All Posts by Himanshu Sheth

|In: Business|Last Updated:
There are no of websites which would tell a person new in the field of business, how to make a business plan but EasiMedia is a website with a difference.
I just happened to install the free business resource guide software which consists of the following:

Excellent contents in IEdition CDThe iEdition CD is an excellent resource which would give you very good insights into business and also the financial side of business.It definitely gives good tips on making business plans biggrin

[CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO DOWNLOAD iEDITION CD]

You can also have a look at this link which is really a very good tutorial to make good business plans razz

|In: Business|Last Updated: | 1 Comment
Just came across this site and found an interesting article “7 steps to small business success” which I found very realistic and appealing.Some of the interesting facts from the article are listed below:

1. Start Smart:
Don’t compete to be the lowest cost provider. Look for what makes your product or service unique and adds a special value for the client and charge for that value.To start smart, you should like the idea of the business. The way to earn a good income and build wealth is by serving clients well.Test your ideas.

2. Plan Ahead:
Have a proper business plan.Plan things well in advance.The first rule of a start-up is put some of your own money in the business. As the owner you must be willing to capitalize the business. The second rule is put as little of your own money as possible in the business. Prepare your plan and look for funding for your business from multiple sources, which can include a business loan or business line of credit.Build a team and if possible ask for a mentor from the industry.

3. Set up Systems:
The most basic system every business should have is a good financial system. Ask yourself how am I going to generate enough income to support myself and my family. Begin here. Put together a personal budget, so you know what it costs you to live.The start-up expense plan, operating budget and your accounting software are vital to your success.

4. Seek out Sales:
This is one of the most challenging tasks of any startup.Since you cannot afford big ad budget,you need to get out and speak to more and more people about your product.Join organizations that would have clients for your product or service. Become a visible part of your market, and then ask for the sale. You begin the sales process with people that you know. Yes, it’s ok to start with friends and family as your first customers, and then broaden from there

5. Aim for Growth:
Creating a company is not like getting another job.You own the company and hence you need to foresee the growth of the company in terms of sales,employees,profit over a period of time,which would help you grow faster.

6. Leverage Opportunities:
As a business owner, be very clear about your core focus for the business and how it serves clients. Your core business is what pays the bills.Always consider if a good opportunity is the right fit for your business. If something looks great, but it’s not in sync with your long-term plan and budget, think carefully before committing your company’s resources.

7. Plan Your Exit:
Someday,you may want to sell your business or retire from the business.So,know the valuation of your business so that you can know the value it brings to your future wealth.

You can read the complete article here
You can also have a look at:

|In: Business|Last Updated: | 4 Comments

Just few days back,there was a discussion here as to why there aren’t more product startups/companies in India.The two main reasons for not having more product companies in India are listed below:

1. Development of a software product requires more investment and also needs excellent marketing.The risk involved is too high(This is the most obvious reason)
2. (This was really shocking for me)To launch a software product,you need to be in a First world nation and not India.This makes me wonder,though there is a huge IT boom in India,it is still not considered an ideal destination cry

Business Today has given a very good analysis of “India’s hottest software Product Companies” and some of the prominent products like FlexCube, Tally were the obvious contenders in the list but there were some surprises too in the list.Keep on reading…..

The list of the India’s 10 prominent product companies is given below(the complete article can found in Business Today-February25,2007):

1. 3i Infotech:
Revenues: Rs 445.1 cr
Flagship Product: Kastle-A universal banking product that covers origination, srvicing and collection of funds
Facts: As per a survey by Dataquest, 3i has become the forth largest player in the Indian products market.What helped 3i is acquisition of small firms like DataCons, FDG and Stet,half of 3i’s revenues comes from Products!!!

2. Infosys Technologies:
Revenues: Rs 391 cr(4.83% of Infosys’s revenues)
Flagship Product: Finacle– A universal banking solution
Facts: In the year 2006, Finacle fetched $81.86 million in revenues.As per Merwin Fernandes(VP-Global Head,Sales & Marketing), “Finacle is growing faster than products like FlexCube and Temenos,but at a smaller base”

3. IBS Software:
Revenues: Rs 225 cr
Flagship Product: aIRES-Passenger reservation and inventory management system.
Facts: After 9/11, IBS decided to improve its domain expertise in travel and tourism industry by building three software products- aIRES, iCargo and iLogistics.

