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stop lookin. start zook.in!

Zook is live.

Zook is a new mobile search which helps you quickly get answers, not pages upon pages of links. It identifies the really clear answers upfront, or interactively narrows down to what you really meant to look for.

To start zook.in

WAP : http://zook.in
SMS : "ZOOK " to 3030

[ when SMSing, remember to always start with "ZOOK ... " !!!! ]

In its first avatar, Zook can get you

Ringtones
Restaurants (Bangalore)
Movies (Bangalore)
Events (Bangalore)

More coming soon - and to more cities too.

If you like what you see, please do include your friends in groups or as friends, and spread the word about Zook. Also, please send your comments/suggestions to feedback --A-T-- zook.in. Or let me know at 984518020 .

A short how-to guide can be found at http://www.zivasoftware.com/faq.php. More details about what Zook can do for you below.

Happy zook.in

Zook FAQts :

Whats Zook ?

Zook is the new way to use your mobile phone. Let it now be your friend which helps you find a place to eat, or catch a movie, or download fun stuff for your mobile.

Its on your WAP phone at http://zook.in
You can also send an SMS - "ZOOK " to 3030

[ BTW, You can also just use "Z" instead of "ZOOK" ]

So, a local search engine on the phone? So?

Zook is not just a search engine. Zook makes sense of the data, and of what you asked. It analyzes the data, your interests and interprets the likely intent of your query.

A few examples [ Remember : on SMS start all queries with "ZOOK" , e.g. "zook chinese" !! ]

you : chinese
zook : 1:Restaurant:Chungs Chinese Corner, Indiranagar
          2:Ringtone:Theme Of China Gate, Monotone
          ......
          7: Restaurant (31+)
          8: Ringtone (19+)
          9: Locality: Indiranagar (5+)
         10: City: Bangalore (31+)

you : 7
zook :1:Magnolia, Koramangala, South Bangalore
         2:Aromas Of China, Langford Town
         ....
         6: Locality: Indiranagar (6+)
         7: Locality: Church Street (4+)
         8: Locality: Koramangala (7+)
         9: Locality: South Bangalore (4+)
         10: Locality: Palace Road (2+)
         More
you : 6
zook :1:Wangs Place, Indiranagar
         2:Chungs Pavilion, Indiranagar
         3:Wan Ley, Indiranagar
         4:Gokul Kuteera, Indiranagar
         5:Oregano, Indiranagar
         6:Vishals, Indiranagar
         7:Ramya, Indiranagar
         8:Bangalore Mandarin, Double Road, Off Richmond Circle,
OR

you : thai kgla
zook :1.Magnolia, Koramangala
         2. Pan Asian Bites, Koramangala
you :  1
zook :Restaurant: Magnolia
         Cuisine: SE Asian, Chinese, Thai
         Phone: +918041102222
         Address: 840, 7th Cross, 15th Main, 3rd Block Koramangala Bangalore - India (Koramangala ) 560095
        1. sms "RES 1 for 5" to 3030 to book a table for 5 at Magnolia
        2. ORDER to 3030 for a callback

(these are some things you can "do" now after you find something. We're adding lots more soon)

OR

you : guru pvr
zook : Movie: Guru (Hindi)
          Theatre: PVR
          Timings: 12:00pm, 12:15pm, 3:50pm, 3:30pm, 6:40pm, 6:45pm, 9:50pm, 10:00pm
          Address: The Forum, 3rd Floor, Nr. Madiwala Checkpost Koramangala Bangalore 560095
          Phone: +918022067511

And Zook is not just local. Its about your leisure, your music, your tastes, your choices, your neighbourhood, your friends....

Friends?

Yes. Your friends give you the best references, and beyond a point can give you a way better answer than even we can. So if Zook cannot dig out the answer, it helps pass it on to your friends.

You can create groups of people you hang out with for various different things - work, bowling, golf, whatever. Your contacts and each set of people can be your 'expert circle' for answers and advice (and soon we'll enrich the data for the entire community based on stuff you find out and share). You can both ASK these contacts about choices, or information, and TELL them about what you like (whether or not you found it on Zook).

you : korean kgla
zook :No Matches Found
      ASK your friends?
      send "ASK  "
you : ask amit, 9878709878 Is there a good Korean place in Blore ?

amit :  Tell nopes theres a couple of good Japanese ones tho

You can ask more than one friend, and we'll summarize their responses too.
Need WAP?

Zook works fully featured on both WAP as well as SMS! SMS is charged at whatever your operator's premium SMS rates are.
[ When SMSing, please dont forget to start with a "ZOOK" or a "Z"... ]

Next time you need to look, Zook it!

