Reaching Delhi in exactly 2 hours from now! …I’ve waited for this moment for more than 2 years now!
Feels like wow!

Posted in Blog | Comments (1)

HCL > Red Hat > IBM, Pune > IBM Gurgaon

November 16th, 2008

31st January, 06 - when I was still an HCL Tech employee - I had read a Paul Graham’s article - which mentioned that there are two type of people - those who earn their livelihood by doing what they love to do and those who do what they love by earning livelihood from something they don’t like so much.

The transition from HCL Tech (Noida) to Red Hat (Kalyani Nagar, Pune) had directly put me into the first category. Time passed, priorities changed, and with changing jobs, short term objectives also changed - but the long term objectives were still there, visible clearly.

Today, almost 30 months later - I am part of the second group, supporting what I love by doing things that support me financially. The bigger objective is still very much there. Getting back to Delhi with family & my team is just going to put that more into the focus.

Talking of getting back to Delhi - how can I miss the mention of Pune.

Taking the plunge to go and work with Red Hat, away from my family & friends - literally turned me ‘upside-down’. This was my first ever stay away from the family and a ton of things changed with that. Money matters suddenly became important, finding good people to live with became top most priority, finding friends whom I could talk at same wavelength became a challenege and what not. The independence came tagged with a sense of responsibility - which ofcourse took a back seat for the initial period - but it sure kicked in, hard - sooner than later.

When I came to Pune, I didn’t even knew how to operate a Debit Card in an ATM - or even how to deposit a cheque correctly. Ofcourse, driving was supposed to be even out of mention. And I really don’t feel ashamed about it anymore. As I realized, all the people I met during my initial stay in Pune were more or less like at the same page as I was - sometimes even worst!

And that turned out to be the best part!

Living away from the family literally taught me everything I needed. Independence, sense of responsibility & ownership, the missing sense of belonging to my roots, being comfortable with what I am, managing money matters (thought I still am a n00b at it) - and ofcourse driving

Luckily, I made some great lifelong friends in Pune - the D25 legacy!
Ratish & I met when we were playing against each other in a Tennis match about two years ago at Deccan Gymkhana Club. Though somehow I won that match… but the dude won my heart. We went on to become room mates in just a couple of months - and that was when I became part of the D25 group. Friends @ D25 were exactly what I was looking for in Pune - full of fun when enjoying and trustworthy when in need. Though the original members @ D25 are now scattered all over India, the legacy still lives on - D-25[at]googlegroups.com

Pune is a great city - unarguably the best after Delhi. A probable second home for Delhi folks who want to relocate.

The flight Captain just announced that we are going to land in a few minutes - so I am going to log off now. If you ever have any questions about life in Pune - please feel free to ping me.

Good Bye Pune!
12:41 PM, thousands of feet in the sky.

Posted in A strong urge to blog..., Life in Pune | Comments (0)

Anything but IST

November 4th, 2008

Its >1 am in the night and I’m dead tired - but since i’m totally out of sync of sleeping so early, my brain is in a hyper active state. From past 45 minutes, i’m simply shuffling through songs on the MP3 player trying to separate out beats from the lyrics… Its fun - try it once …requires lots of concentration

Posted in Blog | Comments (1)

Why Jains celebrate Diwali…

October 29th, 2008

Ever wondered, why we Jains celebrate Diwali…
No! Its not because of homecoming of God RAM but some other reason!

Well… This day, back in history, Lord Mahawir Swami got “Nirvana”, ie - left the material world forever (no re-birth cycle any more) . The very next day, his disciple, Lord Gautam Prabhu attained “Kewal Gyan”.

Hence we Jains, celebrate this day by lighting diyas/candles & pray the GOD to shower prosperity & happiness upon us.

So! Light up the day & be happy!
Happy Diwali to all!

PS: This day, we have khichdi as our dinner! The reason being that all day long we eat all sorts of junk food, & hence the Dinner should make up for the all the protiens lost during the day

Only today’s khichdi tastes yum!
rest… yukk!

– Content copied over from my older blog @ Blogspot –

Posted in Life | Comments (0)

Linux Creative Group

October 27th, 2008

After a long gap, the guys at Linux Creative Group (LCG) met again today @ 3PM at Mocha Cafe in Koregaon Park in Pune. We discussed stuff ranging from girls to virtualization, startups including

Rati, Subu, Manoj and Abhishek (behind Subu)

Ofcourse, I was there too

Feel free to join in at the LCG Orkut Community.

Posted in GNU/Linux | Comments (0)

My thoughts - Apple iPhone 3G in India

October 21st, 2008

I’ll be honest here - I’ve been a Nokia fan from the day I started using a cell phone.

Luckily, I was the first person in my family to own a cell phone - a Nokia 2100 (back then,owning just a cell phone was a big deal). Moved onto a Nokia 6600 (with a lot of support from Sameer) and then after drowning the phone in rain, I moved onto a Nokia E61 - the device which made me fell in love with QWERTY keyboards and big screens. People used to think I am carrying a scientific calculator around - but little they knew that I can type on my E61 faster than they can type on the computer keyboard - completely in love with it. Its going to be almost 2 years since I even thought of buying a new phone.