4. Ittiam:
Revenues: Rs 36 cr
Flagship Product: DSP(Digital Signal Procssing) solutions for portable media players
Facts: The company name Ittiam is inspired by a one liner philosophy “I think therefore I am“.For third year in a row,Ittiam has been voted as world’s most preferred provider of DSP based IP in a survey of DSP professionals.

5. Ramco Systems:
Revenues: Rs 194 cr
Flagship Product: Enterprise Series-ERP package targetted at primarily small businesses
Facts: Ramco has never tried to compete with the bigger players like SAP , Oracle in the ERP market but has always focussed on smaller companies and domestic markets for its expansion.As per the COO of Ramco Systems,”Cost is not the only reason why customers come to Ramco but Ramco also provides an excellent software application that not only addresses functional requirements but also enhance IT capability of the customers”

6. Sasken Communication Technologies:
Revenues: Rs 339.69 cr
Flagship Product: NA – Solutions in millions of cellphones used globally
Facts: Sasken was founded by Rajiv Mody in 1989 in a garage in San Jose , California as “Silicon Automation Systems” and later moved to Gujarat as ASIC Technologies and than to Bangalore as “Sasken”.Its modem software is into 55 million handsets globally and its application suite is installed in more than 8 million smart phones eek

7. Subex Azure:
Revenues: Rs 172 cr
Flagship Product: RocWare – Operational efficiency and service agility software suite
Facts: In seven years(since 1999), Subex is made seven acquisitions worth $323.5 million!!!With the acquisition of Canadian company,Syndesis(for $164.5 million) Subex’s products have expanded from telecom fraud management(Ranger) and billing solutions(Concilia) to revenue enhancing solutions(Moneta and Optima)

8. Tally Solutions:
Revenues: Rs 120 cr
Flagship Product: Tally 9.0 accounting package
Facts: Tally has 90% market share in the domestic market for accounting software rolleyes .Tally claims to have 2 million users in 92 countries.Now,Tally is looking at ERP solutions for small businesses and another one in the retail industry.

9. Talisma:
Revenues: NA
Flagship Product: Talisma CIM-Multi Channel customer interaction management solution
Facts: Even though, Talisma is in competition with the stronger players like SAP, Siebel etc in the CRM and CIM market ,it has around 800 customers worldwide and also expects to add 50+ customers(big and small) every quarter.For its progress,Talisma believes in word of the mouth marketing and on Search Engine based marketing.

10. Tejas Networks:
Revenues: Rs 250 cr
Flagship Product: Optical networking products
Facts: It as co-founded by Sanjay Nayak along with Gururaj Desh Deshpande of Sycamore Networks.Even with bigger players like ZTE, Huawei and Cisco operating in the same domain,Tejas has around 25% market share in the segment it operates in!!!

11. Apps4Rent

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|In: Unconference|Last Updated:
WikiCamp 2007It has been almost two days since the Wiki fever is over and I have been waiting and waiting for the slides to be uploaded on SlideShare.Finally,I was able to find Soumya’s session on “How ways Wiki changed the way I work-A true story”.I missed this informative session but finally got it on SlideShare

There was a session on “Semantic Web 2.0” by Narian-CEO of 360 degrees and trust me it was a wonderful session.For the people who have missed the session or have missed WikiCamp , do not miss this one by any chance biggrin
I hope that other presentations would be soon uploaded on Slideshare!!!

|In: Firefox|Last Updated:
May be, I was somewhat late in noticing this Firefox plugin but like me there would be many others who might have missed this one.Hence,thought of updating this on my blog biggrin

Many people might have wanted to grab the videos on YouTube(or some other site where live streaming of video occurs) and Unplug is the solution to all your problems wink

What is UnPlug?
UnPlug is an extension which lets you save video and audio which is embedded on a webpage – it’s a video download tool

What can UnPlug do?
UnPlug works for lots of sites including Youtube, IFilm, current.tv, MySpace(video) and lots more.Unlike many other extensions, UnPlug scans the page, and if it doesn’t know there the data comes from it can guess – correctly most of the time.

