Delip Andra's Blog

Information Overload certainly seems to be a key problem most netizens are facing today. Read my earlier posts "What have I been upto lately" and "And finally" where I have touched up on this problem at a high level and I have also talked about some of the experiences/ learning curve some of the early bloggers have gone through.

Bubba Murarka, seemingly a great technology enthusiast (one who is out there to try new products and services) has just posted his experiences/learning curve about reading blogs and feeds at Robert Scoble's blog.

Let's say you are beginner in the blogosphere and have some interesting stuff to talk about on your blog – but, how can you get your voice heard – when there are dozens if not hundreds and thousands of people talking about the same issue?

Blogosphere today seems to be heavily in support of links. Meme trackers like Memeorandum, Tailrank and blog search engines like Technorati rate you higher up when you have a lot of incoming links to your blog. That can often be a test for your persuasion skills and not always a best indicator of how good the content or the opinion you have presented on your blog is. How many friends can you blog roll and how many can you ask to blog roll you?

And then there are user rating/ social approaches like digg for example – where the bloggers can digg the article themselves and hope enough people read the article and vote for it to move it up the chain of authority. As the blogosphere continues to evolve there will be several interesting techniques and methods that would continue to evolve to rank the authortiy of the blogger and the relevance of the post.

On the other hand, for the blog/ feed readers how many blogs and feeds can you subscribe to and actually read win the limited time that we have? How do you keep track of all your friends blogs and also at the same time track some interesting posts from authoritative sources like scobleizer? This is certainly a big challenge for most of us today.

Don't be diasppointed !!! This is the problem we are working hard to nail down at my new start up Minekey. We will be launching to the public in the next couple of months. So, stay tuned.

Just wanted to say a big "Thank You" for all those wonderful emails and phone calls during the last few days. Your response is very encouraging and I really appreciate it.

I had some interesting discussions over the email and telephone on some topics related to blogging ranging from …the impact of blogging in the Entertainment Industry to … what should they be really talking about on the blogs etc., I'll put up a new post summarizing my thoughts on those areas.

In future, it may be a good idea to have some of these conversations right on the blog!!! Let's use the comments feature …that way we can have these interesting conversations for many of our friends to view later than just get buried in our emails.

You Tube Videos of Steve Ballmer – Microsoft CEO dancing. Nice entertainment .

Steve Ballmer going crazy

Steve Ballmer – Developers

As I promised in my previous blog post that I’ll use the blog to keep you all updated about what’s happening at my end …Here you go…

After I left Euclid (the 1^st start up I cofounded, just 3yrs after my undergrad) in July 2004, I took about a year off …practically did nothing on the business front …but dabbled with a lot of other interesting things.

While the list is certainly quite long, some of the unsuccessful attempts include:

1. Learning to play guitar
2. Learning Hindustani vocal music from the Maestro Ali Akbar Khan (I actually enrolled for a quarter at his school and drove long miles several times a week)
3. Setting up technical finishing schools in India to help bridge the IT talent supply chain gap (between the quality of in take Industry expects and the quality of the engineers being made available by colleges esp. Tier 2 and Tier 3 engineering colleges)
4. Promoting the concept of Health and Wellness through a chain of Ayurvedic Cafes – “Starbucks for Ayurveda”
5. Setting up an Online Learning Community – “eBay for Learning”
6. Setting up Grameen style Micro Finance program at my home town in India (I read and researched a lot about Grameen, Micro Finance and Social Entrepreneurship programs around the world and I am a big fan of Prof. Muhammad Yunus)

Some of the successful ones include:

1. Spending 3 months of quality time with my family in India
2. Cofounding and launching Jayakrishna Foundation a non-profit initiative with my family members to serve the underdeveloped rural areas in and around my home town in India
3. Training to be a Phase 1 Art of Living Teacher (and all the voluntary work associated with it)

(Note – Most of you who have been mailing me – Are you married? Kids? Nope – not yet. But, I don’t know whether I should put that in the unsuccessful or successful bucket:-))

During this time, I realized that each one of us is truly gifted with some things and it is very important for us to honor these gifts and share them with the world. The principle of nature seems to be – those who have more shall be given. So, it’s all about realizing the gifts you have and honoring and putting them to good use!!! This is Swadharma (more on this later).

Technology is some thing that I am very passionate about and I decided to get back to business to do another startup. As a second time entrepreneur, I wanted do things a little bit differently. Having been closely involved with defining, developing and launching products for over 10 years – I have realized that the work that happens in Product Development Organizations around the world is mostly just good Engineering!!! Where as, most of the disruptive inventions and innovations are born out of Academic Institutions and Research Organizations. I am a big fan of all the success stories that sprung up from Stanford and PARC …few notable ones among them include Apple, Sun, Yahoo and of course the one and only Google.

While, I spent the first decade of my career delivering products and services for businesses – touching the lives of millions of Consumers is some thing that I have always been very passionate about. So, I decided to do some thing for Consumers this time.

