The Randomness of Randomness

Open Coffee Club Kolkata gets a new life!!!

// August 28th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // Business, Crowdsourcing, Entrepreneurship, Events, Open Coffee Club, Startups, Technology, The Ecosystem

It was this HeadStart Kolkata meeting in Pallav’s office! Post the meeting, I caught up with Manish & Sumit at the RDB Adlabs Cafe Coffee Day in Sector V.

We did some brainstorming & had short spurts of chit-chats over random topics. A part of this conversation was reviving the OCC Kolkata chapter. In fact, when Sumit suggested his idea, he didn’t even know he was talking about reviving OCC

Sumit’s idea:

Sumit hyperactively said that we could create a group of a few people in the city, who could meet regularly and work together, meanwhile sharing & discussing ideas and be helpful to each other. The basic concept of crowdsourcing per se.

How the picture was drawn.

I told him about the existing OCC Kolkata community, how it started in July last year out of my post-jaundice pastime and its current state, where Amitabh was frantically trying to survive the community.

It was at this point when we decided to take a plunge on this. And after two weeks of lethargy(We’re in Kolkata. You have to spare us for that ), I got in touch with Amitabh, we started shooting emails to each other much faster than the frequency of the consistent strikes in Kolkata, and eventually decided to imbibe the original concept of Saul Klein in Kolkata’s OCC, about which you can read more here and even more here!

And that was not very far behind. It was just this last Sunday! We closed the topic by Monday. Sumit took up the job of writing a blogpost & circulating it. Everyone else among us and the HeadStart Kolkata team decided to tweet & retweet about it!! A day-clash with something called the Toastmasters Club which happens every week on Tuesdays prompted us to schedule OCCs on Wednesdays instead of Tuesdays. So, we decided that we will arrange for internet, wi-fi & meet twice every week on Wednesdays & Saturdays. Wednesdays in the Sector-V CCD & Saturdays in the Park Street CCD!

Well, what it apparently meant was that the re-shaped OCC Kolkata would start off on my 25th birthday !!

The first new-faced OCC Kolkata – when it happened

The work culture at OCC Kolkata

On the D-day, me being sick joined in a bit late. But, when I reached, I found there were already 7 other people there. All were happily working. Bingo! That was a surprise!

Lending a supposedly incomplete list of people who’d come down, from Sumit’s blog:

• Sumit Datta
• Saikat Singha
• Prashant Verma
• Pallav Nadhani
• Sumana Chakraborty
• Sougata Pal
• Bibhash
• Samiran Ghosh
• Mitesh Ashar(myself)
• Nitesh Ambuj
• Pankaj
• Abishek Rungta
• 

  Sumit & Saikat in an intense discussion about their product, while Sumana is busy with her own work

  Ashmita Brahma

• Nikita Poddar
• Debashish Mohanty

Now, as I see the first OCC after the re-design, the response was simply fantabulous. Apart from the number of people who turned up over the span of the whole day, there were people who took back some value, which has had been the lacking part, as I can say from personal feedback I have received from so many people.

The value

Among others, Sumana, who is a copywriter, got 3 leads!

Abhishek & Pallav

Where as, Abhishek & Pallav, who are planning to come up with an angel fund based out of Kolkata, actually ran the idea through the people present and crowdsourced the name of their angel investment firm! As requested by them, the name of the company is still a secret, and they’ve promised to launch the fund at one of the OCC Kolkata happenings!! They have also promised to have a cake-cutting ceremony on the day of the launch at OCC!!

Not to mention, there were a lot of mini-discussions with different results for different people, while they worked on their laptops, sipping on to coffees and munching sandwiches.

If not anything, you are at least doing the work that you would have anyways done otherwise!!

What’s next??

What’s next?? Yes… Next is the next OCC. Now it will keep on happening. Every Wednesday & every Saturday.

For this Saturday, the venue is going to be one of the CCDs in or around Park Street. We’re still contemplating which one to go for. Suggestions about this are welcome. To know the venue, follow either me or Sumit on twitter.

Once we crowdsource a definite venue, it will get fixed & come what may, if you walk in on one fine Wednesday or Saturday, you shall definitely find at least a bunch of few enthusiastic chaps to sit and work with

So, more of it this Saturday! Catch you there!!

Update: Please do join the OCC Kolkata mailing list here: http://groups.google.com/group/occ-kolkata

Update: Please follow the hashtag #occkol on twitter for updates on the timing, venue

To PPT present or not to PPT present?

