The social network - bubbly business

Once upon a time, the world wide web was all about information- web sites about science, literature, journalism, academics and so on. It was organized around content/data. About fifteen years back, it was anything but a place where people would "hang out", "connect and communicate" or "share" things.

Today, however, when you stop for a moment and look, its almost a no-brainer to spot how dramatically it is being re organized around people rather than content.  Increasingly, what constitutes the web is PEOPLE - friends sharing party photos, professionals sharing information about work, college undergrads following updates about their heroes (and I mean anything but film stars :p), leaders reaching out to millions of followers and uprisings that topple governments being organized entirely (and successfully) through the excessive penetrating power of social networks.

So what social networks are you on ? Ever feel like there's just too many of them ? Well, here's a list of the ones I've tried. I hope you might find something useful in there:

• Quora:

If someone asked me to choose a favorite, Quora will be it ! Great place to be, if you like "knowing about stuff"; currently invite only; Online knowledge market; Users ask and answer questions and read and vote on existing answers. Want to know how to start a company, or which is the best source for learning PHP or what does it feel like to be a drug dealer or how did the Beatles get very famous ? Quora is the place.

• Twitter:

Share links; update your followers; receive updates from people you follow; great way to keep in touch with what's latest in the field of your interest; even greater to mine trends and topics that are making news. (What's the world thinking right now ? Twitter is the place to look for)

• Facebook:

(Yeah, well, nothing much surprising here)
Share pictures, videos with friends; communicate and stay in touch; chat

• GooglePlus:

I was on g+ on the second day of its launch (yes, I feel that is kind of cool); a bit of twitter (in that the relationship graphs are directed) and a bit of facebook (in that it allows sharing photos, videos, it has almost what you can call a "wall"); circles are amazing; clean look; yet to give its users the ONE reason why they should stick around.

• Linkedin:

A social network for work and professionals; went public in 2011; nice place to list your work experiences, accomplishments and recommendations; groups are pretty useful

• Academia.edu:

Social networking for academics and researchers; for college grads, professors and researchers in the industry; share research with relevant members

• Delicious:

Social bookmarking; allows users to locate and save websites based on personal interest; see what's hot and what's recent on the web; has a very interesting story behind how it was founded :)

• Foursquare:

A location-based mobile platform that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore; Kind of like a directory of local businesses; users “check in” with a place via a smartphone app/SMS and share their location with friends; Interesting incentive system

• flickr:

Photo sharing with friends made easy

• Live journal:

Virtual community where you can write blogs and journals; keep friends updated about what's new in your life (Oddly, female users account for more than 62% of user activity on LJ, unlike many other similar sites)

• Myspace:

"The social network that could have been" - Bought by NewsCorp for $580 million in 2005, sold in 2011 for $35 million. Enough said. (is it cool though, that it is headquartered in Beverly Hills, CA ?)

• Stumble upon:

Web content recommendation engine; Users discover and rate content - web pages, photos, videos .. pretty much anything that's hosted out there.

• Tumblr:

Micro-blogging; (David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr studied till 8th grade and dropped out to be home schooled. Wow ?? Hell yeah !)

• Yelp:

Users review local businesses; recommendations based on personal taste/interest/user trends

Are all of them here to stay ? Well, at least the investors would like to think so ;-) Let me know if I've missed out some and should definitely have tried !

Until next time .. :)

Cheers

Nihit

All About Ads

I'll keep this post simple. Very simple. Two videos and that is it (some one suggested me after my previous post that video does work out much better most of the times !).

One is back from the 90's (I guess) and the other is as recent as 2011. When you see them together (not in parallel ..but one after the other !), they make remarkable sense. I found a whole lot of wisdom in there.. Steve jobs might manage to drool the fans and Apple might be triggering a "religious" reaction in fans' brains (this is not my conclusion. You should read this) .. but there's a good reason why that is so ..

All of it just makes so much sense ! A brand's ads shouldn't be about them pathetically trying to convince people about how their product is better/cheaper than everyone else's. The end users and the experts will make a call on that. Marketing has to be about values, about what a company fundamentally believes in and what does it perceive its role as. (Occasionally humor works brilliantly I feel. But one needs to pull it off well.)
I think Coke nailed it for most part. Have a look ..

I hope you found them worth the time :-)

Until next time ..
Cheers !
Nihit

A day from the Startup diary

Hi guys !!

Glad to be back on the blog. I was in Chennai for a week after my fourth term at IIT-Madras got over, for I felt going back home for just a few days (well I had less than a week between the term getting over and the internship starting) wouldn't be much fun. Staying back in the campus after most of your friends have left seemed like an exciting gig .. well, let me tell you it ISN'T !! especially when the entire wing is populated by just three people, there's hardly anyone to share content on the campus LAN and those idiotic admins cut off the internet after midnight even if it is summer break !

