The occasional light expression

I usually don’t get excited about new technology launches (yes, I admit, I’m not a technology ‘early adopter’) - the iPhone launch didn’t give me goosebumps, the Nintendo Wii didn’t register till much later and i discovered Adobe Buzzword, Microsoft Photosynth and Google SketchUp much later than most people did.

And yet, I’m excited about Google’s proposed Chrome browser : - ) As a longtime member of the Internet community (which hasn’t switched to Safari), I feel we could do with some excitement in the browser space. The buzz is already quite strong - from ZDNet to the Guardian and Telegraph to Techmeme - lets see how Chrome fares. I hope Google outwits the Google-bashers!

Thus spoke Rajeev Purnaiya at last Sunday’s Open Coffee Club in Bangalore. OCC Bangalore is an informal fortnightly meet-up organized by Amarinder Singh, Ramjee Ganti and Vaibhav Pandey. It is aimed at getting together entrepreneurs and ‘intrapreneurs’ in companies to share business ideas and get informal feedback and mentoring.

This particular OCC was hosted by Hooeey.com. A couple of things happened at the event including a presentation, introductions to new entrepreneur forums, and useful networking. In this post I will mainly transcribe some of what Rajeev shared in his fascinating entrepreneurial story of Cyberbazaar and Hooeey.

I will cover Rajeev’s talk through the lens of several key aspects of entrepreneurship:

1. Team building and advisory board

Rajeev mentioned that during the formation of Cyberbazaar he and his co-founders found a natural alignment with key required roles. One founder had a good grasp on dealing with the telecom regulatory authorities, another was good at Sales & Marketing and a third had the financial expertise while Rajeev was the man on the ground managing everything. Other than the core team, Rajeev mentioned their leverage of an informal Advisory Board which even had mentors who could bring a perspective from related industries. Hooeey has also successfully conducted an internship program and graduated 25 summer interns in 3 batches.

Personal Note: I can strongly relate to the value added by interns to a company and its product development process. In my experience with interns from the IIT design programs in the past few years, I have felt that these interns have added a great deal of energy, perspective and value to the projects they worked on.

2. Product development – Cyberbazaar

Cyberbazaar was India’s first conferencing service provider. It understood the pain points of the IT industry in india especially how employees had to stay back in the office to make US calls. It was a pure phone conferencing service that could be run off any ISP and hardware which could be used by employees to work from home and communicate with their US peers. The service evolved to include into an online conferencing offering as well.

Rajeev and his partners thought Cyberbazaar was a good idea since liberalization had taken wings in India and the Internet was just getting its foot in the door.

When they started CyberBazaar, they first ran into the venerable Department of Telecom (DOT) and the VSNL and suddenly realized that what they wanted to do (phone conferencing service) was just not possible because of the VSNL monopoly.It took Rajeev and his team a good 3.5 years of full time product development before they sold a single unit. They learnt a lot about licensing, funding issues, dealing with bureaucracy and red tape. Rajeev felt trying to convince people in state agencies was a useful experience – it helped them modify their own assumptions.

3. Product development – Hooeey

Hooeey is a memory system for the web which is the next step to managing your web experience after bookmarking. It provides a longitudinal view of your browsing history.
Rajeev started hooeey by first looking into areas of the web experience which he felt could do with improvement.

(On Hooeey versus Google: Google showed a spotlight on the web history area recently and that has helped raise awareness about the need for this product space. Hooeey in general is more discretionary as a product and does not do auto-logging.)

One possible business model for Hooeey is to provide recommendations based on past browser history/usage and provide both consumer and enterprise productivity features based on the aggregated data collected by Hooeey. Hooeey is free for consumers but is looking to build premium services for customers and looking at licensing and tie-ups.

Personal Note: Hooeey is a good example of a service incubated in India which targets the global community of internet users. Its ‘design’ is neither Indian nor American but global - let no one say Indian companies cannot create good consumer web experiences!

4. Dealing with the government

While dealing with government agencies can be tricky, it is useful to keep simple straight examples at hand and explain things calmly. For example, when asked about whether Cyberbazaar would be able to keep privacy of phone conversations, they gave the example of how in India if passports are couriered, then the delivery person can always open and see the passport. The reason this does not happen is because the delivery person (and Cyberbazaar and other vendors) have no personal interest in the business conversation/transaction of the two parties they are connecting. Rajeev mentioned this seemed to have worked with the government. I appreciated Rajeev’s even handed description of working with government bodies.