// August 20th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // Technology, Usability

This is a post in response to Manan’s post about an article on BBC World by Max Atkinson about The Problem with Power Point

It started in the comment form on Manan’s blog, but when it started becoming so large, I decided to make it a blog post on my blog.

Well well well!! Max has made some points here!!

I am sorry to say that a person who has spoken about how things need to be presented to people, seems to have himself not been able to do it effectively.

Now, why would I say that? Mainly because I had to go through his whole post on BBC twice to actually figure out what the point he’s actually making in this post is.

As I see it, he has basically pointed out how people tend to make mistakes in the manner they present & in the way they select and represent their content.

He has done this apparently while attempting to – as the title of the news item suggests – find the core problem that Power Point as a tool carries.

As a person who carries some interests in user experience & usability, I find some of his points here very interesting and useful.

What is the point Max is trying to make?

Mr. Max here, in brief, is saying that:

Power Point is an amazing tool. But, it carries a flaw of usability. It is more usable to create content in a certain manner(paragraphs, bullets) and fails to make other functionalities easily usable(like the ability to add visual representation of data or ideas or thoughts).

My argument to that

Well, yes. Of course the way data/ideas are represented are important. But, blaming a tool which empowers people to do this in n number of ways for not being able to make the user use the `better` ways, is not really justified.

Specially, when Power Point actually gives an effective solution to all of these:

• You want to use paragraphs of text for the user to read
• You want to use sets of large sentences mangled together
• You want to use brief <15 word bulleted sentences
• You want to use images to represent your ideas/content
• You want to use graphical tools to represent your data
• A lot of other options or possibilities can be definitely worked out, and are out of the scope of this exhaustive bulleted list

The above functionalities are all enablers. They help you represent your content in the way you want.

As I see it, whatever Max has mentioned in his article, are more decisive attributes of the presenter, rather than the tool(Power Point).

The presenter has all the power on Power Point to disentangle his web of content and draw it out to people, but there are a few possible reasons I can think of why he/she is not successful in doing it:

• The presenter knows shit about presenting. He just copy pastes data, in whatever disposable form available to him through various resources, right into the presentation.
• The presenter is a lazy a**. Although he has time, he wants to do it quick and hence, he `doesnt want` to use the features available to him.
• Irrespective of the representation of the content, the presenter just doesn’t know how on earth to interact with his audience.
• The presenter has nothing to say to the audience. He’s only there to read out what the presentation carries.

Like I mentioned above, all of these are things that can be improved on by the presenter.

The tool gives us all the options. It depends on us, how we use them.

Take a look at this presentation by @thakkar, and this one.

The first one is a award-winning presentation by @thakkar for Slideshare’s annual contest. It speaks out. And if you know @thakkar, I’m sure you can visualise this. If he would be in front of you presenting this, you would have spent around 90% of your time listening to him and the remaining 10% to actually imagine yourself eating Pani Puri(thanks to the images).

The second one is of types available in abundance, that I randomly picked up from Slideshare. Take a look at it.

Both have been made using Power Point. The only difference is, @thakkar has represented the content in a more eye-appealing and brief manner, while the other presenter has not.

So, Power Point is just a tool. It is an enabler. Don’t blame it for what the presenter has done.

P.S. This topic will always remain open-ended. It will draw comments from various schools of thought.
Please do not flame or get into a recursive debate here.
But, yes do make yourself heard without doing the above by adding your views through the comments.

Throwing information at yourself

// October 14th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Internet, Technology

Information and knowledge are two never-ending elements and people crave to gather as much of them as possible. Blogs have established themselves to be an alternate media and there are unimaginable number of blogs that have come into existence spanning across unimaginably wide topics. These blogs act as a continuous source of information, news, facts and so much more. Using a feed reader to subscribe to blogs you are interested in, can help you throw loads of quality & relevant-to-you content on yourself.

Google Reader

I have started following quite a lot of blogs on Google Reader. Google Reader is a web-based feed reader that helps you follow websites & blogs for new content. There are various options available if I want to follow feeds, but I preferred to use Google Reader because of the decent tagging system, which helps me organise my feeds and the email-inbox like interface that they have churned up.

The Google Reader Interface

So, you subscribe to blogs you are interested in and let Google Reader throw all of the information that is produced, right in front of you for you to consume. You need to be very choosy with the blogs that you subscribe to. Some blogs like Killer Startups might be very useful ones, but have 15-20 posts per day. So, if you really want to subscribe to such a blog, be very careful to keep clearing the lag and clutter and keep up with the pace of your subscribed blogs, else it would gradually take the form of those 1000’s-of-unread-emails like scenarios, which happened with my previous encounter with Google Reader, when I had over 10,000 unread posts.