Interestingly, I had a chance to use iPhone (initial model, not 3G) - the onscreen keypad was a bit weird and awkward as it had no tactile feedback (except for the sound it made on each keypress) - as a result, I quickly brushed it off. The craze and hype also didn’t seemed any good to me as I knew that the iPhone (1st Gen) was just eye candy and gave me no good reason to make a switch.

Come iPhone 3G and the situation changed.

Actually, I was still keeping away from the hype - specially because Airtel and Vodafone launched iPhone 3G with roof-hitting prices - plus they have a deal stringed to the iPhone. But then, my E61 started looking a bit old, calls were dropping, battery was going dead etc.
**Actually there’s nothing wrong with the E61, just that I needs a new phone **

Reviewing, reviewing and reviewing. The only phones I could think after using the awesome qwerty pad in E61 were Nokia E71 and Nokia E90 - they have no real competitors in the business class category.

However, the iPhone 3G was also there in my subconscious mind. Though I was just simply rejecting the hype all along, I had actually not done an informed review of the phone myself. I act dumb at times

Okay, so I set out to find what exactly is iPhone 3G. What I am going to describe here is just a summation of my thoughts on the device. Please feel free to use them as you like.

Cost
The device in India costs a whopping INR 31,000 and INR 36,100 for the 8GB and 16 GB models - devices from Airtel and Vodafone are competitively priced. For Airtel, the contract seems to be for a year. Though I could not determine the same for Vodafone data plan- but considering that the device is competitively priced, the data plan ought to be similar in conditions too.

For Airtel, the only data plan is pretty straight forward

However, the data plan for Vodafone is a bit more detailed. Best one I could figure out was to get a regular Vodafone connection and then buy their iPhone data plan. Click on the image below for more details

Now if a regular iPhone user (3G or EDGE) uses upto 2 MB data per day (push email, chat, browsing, downloads, etc) - total month usage would be 60 MB.

For Airtel
Per month usage = 60MB
Since per month allowed downloads are free upto 500 MB, there’s nothing extra to pay with Airtel Data plan. I’ll have to check with Airteloutlet if there’s any other not-mentioned cost in the data plan.

For Vodafone
Free as per month allowed data usage is 250 MB.
However, you still have to pay up INR 499 per month as usage cost so…
Yearly usage cost = INR 499 * 12 = INR 5988 ~= INR 6000

An extra cost of INR 6,000 is definitely a bummer for Vodafone. Since there is no way to get around this cost, the effective price of buying an iPhone 3G from them is INR 37,000 and INR 42,100 for 8 and 16 GB models.

Both the carriers actively state that their iPhones would not work with any other data plan and that unlocking the phone before a period of 12 months would render the warranty null and void. An interesting question that springs up - what happens after a year? Would the customer be free to use his iPhone with another carrier or other regular data plan from same carrier? I am going to find this out from their retail/customer service department.

Network in India
The data plans bring up an interesting question. Is India ready for 3G rollout?
This being a subjective discussion and out of scope for this article - I’ll stick to what’s available in realtime - here in India, EDGE networks are running just fine - I used to download at speeds ranging from 15-20′ish KBps in New Delhi. Though BSNL has started experimenting with EVDO cards in select cities, working at 2Mbps speeds, I still feel that its going to be atleast another 6 months before things take shape for a 3G rollout in India. That means, the iPhone would have to be used on existing EDGE networks - atleast for another 6 months.

Browsing
I could have NOT missed out the mention of Safari browser on iPhone. It just blows away any mindset you might have for any browser on any of the mobile devices. As I mentioned, I am using my Nokia E61 from past 2 years and love its browser - after using Safari, I cannot begin to imagine that how child’ish the Nokia browser looks in front of Safari on iPhone. Safari on iPhone renders the page *almost* in perfection. I am so damn thinking of performing an online transaction from ApnaBill.com using the iPhone - which I could have not even dreamt of doing on my E61. You have to - have to - use it to understand my point here.

Oomph Factor
Apple is known for its brand value. Be it an iPod, an iPhone or even a Mac. There are no two thoughts here that this factor cannot be ignored. You can either love Apple for the user experience they create, or just hate it. You cannot fall in between. For the iPhone, this goes a step further with the multi-touch sensitive screen.

Touch Screen vs Real Keyboard
After using the E61 QWERTY keyboard, nothing feels good - not even the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard. Onscreen keyboard’s tactile feedback just can never match that of a real keyboard. Further, if you have bigger fingers - typing is going to be a problem on iPhone. My finger tips are neither too slim nor too broad. However, even after a day’s heavy usage, I was only partially comfortable with the landscape keyboard that Safari pops up. This should be an option for all input expecting apps on iPhone. And since this is a software issue, this can certainly be addressed in a software update.

Landscape keyboard in iPhone

GPS
GPS’s are ubiquitous in today’s phones. Every Nokia/Samsung phone coming out these days has a GPS chip onboard. So does iPhone. With an ability to track current position - a whole new era of location aware services can come up. And this is not limited to just finding routes. The iPhone 3G has an A-GPS which (besides using regular satellites) can triangulate your position using the cell towers as well.

