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’

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’