As I had mentioned a couple of posts earlier also, I'm in Bangalore right now, interning at Beevolve, a startup that provides social media monitoring solutions (feel this link has too many numbers ? Try out the video below) to customers. I don't exactly remember how my fascination with startups began. But it began ..   and here I am. So let me write a bit more about the internship so far.


(Little note about the video : Attensity is a company based out of the US. Some time back, it acquired Biz360. Their product is now called Attensity360).

In short :The work is insanely interesting ! It is diverse and intense. There are very few things more satisfying than to see your own code go into production and run live in action! I will blog about what have I been working on next time (a month into the internship might be a good time to write about that) but for now, I'd like to write a bit about my experience here and what I've learnt from it. So here it goes ..

0) Startups don't always have to start because some one has the most brilliant idea on Earth. The way a startup become successful is by offering people better technology that they already have, or offering it at a better price. People don't become great entrepreneurs because they are inherently smart and conceive ideas that no one can ever think of. They become great because they have a great product vision and are willing to get their hands dirty to execute ideas.

"Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward" - Paul Graham


This might seem a bit like over simplifying. Well check this out. Now after checking this out, consider that the guy who founded it worked at Microsoft Research (Redmond, Washington) for nine years and moved to India to startup (unbelievable ??)


1) 'Keep it simple and neat' : Probably no one in a startup cares about how well you document your code or how good are you at VIM or how judiciously you compiled project reports back in college for your programming labs. Typically teams in startups are small and work at hand is huge - scaling problems, server outages, meeting deadlines for shipping the new version, answering customer queries, responding to feedbacks. The whole idea is to build things quickly, and see them in action, learn from the results and improve as quickly as possible.

2) 'Move fast and break things' : The goal of a startup is to build a better product or bring better technology to the market, and not to 'not make mistakes'. Failure, wrong decisions, missed opportunities, are all a part of the process when you are trying to innovate. Here is an interesting perspective : Move Fast and Break Things.

3) Whatever the startup attempts to develop, there is that one part of the final product that must differentiate it from the rest, for otherwise, it has no reason to exist in the market. And the best way to ensure this differentiation is to develop any technology that is of prime importance to the product's quality in house. Building the entire product out of open source tools/outsourcing the development might sound like an easy way out but it is just a matter of time before someone offers the same product at a better price.

4) Finally something about the culture : Teams at startups are usually small. So, in a week or so you pretty much know everyone at the company. You have lunch with the founders everyday, you drive to and from the office everyday with the CEO :) and you end up having a lot of interesting conversations with people about the company, hangout places in the city, movies and girls lol ..(I do not know of any other instance where some one could say "I took a random sample of girls he gave me and tried them out. We're 62% accurate"** haha ..)

So, it is an interesting life to say the least. It is much different from working at a big company. Both are good I believe, but come with very different benefits. I'd say, from my personal experience so far, that one might end up learning a lot more at a startup (I might be wrong though. And I'd love to hear what people think about this). Life might not be easy for a couple of months, you might not enjoy the delicious free meals and massages and you might find yourself a bit lost in the beginning seeing that things move so fast. But the experience and the learning is all worth it, if you end up at a right startup that is. If you end up at a place where the people running the damn place are as lost as you are, GET OUT OF THERE !! I hope this was helpful.

Till next time ..
Cheers
Nihit

(edited on May 31st)
**we were writing a gender classifier to categorize people as males/females based on first name and last name  (this forms an important part of any social media monitoring product). The most common way to achieve this is through Machine Learning approaches. Gunaa tested his algorithm on a random data set (~22000 unique names if I recall correctly) and managed to classify 62% of the names (others remained unclassified. We're trying to expand our training data set to incorporate wider range of names). although THAT meaning might seem less apparent from the conversation above :P

ps:
This article made the front page of Hacker News. Happy I am :)

exebit, cricket and a weekend of all nighters ..

Hi guys !

So it was a grand weekend for all Indians ! Winning the cricket world cup .. simply awesome ! Congratulations to the Indian Team for a fabulous performance. Ya well .. i don't feel like writing down any other details .. go fetch them on some news site ! :P

Exebit took place this weekend. I was a student coordinator for newsletter, media and PR (hah ! we give interesting names to portfolios).. We'd wait for the day's events to end, get together in the lab after dinner and write out the newsletter for the next day. So i just discovered that late nights are great to write stuff .. and we decided to do the entire thing a bit differently this time. How? Well ... here are a few interesting parts from our daily newsletters.. (read our 'glossary' if you're not from the institute :) 

Quotable quotes:

"I’m definitely not a fudge packer!”

