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This article is reproduced from ISB Alumni Affairs News letter and is written by Vivek pahwa. The article lucidly explains the life on an young entrepreneur. I thought this is worth reproducing.

In this article, Pahwa gives a first hand account about being a young entrepreneur. “A combination of passion, risk taking, and a commitment to build something big and different,” he prescribes.

The Purpose, the Pursuit
Being an entrepreneur is a responsibility – a responsibility to produce superior goods and services for people to consume in an efficient manner, and to put capital, intellect and knowledge to productive use. It means giving up personal interests in the interest of building an enduring company. It means to pursue the journey of building value for your employees, shareholders and customers single mindedly. It often consumes your entire ‘brain space’, and therefore becomes the pursuit of life itself for most entrepreneurs.

The most rewarding aspect of being an entrepreneur is creating a product or service which benefits people. Use feedback on how they have benefited from the use of our product, not only makes us happy but also motivates us to create an even more rewarding experience for the users.
On the other hand, there are many days where effort goes into things with seemingly no benefit. The results take a long time to show and this can get quite frustrating. Being an entrepreneur means a lot of effort in the initial days, without much feedback.

Real Life Learning
When I graduated from business school, I thought I had the necessary skills, tools and experiences required to become a successful entrepreneur. However, I have learned a great deal more outside the classroom. Practical skills of identifying, attracting and motivating talent and people in your organisation, working and building performance oriented teams, learning how to deal with failure or disappointments, and the ability to overcome challenges to achieve success – these are some of the “real life” management skills that are essential for success.

I believe that there are a few essential traits to become a successful entrepreneur. First, the determination to succeed is very important. It helps in overcoming all the obstacles and challenges that come in the way. Second, enthusiasm and energy are essential to building a successful business. Finally, having a business sense – some people naturally have a keen sense of profiting by doing business, and these people tend to be street-smart, fast and hard negotiators, and tend to get the best out of their employees. This is a very important differentiator.

Driving Forces
To be a successful entrepreneur, it is important to be committed to it - be prepared to spend the rest of your life in building the business. Do it because you are passionate about the idea and want to create a change in the world. Have an incessant need to create, build value, and grow the business.
It is beneficial for a young entrepreneur to have a mentor. It can cut down the mistakes you make into half. A mentor can help you choose the right track, make the right ‘big’ decisions and support you when you are discouraged, since he/she probably has been through the same path successfully.

Vivek Pahwa, Class of ‘06 was named Asia’s Best Entrepreneur according to a 2008 poll conducted by Business Week. Post ISB, Pahwa started a social networking site in India called DesiMartini.com., which he later sold. Pahwa then founded the company Accentium Web Pvt. Ltd., which created a niche matrimony site, SecondShaadi.com. The site on date records 150,000 registered users. Accentiums second site, Gaadi.com, an auto research site, is already the number one automobile web site in India. Accentium also runs StudyNation, Taaza.com.com and SitaGita.com.

I am grappling with a strange issue. Some guy from Spain called Javier Castilla has stolen the site design of our website 91mobiles.com and apparently populating the site with clear-cut site-scraping again from our site (without adding any value whatsoever).

It’s been 9 months since we launched 91mobiles and we took the services of a professional freelance designer to design the site from scratch. Anyone who have checked out 91mobiles.com can vouch for that.

Look at the screenshot of byemobile.com. Though he has done a shabby work of copy-pasting, it will be obvious in the first look that the site is a copy-paste of 91mobiles.com.

The domain has been created on 3rd August 2010! Just 23 days old Whoa! Check out the proof yourself. http://whois.domaintools.com/byemobile.com. No denying there!

Obviously I am not happy that a spanish guy is copying from Indian website. I am pissed off with him. I have written a warning mail to him and asked him to change the design. No response yet. There is only one way left now. Filing a DMCA Complaint with google and the web hosting provider. It’s a long procedure. But filing a DMCA complaint will definitely yield results even it happens little late.

Any other suggestions on how to tackle this issue? Is this worth chasing this guy?

A very disturbing security concern over Indian Electronic Voting Machines has emerged recently. VeTA has performed a kind-of sting operation on Indian EVMs and has published a white paper briefing the security flaws in the Voting machines. VeTA is an independant National level citizen’s forum for promoting Verifiability, Transparency and Accountability in Indian Elections. Some of the well known computer experts, political scientists, public activists, legal professionals, academicians have come together to analyze the state of Indian Elections. On Saturday, August 21 2010, Hari Prasad, Chief Technical Coordinator of VeTA was arrested for the possession of Electronic Voting Machine, which apparently was acquired through anonymous insider source! The Anonymity is still not revealed.