My Experience with UnPlug:
After installing UnPlug for FireFox 2.0,I tried unplugging my favourite movie “Guru” and as per my expectation,it was excellent.It saved the file in a .flv format and you can download flv player from here
I saw the feedback for UnPlug and found that the user might encounter some problems with the Firefox versions which are older than 2.0

[My Experience with UnPlug]

Wanna download UnPlug?

You can download this excellent extension from here.For playing Unplugged files,you can download the flv player from here

|In: WiKiCamp 2007|Last Updated: | 6 Comments

Hey,This is Jimmy WalesReached the venue Tidel Park at around 9:30 AM and was good to see so many techie guys around in one room.There was Jimmy Wales,the founder of the Wikipedia talking about WiKi and its journey.Some of the interesting during this entire session with Jimmy Wales which lasted around 1.5 Hours is below:

a. WiKi and Search Transparency:
The question is what the traditional search engine companies take some good stuff from the Wiki?.As per Jimmy,this is not a potential danger.Security through obscurity is a bad idea!!Hence,there is no danger in making the search open to the entire world.During the course of the same question,Jimmy revealed some facts of the Wikipedia foundation:
1. 10% of the money goes to the growth of the WikiMedia foundation.
2. There are only 31 employees working full time for Wikipedia.

b. What about the funding model of WikiPedia?
Donations come from the general public and this is where the major funding comes for Wikipedia and money comes from all over the world.There was recently a false news that the WikiPedia foundation had a fund problem and this is where Jimmy completely denied the news.

c. So where does Wikipedia get the revenues from?
The entire revenue comes from advertising and it is only through Google Ads

d. Why do you so less on your wordpress blog?
Jimmy Wales blogs here. Jimmy is very much afraid of the press and said that “What if he misses a comma in a sentence,than he has to wait 2-3 days with the press”

e. Business Model in the Open Source World:
Firefox is an excellent example of an open source browser.It gets around 100m$ every year.Also,I(Himanshu) was surprised to know that “Every Google search in the Firefox leads to some amount of donation to the FireFox(Mozilla Foundation)

f. How about donating of computer resources to the Wikipedia foundation?
1. Latency problems may arise in case of Peer to Peer networks.
2. User privacy would be a problem.For Wiki Foundation,the bandwidth would cost around 25000$/month.Jimmy found very difficult to reveal that “There is a major internet company in the US that has already offered to host Wikipedia for free but the Wikipedia foundation has not accepted the offer.

g. What about using Wikipedia as a source of delieverables in our day to day business?
The hierarchy business is all nonsense.I don’t believe in it.Instead,grass roots communication can help a company grow better.BestBuy is an excellent retailer in the US.It is a company that follows the grass roots communications rule.In BestBuy,some guys install stereos since it is their job and some install them since they are all stereo geeks. biggrin

|In: Entrepreneurship|Last Updated:
This update would be late since, I reached Chennai at around 6:00 AM in the morning And my bus journey from Bangalore to Chennai was a pretty good one.The person sitting next to me Sayantan Dasgupta was reading “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by Dr C K Prahalad” and this made me wonder whether he wanted to be/he is a “Social Entrepreneur“.So,with this note,I thought it would nice to start a conversation.

Sayantan is working as a Manager in a firm and his trip to Chennai was not for WikiCamp but a competition which I always wanted to attend “Genesis in IIT Chennai which was aimed at Social Entrepreneurship”and as you might have guessed “Sayantan’s business plan was shortlisted among the finalists and he was there to give a presentation on the same”.So what the winners of the competition get is given below:

Genesis:Targeting Social Entrepreneurship Some of the presentations can be downloaded from here but except for one presentation by Mr K Satyanarayan,Director of Director,New Horizon Media rest all is general stuff on Social Entrepreneurship sad

I would be watching this space on Genesis for the presentations from the other participating companies as well

My best wishes to Sayantan for this competition.Wonder if my friend Harinath,the new age Social Entrepreneur would have participated in this competition?
Rest updates from WikiCamp tomorrow..Keep watching this space for more eek

|In: Google|Last Updated: | 4 Comments
22nd February 2007,5:30 PM was a date(and time) to remember since, people in India could hear the “Father of Internet” live in Ambedkar Bhavan,Bangalore.Yes,I am referring to Sir Vint Cerf,the brain who co-invented the TCP/IP protocol and has been in this internet stage since the early days of ARPANET.He is also called as the “Father of Internet”.