Personal Note: Dealing with the government is never easy, but arguably, the government is also human and if one can build the right channels, the Indian government still remains the largest consumer and distributor for technology products and services

5. Partnerships with large companies

Cyberbazaar partnered with WebEx which had slowly grown to a $25 million company. It had already scaled to Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and was moving into niche horizontal services. In 2004, WebEx offered to acquire Cyberbazaar. As passionate as the Cyberbazaar founding team was, Rajeev felt that an entrepreneur has to be very dispassionate about selling and consider the inorganic growth opportunities and the value created for early employees.

One word of advice Rajeev shared was to get a good internal referral within the large company that one is targeting. A strong referral who believes in you and can put in a good word helps in working the channels within large companies. Also useful is getting people used to the service and then building a case with upper management based on feedback from the early adopters. One audience member mentioned that there are 3 types of people in large companies that entrepreneurs encounter: Influencers, Decision Makers and Showstoppers. It is important to build bridges with all three of them so the deal does not get stalled at any level.

Personal Note: Large companies are notoriously monolithic, narrow-visioned, and political. It certainly helps to be savvy and plan the political maneuvering upfront - and if required spend more time in drawing the network of influencer, decision makers and show-stoppers and plan a relationship strategy.

6. Market research

While formal upfront market research is a luxury for start-ups, they can always study the market by tapping research results from universities and other individuals. In case of web products, there’s already a lot of research on online consumer patterns that can be found on the web and this can be leveraged. Informal sources of data can be valid if entrepreneurs can make ‘reasonable’ conclusions from these sources. It may also not be a bad idea to take feedback from a close and knowledgeable circle of friends and family. Hooeey even takes product feedback from bloggers and visitors, whether about their site or the product. It is important to meet enough people in the trade.

Personal note: Using online and crowdsourced research services and leveraging university research is a great way for new companies to stay ahead of the curve. R&D on end users need not be siloed into an ‘innovation’ or ‘design’ department. If the right question can be framed, the Internet-Goddess will figure out a way to find out the answer in most cases.

7. Other tips for new entrepreneurs

Regarding whether one should work full time on their start-up or work part time and bootstrap on the side, Rajeev strongly felt that working full time on the startup was a decision that worked very well for them. Also, while you bootstrap it is crucial to network relentlessly with people within your industry, build your own ecosystem and learn to pitch your services in different settings.

Regarding WebEx acquisition, Rajeev and his core team conducted town hall meetings in different national centers to smoothen the transition. They felt the core team had a good opportunity with WebEx and all the founders also continues on with WebEx except Rajeev who moved out after 1 year of working as Managing Director of WebEx India.

Regarding product ‘originality’, Rajeev felt that every product idea or implementation in technology may possibly have an ‘alter ego’ product our there. The trick is to have a clear focus, get the basic market targeted correctly (before targeting the enterprise market), getting the viral online loops worked out and working closely with the online and blogging community. Early R&D including on Amazon S3 and EC2 helped Hooeey months before the product was actually built.

Regarding managing expenses, Rajeev stressed that many of the expenses incurred in the first startup were better managed in the second startup. For example, he optimized more on spending on capital goods and instead devoted part of the money to R&D. He also felt that the main difference in doing a startup the second time around is that there’s more patience and the ability to stick to the plan when things are not picking up. Otherwise as such he felt entrepreneurs are free to make new mistakes and explore new opportunities as well everytime they start a new venture.

Regarding facing crisis situations, Rajeev felt that entrepreneurs should not internalize all the chaos and struggle they feel. They can also externalize and open up to a larger community and build their support structure. Also, crisis situations are opportunities to precipitate your own thought process and reach new avenues of thought.

Regarding where things can go wrong, Rajeev felt that the biggest problems occur when assumptions are not validated and enough time has not been spent on the ground to understand how people actually work and what their real problems are (is the product solving the right problem?)

Personal Note: Entrepreneurs like Rajeev do not see the world in Black and White absolutes - they are able to navigate very flexibly through changing assumptions, shifting market preferences and wavering stakeholders. My personal experience is that one can gain a priceless amount of real world business experience by working with the right kind of startup.

Do you have your experiences as entrepreneur to share - do write a comment : - )

I am busy with planning out Dcamp 2.0, the second edition of the Dcamp unconference series. After last year’s rather fun experience of organizing Dcamp 1.0 at the Yahoo campus in Bangalore, I’m looking forward to seeing newer topics and perspectives this year. This year, the folks at Aditi Technologies have been nice enough to provide ample event space in their Bangalore campus.

