Actionable Insights into the World of Indian Startups

Today Google announced the Google Maps for Android 2.0 and reports are that it is so awesome that it has turned the GPS navigation industry upside down. By giving away GPS software for free, it has changed the dynamics of the industry and this is reflected directly in the stock price of Garmin whose stock is down 16% and TomTom whose stock is down 21% today. I had blogged earlier about the GPS and how it was going to be come an integral part of our lives. Google is giving this awesome piece of technology away as a part of the Android device and is likely to offer it on other platforms like the iPhone and Nokia for FREE. There is absolutely no way in hell Garmin, TomTom and Nokia can compete with a GPS app that leverages Google Search to find things.

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Watch live video from Startup School on Justin.tv

Read Paul Graham’s Post that summarizes the Video here.

I have written a lot about entrepreneurship and qualities of successful entrepreneurs in my earlier posts and based on my experience working with a lot of great people I concluded that a pedigree does not guarantee startup success. The most successful entrepreneurs have been underdogs who never got things easily in life and developed fierce tenacity and with just this one quality they are able to achieve greatness. Larry Ellison who founded Oracle and where I started my career is a great example of a total underdog who is one of the dominant forces in the tech Industry today.  Larry still has my greatest respect for sheer intellect and tenacity in business.  I remember an event very clearly back in 1995/96  when Oracle 8i was launched and Informix started positioning themselves as the game changer in the database world as they had just bought Michael Stonebraker’s Object Database company Illustra and announced to the world that Relational Databases were dead and that Object databases are the future.  I was part of a technology team that was working on training Oracle’s Salesforce on how to position against Informix’s attack.    Larry knew all along that change in the technology world is very slow (though people outside the industry perceive it as very fast)  and bet that evolving Oracle to the object world as and when the market was ready was the right approach and people were not going to dump relational technology for object technology overnight.   His way of defending against Informix’s attack was to simply change the compensation plan of the entire salesforce and double their incentive if they took out Informix in any of their deals.   Oracle at that time had one of the best Enterprise software salesforce in the world and this one small change just motivated every single sales person to go and kill Informix.    This type of tenacity is not taught in IVY league schools.    We don’t hear a lot about Informix today

This awesome post written by Vivek Wadhwa on TechCrunch today drives home this point:

Quote:  ” An Ivy League degree may get you a job as an investment banker or VC, but it won’t increase your odds of becoming a successful entrepreneur.”

Read the entire post at TechCrunch titled Got degree envy? No worries, you can still make it big.

Mission #2 was to find a nicely designed logo for the company.   It really bothers me to see companies in India not take enough time working on building a brand.   Many startup founders don’t know the importance of a well thought out brand experience.   A well designed Logo is the first step in establishing corporate identity.   A well designed Logo should consider the following:

1. It’s describable
2. It’s memorable
3. It’s effective without colour
4. It’s scalable i.e. works when just an inch in size
5. It’s relevant to the industry in question

I really like this article by Designer David Airey on “What makes a good Logo?”

Infinitely Beta decided to crowd source our logo design by posting a contest on 99designs.com.

We ran a one week contest with prize money of US$295.   The Contest can be viewed here.  We received 97 entries in a week out of which a good 15% made the cut of being awesome.   We think entry #80 by redzart was the best design and is very clean and meaningful.

My new company Infinitely Beta Technologies Pvt. Ltd. was incorporated and the entire process was very smooth. The Indian Bureaucracy definitely deserves credit for making this process fairly smooth. My CA/Tax Advisor managed all the aspects of this process allowing me to focus on more important things like building my team and working on the product.

So, why did we call the company Infinitely Beta Technologies? I believe that in India, we do not spend enough time thinking through the mission of the company and then brand the company around the mission and values. We wanted our company to reflect that we do the following:

1. awesome tech company
2. that builds engaging Internet products
3. where perfection is constantly redone (hence the state of Beta in perpetuity – thanks! google for showing us the way)
4. with awesome people and culture
5. with infinite opportunities to create value

We made sure that both the “.com” and “.net” domains were available and we registered them.  So, our web identity is infinitelybeta.com.   The Indian ROC did not allow us to use just Infinitely Beta as our company name and added Technologies to the company name which is not great but an acceptable situation.