Google has launched the Google Speaker Series and this is was the first and the most memorable one in the series.The talk by Sir Vint Cerf was about “The future of Internet” and what all innovations can be done using the internet.You can know more about Sir Vint Cerf here

Sir Vin Cerf Speaking about the future of internet
Discussions at the Talk:
The talk started around 5 minutes late[which is acceptable as per Indian standards wink] and Prasad Ram,CTO at Google India inaugurated the event and gave a warm welcome to Sir Cerf.Well, even though there was darkness in the auditorium, I was able to take down notes of some of the interesting points Sir Cerf mentioned about the internet.They are mentioned below:

1. Internet should make the world’s information accessible across all the platforms
2. There has been a huge growth in the internet usage across the world and there are total 400 million internet users in Asia of which 40 million(10%) are in India.Along with the internet,mobile has also been becoming more and more important in day to day life.
3. All of us know internet operates with the transmission of packets from the source to the destination.Well,but Sir Vint Cerf had a point “Do the internet packets have the intelligence to know what information is going across the internet(ie. whether it is audio,video etc)”?
4. Things which we cannot predict in this industry:

  • How long would it take to write a program
  • How many bugs would we find in our code
  • Does the program do what it was supposed to do
  • Is this message spam?
  • And many more……

5. Security issues in the internet:

  • OS security
  • DNS and BGP authenticity
  • Dual core chips and project MAC’s

6. Technology called as “Semantic Networking” can help make search better.”Auto Tagging” can be used to make this happen.For eg. If you want to search for “Tommy”, you might be referring to “Tommy Dog” or “Tommy Hilfigher” hence, a tag like “Dog” or “Hilfigher” against “Tommy” would help make search simple.
7. This is not Web 2.0 but it is the arrival of new phase of internet hence it cannot be tagged as 2.0.Technologies like Google Maps,Wikipedia and many more contribute to “Sharing of information which contributes to the power of internet”
8. Now this one is really called as “Out of the Box” thinking.There was a talk about “Refrigerator having intelligence to know what is there inside the fridge,what is the expiry date and this would be possible with RFID.Imagine,the Fridge sending an mail to the owner about the recipe that he can make with the vegetables kept inside the fridge.This is the power of RFID and the way Sir Cerf was speaking , it seemed that this age is not so far surprised

Interesting inventions with the internet:
a. Project called “Interplanetary Internet”.The objective of the Interplanetary Internet project is to define the architecture and protocols necessary to permit inter operation of the Internet resident on Earth with other remotely located internet’s resident on other planets or spacecraft in transit.You can know more about “Interplanetary Internet” here. And yes important to know that is it not a Google Project biggrin

Interplanetary Internet now a realityb. A guy thought that he cannot use the internet while he sliding and this led to the invention of the “Surf Board”.So now he can slide as well as surf the internet at the same time lol

A guy surfing on his Surf BoardThe session had a Q&A session where most of the questions were targeted to the recruitment in Google and hence was not as per the expectation sad

End of the Talk:
The memorable 1.5 hours session ended at a very nice note.There was a comment from the audience:
“Now I know why browsing on the internet is called “CIRF(ing)”(Surfing).Thanks to the Sirf Vint Cerf, the Father of Internet. -From the Son of Internet.

Photo Gallery:
Thanks to Lakshman Srikanth for his photo courtesy.You can find photographs covering the entire event here.

Memories from the event:
My friend Abhay Kumar was able to get Sir Vint Cerf’s autograph in this PDA phone and that would be on my blog once I get his autograph wink