Applications
iPhone 1st generation came with a fixed set of apps and (please correct me if I am wrong) there was no way of installing new apps. However, with iPhone 3G (update 2.1) - the new shiny App Store is live. It has hundreds of apps (paid and free) which can be installed on the device. The reason Symbian smart phones became so popular was that there was a plethora of apps that could have been installed on them. This included native Symbian apps and the Java apps. iPhone however does not supports Java apps - meaning, only the apps made for (and using) iPhone SDK can be installed on the device. I do think that this is a disadvantage - as all the logic that was written for other Java mobile apps would have to be re-written. Apple has interesting ways of pushing people to use their SDK’s. However, the apps you install on your device need to be approved by Apple and this is where Jailbreaking comes in.

Jailbreak and Unlocking
Both of these terms are different and not to be confused. Jailbreaking is the ability to get access to your device in a way that helps you in installing new apps and accessing the file system. Unlocking however means that you are no longer restricted to your carrier. Please be informed that either of these activities can make your iPhone unstable and can render your warranty contract null and void. For more on the difference between the two terms, checkout this thread. Follow through to The Dev Team’s blog for more information. I am still continuing my research on Jailbreaking - so cannot comment more on this technically.

Missing Features
I have seen endless forwarded mails and videos, making mockery of the iPhone 3G about the most basic features it lacks. To list a few…
- Flash Support in camera
- Cut and Paste
- Video Recording
- iPhone as a Modem
- Password Manager
- MMS
- Forwarding SMS

As a regular user - I clearly understand the lack of video recording and missing flash on camera. I am more worried about the missing flash as its the only hardware component. Rest everything can be fixed in software updates. So those making fun of iPhone on these points - need to seriously reconsider their argument. Cut/Copy/Paste, video recording, Modem, MMS, forwarding messages - are all in _the_ software. Even 3rd party applications can fix this anyday. I have read that Apple denied entry to an app which fixed the copy/paste fixing problem. If this is even 10% true, you can be completely assured that Apple knows of this shortcoming and is onto fixing it.

Conclusion
Would I buy it?
- Hell ya! - It is definitely going to succeed my E61.
When?
- Not just now. I’ll probably wait for the year end 2008. Hopefully the prices would come down.

Acknowledgments
A big thanks to Ratish for lending his 1st gen iPhone for a full day. I couldn’t have started my research without his support.

Posted in Review, iPhone 3G | Comments (8)

My latest grab!

October 16th, 2008

Programming Collective Intelligence - I just managed to grab a copy and already have gone through three chapters - soo full of information - definitely worth an investment.

Posted in Blog | Comments (0)

How to stip tags, script and style off the HTML

September 21st, 2008

Havn’t you just wished sometimes that all the html, script and style tags would just vanish from the html pages and all you get is pure text (for fun and profit). Well, here’s how I am managing it

require "open-uri"
require "hpricot"
require "sanitize"

html = open("http://www.google.com")
hp = Hpricot(html.read)
hp.search("script").remove
hp.search("style").remove
sanitize(hp.innerHTML, okTags="")

And output?

“GoogleWeb Images News Orkut Groups Gmail more ▼ Books Scholar Blogs YouTube Calendar Photos Documents Reader even more » iGoogle | Sign inIndia Advanced Search Preferences Language ToolsSearch: the web pages from India Google.co.in offered in: Hindi Bengali Telugu Marathi Tamil Gujarati Kannada Malayalam Punjabi Advertising Programs - About Google - Go to Google.com©2008 - Privacy”

Now you can use this text to any imaginable use - as I mentioned earlier - maybe fun & profit

Libraries - hpricot, sanitize, open-uri

Have fun!

Posted in Ruby | Comments (1)

Earthquake in Pune

September 17th, 2008

This is probably the first time in my life when I was fuly aware of the quake - and am close enough to a laptop to blog about it. As per timeanddate.com, its 3:20 AM on 17th Sept 08 morning. Lets see, what do the newspapers report tomorrow

Posted in A strong urge to blog... | Comments (3)

Hello World - all over again!

September 10th, 2008

Saying hello to FF extensions

Posted in Startups | Comments (0)

PuneTech.com interviews ApnaBill.com

August 26th, 2008

PuneTech.com just posted an online interview about ApnaBill.com on how it started, challenges it faced and some tips for budding entrepreneurs. Don’t miss it!

[A snip from the interview]

There was this funny thing that set us back by almost 1 month…

We applied for a PAN card for Four Fractions. First, our application somehow got lost in the process. Then someone in the government department managed to put down our address as 108 when it was supposed to be 10 B (8 and B are very similar looking). Read more…

[/A snip from the interview]

PuneTech.com is an initiative from Navin Kabra - with an intent to bring together in one place all information about interesting software technology in Pune - the companies, the products, the people, and the technologies.

Posted in ApnaBill, Reviews, Startups | Comments (0)