Rgds,
TeamZook @ Ziva

Ziva in the TOI

Ziva got a passing mention in a TOI article about recruitment ai IIITB.

We're actually pretty deeply married into IIITB - with three people and soon 3 interns from there!

A lesson like few others!

Binary Search revisited - its never over till the .....

Illusions turn reality

http://www.chemistrycoach.com/nature_of_reality.htm

Tis a good read for wannabe entrepreneurs, thinkers, and other world-changers.
Hypotheses, facts, conjecture, hope, desire, fears, ambition, success, failure.
Are they all part of the curry ? When is the salt too little, or the spice too sharp ?

Ubuntu good

Linux for Human Beings

My Presario had been running Fedora Core 3 for ages together, and no upgrades (for 'business reasons') had made my fingers twitchy.

Moved to Ubuntu "Edgy Eft" a couple of days ago.

It Totally Rocks!
Volume buttons worked out of the box
WiFi worked out of the box
Anything you down works
Packahe installation is a breeze using Synaptic, and just works
All the commands on The Unofficial Guide actually worked
Battery management, hibernate/suspend actually works

Also tried Swiftfox. They Should've called it StableFox instead. Speed is not the draw, lack of memory hogs, and overall stability, is.

Laptopup

On the Bombay trip, the LCD screen suddenly went near-dark! Connected to a CRT terminal and managed for a couple of days.

Back in Bangalore, asked cousin to take a look at it - essentially the 'power supply' (in lay terms, there *are* propah terms for suchlike which I do not remember) to the LCD had a teeny diode gone kaput. Simple enough fix, or replacement of a small part. Except that HP does not list this as a part !!

Their solution - replace the LCD!!!!!! And if not under warranty, the cost would be 30k, the lady at the service point said!

This is highway robbery under a corporate policy garb! The diode would cost 25p, and even the power supply or whatever would be a couple of hundred bucks (INR, please). thirty-thousand-rupees for that !???

"We only change components" the lady said helplessly.

Well, you could define the whole laptop as a 'component' and I would be able to do precious little about that either. Its akin to saying that the car's engine needs replacement since the starter's gone bad. Or pulling down and redoing my living room since the door to it will not do its job anymore.

One should be able to go to HP's assembly line, see what 'components' they have in independent bins on the assembly line. I'm sure this power supply bit is an independent enough piece to be classified a component - it looked like a clearly plug-n-play bit, except the connectors were all very model specific and stuff (i guess to try and lock me in for sure!)

I want to badly create a fuss about this, and ensure HP takes notice. The current way of doing stuff is clearly unethical, and customers must be bleeding for minor electronic failures! Even if you factor US labour costs (which you shouldn't, logically) this is unjustifiable. Hewlett Packard, are you listening ? (Well, I'm guessing here that this is true for most manufacturers.)

After this, is it surprising that customers go looking for grey market stuff ? I really want to take this all the way up to the big boys and girls at HP.

Of course, what I'm probably going to do is - having ranted on this blog, pay HP some more money and buy a 2 year extension on the warranty now that they've managed to instill the fear of the big brand in me.

In the future, no more 'big-brand-so-proprietary-components' electronics for me - especially delicate stuff like laptops. Robust take-it-all desktops if I can live with that, or possibly some stuff assembled from commodity parts bins.

Productivity, greed and the long term health of IT

To start with heres a few good links

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/12/bloomberg/sxmuk.php
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/2006/08/21/stories/2006082100170300.htm

Though its toughie to measur the Indian IT industry's ouput, various sites point to numbers between $23k to $32k p.a. How the 'revenue' generated by the engineering and support arms of MNCs is included is a grey area - if its just the budget allocation for the headcount, that would skew the numbers terribly. The Oracles, IBMs and Microsofts of the world make a lot of money per employee, and that needs factoring in somehow.

In any case, in this backdrop, the auto industry has been seeing massive growth in productivity. A friend quoted a number of 30+ lakhs - thats about $55k per person - I have not been able to substantiate that, but have found papers refer to 40% growth in productivity bet 1993-2003, and some which state a figure of 13Lakhs or so - about $25k. This used to be a very labour intensive industry till recently.

Of course, the big story underlying the data is the wage difference between the two! IT almost exists in a different economy, and has created an economic island around it wherever it exists - driving up cost of real estate, services and everything else. This is turn has created a constant demand for the 20%+ raises year after year, and earlier-unimaginable starter salaries.

