Yes..that’s right. While most people may or may not agree, the fact remains the same. People spend their life time finding love, believing in fairy tales that love happens while in reality it might (I say might here !) only be the infatuation / attraction that happens. The love is all upto you my friend. Unlike a one-night stand, love needs to be fostered, encouraged, and relentlessly persuaded (throughout the lifetime) to actually make it work.
Consider starting up. Doesn’t the similarity strike you head-on ?? Unlike a fly-by-night operator, if you need to be called a successful entrepreneur, then you need to race behind your idea throughout. Ideas without execution rarely make any difference. Hence while the high of getting quick money / fame (akin to a one-night-stand with a perfect-10 model) might get your adrenaline bursting it’s peak, you are a real entrepreneur if you have the guts (akin “balls” for guys) to sustain it over ages, persuade your dreams as does a kid to loot a free-floating kite, and SIMPLY “just make it work”.
Believe me, the similarity is all-too similar. Lesson – get out and make things work, for both love and your idea. It doesn’t matter if you make love to a hot babe or your idea is worth only a few shit hundred dollars; all that matters is you and the effort – the rest is actually useless.
I plan to do a detailed research on the similarities of these two things. Would be grateful to anybody for any contacts / pointers in the correct direction.
So what’s the point of having the term “Wannabe Entrepreneur” ?? Does it not fall into the category of not being an entrepreneur ??
Met a few guys the other day, and they introduced themselves as “Wannabe Entrepreneurs”. Well, even I used to use this fancy term till a few months back, and then I realized that it really doesn’t make a difference whether you are a “wannabe” or the accomplished one. My understanding is that, this term – “wannabe entrepreneur” – is mostly used by people who are afraid; afraid of failure, afraid of letting the world know that they are doing something in the wild, and afraid of the fact that it might be embarrassing if they fail.
I think, till the time one has the guts to declare openly that he is an entrepreneur, he really is not. All these fancy terms really don’t matter, especially to those who understand.
So, leave the tag of “wannabe” behind, and jump in to the entrepreneurship bandwagon. It feels good.
Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t
When you are starting up / bootstrapping, you need to make sure you save up each and every penny on anything / everything, even if that means getting your hands dirty and doing things yourself. Most of the time, web applications need to be SMS-abled, viz..send and receive text messages, and while a lot of solutions already exist, they tend to be expensive for you (and / or your users).
- The special numbers provided by some operators charge the sms senders exorbitantly (approximately 4-5 times the normal text rates). This definitely isn’t very lucrative to your users to start interacting with your application via text messaging
- The rates for sending and receiving messages using some gateway (Clickatell for example), would set you back by a decently large sum of money, even if you are just receiving messages (and sending less)
Hence, it is always a good idea to use some existing SMS gateway to send out messages, while one could easily take care of the receiving part themselves.
In the next part of this series, I will do a detailed step-by-step tutorial on making Gammu work on Ubuntu 8.04 with a Nokia phone (6300) over Bluetooth.
Yes, it has happened to a lot of apple fanboys…and it happened to me today. As they say – “A picture is worth a thousand words” – here goes the ordeal -
Broken iPhone 3G screen
Vodafone’s already announced that they are bringing the new iPhone 4 to India, hence the need to get my phone repaired, wasn’t really the initial thought. But then, I had recently heard of these guys at iFixit(who are known for their gadget teardowns (literally !) ), and quickly realized my situation to be apt for my own teardown.
So, with no further waiting, I quickly ordered the iPhone front panel kit, and hopefully in the next 14 days, I should be able to tear down my iPhone 3G.
Next blog post on the teardown experience !
Tagged as:
DIY,
ifixit,
iphone 3G screen crack,
replace yourself
Here’s a very quick and low-down review of 20 North.com.
Somehow, I always find myself always trying out new e-commerce startups (and not so startups), trying to assess what’s got them going. So far, I have really pissed off with one such, and mostly satisfied with most of the other remaining ones. But, 20North was one such, which I was very skeptical about. Maybe it’s because these guys ship everything from the US, and while sometimes their price tags are actually pretty amazingly low (notice the use of “actually”, “pretty” & “amazingly” in one sentence !!), my experience with international shipping has been bad (to say the least).
Anyways, I’m just going to write about one thing for 20north guys. When I ordered with these guys (on the 13th of this month), the order details mentioned “Shipping Time : 14 days”. And guess what..I got my order delivered today (28th of May) !! That’s 14 days exact !!
There’s only one thing to say to these guys : “Keep up to what you guys are doing !”.
I have been a big fan of infectious.com from their early days (when they were doing only Apple skins) and these guys just keep getting better and better. I previously wrote about buying art for my iPhone, and this time I went ahead and added a skin for my Macbook as well (replaced my earlier iPhone skin as well).
