Community Organizers

Seth Godin has an excellent post on the need for community organizers in the virtual world. In one of my conversations with Deap Ubhi founder of Burrp, he extolled the importance of community organizers – I could’t agree more.

So if you wish to become a community organizer at Locomi, drop me a mail at ravi.bhushan@you-at.com and we’ll get in touch with once the site is up and running.

‘rb’

Updates on Locomi

Well yeah, thats what we have decided to call it. In this world of crazy Web2.0 names, Locomi actually means something. Lo, stands for local, co for content and mi – for me ( we didn’t get Locome – it didn’t sound half as cool anyway) – essentially its a social networking platform for giving me locally relevant content.

Other updates apart from the name? Well – we are still working on the logo and should have something soon. The backend work has started and we should be ready for a private beta by mid-September at the very latest. A big thanks to our development team at Anblik for devoting long crazy hours to this.

On another note, our team is out scouring Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Calcutta with GPS devices for hangouts that are popular with our target demographic – restaurants, clubs, gyms, theatres, salons and the like. We hope to have the most comprehensive database of such locations by September. Its costing us a bomb but is worth every penny and then some more. It gives us significant IP that we could sell later to the likes of Google.

That’s it for now. Will keep updating this blog as and when I can. Which reminds me, I need to work on the blog’s visibility. Time for some much necessary PR.

‘rb’

Getting an email account for your domain

We’ve all gone through it some time or the other – signed up for ‘SquirrelMail’ with one of the domain name providers and gotten stuck with some shitty email service with space enough to hold a day’s worth of mails.

We decided to switch to Google Apps for Your Domain instead and its been smooth going ever since. I get to use my favorite email client (Gmail), get a 2GB inbox, amazing search features, integrated chat – the works. Its the best solution out there for startups.

We infact recommend it for all the educational institutions we work with. So move over Squirrel Mail guys – it sucks!

‘rb’

The standard layout

As promised, here is the new ’standard’ layout as we call it for the site. We really should give it a name now - i am tired of calling it the site. Let us know what you think!

Update: There is a newer version (which I just go to know about ) – will put that up in some time.

‘rb’

Designing (for those of us who cant afford much)

For any startup, getting your website designed is always an issue. You need it to be attractive, striking and at the same time you can’t afford much. What do you do? Well – for one there are a number of templates available online – so if your website is serving as nothing more than an information resource, then this might be a good idea. If your startup is a web based one however, then this obviously won’t do.

One way to do this is to source for freelancers – preferrably college students. These guys are good because they (usually) do it as a hobby. People who are genuinely interested in design vis-a-vis the kind who use templates, modify them and claim to be web desgners (and there is no dearth of them in India)- are obviously going to be a hell lot better. And they primarily they do it to earn some good money while focussing on their studies – which means that don’t chareg all that much.

We got our corporate website designed by a friend of mine who is studying at Manipal currently. He did a fab job for us and he’s working with us on the design of the social networking site as well.

Its looking great! Thanks a lot Sid..

‘rb’

Collaboration Solutions

Was hunting around for some tools (free of course) which would allow for collaboration amongst far flung founders, developers and designers ( yes, we do manage to get work done inspite of this) and found a couple of really nifty tools that I thought I would share

 a) Vyew - excellent for desktop sharing, document collaboration etc. Here is Techcrunch’s coverage on it.

 b) VMukti – Open source software thats ideal for multi way video conferencing. These are the only two I have managed to check out till date – will let you know if I find some more.

‘rb’

The hunt for a name..

