Staying in the Zone (The Social Network vs Inception)

One of the best things that I liked in the movie "The Social Network"  was the concept of "wired in". In November, I was looking back at the effort of the last few months and was wondering where did I go wrong. I thought it took me way too much time to come up with a stable release of CAT-Ninja. Why did it take me so much time and what could I do to improve? 

One of the many things I came across was people talking about getting in the zone, or what was depicted as "wired in" in the movie. This struck a chord with me. I was never in any zone, rather I was always on the HIghway to the Danger Zone.Things that could go wrong, went wrong. Things that couldn't go wrong, also went wrong. Being a one man army (definitely not like this one man army :P) I was unable to manage tasks properly and was most of the time firefighting. Also, what Raghu of Recruiterbox calls the challenge of context switching, is magnified when you are working alone. Its very difficult to sit and code right after your vendor informs you that they will be missing yet another deadline.

So I decided that I shall plan my tasks keeping in mind that most coding work shall be done in time-slots with absolutely no disturbance. That I shall try and get in the zone or be wired in. So with the New Year, I decided to start that practise and started work on a mini project which I have to finish by Jan end. I am also using this mini-project as an opportunity to switch from webforms to mvc, so when I started coding and learning mvc on the night of 2 Jan, I was amazed that I had spent the whole night learning, reading and trying stuff. The same continued on the night of Jan 3. I wasn't going to Jaaga as I was pretty sure I was heading into the zone and that too pretty soon, I would be cranking code out like anything. My new Dell and the switch to Windows 7 from Vista also added to the pleasure of coding. 

However, as I was deep into thinking about TDD and mocking frameworks, something happened. Inception. From within that peace and quiet at 2 am in the night, when I was thinking about TDD, came an idea into my head. A brainwave! A Eureka moment. Suddenly it was very obvious as to why the current product did not gain traction and what could be the possible pivots in the coming months. Excited I tried getting back to work, but was unable to code. The incepion had happened and I was way out of any zone. All I could think was the new approach. 

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Awesome Response to the post "Keeping Track of the Roads"

A few weeks back, I had blogged about "Keeping Track of the Roads". I shared the link to the blog post in HackerStreet ( a clone of HackerNews, but focused on India). One of the users has shared his experience about the RTI process in the responses and it is an awesome read. Do check it out and join the discussion. 

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Keeping track of the Roads

 

The state of Bangalore’s roads has become pathetic. At least the roads on which I drive frequently. Old Airport Road has been dug every now and then which makes it difficult to ascertain whether the pot hole you encountered was caused by the digging or by the degradation of the road. The stretch from Garuda Mall to Hosmat Hospital had such deep potholes that when I accidently drove over one, the impact was so strong that the attachment holding the headlight broke on the left side. The potholes were filled recently.

But it begs the question why did we have potholes in the first place? When were the roads  last rebuilt? If my memory does not fail me, it was probably around a year and a half ago, somewhere between January and May 2009 (though I cannot be cent percent sure). The roads were built by the present state government, which came to power in May 2008 and it was done during late winter/spring well in advance of the monsoons, so my timing cannot be off by much (If you thought the monsoons only affected when the rice paddies are sown, well there you go.)

Is that the life of our roads? I searched on Google and after trying a few different keywords came across this site, where somebody has answered a similar question. So an asphalt road’s life may vary from 10-20 years depending on various factors. That is a far cry from a road life of 2 years over here. In fact, I am not even sure if all the roads in Bangalore have the same life.

One of the public figures that I follow on twitter, tweeted a few months back that he/she had spoken to someone who was into construction of roads. The roads they had developed in Orissa would last longer than the roads they had developed in Maharashtra even thought the Tender amount was the same. This was because in Maharashtra to win the contract they had to bribe, so accordingly the contractor used less quality materials for development of roads in Maharashtra, so that his business remains viable. ( I would link to the specific tweet if I could find it)

It is hard to believe that such cases do not happen throughout the country. Read this article in the Forbes for instance. Even if corruption cases are uncovered, they are silently shut down due to political pressure.