So, what made me do a makeover and start off with my Google Reader all over again and not choose some other RSS feed reader?

Google Reader Mobile

I recently bought a smartphone, and then decided to start following feeds on it. I evaluated a few softwares, but didnt really find juice. And one fine day I casually checked out the mobile version of Google Reader from the Google Mobile homepage. What I found was a very simple, clean and intuitive interface to read your feeds.

After using it for around a month, I realised that there were a lot of blogs that weren’t really suitable to follow on the mobile, for e.g. PSDTUTS. So, lately I created a tag on Google Reader: Feeds for Mobile, and used it for all the blogs that I felt I would like to read on the mobile.

So, voila I now use up my travelling time or other idle time like lone tea breaks, etc. reading blogs on my mobile. And when I am on the computer, I read the remaining posts.

UPDATE: My smartphone got stolen and I am badly missing Google Reader on-the-go

OCC KAdda 2.0 is here

// August 7th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Business, Entrepreneurship, Events, Open Coffee Club, Technology

Keeping in mind Kolkata’s “Addas“, Amitabh Choudhury & 100rabh Minni devised a new term for OCC Kolkata. The OCC KAdda. And since it is the second OCC in Kolkata, it can be called OCC KAdda 2.0. Sounds cool, ain’t it?

The first OCC was an awesome experience and I met really amazing people. It’s now time for us Kolkatans to gear up for the second one in town.

It is happening again at Oxford Bookstore, Park Street. Here is the venue on maps: http://linkbun.ch/m53

If you are an entrepreneur or any other startup-related professional or even a student who is keen to do something on your own in future, make sure that you are there at 12 PM this Sunday, 10th August, 2008.

See you there!!

Too many rumours and too much hype about the iPhone

// July 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // Gadgets, Personal, Technology, iPhone

I agree Tech 2.0 is big and can be relied upon. It is the one which triggered the news about iPhone 3G launching on 18th of August by Vodafone. But the grapevine, as notorious as it is supposed to be, has added all sorts of rumours about its price.

But it is for sure that if the iPhone does launch for the price of 12,000, I would really consider buying it, but only after I find out a bit more about the data plans that are going to be attached to it.

I eagerly await Vodafone’s & Airtel’s press releases to tell us more about the iPhone in India. That would decide the fate of the phone that would reach into my hands.

Open Coffee Club kicks off in Kolkata

// July 28th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Business, Entrepreneurship, Events, Open Coffee Club, Technology

It’s been long since I posted anything out here, thanks to all the OCC preparations.

OCC stands for Open Coffee Club, which was founded by a London-based entrepreneur, Saul Klein. To know more about what is the original philosophy behind Open Coffee Club, you should check out the following posts on Saul’s blog:

• http://localglobe.blogspot.com/2007/02/opencoffee-club.html
• http://localglobe.blogspot.com/2007/03/opencoffee-club-structure-vs-free-form.html

We pulled up the first OCC meet out here in Kolkata at Oxford Bookstore this Sunday. For a first OCC meet, it had an exceptionally amazing amount of energy, interactions, networking and bonding among the seven of us present out there. Two veteran entrepreneurs, two about-to-startup entrepreneurs & 3 wannabe entrepreneurs.

The discussions ranged from introductory to fact-identifying to debative ones. We went on for four & a half hours with a lot of useful chitter-chatter, and most importantly, we did not follow the so-called agenda that was set. That is what is an OCC meet is supposed to be. The meeting is supposed to take its own course.

I would rather call it an OCC mashup. A meeting sounds highly formal. Isn’t OCC supposed to be synonymous with informal..

Ohk. So the next OCC mashup is expected to take place on the upcoming Sunday, supposedly at the same place. We will keep you updated.

Also, folks in Mumbai are now enthusiastic to start off with OCC once again, and hopefully the OCC scenario can really rekindle again.

If you are an entrepreneur or OCC sounds interesting to you, you can catch up with us on our Google Groups. Visit the following links to join them:

• http://groups.google.com/group/occ-kolkata/
• http://groups.google.com/group/opencoffeeclubatmumbai/

Hope to see you at the next meet!!

Also read:

Angsuman’s blog post on yesterday’s OCC meet.. oops sorry mashup

WiCampKolkata was cool! Kolkata is now alive!!

// July 20th, 2008 // No Comments » // BarCamps, Entrepreneurship, Events, Technology

The start wasn’t that very pleasant for me though. I was asked to submit my camera in the security counter. Have never seen that happen in a BarCamp. It could have been mentioned on the wiki that we cannot carry x,y & z and could save some time and hassles.

