I recently had a great opportunity to write something about startups at pluggd.in, and which I had to accept (I mean who lets such great opps to pass by :) ).

So I wrote about some of the points that I realized one should ideally do a reality check about, before joining a startup. And as it turns out, and as I had imagined before starting off, this really pissed off some of the startup janta (to say, the employers..a.k.a founders, co-founders).

It actually is a very debatable topic, and as an employee, I could probably argue till death with all those startup guys who thought the post was “misleading”. Actually it’s funny how these guys call it “misleading”. Aahhh…so much for the buzzword “startups, entrepreneurship and the eco-system” where employers always want it their way…huh..!

Read the whole story here at pluggd.in

Let Mozilla break all the records as the most downloaded browser, curse Internet Explorer for anything (everything) as a developer and crib as much as you feel like, but the fact remains the same. Internet Explorer still is the most-used web browser.

Through techcrunch, I stumbled upon this report, which clearly shows the bigger picture. As a developer, use all the hacks you can to make things work in IE, but do it definitely. As a web developer, I myself have had tons of occasions when I wanted to simply through IE out of my system, and code for Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, et all. The times it gives me a headache to code for 3 different browsers is almost equivalent to the times I get a headache when I code for IE. Ahh…I wish Microsoft could understand my plight. Amongst all the things that could have been better, some are:

• Imagine no specific hacks for writing cross-browser css. One style-sheet to work for all :)
• Javascript. Life !! Debugging. Cakewalk !! But the best thing would be that DOJO would work all it’s magic. Specifically Dojox. A minor problem resulting in a major issue with dojo gfx in internet explorer is here. If this would have worked, I swear I would have never touched flex at all.

Where is microsoft ?? Are you guys listening? Do something about IE, and save us, the developers, of the unnecessary / extra work to make our neat and clean code work on your pathetic browsers. (Sigh :( )

I’m not really a great blogger - i’m not even a good writer. There are tons of blogs coming up daily, and truly 99% are crap (in the sense of the writing style, and how the ideas and facts are laid out…totally random…highly illogical..etc), and the rest 1% are like this (which I just totally adore because of the way Rahul puts his ideas…logical..humorous…sarcastic..superb).

Just one of the reason (that I personally feel) is the inability of people to jot down their thoughts exactly as they have in their head, on paper. It’s no surprise then, why a SOP is mandatory in a lot of B-Schools.

With google coming out with it’s speech-to-text app for iPhone, there is something there for not-so-great bloggers too. Something that they should be really happy about.

Simply imagine a blogging platform, where you log in to the admin section, click on the new post tab, and just start speaking what you have in your head. This approach has atleast 2 benefits

• Firstly, for this you will not have to keep track of your ideas on a paper, before making a post about those. What you think, is what is blogged. Great.
• Secondly, the time to write a blog post (which is undoubtedly pretty damn long for a meaningful and good post - I nearly quit twice before completing this useless and directionless post) decreases to a minimum - equivalent to the time you spend thinking over it. The jotting down the points, then a rough draft and finally the proper post is gone forever. Great again

While this is something very difficult, because since eternity, speech-to-text has been one of the toughest problem of Artificial Intelligence and self-learning algorithms, this is certainly not impossible. So while Google may think about it in the future, but till they do so, if you are a great dreamer, an aggressive entrepreneur, and most importantly have lots of moolah and courage to stand against failure also, this may turn out to be one of those killer ideas to change the world (i.e. what google and youtube did :D )

Over the years, the web has been immensely revolutionized, with a lot of rich content, browsers that are capable of displaying rich media, technologies such as AIR effectively taking and web app seamlessly to the desktop, data mining and data exchange taking place across domains in a second, and a host of other things.

While web designers, developers, bloggers, et all do stress a lot on usability, still majority of the work is done for the humans - people who can use their eyes and make sense of the data. For search engine crawlers/bots, making sense of data still remains an uphill task, and not everyone is interested in utilizing the power of search engines effectively. Or to state in different words, nobody cares as to what the search engine bot makes out of the data; it is Google’s, Yahoo’s, et all’s problems to make sense of the data. So, we feel good when google starts indexing Flash content, and are happy with the google webmaster tools for our website (no doubt it gives any site a relatively better SE ranking in a couple of months)

But, there is this small little thing called Semantic Web - which although most of the people know about, unfortunately nobody is interested in implementing or coming to standards with it. For bloggers, there is something called Structured Blogging which obviously seems to have got extinct these days with the fact that there are not many people ready to get along easily. Then there is Microformats which helps you semantically mark up data on your website. There are tons of other formats that are used to mark up your data in a way that makes sense of it to the search engine bots. But, still these technologies are not mainstream. Maybe now that yahoo has started the open search initiative, we might find smarter developers devoting some time to semantic web, the search engines, and making sense of their data to crawlers.

And as for the benefits - just read through this post on Yahoo search blog, regarding the goods. There are tons to be benefited from. And do not forget to check out the live examples - especially the LinkedIn example :)

Yes, that’s what Django means in Romanian language (source:wikipedia) - I awake. And, I just woke up to python and djnago :)

On the point of “Why to python from rails” - the new project that me and my friends are going to develop in the coming few months (brainstorming still) is going to be awake on django. This just because my friends are already awfully fond of python and django, and as you say, India is a democratic country, and the majority votes win the candidate. So, my candidate (RoR) was beaten hands-down this time around :(

Anyways, getting django-1.0 along with python-2.6 to install and run was not a really big problem (on my Vista machine too), though out of envy I would still say that RoR is easier to setup :)

Anyways, more on python and django in my later posts

I am a Technologist. I am a blogger. I am a kid (though not quite anymore :( ) growing up in the internet age. My niece will probably start typing on an iphone before she gets to the notebook. She will probably blog by the time she hits 4 (3 years, 12 months and 350 days from now), or maybe not. But she will be smart and tech-savvy and know how to get things easily and comfortably from the simple click of a mouse button.

