See you!

Dudeva!

I have moved my blog-engine to Tumblr. I think Its working for me, considering the super-busy entrepreneurial days ahead!

Updates: Sequoia is comming as our financial partner. I'm serving a 6 month notice-period [ funny], Life's good, Full swing fund rising and LP connect happening. 

Do follow my tumblr. Its fun! 

Song for the moment? 

Bye!

Daily Round-up?

Ring around the ringtone! Apple wants to charge iPhone owners an extra 99 cents to turn songs they've already bought into ringtones. iPhone owners find a way around this. Apple pushes out a new version of iTunes to plug the hole. iPhone owners find a new way around this. Hmm - wonder what will happen next? Meanwhile, the good news is that all these work-around's are legal.

Apple cut the price of the iPhone by a third two months after shipping it, hoping consumers would start yelling "Buy!" Instead they got Wall Street is hollering "Sell!" $11 billion fell from the company's market capitalization in a few short days. Barron's has an excellent roundup of what a dozen analysts have to say about this.

Could Apple's next big price cut be in TV episodes?

Who really knows? The future is unwritten. It's not even burnt into toast.

Perhaps the brilliant toasters of today are harbingers of an imminent takeover by co-mingled human/machine intelligence? A Bay Area gathering ponders this possibility.

Whatever the future holds, we here in the US are tired of being so far behind the rest of the world. Japan has faster Internet, Korea has faster everything -and even the Brits can place a Starbucks order through a laptop.

And soon, they'll be able to do this while editing their photos via an online version of Photoshop.

Lindsay chats with Mike Volpi, CEO of Joost, to discuss the future of television on the web.

Housing…The Bottom?

I could care less about the financials and homebuilders because I don’t own them, but the tech leaders are going to explode and I own a lot of them.

I don’t know if Bank of America can fix things, but they are going to put a new world of hurt on the shortsellers once again.

Sex & the Investor

Enophi.com - iPhone Feed Reader

Most of us are accustomed to having Feed Readers on our computers, but not yet on our phones.

Now that the iPhone is out, Enophi.com has created a free RSS feed reader app to use with the device so its users can just as easily access their feeds on their phones as they would on their home computers. With Enophi a user simply needs to go to the site and register and then pick the feeds that they want to subscribe to. The reader is just as easy to use as any other feed reader that you would use on your home computer.

As people become more and more accustomed to having feed readers at home it will be totally inconvenient for these people to have an iPhone and not be able to access these things on the iPhone. Enophi stepped in quickly to make sure to be the first to offer this service.

As of now the service from Enophi is free and there is no advertising on the site. There's a link to Adbrite and there's a question ' interests' - so plan to monetize the feeds is there and sure.

I strongly believe there's a need for Mobile based RSS readers, think about a RSS enabled NOKIA series? Video enabled?

Geeklust, anyone? Come to me. I'll invest all my personal savings to that killer idea! :-)

ZING - Satellite Radio Goes With You

ZING is mobilizing a new generation of mobile audio and entertainment devices that are always connected so you can always stay tuned. With ZING software and services, your mobile experience goes far beyond simple playback. ZING brings you quality real-time streams and two-way connections that let you discover, play, and collect new music wherever you go, whenever you want.

If you can’t bear to part with Howard Stern and Martha Stewart when it is time to get out of the car and leave your Sirius radio, take them with you. The Stiletto SL100, Sirius’s new portable satellite radio, offers live reception in pocket-size form, as well as Wi-Fi connectivity for listening to live Internet radio whenever you’re in range of a wireless network.

The Stiletto 100, available at retailers and expected soon at shop.sirius.com for $350, can store up to 100 hours of live Sirius programming. The device’s two-gigabyte drive can also store and play songs in the MP3 or WMA formats and is compatible with many Windows-based online music services.

Measuring 4.7 inches high by 2 inches wide and an inch thick, the Stiletto 100 has a 2.2-inch color display. Kits for car or home use are available for about $70 each. Listeners can jump around among 30 preset channels, pause and rewind live radio, and even receive alerts when favorite sporting events are being broadcast — or when scores change, which could come in handy during football season.

Tim Bucher is leading the Zing team and he assembled an extraordinary team with many of the technical rock stars from Moxi, WebTV Networks and Apple. Another beautiful product is Zing's integration with Yahoo! Music - wow thing!

I'm really not surprised that Dell wanted Zing all to themselves.

btw Worldspice India, are ya listening?

Saywit - A Creative freak or a Cognitive Geek?

Saywit is a social webapp to share our ingenuity, creative thinking, and out-of-box solutions. It aims to bring out our creative intelligence naturally through participation!

This is a self-initiated project by Seshu Karthick Tanveer, and a product of Siddhi Labs.

Implementation Specifics

Technology : Java 1.5, Spring MVC, Hibernate, MySQL
Libraries : OpenId4Java, Rome 0.5.
Third-Party : Haloscan, JS-Kit, Gigya.