Is there anyway we can fight this? An idea occurred to me when I read this and this tweet by Indus Khaitan. Why not build an app which tracks all the data related to building of roads which is integrated with google maps and location enabled? Lets again take the case of the stretch of road from Garuda Mall to Hosmat Hospital and also assume that our app (lets call it betterroads) is available. I access the app from my smartphone which is GPS enabled.

It automatically maps my current location to the road and pops up a map with information about the road such as when was it last built/relaid, the expected life, cost of building the road, contractor who built etc. All this info can be available with the app through RTI. Now since I encountered a pot-hole, I can report a pothole and also rate the road.  I can also take a pic of the pothole and upload it on the app. So can anybody else. Now since the road is in a bad shape in 2010 whereas its expected life was till 2014, the following steps could be taken :

1) The road is relaid.

2) It is determined whether any digging etc from other government departments reduced the life of the road.

3) If not, the contractor is blacklisted from participating in any future government contracts.

Imagine if such a thing were possible for each and every road in this country. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Not only would one be able to report bad roads, but be able to pin point possible instances of corruption.

So why not build such an app? What are the challenges? Well I think an app to report potholes is pretty much possible because that is essentially a mashup of Google maps with Crowdsourced data, even though this shall have challenges such as ensuring the data remians relevant and provides true picture. No point in having a road reported a bad when it has been repaired recently.

The bigger challenge comes when you want to have the data about road construction from the government through RTI. Getting and organizing this data in the current scenario is a gargantuan task in itself and probably needs an NGO to focus on this. All the roads on  Google maps will have to be marked according to the way contracts are awarded for road construction. i.e in the db of the app, the stretch of Old Airport Road from Diamond District to Pizza Hut Signal could be one row (road id : 1) in the db whereas from Pizza Hut to Marthahalli would be a different row(road id: 2), even though the whole thing is Old Airport Road. This could be because contracts for repair of the first stretch could be given out at a different time and to a different contractor and if we are capturing this information then we have mark roads accordingly.

Also, ensuring that data is provided by the government, in the format that is required, consistently is going to be a challenge. I am not even sure what and how does the government track. The essential thing to ease the whole thing would be digitization of government records and provide the data to NGO’s and researchers through an RTI api. Even after the data is available, there are going to be many issues such as agreeing to a road life at given cost, ensuring government agencies act etc. All this just reinforces the adage that “Technology is just an enabler” and the app in itself is not going to solve problems overnight.

Then what is the point of discussing all this? Well for starters this can be tried at a small scale, say only Bangalore. That would be the MVP for this idea. No need to wait for government to digitize its records. File RTI’s and manually get the data for Bangalore or a smaller part of Bangalore and develop the app. See if people use it. After all, as someone once told me, when Naukri.com started, they were manually entering jobs into their website.

Perhaps a few techies along with an NGO such as Janagraha could take a shot at it. What do you think? Worth a try?

Do you really need a Web Designer?

This is a question that has been asked and discussed time and again. While it is awesome if you have a kick ass designer in your team, what does one do when no one in the startup team is has good design skills. I mean no one in the team can start from scratch and design a decent looking UI. What does one do then?  

The first thought that occurs is to outsource your design work. Seems like a good idea. But if the startup is bootstrapped and has not yet found a proven revenue model ( or in other words you have zero revenues) is it a good idea to spend on the design of the website? In India, good designers charge as much as their western counterparts and if someone is not charging enough and promising you awesome designs, he/she is probably giving false promises (at least that has been my experience). If outsourcing to a web designer is within your budget, then, by all means, hire a good designer. But what if the cash situation is a bit tight?

