Business Line article on 8KMiles

Business Line carried an article on 8KMiles yesterday. Please read it here

It was a very well written article that clearly explains the 8KMiles value prop and the target users. The article is the result of a discussion I had with the IT reporter of BL, Shamik Paul.
Shamik seemed to appreciate what we are trying to do at 8KMiles and saw value in it. Thanks Shamik!

Personality Quiz: What’s your Freedom Quotient? by freedomishere.in

What’s your Freedom Quotient? by freedomishere.in

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Freedom is here.in

www.Freedomishere.in is a new website that talks about freelancing as a career option to all the IT professionals. The site has some interesting aspects to it –

• Freedom Fundas – A funda (updated weekly), that in an illustrative and comical fashion talks about the benefits of being on your own and the demerits of being associated to a regular job
• Freedom Quotient quiz – A quick and easy way to find out your freedom quotient and what it means.
• Share your freedom story area- A place for users to share their thoughts, views and stories on their work freedom (or the lack of it)

The site will have some more cool stuff added in the next few days/weeks. Please do visit the freedom site. The site is run by my company 8KMiles as a way to educate the Indian IT talent about freelancing.

25 dangerous cities for outsourcing from cio.com

Came across an article in CIO.com that listed the 25 most dangerous cities for offshore outsourcing.

 

The article had a protectionist overture and hinted that US companies are better off getting the work done locally (or through nearshoring). Almost all the Indian IT cities are listed in the top 25 (whew! Didn’t know you can actually outsource to Accra in Ghana till I saw the list!). In fact, all the well known and not so known outsourcing destinations across the developing world find their names included in the list. While Bangalore is there for environmental waste & pollution, Jerusalem along with Mumbai and Delhi are listed for high terrorism threat.

 

What is surprising though is the timing of the article (and the report on which the article is based). The report is titled “2009: The year of outsourcing dangerously”. It is not in 2009, Bangalore has suddenly become a threat to the environment or Jerusalem becomes a soft target for terrorist. And to bring about a list of 25 cities and including parameters that are not so serious is stretching this anti offshoring propaganda a bit too far (most of the Indian IT cities are listed from 20-25).

 

You can read the full article here and arrive at your decision: http://www.cio.com/article/482404/The_Most_Dangerous_Cities_for_Offshore_Outsourcing?source=artrel_top

 

Outsourcing has become an imperative business decision and offshore outsourcing is indeed a very attractive option for companies looking to optimize cost (who isn’t!). There are enough business cases for each one of onshore/nearshore/offshore solutions or a combination of these. It is also fair for a government to try and protect the jobs of its citizens. The good times helped in overlooking this tricky situation. But the current economic situation demands an answer and it will be interesting to see how things pan out in the next few quarters!

Sachin’s ad – RBS

Loved this ad where Sachin talks about “Team”. Well said!!!

Presentation in Start-up Saturday

I made a presentation about 8KMiles in October’s Start-up Saturday event in IIM-B. The presentation was very well received and the audience found the idea to be cool with lots of potential. It was an interactive session and useful one too as we got a pulse of the audience. Watch the presentation:

Many thanks to everyone who attended the session and thanks to the Start-up Saturday team who gave this opportunity.

Sun Startup Essentials workshop – part 1

As a member of TiE, Bangalore and Sun’s Startup Essentials Program, I was invited for the SSE workshop that happened in Bangalore on 31^st May, 2008. It had many flavours starting with the key note speech to panel discussions to guest speeches to one-one sessions with VC’s. 

 

I had jotted down a few points from the meet. Will try to list list them out in this post and the next one.

Key note speech by Sanjay Nayak, CEO of Tejas networks:

Sanjay gave a background on Tejas and how they have got to where they are. His “lesson’s learnt”:

-         Set a grand vision but stay focussed.

o       Set aggressive but realistic milestones

o       Critical to focus on few things but try to be the best in it

o       Start-up should think themselves as a “zero billion dollar” company

-         Markets/customers:

o       Global ambitions starting from India

o       Be open to partnerships for a global reach 

-         Sustainable advantage through aggressive R&D and innovation

-         Team is the Key

o       High-energy talent (need not be IIT’s) with a “can-do” attitude

o       High quality board of directors

o       Regular communication and updates

-         Funding

o       Quality of investors is important. They must understand, appreciate and add value to the business

o       Always take more funding than less!

He also mentioned about the Chinese competition (Huawei, ZTE) and how tough it is to compete with them because of the unfair government support they get. (He mentioned about a friendly credit policy where these companies don’t have to bother repaying them…don’t think it can get any friendlier!)

 

The key note was followed by a talk on the SSE program by Sanjay Sharma, Worldwide Director of the SSE program. Will cover that along with the other things in the next post…

Interesting slideshows- SlideShare

SlideShare is a great plcae to go for a whole load of presentations on different topics. Worth giving it a shot.

Came across 2 very interesting slideshows in SlideShare.

One is titled ”Bad to Worse” – a short guide for start-ups. It explains in a very crisp and to the point manner the things that a startup needs to do so as to avoid going down the drain…

The second one is on marketing: specifically, the way forward in marketing and advertising. This one too is a very informative deck that gives a good understanding on marketing, branding and advertising. A few important observations

-the product should have marketing embedded into them. Simply put, build a remarkable product, marketing will happen on it’s own. 

- Have great/engaging content

- Have some utility value for the consumer

- Be a part of the web 2.0 movement to be on top of things. Watch the slides for more info

Back from a lengthy hiatus…

I have not been doing enough justice to my blog of late. There were no posts for quite a while. Things like naming the company, working on the registration, hiring and whole lot of other stuff took most of the time and blogging took a back seat.

Most of the said things are getting settled and I would be back to regular blogging from now on (hopefullyJ)

 

The start-up as I had mentioned earlier, is getting incubated out of IIM-B. We have named our start-up as 8KMILES. It is an abbreviation for 8000 miles, which is the approximation of equatorial/polar diameter (of earth, of course!). Before you jump to any conclusions, let me make it clear that 8KMiles is not a travel/automobile portal. Check out our website (www.8kmiles.com) for some teaser info about what we are planning to do.

 

My Start-up @ iim-b

It’s official…Me and my team have got the approval for our start-up to be incubated out of NSRCEL in IIM-B…We would officially inaugurate the office on Friday (15^th).

 

This is a great achievement for us. We value it a lot for many reasons. Most importantly, we see this as an approval of our idea (from people like N.S Raghavan, Prof. Kalyani Gandhi, Prof. K. Kumar and 4 other eminent people)…As I had mentioned in a previous post(http://paddydefies.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/nsrcel-iim-b/), there are lots of benefits to being incubated in iim-b (space, library, access to professors and consultants etc). It feels invigorating to be working out of a calm and super serene location right inside Bangalore city (calm and serene and Bangalore are becoming an oxymoron these days!). We would try to optimally leverage the facility (In fact, I already had a good and very useful 3 hour in the library today!) in the days and months to come.

Watch out for us…