Sooner than later, we'll get to a place where we're so out of whack with reality we'll need to consider some questions.

How soon must salary growth get in synch with the rest of the economy
How do we see a multiplier effect in productivity, so brand India does not seem overpriced

tech upgrades
The industry grew up in Univs not too long ago - and 35% of the work never gets 'done', and a lot more never sees the market. Its got to start working more like the auto or consumer goods sector and working back from costs and market needs.
Build services, organizatiions around standards (and get involved in supporting/promoting them) and longer running "basics" - OSs, protocols will help. Too many, frequent upgrades, a multitude of standards can only slow things down, and create more learning curve issues.
Stop focusing on 'time' as a productivity enhancement tool.
Better time-management skills and tools.
Transparency, collaboration and wikis.
Some good knowledge management tools.
Industry needs to poke its nose into education wayyyy more - projects, seats of learning, sourceforge.net initiatives, curriculum.
Its possible to over-processify

Agile methodologies - in spirit, not letter (actually XP etc cannot be 'followed' - goes against their idea)
Measure the value of each step, and judge if its become 'bureaucracy' ?

Cater to the domestic market - and stop existing in the 'dollar' world. Or, work back from costs and price/develop for what a long term, sustainable market will happily support. Develop pricing models for the domestic market - its a very different one, and a much larger challenge. Once arbitrage opportunities end or migrate away, the base of the pyramid will have to be the domestic market, with highend tech work bringing in the high-margin revenue. A robust local market will also help push branding/products, but pricing vs value wise its a chicken and egg issue that the industry must take the first crack at.
Crazy - but for two years the hikes of all 3+ years experienced people get used for a managed upgrade of tech institutions and education.
Help smaller tech entrepreneurship for experimenting with region, niche specific products etc. Why do we have to ape the 'large tech product co' model ? India traditionally has been a very fragmented market, with customers keeping costs low and keeping monopolisitc situations from happening inherently (not counting the legislated monopolies).
Evolve new work models to use combined experience of individuals. A lot many people have made it financially, and are not willing to give all their time to work, which seems to have become the norm. Some of these would not mind taking either part time lowered effort roles, or even combining forces with someone with complementary skills to fill in a job! HR needs to innovate beyond team building, and management styles even more so.
There's been a lot of lip service to this - but team accountability needs to be way more important than individual responsibility (not replace it, but be the decider).

As a corollary, the hiring of 'clones' i.e. multiple of the 'stated' ideal person will reduce - cause the best teams always have a mix of complementary skills.

Telecommute when/where possible. The number of hours saved alone will improve output if used

Updated:

As one of my friends pointed out over email discussing this post, the whole using the raises to better institutes idea is too far fetched and 'socialist' - I take that back.

And, on the other hand, http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/sep/07jobs.htm.
One crore IT jobs! Wow. I don't know what that number is based on, but its staggering.

Some rocking stuff, some not so

MediaWiki - truly easy to install/use. Configuring options take a little figuring out tho
Webmin - you almost cannot manage remote linux servers without this. I've installed it for my laptop too - lazy old me.
Postfix - Sendmail replacement - making it work with LDAP, SASL took Siddhartha some figuring out
Bugzilla - as always, easy, breezy. Need to figure out a concept of "views" for specific users though.

Some interesting blogs

http://www.mobility4enterprise.org/
http://gigaom.com/

Ups n downs

On the same day, within hours of each other, I had my near-worst and near-best startup moment!

The former made me question my existence, life, the meaning of Om etc, and the latter got me irrationaly excited like a kid. Both reactions were over the top, but these have become part of this new life, so all said and considered, its fun.

Corollary : "celebrating differences" is a great phrase - and a very important one to build a team around - but extremely tough to internalize. We all have layers of masks, and even in a mirror we see those more than ourselves very often. Often, these masks get painted by what we hear from others, and that both rocks and sucks.

OTOH, others do pay you for what you sell/give them. So their reportcards are not totally irrelevant, are they ?

Obviously, I'm running a little confused :)

Addendum:

Am i a biker at heart ?
Geek ?
Dreamer ?
Bum ?
Poet ?
Non-conformist ?
(for the heck of it ?)

A year today!

Aug 19th 2005 was my last day at the last job - its been a year! We're doing pretty good for a year old startup, I'd imagine - done with the first deployment (rollout pending - some other biz decisions at the customer's end), couple of more customers starting to, the first cheque already in, 6 people, sooo many more plans ahead, and possible funding options!

Sorry, no details till its all done and signed, but its been a really amazing year.