Learn to do stuff on your own? Well if you can then nothing like it. But if you do not have the bandwidth to learn, I would suggest learn just enough to modify somebody else's work. There are tonnes of awesome freely available CSS templates available on the web. Just pick the one which you feel shall suit your needs and learn to modify it according to your needs. It looks decent enough for you to focus on validating your idea. And when your app is growing and you feel a change is needed, hire a kick ass web designer to revamp your app. At this point of time, you shall have much more clarity about what you want from the designer. I recommend this approach to everyone. 

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Insights

"Why do people watch Big Boss? Completely fail to understand" This was a tweet on my timeline. 

What interested me in this tweet was the second part. Completely fail to understand. So do I. I have never watched Big Boss and I have no clue why people would like to watch it.

But this only means that I do not have insights which the producers of Big Boss have. The question then is, what are the insights that I have which other people don't have? What are the things that I am sure people would do, but others fail to understand why? And why/ how/since when do I have such insights? What is the basis for such an insight/gut feel?

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Perception vs. Reality - Some interesting thoughts

One of the great lessons of starting up has been the realization of the difference between perception and reality. What do I mean by that? Lets say you hit upon an idea which you think has huge potential. You talk to a few friends and they seem to agree. You get down to work, talk to probable future customers, research the market and your hypothesis seems to be validated. You seem to be solving a major pain point for customers. You form a team and start work on the product. As you are nearing the release of your first version, a big company also releases a very similar service, and most of it is for FREE. End of the road for your startup? How does one react to such a situation? Does the motivation level remain the same? 

The above is just an example and if you are starting up, you may come across many similar situations in your journey. It could be something as huge as the example above or something as small as a friend promising to help you out with certain things and then getting caught up with some other important priorities. Whether the startup is going to succeed or fail is just a perception. Take the example above. Its not that the big company was waiting for the release of your first version to near, for it to launch its service. No. It probably started work on developing that service before you did. If , a couple of months ago, you had known that the big company was planning to come up with a service like that, you would probably not have worked your ass off to develop your product.

But you did work your ass off and developed that product, because you thought there was potential. Now, that's interesting, isn't it? A couple of months ago, if you had that bit of information about the big company's plans, the potential did not seem that huge, coz "anyway, they are already doing it." But without that bit of information, the potential seems huge or "nobody has solved this yet, we are going to be rich having solved this." But did the potential of the idea, really change? Before that bit of information, there were say a a supposed 100,000 people who were looking for a service like yours. That number does not change even if you have the information about the big company planning to release their service. The potential of the idea has not changed. What has changed is your perception about the potential, because of the piece of information you were supplied. 

Thus the more information/data you have, the closer is your perception to the reality. This applies everywhere. People are afraid of cancer and not common cold. Why? If I were to tell you that your cancer can be cured by eating a new magic pill, will you be as bothered. 

The reason I write this is to remind myself of this realization. That change in one's perception doesn't necessarily change the reality. 

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Moving towards an Instant World

I love Google Instant Search. It is fast and it has changed the way I search. I expect the search behavior of other users may be changing as well. A question that comes to mind is how is your website affected if it does not feature in the top results. I think users are more likely to change the search query rather than navigate to the next page, when using instant search. 

But apart from web search, Instant is going to change the way applications are developed. The first one which came to my mind is helpdesk software. Imagine a call center operator having access to instant results. He/She can keep talking and search for a resolution to your problem in their knowledge base. Instant results means less chances of putting you on hold. Faster search results could mean lesser Minutes per Incident. Just as my web search behavior has changed, call center operators will change current ways to better handle calls and provide more resolutions. A direct benefit to the customer is in cases where talking to an operator is charged, such as when you now call Airtel helpline and talk to a human being, you are charged. If the operator takes less time answering your call, you save money. 

I think this is a good idea which will make its way into the market sooner or later. A good idea for a startup? I am not so sure. After all, how much time would it take for current helpdesk companies to bring this feature into their products?

What do you think?

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