Anyways, there were better differences than that to be written about. Firstly, it did not follow the conventional method of dynamic barcamp scheduling(as I would call it ). Pavan Soni, the lead planner who has successfully conducted WiCamps in other cities earlier and is also conducting WiCampKochi in the week to come, was anchoring throughout the camp, discussing various facets of innovation and inviting the session-takers.

The attendance was much more than I had expected at the WiCampKolkata. When I had registered on its wiki, there were only 13 people on it and that was only 5 days before the camp. The day the camp was held, the wiki had 96 registrations, and almost 100-110 people turned up.

Like I said, there was no wiki on the spot to register sessions. The few sessions that were registered on the online wiki were the only ones that were taken apart from a session by Myshkin about his entrepreneurial venture Anaemedia, a pathbreaking product to curb the number of anaemia-triggered deaths in India. He had started in 2005 and the product is still under development.

A notable session was Ram NK’s, about his experience of leaving a really cushy-comfy position in the UK and starting up RangDe, a non-profit peer-to-peer MFI he started with his wife earlier this year.

Overall the camp was cool, the attendees were diverse and a good boost to open communities in Kolkata. I am looking forward to a lot of action out here.

Should twitter search crawl other microblogs?

// July 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Business, Internet, Microblogging, Social Networking, Technology

Put in summize.com in your browser and it redirects to search.twitter.com. Yeah, finally it has been confirmed by both summize & twitter that the former has been acquired by the latter.

Summize was a search engine formed to facilitate people with the ability to gauge user opinions extracted from blogs and review sites.

Thanks to some extended machine learning techniques and a complex data engine at the back end, summize turned out to be a very effective search engine for what it was meant to do. Now common!! The three co-founders had 7 long years of experience building numerous highly scalable search applications.

They realised early in 2008 that microblogging sites can be the best and most reliable source to figure out how and what people are thinking about some particular thing. And twitter being one of the most popular mb sites around, they started using summize to let people search how people on twitter(a.k.a. tweople) think about something.

They churned out something that really interested twitter, and since the last one month, the folks from twitter were in talks with summize to take it over and they now finally have for reportedly $15 million.

Tom’s heart does not really sound as happy about having sold twitter than being sad about not being able to assure that the promises summize had made to their users would be kept. You can read more about that on Tom’s blog.

What people will look upto is that how twitter goes about developing summize further. It is least likely to crawl other microblogging sites, which could give people much wider results than just crawling twitter would.

After all twitter is for people, people are not for twitter. They bought summize because they felt it to be the best out of all the mb search engine lot. So the best mb search engine should be used to crawl & index the mb’s so as to give people a more reliable opinion of what the internet thinks.

Summize’s vision is clearly given in Tom’s above mentioned blog post, and that is what could have been the reason of sustainability for summize had it not been acquired. So, twitter should rather look forward to giving people better results using their search, than letting people only search twitter.

What do you say?

Should twitter use their search engine to crawl other microblogging sites or should they only do it for their own?

I will be attending WiCampKolkata

// July 14th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // BarCamps, Events, Life, Technology

The BarCamp scenario in this metropolitian has not really been happening till now.

I’m not sure but I guess that there have been more than one BarCamp in Kolkata in the past, but the fire still does not seem to have alighted.

A few folks from Wipro have got together and un-planned three Wipro Innovation Camps within this month of July. The first was in Gurgaon: WiCampGurgaon two days back on July 11, i.e. 2 days back. I will be attending the next one, WiCampKolkata on July 18. And the last one follows in Kochi: WiCampKochi on July 24.

I’m attending this one after seeking special permission from my doctor, since I have jaundice. It feels good to be able to catch on to atleast some action after being in a house arrest since the last 30 days and missing out on two Mumbai Startup Saturdays & most likely to miss the BarCampAhmedabad.

BarCampAhmedabad is back!!!

// July 12th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // BarCamps, Entrepreneurship, Events, Technology

It was an experience to be at BarCamp Ahmedabad in January this year.

After a long time the folks have got together to initiate the BarCampAhmedabad Monsoon Edition to be held on the 3rd of August, 2007 again in the IIM-A campus.

I’m very very eager to attend the BarCamp and catch on to some action after missing two Mumbai versions of Startup Saturday, but I’m most likely not to be able to attend it. I would definitely miss on some real action, but for now, I found a way to stay involved. I designed a logo for BCA.

Register now for the BarCamp