Things didn’t go smoothly as last time though. I didn’t receive my order for a month, and then had a few email exchanges with the infectious guys. Even they didn’t know the reason why it was getting delayed (customs clearance is a big pain in international orders), but then after a few days shipped a replacement consignment !! Cool !!..really…there is a lesson to be learnt for Indian e-commerce setups (read here why cafegadgets.com really sucks at the online model).
Anyways, this is what I have on my Macbook and my iPhone right now !
My Infected iPhone :)
Infectious.com skin for my Macbook
Tagged as:
art skins,
design,
infectious,
infectious.com
Facebook and the Live feed suggestion
Just a quick post about the way live feed works in Facebook. Well, you see, a lot of my friends keep posting updates, which come and take up my whole of live feed, and more importantly these updates are mostly from third party apps and hence useless to me.
So, I often hide a few people’s updates from barging into my live feeds, and then as it happens, I tend to forget that these people are still alive and active as usual on facebook. Pretty bad..huh!. Request facebook to have more options than just simply saying “HIDE” or “SHOW” to a friend’s updates (maybe some level of control from where my friend’s updates are coming from or even showing only one consolidated update per day from the friend who I “HID” from my live feed ??)
Don’t know how this might work, but definitely would be a plus to have this slight little level of control on my live feed
The green colored tshirt I bought from Inkfruit
I have had a pretty good experience with
Inkfruit.com, their tees being of good quality and design, plus the order processing and shipping time. They have mostly got everything covered.
But then, which ecommerce startup is without some flaws; in fact not just an ecommerce startup, but every startup in general. I ordered this awesome designer tshirt from inkfruit, but as it turned out, after the first wash it turned from a darker shade to a lighter one, and worse, I got another of my white colored tshirt patched with green color in places. Uuff..should have listened to mom saying never wash dark clothes with lighter ones :|
But, frankly, I did not expect the tee to loose color. It’s been ages, since I have had a color tee loose color after washing. So, my friend came up with the most logical answer about why this tee lost color and other’s didn’t -
“A tee selling for 350 bucks, means they must be dying white colored tees to get the other desired colors, and obviously these will loose color on washing. On the other hand, the more expensive tees have the fabric inherently colored.”
Well, I’m no textile engineer nor someone with much fabric / cloth knowledge. So, whatever my friend said, sounded logical. He may be right, maybe wrong. But, the question that I have right now for inkfruit guys is whether there is any way to exchange this *almost useless* tshirt now, or am I supposed to spend 350 bucks for a one time wear ??
Tagged as:
inkfruit,
tshirts
While it might not be visible to a lot of people on the internet, but my being from an an e-commerce background I can’t help but think how cafegadgets.com is ruining the whole e-commerce experience of Indian internet users. The fact that the number of Indian internet users is increasing everyday, and more people are getting hooked on to e-commerce, it is both, surprising and sad to realize that these guys over at cafegadgets seem to get the whole concept of order processing and customer service absolutely wrong. The major problem with this is that a user’s trust from shopping online is lost, and this directly impacts the other e-commerce guys in India; as well as the fact that if India really has to grow the e-commerce industry then the best practices(as seen on major online retailers in other countries) need to be established first.
Why I write this, is because I have had two *forgettable* occasions when I had to shop at cafegadgets, and while I could ignore the first time, the same experience second time made me write this blog post (on the other hand I wrote this post about Inkfruit.com guys immediately after my first purchase with them !). You have to understand that “impatience is the new buzz”, and “third and last chance” has become “once and never again” for the new generation :)
Coming back to CafeGadgets, my first order took 20 days to be delivered (after about 4-5 telephone calls that the customer service guys picked up, 10-15 calls dying after “no answer” at the other end, and a bunch of mails being exchanged with the customer service reps as well as some top-level guys, and finally some jugaad to get my message through to the best possible authority). And yes, my order consisted of just a computer mouse and a keyboard. Now, when you are not selling any personalized stuff, item availability is either a “YES” or a “NO” and maybe “Will ship in X days”. Simple. So, it grew on me, why I had to wait 20 days to get something delivered, which is either in stock or not. So, either take the order for such an item or say no. Anyways, problems like these arise, and for once they can be neglected / overlooked. But, what if the same thing happens again ??!! Email them ? Call customer support ?? I tried both, but this time less frequently (going by the previous experience). And yes, this time I ordered a set of Sennheiser headphones (which BTW, are being thrown away by these guys, dirt cheap…and I suggest you order one asap !). It hasn’t been that long(5 days to be precise) ordering those headphones, but I just thought…“something these guys have put on sale..has to be in stock for sure…in fact in stock more than they are able to handle…that’s why the sale !”. Not good…definitely not impressive.
I just wish, someone from CafeGadgets reads this, and does something about my order, and more about how they are actually going about their e-commerce endeavor. These guys need to change / improve a lot and FAST, else they will be just another name in the past.