-the highly esteemed NL core, a man of (not so) few words, when his coord compared him with Tom Cruise, in the hope that he might get more food coupons.

"I’m getting addicted to linux. I wonder if that’s because I love doing penguins.”

-the self proclaimed founder of MUG ( Microsoft Users Group), so overwhelmed with open source that he now has pet penguins in the wing.

“Don’t you want to hear how the event miserably failed?”

-the rather naive event volunteer, when the NL team asked for event “details”. (We are proud of how we are so transparent in our dealings)

"Finally, William the secretary ... walked in with an uncharacteristic swagger. His flowing kurta

offered a nice deviation from the otherwise formal attire of the dignitaries and his vote a fresh

departure from all other vote of thanks ever delivered."

This is an excerpt from a report submitted by one of our newsletter volunteers. We leave open interpretation regarding the volunteer's sentiments and orientation. 

"Amazing, from the moment he stepped onto the dais, I couldn't take my eyes off him."

-The Exebit secretary, on William's vote of thanks at the inauguration. He has been finding it difficult to ask girls out. :P

"Emma Watson? I liked her when she was a kid."

- the super excited ECW (exebit code wars, an onsite event at Exebit 2011) coord, when asked about his childhood crushes. Clearly, he misunderstood whose childhood were we referring to :P

"Ok, now I need to go pee."

-the same ECW coord after reading this : http://xkcd.com/879/

Get to know your cores:

“I just woke up and I see lot of sleeping people. I think I should wake them up and go back to sleep.”

-The sleep derived events core, who woke up and requested that he be removed from coreship so he could get more sleep.

 "Hi, I would advise all of you to "Like" my exebit bindass comp entry on facebook. And remember I' know the ones who don'like it. .”

 -The other events core who, after coming out of hiding, uses his/her (we’ d like it to stay anonymous :P) other positions of power to win a rather naive contest. We wanted to contact him/her for further comments but he/she went back into hiding.

 "Are there three??”

(The events coordinator who was quizzed about the event cores by the NL team. (the interview did NOT happen at 3 am). note : event coordinators are appointed by the event cores.

“ Hey, what is this fudge? I want some too”

-an enthusiastic Tank Wars coordinator after reading the previous day Newsletter

“ Ok, maybe we should show him”

-the very enthusiastic NL core who finally got the chance.

Brainbooz

In what is being regarded as one of the greatest appeasement scams since the DMK Government' giving away of free colour TV sets to every second guy on the street, the coordinators of BrainBooz have promised an all-you-can-drink-before-you-belch-out-your-bowels booze treat to all participants of the event. In fact, the cores were so confident of this offer bringing in unprecedented participation that they decided to save money by not publicising this event in any manner whatsoever. As a result, no one really knows what this event is about and, as a result of its general popularity due to above mentioned offer, there seem to be one too many theories about what it is, including:

1. A wine-tasting ceremony.

2. An anti-hippocratic experiment in which hideous monkey-faced surgeons from Albania

lobotomise participants and fill their skulls with gin.

3. Nothing. The event was a hoax to obtain funds for the booze treat mentioned earlier.

4. A desperate measure by Google to promote Google Buzz, which on release plummeted faster

than any recipient of a Chuck Norris round-house kick.

5. A sick horror movie with brains oozing all over the place.

6. A metaphor for the ontology of the social and anthropological aspects of organic solidarity and

stratification in human society, as suggested by the Department of Humanities and Social

Sciences.

7. A buzzer-round personality development session. (refer IIT Kharagpur modus operandi)

On a completely unrelated note, there is a puzzle competition (which they decided to call Brainbooz) sometime tomorrow. Please attend.

This newsletter was compiled, assembled, linked and executed by:

William K. Moses Jr. (whose favourite quote is “ I am not a fudge packer, you b*****ds” .)

Nihit Desai and Prashant Vasudevan (who tirelessly worked by first playing Counter Strike, then doing interesting stuff on the department terrace, then almost crashing and yet somehow managing to get this out by 7 am when a certain fudge packer actually threatened to pack their fudge)

Akshay, Aditya, Priya and Dheepikaa (who were soundly sleeping when all the fudge packing happened)

Disclaimer: No fudge was packed in the making of this newsletter.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. NL : short for Newsletter

2. coords and cores : the organisation committee of the fest consists of core committee (final and pre-final year students, we call them cores), the student coordinator committee (we call them coords) and volunteers (vols)

3. Tank Wars, ECW, Brainbooz etc - various events that formed a part of Exebit 2011

4. fudge packing - (hint : it starts from south park, and gets more interesting) :P

Cheers

Nihit

Almost a new beginning

Hi people !