I am hoping to invite creatives from other fields to Dcamp as well – including from art, photography and film. If you know of any good folks I can send a Dcamp presentation invite to, please email me at pande dot amit at gmail dot com

Microsoft announced the launch of multi-touch technology with Windows 7 by 2010.

Its good to see that touch is generally becoming a more common form of interaction. Its time we got rid of the clunky keyboards and error-prone and mechanized voice recognition technology through some intuitive, instantaneous, responsive and almost-fluid Touch Interfaces.

Darwin would definitely approve…

Via Tom Stewart on the upcoming ISO 13407, a good article on the need to include the language of ‘user experience’ within existing usability standards. Mr. Stewart’s expansion to the ISO standard will define User Experience as ‘all aspects of the user’s experience when interacting with the product, service, environment or facility….a consequence of the presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behaviour, and assistive capabilities of the interactive system….all aspects of usability and desirability of a product, system or service from the user’s perspective’.
I particularly liked the reference to the Apple Store in the article. I’ve used the Apple store as an example of stellar Customer Experience (not just individual user experience) in several of my presentations. Apple did so many things right - they followed the golden role of rapid, iterative prototyping (under the vision of Mickey Drexler and the smarts of Steve Jobs), they hired passionate Apple enthusiasts instead of the sorts of run of the mill floor staff you find at Best Buy or Walmart and they kept ‘live’ (Wifi/music/video enabled) products you could play with (which Nokia’s concept stores do a pretty tacky job of as far as I’m concerned) for as long as you want. The Apple store is a brilliant component of the Apple experience ecosystem.

All in all, the broadening of the ISO usability standard to ‘User Experience’ is a step in the right direction - Apple illustrates how user experience driven products and services can lead to significant market innovation. I hope more companies can learn from them without blindly imitating them.

As ironical as it sounds, I found myself thinking more consciously about Information Overload (a term coined decades back by Alvin Toffler of the Third Wave, Future Shock variety of futurist books) while sifting through banal, repetitive, vanilla articles describing the phenomenon and suggestions on how to deal with it.
Most articles point to email, Powerpoint and other office productivity tools as the culprits . Whenever powerful tools land up in the hands of the human race, they tend to gravitate towards the tastes, preferences and behaviors of the lowest common denominator than the highest one. Consider the Internet - 50% of it still serves the free porn bandwagon and not surprisingly the Internet porn industry was an earlier adopter of Internet technologies than most national Governments. (with perhaps the exception of Singapore!). Along similar lines, email, Powerpoint, Word and other tools in the workplace ended up conveying too much redundant information, meta-information about information, and regurgitations about actions around the information. And this is when people actually did work. Most of the time folks were busy forwarding political caricatures,  YouTube videos, creating chartjunk on Powerpoints, checking over email if anyone wanted to catch a movie or appearing busy by having an email client and an Excel sheet open on their desktop. Lowest common denominator.
I offer here two social/human perspectives on information overload:

1. Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer had a revealing (if fictional) story about what happened to the human race when we went from relying on the Spoken Word to relying on the Written Word. One of the lessons of the story was that in relying more on documenting and archiving and retaining information, the modern human race lost the meaning and essence of the original Words (Cap. emphasis mine). We went from Biblical and Vedic truisms to the random mission statement generators which every corporate citizen takes potshots at. Somewhere in the cognitive switch we made in considering the Spoken word as less important, we ended up in a trap of dead documents, email graveyards, and Powerpoint Hell. With the original intent and agency lost in transit.

2. What happens if you put a gun in a child’s hands? Well, you don’t! Most of the knowledge workers entering the information/experience economy of today have been fattened on a digital diet where multi-tasking is the form, and where the ability to surf the electronic waves while doing your Physics homework, getting Gmail alerts through your desktop gadget and searching for your soulmate on Myspace/Orkut is the norm. Young knowledge workers fully except to multi-task successfully in the workplace without for a moment realizing the serious attention deficits this digital diet has caused. Without the discipline and the perspective to handle multiple concerns with dexterity, most knowledge workers drift from area to area (email to email to Word to Powerpoint to email), doing little justice to any of the individual tasks.

One of my resolutions for 2008 is to be aware of where i find myself drowning and use simple tools (to detoxify - no less!) for managing information overload. For today, here is one simple illustration I thought I’d share:

(courtesy Ralph Perrine: http://www.ralphperrine.com/)

I recently caught an iTunes video of Jonathan Harris’s work including the fascinating ‘We Feel Fine‘, ‘Yahoo Time Capsule‘ and ‘Universe’ projects.