Well, the hunt for a name is an all consuming one. We have come up with a few – if you guys do happen to read this blog – would greatly appreciate you letting us know which ones you like the best

 a) Woosaah – Sumit had this as his MSN nick once – I saw it and figured that it could be a nice name – if you are thinking where you have come across this word before – remember Bad Boys? Well – the name has the zing – as expected woosa was taken so we came up with this distorted version. The problem? Well – I dont know if anyone will remember the double a – maybe its a risk worth taking – what’s your take?

b) mochiato – socializing and coffee go hand in hand. And if you are talking coffee – mocha is one of the few words that come to mind. Macchiato is something that CCD and Barista frequenters will know of. Join the two and presto you have mochiato. What do you guys think?

c) Zazzlo – Well, dont ask how i came up with this. It could be used as a verb – Zazzle me or I am zazzling, and there is something about Web 2.0 and the letter Z – think Zoho, Zimbra etc. Yes, No?

d) DeTalee – The Hindi Translation of Hi5. I believe, this is going to be made into a movie – might work though it has two issues -  could be a hinderance if we try going global some time ( yeah, yeah laugh. but who’s stopping us from dreamin) .. besides it may not appeal to the corporate kinds. On the other hand when I asked someone – yeh chalega? She replied back by saying – Orkut – Hello! I run with it! Of course chalega. Maybe we are thinking too much – maybe we should just get a name and run with it.

So let us know what you think. And oh btw, if you think that we still havent developed the site yet – well, we have. I joined Sumit, after he had started this remember? The sites called SchoolScrool. Its currently a Facebook rip, but we are changing all that – adding a whole lot of interesting features and redoing the design completely. Will upload the most recent design in a bit, so you can let us know what you think.

And oh yeah, our parent company – You-At, is in the midst of something exciting. Shall let you know if we manage a deal within the next few days. To check out what we do, please visit the site!

‘rb’

The journey thus far..

The idea for a blog emerged when Sumit and I were thrashing out ideas for our startup. We figured that it would be interesting to document the entire experience. Steve Poland is doing something like this for his startup. So we thought – well – why not us? At the very least we could look back at it some years down the line and have a hearty laugh. At the most, it would provide some kind of perspective to would be entrepreneurs in India, on what they can expect when creating their own web startup. For without doubt, a web startup in India faces its own unique challenges – given the nature of the Indian economy, the limited penetration of the internet and well the many foibles that characterise the indian way of life.

Before I begin, there’s something that you simply must know. While Sumit and I have studies in the same school, La Martiniere, Calcutta, we haven’t met since. I got to know of what he was doing through a mutual friend,  and jumped right in. Its been an interesting journey thus far, collaborating across the globe - with me in Singapore and him in LA. It has its own challenges ( thats a story for another day), but we are both in India for the moment, so we plan to meet up. I am looking forward to our first face to face idea thrashing session.I am sure its going to be a lot more productive than phone and IM conversations.

That aside, what exactly are we doing – what exactly is our company all about? Well its a social network – .and before you say not another one – we promise you (cliched as it may sound) this one is different!

Of the existing social networks used by most Indians – Orkut beng the most prominent-there are none that I would like to use - for a number of reasons (not sure competitor bashing is the best way to start off my blog. Yes, I am a massive Facebook fan. However its just a bit too Americanized eh? What about having something more desi? Something that really reflects the Indian way of life?

Besides, Facebook started off as an online year book for Harvard students  and then spread to other colleges, finally opening itself to the rest of the world recently. Its popularity was because, it created a trusted community of university students since they could be authenticated by their university email addresses. How does one do that in India? Sure, the IIT’s, IIM’s etc. have hosted email servers for their students – but how many others? Given these constraints, how does one build such a community? We think we have the answer – sharing it in public, I doubt would be the most prudent thing to do. But for a moment just think about this - how comfortable would you be being part of a community where you knew no one? There in we hope lies the solution..

If you think we are creating another Facebook, well no.. that isnt the idea. We want our site to be open to everyone – students as well as the working communitu. Essentially we are trying to create an online platform for pre existing offline communities. While you figure that one out, we would love some help from you guys on a pretty basic problem thats been troubling us for some time now.. a name for our site( its not like we arent creative. But every domain name imaginable is taken!) So if you guys have an name that you think might fit what we are trying to do, and more importantly IS AVAILABLE – let us know! For those of you who are knew to this – Betterwhois is probably the best resource I have found so far for checking availability of domain names.

‘rb’