If you are still reading this post, I must say I'm one lucky blogger ! Sorry for being out of action for a while .. the coursework's been overwhelming. But I have survived .. and aye ! in style :). So after a rather long break, I write this post. A few things have changed since I wrote my last post (well, the govt is still fighting over all the scams that a govt could possibly have come across. So that is one part that surely hasn't changed :P. Also, I'm as quirky as I was before lol ..)

So let me write a bit (rather a few Kilobytes :P) about my semester so far. I have a little over a month left, which is good because I can see the holidays approaching soon ! I finished my second set of quizzes today. Decent for most part, except that I have almost forgotten what time I used to got to bed at night. So there is going to be a lot of partying this week I'm sure :). U're invited btw !

Next week, we have the Computer Science dept's annual fest Exebit lined up. I've taken a coordinator's responsibility. So, among all the other things, I get to wear a huge batch, hang around the department's computing facilities, miss a few classes, pretend that I'm conceptualizing an event and get lottsa coke and pizza (booze .. what ? yaa .. no .. maybe .. oh, its just a blog post). You should pay us a visit if you're in Chennai this weekend. I'll be interning this summer. Exciting ?? Hell yeah ! So I go to Bangalore in the first week of May for about 7 to 8 weeks. I'll be working with Beevolve Inc. So what the heck will I be doing there ? I'll want you to preferably read this first, or atleast have a look at it - one of the more amusing papers I've read.

If you're liking the post so far, you might have returned back from the link :D.. or if u're studying literature/international relations/law you might have come back anyway .. lol, sorry for that ! I guess xkcd makes you kinda shameless in this regard. I'll be working on analysis of online social networks and social media. Why particularly so? Because my bet is that as the web gets more ‘social’, parts of it will get reorganized around users rather than content. Online social networks will increasingly reflect offline conversations between people. Based on the information about adjacent users in a social network graph, one can design systems- spam filters, customized search tools, sentiment analysis tools- to be more efficient. We might have started to look at new ways to filter web content to decide its relevance to the user. Since we’ve only begun exploring these possibilities, it might be a while before we have definite answers. I feel the uncertainty only makes it a more interesting area to study!

Why a startup ? Well, I could dedicate an entire blogpost to it. And I probably will .. in short .. "We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here?" (Steve Jobs). Perhaps you get the point :-) (Also, I get exciting gifts at the end of the internship.. now you know why .. lol). So now that I'm free for a while, I'll try to squeeze in a few more posts before it all gets all very busy again. 

Hope you're having a great time !

Cheers

ND

Try this !

Happy New Year people !!!!!

2011 is here. 4th semester starts. This Weekend's amazing. Pizzas are delicious. Beer is fun. So are algorithms. :D. Okay enough .. I was just trying out how long can I go on with just three word sentences lol ..

So, I just returned to Chennai last Sunday. Its been a week into fourth semester and it does look an interesting one. I get to study algorithms and data structures (like finally !) and then there's linear algebra and numerical analysis and automata theory. I get to explore a bit of sociology as well (still I'm not sure if I'll find and answer to why do girls experiment in college ;-) ). That is on the academics side. And not many others should I probably discuss in a blog post :P. Oh, and Saarang is coming up in a couple of weeks.

The other day I was browsing and came across this interesting article : weird questions asked by companies during recruitment in 2010. Well ! ... not that I have any plans lol .. but many of them were fun to solve ... and a bit crazy too (which is always more fun innit ? :P)
1. How many basketballs can you fit into this room ? (Google)

2. If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put into a blender, how would you get out ? (Goldman Sachs)

3. Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, how weird you are. (Capital One) (dude ! seriously ?)

4. You have 8 pennies, 7 of which weigh the same, and you have a weighing scale. Find out the penny that weighs different in 2 uses of the weighing scale. (Intel)

5. Given 25 horses, find the minimum number of races needed to find the fastest 3 horses if no more than 5 horses can run in a single race? (Bloomberg)

But on a related note, placements in the campus were decent this year. Great ! On an unrelated note, a few quotable qoutes haha:

1. "Oh look, the dogs are doing it doggystyle !" - an anonymous friend walking through anonymous part of the campus in an anonymous hour of the day

2. "Is it settled that you'll do the Kancheepuram professor on Friday?" - the Fourth estate correspondent to the editor

3. (after drawing a cylinder with varying radius to approximate a human body) "Hmm ... I'd have to say that's the first time I have ever seen such a body" - the professor :D

4. "Sometimes I wish life could come with a Ctrl+Alt+Del button" - a rather sad facebooker obviously not very well versed with her(ok let me not be partial ..her/his) keyboard :P

5. "Why is this pizza so hot ?" .. "Yaa ! I guess just one of those strange mysteries of the Universe" - a great friend to a great friend (yes, we order pizzas often)

haha .. have a great week !
Cheers
Nihit