During the time I took off, I used to spend a lot of time on the Internet to read, research and keep track of a lot of different things covering my professional and personal interests. Gosh, I was spending tons of time searching for information and going from site to site!!! Of course, I had lots of time to do that. I wondered if people all over the world were facing a similar problem – spending lots of time searching for information and hopping from one link to another to find that. To my amazement I found a Pew Internet research study that said people esp. in Corporate America were spending about 2.8hrs a day searching for Information. There you go – solving this pain became the core idea for my next start up!!!

Next few months went into thinking hard and discussing with various Friends and Advisors on – How do I solve this Information Overload problem for users globally by connecting them to the most relevant information? Is it by a method of intelligent search? Is there a way I can help them Search less and Find more? Is it possible to develop an Infomediary who understands my interests and can get me the latest News around the Web and the World?

I wanted to see if there was any research being conducted in this area at IIT Kharagpur (School where I did my undergrad; Check out this CBS News 60 minutes coverage about IITs). I found Dr. Sudeshna Sarkar was doing some cutting edge research work in this area for the past several years. I got in touch with PPC (Prof. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti – Dean of Sponsored Research and Industrial Consultancy and a renowned Computer Science Guru) and then we worked on putting together a deal with IIT KGP.

PPC and Sudeshna helped me put together a team of 8 brilliant guys and we have been working hard during the last six months. So the past 6 months it has been a lot of travel back to India (3 trips) and I spent half my time in India during the last 6months; and of course almost 7 trips to KGP and 45 days on the Campus. The progress we have made is amazing!!! Working with the team and IIT on this piece of cutting edge technology has been really a great experience. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

So, that’s how my new startup Minekey was born. Do check out Minekey’s web site (www.minekey.com) and the blog (read the blog post on why we chose Minekey name). We currently have the Alpha version of the Minekey product and we will be launching the Public Beta around end June. Stay tuned.

Update: We are launching the Minekey Service on April 17, 2007. Some of the old blog post links may not work. The new link to our blog is www.minekey.com/blog.

After several months of determined procrastination, finally I resolved to set up a Personal blog this week. While, this clearly shows I am not one of those Alpha geeks, who is always out to try the latest and the coolest; I am not a laggard either. Geoffrey Moore and other high tech Marketeers would perhaps put me in the “Pragmatists” bucket. Pragmatists often want to be convinced if a new technology can help them do things faster, better and cheaper and are often the bulk of any market. Well, I am not sure if I am a complete pragmatist either. So, let me put it this way – I am perhaps a Technology lover at heart and a Pragmatist by brain. Good luck to marketers who have to figure the behavior of hybrid consumers like me

So, let me start out by telling you about the internal dialogue I was going though and what eventually led me to set up my blog.

As an avid reader of several blogs for the past few years, I am certainly quite impressed with how blogs simplified publishing on the Web and helped millions of people to have a voice on the Web, connect with the Community and have made significant impact in the fields of Technology, Journalism and Politics. Blogs have enabled an era of interactive communications over the Web for the masses through comments, track backs etc.,

Some of my early adopter friends had jumped into the blogging bandwagon several years back and they had quit soon after their initial enthusiasm fizzled away saying … “Keeping your personal blog current is always a big pain”… “Blogging is all about self promotion …It’s all about MEME” …”I can’t find things interesting enough to post on my blog” …and the list goes on.

But some thing interesting I discovered recently. Email maniacs like me are constantly punching on the key boards several hours a day to communicate at a break neck speed with people at work and friends and family. Thanks to Parkinson – “Work always expands to occupy the time”. So, keeping in touch with every one at all time is a loosing game and I am hopelessly hopeless at it (My friend KK invented this term …I will talk about him in one of the later posts!!!). Also, when I come across some thing interesting – like most of you I like to forward and share with friends. Sure, that’s a lot of email both for me and my friends. But then this just doesn’t happen once!!! When I realize a few weeks or months later that I missed out sharing with a bunch of others or some new friends crop up who might find this interesting …I am again searching my email and forwarding. This whole process is certainly quite cumbersome.

Last week, when I forwarded an email on an interesting issue (rather burning issue!!!) to my friends list …I got mails back from more than half a dozen of them saying what are you up to these days and haven’t heard from you in awhile?? Well, I did dutifully reply back to most of them.

During this process, I just realized …things would have been much easier and simpler to update all my friends about what I have been up to lately (coming soon!!!) …if I maintained a blog. So, that’s how I ended up here on the blogosphere.

Blogs are effective not only in one to many communications, interestingly even in one to one communications. I hear that most of today’s teenagers and college goers in the US prefer to communicate with their friends using blogs on My Space or Facebook than email. So, if you have been still sitting on the fence about whether to blog or not – Just stop thinking. Get started right NOW.

You can start blogging for Free at several sites like blogger, live journal, word press etc. Word press is open source and is getting quite popular these days and is one of my favorites (that’s where this blog is currently hosted). You can find more information about setting up a blog at: http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articles/internet/page2084.cfm.

As I continue my journey on the blogosphere, I will certainly try and keep you all updated about me, my thoughts, ideas, passion and pursuits. Please be generous with your comments and feedback …that’s the only way I can improve.