Harris’s work reminded me of an old (paraphrased here) Terence Mckenna quote “If aliens were to look down upon Earth from their ships, they would not see biology the way we see it - they would see the evolution of a gene swarm of concepts and ideas and language using human biology as the reduction valve”.
Harris’s work describes a new mythology - the mythology of the post modern relativistic age of the 21st century. For every kingdom, merchant mafias, gate keeper and courtesan of the ancient age, there is a corporate monopoly, Private Equity cult, legal counsel, and minor celebrity surviving through their 15 minutes of infamy. Harris’s Universe is not made of hydrogen and carbon, but of the bubbling cauldron of thoughts, events, concepts, and meta-verses.

I’m reporting this live from the UPA China conference at the Jiuhua resort in Beijing.

Thyra Rauch, the UPA International President just finished a short and inspiring talk on UPA, on the evolution of UPA in China, and how in the experience economy, the user experience professionals in China have an opportunity to not only grow in their respective Interaction Design and usability areas, but also be responsible for new product innovations and new market innovations.

Jason Huang, the UPA China President is now giving an overview of UPA China and how they got to where they are (to become the fastest growing UPA chapter worldwide). He described how it started as a volunteer group and eventually began working as a non-profit, while dealing with the financial and operational challenges of a company.

He shared some personal anecdotes about his core UPA China team and how his team worked extra hours to be able to put User Friendly 2007 together. Jason them emphasized that this year’s theme is more around innovation, and that in innovating for China UPA China can be a catalyst for China’s creative industry. He presented lots of charts and details on the demographics of the UX industry in China (still a strong bent towards Hong Kong), on the undergraduate programs in UX and HCI, average ages, training realities and requirements on the ground for Chinese UX professionals, average salaries and such.

It seems the average salaries are highest in Shanghai (82000 RMB) and then Beijing (70000 RMB) and are lower than 70000 RMB in other cities. 220000 RMB was quoted as a very high salary number for a Shanghai based practitioner. It appears that 70% practitioners do not think they are paid well (is that a global trend or what!).

Jason then presented some other details on how many companies have usability labs, what the levels of UCD embedding are within the software development process and such.

He ended with an overview of presentations for the day and some design competitions for students.

While listening to Barry Vandevier of Travelocity, i noted that very few companies have actually walked the talk in terms of ‘open innovation‘. Most companies pay lip service to building an innovation culture across their global workforce (from the mailroom boy to the documentation guy to the UI designer) but end up building ‘innovation’ silos which, when they interact with the rest of the ‘normal’ organization do so very little, very late.
In this regard, Yahoo and Travelocity’s Hackday initiatives are inspiring. Both companies have held Hackdays regularly in their US and international locations, and Yahoo has even gone one step ahead and hosted a ‘public’ Hackday. The notion of bringing in select groups and individuals from outside the company to seed new knowledge networks within the company is an old one but doing so in a Hackday format is pretty innovative. There is a difference between a 1 hour staid lecture and a 24 hour marathon design and technology creation session.
There is something exciting about the Hackday format - throw in a lot of smart and hands on people in a large room with lots of coffee, pump up the challenge by having multiple groups competing, and then select winners based on audience polls and expert reviews - i would argue that this format is suitable for any sort of post-brainstorming work and especially so for ’suits’ - there is nothing more heartening than seeing people create new concepts and ideas without the bureaucracy of top down organizational structures.

Jared Spool’s article “Surviving our success: 3 radical recommendations” in last month’s Journal of Usability Studies is a nice quick read.

He proposes 3 recommendations to deal with a common problem (backed by studies such as by Rolf Molich) that CEOs point to — UE findings by supposed experts can be very variable depending on who conducts the evaluations.

Among usability studies conducted by dozens of ‘credible’ teams across the world, Molich found that usability studies on everyday products such as Hotmail and the Flash based Hotel Penn website (which is a favorite hiring ‘test’ for some firms) had a lot of variation in what experts thought of as ‘catastrophic’ issues. Very few of the teams that conducted the usability studies had similarities on what they thought were P1 issues.

Here are Spool’s 3 radical recommendations – perhaps worth a thought:

1.    Stop Making Recommendations
2.    Stop conducting evaluations
3.    Seek out new techniques

Read the paper to see the details on these recommendations – they’re not as controversial as they appear!