Sean Parker of Founder’s Fund predicts that Facebook/Twitter will dominate the Web and not Google.   He opines that the days of the first generation of the Web or the Informational Web are over and the next generation is all about Network Services and connecting People to People and People to Services.  Incidentally, Sean helped in founding Facebook and so we need to read this article with the appropriate filter on bias.

Quoted from TC:  ”Sean Parker, a managing partner at Founder’s Fund, gave an interesting talk today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The key to it is simple: Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and eBay will dominate the web going forward. One company of note that won’t? Google.”

Read more at TechCrunch   Sean Parker: Twitter/Facebook Will Soon Dominate The Web — Not Google.

As reported by TC today Google’s Android is making significant strides in the Smartphone market with several OEMS/ODMS announcing a plethora of Android based devices.  Almost all the major OEMs have jumped on the Android bandwagon including Sony Ericsson and Motorola.   It is going to be real fun to watch the industry gang up against the leader Nokia. May the best Win!

More reading at Android Avalanche: A Complete List Of The Android Phones So Far

Some of you may have noticed advertisements for iPhone and Android developer training being offered in Pune. If you have not kept up, Mobisoft Infotech is offering developer training in both the platforms. I have been writing for a while about how these two platforms are going to be the game changers in the world of Mobile VAS.  It is time for all those J2ME and Nokia/Symbian developers to get trained in these technologies to ensure you stay relevant in the coming 2-3 years.   The Android 1.6 SDK was released on the 15th of September which now support the CDMA platform, a variety of screen resolutions, an enhanced gestures API and a Text to Speech Engine.   Please read the Android blog for more details.  Apple has released the latest SDK 3.1.2 and you can very easily become an iPhone developer.   Just sign up as a iPhone developer at Apple’s Developer site.

After the dismal performance this past quarter at Nokia, as expected of a company caught in its own death-ward spiral, instead of firing the suits that led to this performance Nokia decided to conduct a game of Musical chairs and shuffle the execs around.

“CFO Rick Simonson is being whisked over to a new post as head of the Mobile Phones group — concentrating on Series 30 and Series 40 handsets — within the Devices division, while Timo Ihamuotila, who currently leads up global sales, will take over for the CFO position being vacated by Simonson. For what it’s worth, the move doesn’t seem like a demotion for Simonson; he’ll be in charge of “strategic sourcing” for the entire Devices division and still sit on the executive board, so we’re sure he’ll be doing alright for himself. All things considered, there’s no way of knowing whether this would’ve all gone down without the quarterly performance, but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

Nokia Press Release

Todays Wireless Industry headlines read   “Nokia shocks market, posts $834M loss” and why am I not surprised. I have predicted this eventuality for a while now.    This is the first time that Nokia has posted a loss.   Nokia may play it down by saying that it is one time write off of the Siemens deal that they did recently. However I think the writing is on the wall.     Nokia is just failing to make an impact on the Smartphone market with their lost cause of Symbian OS based phones.   Their smartphone market share has fallen from 41% to 35% while Apple has climbed into a comfortable 3rd spot with 15% market share after only 2 years of launching the iPhone.   RIM is number 2 with 18% but my guess is RIM is going to kiss the bottom along with Nokia in the next 2 years while Apple and Google Android will lead the smartphone market.   A lot of Nokia fan boys may say hmmm… but the traditional phone market is huge compared to the smartphone business and Nokia kicks butt there.  My thesis is that the traditional handset market will die eventually as Moore’s law will drive the smartphones into the lower price band of the market and once someone experiences the integration of a music player and a nice Internet browser with touch integration, they are not going to go back to a traditional phone.    So, that brings us to why I feel that Nokia is eventually going to die while Silicon Valley companies are going to shine in the Mobile Device business:

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