VeTA did a very thorough analysis on the EVM Hardware and software and proved in various ways that the EVM can be hacked and the results be easily manipulated. VeTA not just content with the findings went on to publish a white paper based on the findings. Now the whole world knows that Indian EVMs are not tamper-proof and the findings are completely contrary to the claim from Indian Election Commission “totally tamper proof, perfect, fail safe and requiring no improvement”.

I am surprised why Indian government and Election commission would have disallowed any independant security evaluation! This raises a serious integrity concern about ECI. While the cyber-hackers are growing powerful and while the cyber security is always playing a catch up game with cyber attacks, this lack of concern and total underestimation of EVM Hacking from ECI needs to be addressed immediately. I think ’sting’ operations are the only way to reform the Indian government and remove the inefficiency and corruption from it.

You can watch the video below to understand the technical flaws of the voting machines and how naive the security mechanisms are.

References:
http://www.indianevm.com/blogs/?p=402
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/jhalderm/electronic-voting-researcher-arrested-over-anonymous-source

Early this month, there was a 3-day SEO Training programme conducted by Bruce Clay (One of the Prominent thought leaders in Search Engine optimization industry) in Gurgaon. I decided to attend the training to crystallize my learnings, to learn new techniques and tips and to meet people with Similar Interest. It was quite useful and comprehensive. I would say the 3-day training gave me a structure and discipline towards how we approach SEO. And Bruce Clay did warn everyone of us about the brutally tough SEO world! As he put it, “every monday it’s (SEO) a new industry” (Google apparently makes 500 changes every month and on good day it might make 20 changes!). It’s like solving a 200 variable non-linear equation, which changes every day! It’s like chasing a moving target! Get the drift? Add to this, the new search result pages which google is experimenting with. The new SERPS (Search engine result pages) apparently show more of google content (google maps, google local, google news, google real-time, youtube, images and what not?) than external content. Alright, I am making myself nervous again

There is a Open source conference coming up in chennai next month. If you are interested in open source, PHP, Mysql, web development trends, mobile computing, cloud computing etc., you should try and make it to the event! Checkout more details at www.osidays.com. I am sending my developers to attend the event at company’s expense. Needless to say, they are mighty-excited and looking forward to learn some new things! If they learn, its good for company too

I always wanted to attend a TED Event. But being an super-expensive event and going by the difficulty to get ‘invited’, I was giving up on it. Then came along the concept of TEDX (local TED Clubs). TEDX Chennai is the chennai local chapter for TEDX. I am attending the event and have booked my tickets. Hoping to hear from some great speakers and gather some insight into their minds. Not to forget the opportunity to meet some really interesting attendees!

Looks like the art of blogging is slowly eroding! Nevertheless, this is yet another attempt to break the shackles. After spending 3.5 years in Gurgaon - a city where I discovered my new self - I have moved back permanently to Chennai. Infact, I am moving to chennai - my hometown - after roaming around for 8 years.

I have been busy consolidating things at my end. I launched 91mobiles.com - A comprehensive mobile phone portal. I do have high ambitions with the scope and reach of the site. The start has been pretty good. We have been working silently on the background to enrich and structure the database. Loads of interesting features being developed in the background. The coming months will witness a slew of updates from 91mobiles.com. Right now we offer Specifications, Price comparison, Videos, News, Answers, Product Comparison, Upcoming mobiles, Reviews and Dealer information on the site. Mobile Apps Directory, Mobile Classifieds, Mobile Knowledge base are to be rolled out. 91mobiles is clocking around 30,000 page views and 12,000 visitors per day currently. Not bad for a 6 month old site!

I am also trying to relaunch antya.com with a professional and cleaner look. The most important task at my hand right now is to build the team. I have hired two developers and a designer and looking for another top-notch and passionate web programmer. Hoping to find someone soon. Needless to say, hiring IS a BIG challenge. I am willing to persist than to compromise! The content team is also growing alongside - both on the in-house side and on the freelancing side. Since I have a heavy dependence on Content writers, planning to tap on to freelancing communities and may be build my own writers community! Will be trying out Amazon Mechanical Turk shortly. It has potential to satisfy few of my requirements.

Since I am keeping the costs down, I am progressing in a phased manner. Right now, the main focus is on product development and promotion. The objective is to build and promote few online properties, say by spending 2 years. Somewhere in the middle of the journey, will be spreading out to build sales and marketing team. Since advertising and Lead generation being the main revenue streams, it is important to have a good products that can scale, target and convert well.

I would be very interested in meeting with Entrepreneurs in chennai region. Nothing beats stepping out of office and meeting a new person with similar outlook towards life. Just ping me for a coffee Hoping to blog within a week…Otherwise, the shackles would be secured again!

Western companies pulling their business roots out of china is becoming a hot trend these days. Just few days after Google officially pulls out of china, Godaddy follows suit and closes down its operations in china. Citing the new regulations which requires domain registrars to gather relevant document proofs such as photographs, residence proof, email address, telephone numbers and signed forms (!), godaddy stops offering “.cn” registrations.