Cool?
I think so. People spend hours and hours online, often doing not much of anything. This site actually wants to engage the mind and increase brain cells, while having fun too.


The site has its creative offerings such as "wittychat", where you can open a dialogue with random people (such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates). The cognitive offerings have algorithms and puzzles. You can then embed any responses on your blog or website.

The site is clever and original, and is a very recent launch. The site has potential, but needs some marketing.

30 books every young entrepreneur should read

Becoming an entrepreneur for the first time requires conditioning yourself to a set of attitudes, skills and knowledge you've never encountered anywhere else before. You've got to be prepared to learn faster than any time in your life. However, being prepared for this 'knowledge hit' hinders many young entrepreneurs in taking their $bn ambitions to actually realizing them.

For those of you that are starting your entrepreneurial careers, you'll find this list inspiring, immersive and essential reading, even providing comfort for those inevitable moments where everyone tells you that you can't succeed. Here are 30 books I've read, which i think you should too.

Attitude

These books will help you to get inspired, think big and refuse to back down when people say you can't succeed.

• The Google Story ( The story behind the greatest start up in history)
• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure (An emotional roller coaster through the founding of Go computer. How do u deal with technology which is too early for its market? Read this first)
• High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars (The fly-on-the wall account of founding, growing and eventually selling Frontpage to Microsoft)
  
• The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley (The story of silicon valley gold rush in 1999. Get into the mentality of an amazing time in history)
• EBoys: The True Story of the Six Tall Men Who Backed EBay, Webvan and Other Billion-dollar Start-ups (An insight into silicon valley during the boom, set around the founding of Benchmark capital and all the companies they funded)
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Interviews with some of the foremost founders of technology startups. Great starts are Max Levchin of Paypal and James Hong of HotOrNot.)
• Boo Hoo: A Dot Com Story (Boo.com received $160m venture capital in 1999. The story of the most prominent European dot com flameout ever)
• Against the Odds: An Autobiography (James Dyson never gave up trying to make the perfect product. The insight into his struggle to what he achieved is inspirational.)
• The Perfect Store: Inside EBay (The story of eBay, from Pierre Omidyar's bedroom to where it is now)
• Icon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (The unofficial biography of Steve Jobs. An unique insight into his dark and disturbing side)
• Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography (The autobiography of Richard Branson. Just how did he grow his empire from starting with a humble magazine ?)

Skills

Negotiation, networking, getting users, dealing with people and executing upon your plans, these books will help you avoid taking investor money and just burning it.

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity (How do you execute if you can't prioritise. David Allen's book will change your life)
• How to Win Friends and Influence People (Mediating a dispute with a cofounder, or trying to impress an investor for the first time. Dale Carnegie has all the answers)
• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement with out Giving In: The Secret to Successful Negotiation (Negotiating for your first serious round of finance, or with a supplier can be make or break. This book will mean you'll know how to squeeze out those extra details)
• Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff (Knowing how to build buzz is invaluable. Learn from the man who decided he would rename a town halfway Oregon to half.com Oregon just to build buzz. Incredible reading)
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (The title says it all. Do what you can to become more effective)
• Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Networking is an art. Know how to build, maintain and leverage your network. Business is all about who you know as well as what, so read this)
• The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything (The concise guide to making it happen. Everything from fundraising, hiring, schmoozing, to getting your pitch right - with a dose of oomph)
• The Effective Executive (Execution starts with you. Peter Drucker nails down how to be that bit more effective)
• How to Be a Complete and Utter Failure in Life, Work and Everything: 39 1/2 steps to lasting underachievement (The only way to success is to know how to fail. This book gives you enough fodder to never fail again)
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (This book is the best book on making a usable website i've read. Start pleasing your users. Good startups are distinguished by good design. Build your advantage)

Knowledge

Starting a technology company is underpinned by some fundamental facts. These range from understanding long tail economics, how to push something to tipping point or what disruptive technology actually means. Read these or sink fast as others conquer.

• The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand (There is 80% of the market you aren't thinking about. This is the long tail)
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (How do ideas, concepts or messages spread through network and reach mass popularity. Learn about the tipping point)
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Getting ideas to have lasting power is tricky. This book will change your perspective on marketing)
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Taleb argues that rare events, can to be some extent be foreseen. Getting to that series A isn't so random after all)
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (This will change your view on the serendipity behind life-changing events)
• The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (This book takes the concept of disruptive innovation and summarises into a series of characterisable steps)
• The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (This book is a classic, illustrating the term disruptive innovation with studies of where disruptive technologies have changed markets. Essential for the budding Niklas Zennstrom)
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers (How to bring technology from your early adopters into the mainstream? This book created those definitions)
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few (How can the average knowledge of a million people be more correct than an expert. With the Internet growing how it is, the wisdom of crowds could be your application's next big weapon)

So what books do you think should in here? Reply in the comments.