Delip Andra's Blog

Well, it has been 8 months since I last posted on my blog. As a Founder/ CEO of a company that provides a widget for bloggers, I have run out of excuses to defend my inconsistent blogging behavior. I realize that most good things in life need some discipline and getting into the habit of blogging regularly is no different. Perhaps it’s never too late to get that going, especially NOW, when there are so many interesting things going on in my life and there is no way to share them all with each one of you other than to post on this blog. How else, can I explain my tardy responses to some of your emails and phone calls .

Past 8 months have been the most interesting in my life. While, things were very hectic with my 2 startups – they were quite exciting too.

My personal startup has been a great ride so far. I am really fortunate to have been married to a wonderful and supportive woman.

My professional startup Minekey, which I have been working on for the past two years, has come a long way. During the past 8 months, we have made tremendous progress at Minekey.

During this time, Minekey got its own existence and identity. We set up our offices at Sunnyvale, California and Gurgaon, India. We were able to attract a great entrepreneurial team at both Sunnyvale and Gurgaon. Some of the former team members, who had been part of the early Minekey team at IIT but had graduated and since then been working for leading global companies in India, came back and joined us – Umar Shah joined us from Symantec, Gaurav Sahni (a.k.a. Rave) joined us from Lehman Brothers and Himanshu Baweja (a.k.a. Frosty) joined us from Trilogy. During a time when there is a huge talent crunch in India, we have indeed been very lucky to attract top IIT Computer Scientists to our team. Between our IIT Research Centre and the Gurgaon Development team, we now have around 15 top quality Computer Scientists working to put together technology that lets Minekey users discover the most relevant content. We are fortunate to have Gaurav Bhatia who relocated to India after living an working in the US for 15 years. Gaurav leads our team in India. In Sunnyvale, California, we have assembled a highly entrepreneurial team with great experience in online media. James Ryan, Alex Gault, Raymond Rouf and Rajiv Doshi have joined Minekey team to spearhead our Marketing and Business Development initiatives.We also completed a beta trial of Minekey Product with over 1000 bloggers during this phase and we have received some really good feedback. Our Engineering team is really working hard to get all these implemented over the next 2 releases coming up in August.

Minekey was also selected as Proto’s Asia Top 25 companies. Check out the detailed coverage about this event by several leading bloggers from India.

Even, without any marketing efforts Minekey was able to attract some level of attention from Analysts and Media during the past 8 months. Also, several bloggers from all over the world talked about us.

We are getting ready to launch Minekey finally next week. We are really looking forward to exciting times ahead. Stay tuned for updates.

Few weeks back I had an interesting email discussion today with my friend Bala, Director of Green Card Fever (among the top movies in Indo-American genre) about the impact of blogging on the Media & Entertainment Industry. 

I first met Bala 2 yrs ago when he just started researching on the plot for his next movie project. He came down to Silicon Valley from Hollywood to interview a bunch of us (Indian Immigrants in the Tech Industry). His new movie project seems to be named Blind Ambition.

While the value of Face to Face meetings can not be underestimated – blogs can be effectively used as a good tool to poll the audience and get some good insights while researching on a new movie project. Yes – that’s really true. I recently attended lectures on the New Media and it’s impact on Journalism by John Battelle (the search guru) author of The Search and Dan Gillmor (former San Jose Mercury News fame and a Citizen Journalism evangelist) and the author of We the Media. Both John and Dan mentioned that they used blogging effectively to interact with their audience while writing their books.

News Papers present News as a finished product. Journalism is really an on going conversation and not just a finished product. 24hr News channels have understood this very well and hence they focus a lot on getting the Voices of the man on the street into their News coverage and conversation. New Media tools like blogs enable interactive communications in a much better way. Interestingly News Papers are working to cope up with this trend and are giving a significant face lift to their Websites. NY times recently revamped the Look and Feel of it’s website to make it look like a blog. San Jose Mercury News is trying to bring the readers to participate in the interactive discussions online. I am sure a lot of News Papers will join this band wagon and bring in more interactive features, forums and blogs into their Websites to have an ongoing conversation with their audience.

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.

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.