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.

Past several weeks have been quite busy with lots of stuff happening at Minekey. Hence I didn't post anything on my blog. I am hoping to blog more frequently going forward.

We have made good progress on Alpha. Just recently we moved the Software from an Intel Desktop at IIT to couple of Servers in a Data center in Texas. Now we can do all the needed rigorous testing over the next several weeks to see if the Software delivers the promised results.

Also, I attended a few Lectures, Events and Conferences during the past few weeks. I will summarize my take aways in couple of posts shortly.