This is one of the case where the person tried his hand in DIY project and made it his job after wards. Viru wanted to re-plan his fathers house, which he did as a DIY project, but then he thought he can do it for others too. Thats how HomePlanGuru started. Go ahead and read the interview I did with this outfoscion.
1. How come you came with the idea of HomePlanGuru?
HomePlanGuru is now HomePlanGuru.com (since I’m doing it online completely & that is how I’ve registered my company name also).

When I was in Infosys, I renovated my father’s house and constructed few new rooms. Since I was very good in Engineering Drawing, I used that trait to plan every inch of my my house. I was inspired by US buildings (when I worked there) and Infosys’ building quality. I used the same concept for my house. After building it, I realized that to build such a good quality house, it is not that expensive and by proper planning, we could get almost all the functional features that are needed for the house. Since the Indian Customers are not aware of many things about quality, I thought of sharing my experience with them through HomePlanGuru.com and make Indian homes on par with developed countries homes.

2. Are you an architect/civil engineer?
Fortunately, NO. (Had it been yes, then the concept of HomePlanGuru.com wouldn’t have come)

3. Did you plan your own house? Did HomePlanGuru came out of it?
Yes!

4. How do you use your past experience in your present work?
My IT Knowledge & experience helps me a lot in my venture. This is how it is:

• I use IT processes for everything starting from ‘Requirements gathering’.
• I use technology (free softwares like OpenOffice, Google Sketchup, etc) for planning and Email & Online Chat for communication.
• I developed my own website which wouldn’t have been possible had I not been in IT.
• I’m in the process of developing a product for Builders & Customers for which I’m using my IT skills.

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When building community sites, we will always have the problem of chicken and egg. Nobody gets involved into your community if they don’t have critical mass, and critical mass wont get built if users don’t join the web community. How are you going to solve this problem? I think it can be solved to some level by “Standing on the shoulders of the giants”. One way is single signon.

But the true single sign on for the web doesn’t exist yet, but bigger players on the web have so many users that, we can consider them as sso providers. Allowing our users to use one of the established service providers userid/password pair gives us the advantage of converting their users into ours. It also reduces the pain of creating Yet Another User Id/Pw for the user, reducing the entry barrier for our users.

In my personal experience at ubuntuAtWork.org, I have seen 45% increase in registration after we opened up register/login using FB Connect. There are many other success stories.
Solutions:
In the market we have three big compitators

• OpenID : Platform and vendor independent. Standards set by an open standards committe. Big internet companies like Google, Yahoo, etc are supporting them. OpenId is a distributed identity provider and has the biggest user base in the world. The usebase also includes the users of gmail, ymail, wordpress, LJ etc
• Facebook connect: Facebook is worlds biggest social network as of today. It has free APIs for the usage.
• Google Friend Connect: is the compitator to Facebook connect. It has bigger user base in India considering the people on orkut and people using gmail (yes, gmail over took Yahoo recently in India)

Integrated solution: Combination of OpenId and facebook connect will give us bigger advantage. It gives us a large internet users we could target. Drupal the platform used by many communities by default supports OpenId at core. And its not difficult to use it on the wordpress and Joomla. Facebook connect is a simple API, the required modules exist for drupal to implement this. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is the third installment of Outfoscions about which I was talking. After the first two technology ones, I am presenting you, next very tasty one called Potluck. Yes, the venture is called potluck and its an exclusive north Indian restaurant in Bangalore, started by B K Birla. Here I present small interview I did with Birla who is CFO, Chief Food Officer at Potluck. Thanks for the time Birla.

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[thej] How and when did you get this idea of opening a restaurant?
[Birla] I have been enthusiastic cook from an early age. In typical North Indian households, cooking is a necessary skill for girls and almost a taboo for boys. But in our family I have always seen my father and brother cooking good food and leo technoloarning cooking came naturally. After I came to Bangalore in 1995 I setup my kitchen within 2 weeks and cooking everyday became a natural habit for me. In fact the deal I had with my roommate was that I will do the cooking and he will wash utensils. Besides all this I always had 10-15 friends at my place on weekends and cooking for all of them was a very regular affair for me and I enjoyed cooking for all. Similar things continued during my Infosys onsite trips and it was always fun to cook for everyone.
Opening a restaurant was always on my agenda but while working at Amazon I came across a soft skill trainer who also runs a South Indian restaurant called Krishna Cafe. It was an inspiration for me and my friends at Amazon and that is the point where we started to think seriously about this venture.
On a lighter note if you have fed free food to too many people, you want to make up at some point J

[thej]How is it different from running a software project, I had to ask this?
[Birla] There are both similarities and differences in running a software venture and restaurant. The similarity is in terms of people and their aspirations. A BTech graduate coming from IITs and aspiring to learn new skills has very similar mindset to an uneducated waiter coming with pretty much nothing from places like Darjeeling and trying to become a captain (guy who takes orders in restaurants).
One of the main differences I see is in terms of the cycle times in creating a product and getting feedback from customers about it. In food business the cycle is compressed and the feedback is pretty much in your face. The other big difference I find is that in software or other white collar jobs we get used to a very polished language and environment. In food business or probably other brick and mortar businesses you come across all types of people.
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Second in our Outfoscions series is a travel search product which is easy and humane to use. Yes, you don’t have to fill to and from places, date, time textboxes. All you have is one single search box and ask it the way you ask your friend. For example Jammu to Knyakumari next monday gives my favorite Himsagar Express as first option and then the rest. 90di is found by three outfoscions Kiran, Abhinit and Naqvi. They surely have an interesting search engine in crowded market. As of now their concentration is on finding the best traveling option and guiding the traveller to the respective site. Which I think is very interesting considering most of the other travel portals allow you to book the tickets on their own site.
Here is an interview of them and thanks to Abhinit for taking time out to answer my questions.

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[Thej]. How and when did you think about becoming entrepreneurs, was giving up a decent job difficult?
[Abhinit]While each one of us, would have a slightly different personal story here, but broadly we wanted to try doing something different and something of our own and so in May 2007 we took the plunge. Leaving the job certainly not easy but once we made up our mind it was not that difficult. Read the rest of this entry »

As promised I am starting the outfoscions series with Onze Technologies. With their first and primary product Latlong.in they are trying to decode the maps for the rest of us. Latlong tries to give you the information on the go, hence the best way is to deliver by SMS. But the biggest problem for delivering the route on the SMS is 160 character limit. Guys at Latlong came up with a plan of decoding the last ~5km route to destination. This is a brilliant idea considering most of the time users struggle in last five kilometers. Any detailed information from a known landmark in last five kilometers is the way we generally give directions to our friend. LatLong tries to do the same on sms.
You can start using by sending “help” to 90088 90088.
This Sunday I met them at their office. In fact I used their own service to reach their office. It was great fun talking to all the four (Sud, Rahul, Sairam and Pavaman) founders.
Here is an interview I did with them. I am not an interviewer as such. But I have tried to ask questions, which probably will help you know more about LatLong.in. Thank you Sud for taking time out.
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