Delip Andra's Blog

It has been a while since I posted on my blog. 6 months exactly. Yes …I was quite busy with my 2 Startups.

1^st one: I have blogged about this in this past. It is obviously Minekey, the startup that I have been incubating out of IIT Kharagpur for a little over a Year now. Past 6 months we have made some good progress and witnessed some interesting twists and turns. Over the last one year, I have been closely working with an academic and research team at IIT Kharagpur to productize and bring to market some of the academic research innovations in the Personalized Search and Recommendations space. By May this year, we had developed an Alpha version of a Personalized News Portal based on this technology. We spent the next 3 months talking to Alpha Users, Potential Investors, Customers, Partners and Analyst. While every one was quite impressed with the technology, usability and the features the product offered; invariably every one suggested that we should look at a potential business model of licensing this technology to Publishers and Content Portals to help them surface most relevant content to every user thereby improving the user experience and maximizing their revenue.We took the feedback quite seriously and went back to the drawing board to develop a Content Surfacing/ Recommendations Web Service that could potentially be used by the Publishers and Content Portals. We’ll be launching the service in early 2007. Good News: We just closed VC funding and the First Customer.

2^nd One: >I have finally found some one who I have decided to spend the rest of my life with. Yes …I am getting hitched on December 27^th in India at Bangalore. If any of you folks are going to be around in Bangalore and can make it for the wedding, please let me know your address and I’ll send across an invitation. Look forward to seeing you there.Unlike the 1^st one, we intend to boot strap this startup all the way through and the 2 major share holders are committed to see through all the different phases of evolution of this startup.

I’ll be off to India for business and wedding from Mid December till mid January. Now that these 2 startups are slowly getting off the ground …I am hoping I’ll be able to post more from time to time hopefully in 2007.
Happy Holidays and Wish you all a very happy 2007.

Over 13 years back, I remember a debate that I had participated in, back at school on a topic that had some thing about whether the world was getting better or worse. I had spoken way too much about Global Warming back then. I remember I had spoken of a situation where some of the Polar Ice caps could melt and the water level could rise up and there was a possibility that some day the room in which the debate was being held could be submerged under water. One of the opponents had come up with an argument that Global Warming wasn’t true at all and there was enough data pointing against it. Well, even though I spoke with a lot of passion, I didn’t have much data back then to substantiate my claims. Of course, I had lost the debate back then …never mind!!!Al Gore did a fantastic Job exposing this inconvenient truth.

It’s quite alarming to see where we are taking this planet. If you haven’t watched this movie yet, go ahead and rent a DVD and watch it soon. Each one of us knowingly or unknowingly is contributing to the Global Warming. And yes …if the Scientists are right we just have 10yrs to avert the imminent danger and destruction ahead of us.

There is so much that we can all do to save the planet and make it a better place. Check out this link to see what difference you can make: http://www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/. Let’s start acting on it right now!!!!

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.