I actually went a little too far in the future. The same story holds for my immediate juniors.

The fact that internet penetration has grown, and the web scene in India has really started to heat up, I still do not understand why job portals do not catch up with the trend. It’s not a new thing in the western countries. You can probably find tons of such, if you do a simple google search on job boards.

What is the feasibility of such a job board in India ?? Can we build a system which aims only at a specific vertical (say IT or Technology in general) and takes a different route to push the jobs to the seeker, rather than wait for the seeker to come across the opening. Why I say this is simply because I had the pleasure of hearing a talk of a marketing genius, where he said a few words like :

There are only two ways to market your product. Either you build a product that is so brilliant that it PULLS the customers; or you build a strategy to PUSH your product to the masses.

Now, traditional job boards have been here for a long time, and neither is there product any longer anywhere near to brilliant, nor are they building new products that are technologically more sound and meant for the coming generation (which is, by large, going to be very tech-savvy and very smart). The main revenue model for them now, is more or less, selling lakhs of resumes that they have collected over time to prospective employers. I can link to two such companies, that I personally know well, who had a rough time with these job portals…..here and here

Alternatively, these job portals also carry-on recruitment drives for larger companies, which are very indirect and lack any transparency. If I had to summarize, I would probably write down these negatives in these job portals :

• Lack of transparency - As a job-seeker, I am not kept in the loop, or probably a direct feedback is not available in most of the cases. I hate the fact that I cannot know as to what is the status of my application.
• What with the privacy policy and all these “New jobs matching your profile” or selling my resume ?? Was that mentioned anywhere that they will be selling my resumes, and I will be getting 10-15 spam mail daily to fill my ever-growing mailbox ??!!
• What happened to the job that I was actually looking for ?? It came and it went. It was not really pushed to me (remember unobtrusive ways only)
• For the employer - it’s more like spending enough money and not getting good resumes. Literally. I knew it in my college, that 99% of the population did not care to go to these job portals or submit their resumes. Or maybe, if and once out of desperation they did (and that too, with all the pain of filling up those lengthy forms, which is also one of the major problems) signup for the service, they never looked back to it. Which obviously, brings in the quality concern.
• The number of resumes maybe high, but as an employer, I need people who are currently actively looking for jobs. It’s like saying the same thing as any desi social networking site would - we have the numbers, but not the active ones.

I could probably go on blabbering about these job portals, and how they are really not upto the mark, for a country like India, where IT has become the second religion (after cricket obviously), but I am looking for some feedback on this first.

• Do you really thing job boards can change the system ??
• And maybe we can go a step ahead of traditional job boards and have a much better system in terms of ROI for both, the employer as well as the seeker (the I in ROI here can be anything, not just monetary value…take for example time for both of the parties to reach their goals) ??
• How can we really push the job openings to the right seeker and at the right time ?? Blogosphere, an advanced job-board-ad system ??
• How to pull the seeker instantly after pushing the job opening to him ?? Technically yes it’s possible. But how otherwise ??
• How to enable transparency for the seeker ?? Should the job board act as an intermediary, or just a third person watching from the sidelines (but with enough power to moderate any talk between the employer and the employee) ??

I know some of these questions might sound vague. But to a young mind, with ample energy, nothing seems to be trivial :)

It’s like a new baby has born inside me :)

This has to be one of the better iPhone apps - the wordpress app for iPhone. Nice nice :)

This definitely is one of the top 10 iPhone apps….easy to use, hassle-free and just enough for the main purpose of blogging - reading and writing :)

Just wish they add image support too soon, or maybe I am unaware of it right now.

Whatever happens, it is a great little app.

So, it’s been like ages since my last useless post, on even worthless topics. Umm (just trying to be a little modest there)

So, I just chalked out certain areas that I have been dying to write about in the last few months, and hopefully, I’ll be able to blog on certain of these topics in this week.

And yeah, I did change my blogging engine to Wordpress from Typo (no offense to Typo or anyone, but Typo just doesn’t seem to work on MT), and talking about MT - I switched over from ASO to MT hosting (more on that in the next few posts). And yeah, I also booked a 16GB Apple Iphone (white) amidst all the hoopla and controversies surrounding the price of this supaaa kewwll gadget (again. more on that later)

Yeah, you heard it. Finally, orkut has launched a few selected apps for the general public. It’s been said that the apps are currently available to a few selected users only (maybe developers only, or GOD knows who are the chosen ones), and Orkut needs to first test the stability of the OpenSocial API on their container.

Earlier, Orkut had stated that they plan to roll out the applications in phases, so that they may be able to test and figure out their API, and other issues. Right now there are only a few handpicked apps (and some of them are really addictive I tell you !!), and when the next slot of apps will be available for users is not known as of now.

It’s actually good to be developer, you get all the inside scoop beforehand, and get to use the apps before anyone else on the sandbox :)

Do check out some apps, and let them know your feedback, and if possible me also. The app that we are developing will get you rolling when it comes out in the next slot.

Happy social apping till then :)

I was over at Rashmi Sinha’s (of the slideshare.net fame) weblog and there is a very interesting article that she has written about the possibility of wordpress becoming a social networking platform, and comparable to Facebook.

It’s a must read really. Go checkout the blog entry, and also do some more reading at further links in the article itself. It’s worth spending time lurking on the internet.