The world’s largest registrar of internet domain names said Wednesday that it was pulling out of China in the wake of strict new laws that allegedly will increase government surveillance of web sites…

Jones [Christine Jones, general counsel for Go Daddy] said the new Chinese policies required every website owner to submit photographs, business information and individually signed forms, as well as their physical address, email address and telephone numbers.

‘We didn’t want to act as an agent of the Chinese government,’ Jones said. ‘We can’t let them be strong and us be weak all the time. We just have to stop it, and then we’ll start offering .CN domain names again.’

link

Is china trying to enforce the closed economy even on the internet turf? I guess so..They are not doing directly, but they are doing it through indirect means such as regulations, strict guidelines, tight web monitoring etc., For now, we will have just observe the cyber-war between the western supremacy (read US) and the new rising power China. Who is next in-line to close the operations? Dell (they are already showing some signs)?

It’s been 3 months since Google announced that it would be serving ads from third party ad networks through its own publisher network called adsense. Today, Google has rolled out the feature to all adsense accounts. Currently, Google is accepting ads only from third party adnetworks from North America and Europe. Publishers can opt-out of select adnetworks or can decide to opt-out of all adnetworks completely. I am going to test this by turning on and off adnetworks and see how this impacts my bottomline. As of now, there are 92 ad-networks certified by google adsense. Shown below are the list of 92 ad-networks.

Adchemy
http://adchemy.com/
Adchemy: Technology for Relevant Digital Advertising
Adchemy enables marketers to compose, deliver, and optimize millions of highly relevant ads from a single platform at massive scale.

Invite Media
http://www.invitemedia.com/
Invite Media - Next generation platform for display media trading

Specific Media
http://www.specificmedia.com/
Home - Specific Media
Specific Media provides advertisers, marketers, and agencies with multiple distribution channels to reach consumers on the Web.

Turn
http://www.turn.com/
Turn - The Smart Platform for Digital Advertising
Turn’s advanced platform combines predictive targeting, custom behavioral modeling, and powerful analytics to deliver exceptional performance to global agencies, publishers and premium advertisers.

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3 Idiots was a much awaited movie and it definitely lived up to its expectation with such a wonderful screeplay, message and performances. As soon as I came out of the cinema hall after watching the movie, I asked my wife, “Shall we go for the next show too..?”. I eventually didnt, but that was the impact of the movie on me..The Movie is a definite crowd-puller.

I read the book “Five Point someone” around 2005-06. The book was fun-read. Quite liked it and have read all 4 books written by Chetan bhagat since then. 3 Idiots is based on that book! Everyone who have read the book can connect with some scenes in the movie. The movie also gave credit to the author as per the contract, which goes like this:

It shall be obligatory on the part of producer to accord credit to the Author in the rolling credits of any audio-visual moving image software (of any form in any media or medium) produced by the Producer in terms of the exercise and execution of the Rights granted as under:

Based on the novel
FIVE POINT SOMEONE
by
Chetan Bhagat

True to the contract, I guess the movie had the rolling credits for the author. All is well So, going by the success of the movie, Chetan wants to grab the limelight. I dont think he has been cheated. He claims that 75% of the movie is based on FPS. But I found lot of new stuff in the movie which was not there in FPS. Most of the comedy scenes which gave life to the movie was not there in the book. The screenplay was very well adapted for the movie.

I personally think Chetan Bhagat is trying to cry foul here and wants to promote his name alongside the movie and clearly making hay while the sun is shining. His name is now known to a larger audience than before! I wonder even if his name was shown in a much highlighted fashion in the beginning of the movie, he would have got the popularity that he has achieved now!! What’s more annoying is the fact that he made couple of posts in his blog stating that he has been cheated and that he is going to fight for the truth and that he is Arjuna and blah…blah…Within few days, he wants to make truce and says he is going to move on and close the issue once for all…What happened to the holy battle of dharma that he said he will wage over these bollywood folks?? Well, I think he lost quite a few fans with those conflicting behaviours exhibited through his blog posts…Bad show Mr. Chetan Bhagat! I will be fan of your books but I lost that ‘good’ impression I had on you…

BTW, do checkout the following link and the video.

25 Reasons why 3 Iditos is not FPS

While this controversy dies down slowly, the power of social media has proven its might in broadening the stage for discussion and debate with everyone chipping in with their views! Just see the site http://www.thefourthidiot.com/ to see for yourself!

Twitter is rolling out features one after the other in a very subtle manner. I like the way this particular feature was rolled out! and ofcourse, I like this feature…It was long missing…Now, you can see a snapshot of who “retweeted” your “tweets” along with your original tweet

JPMorgan Internet Report 2009