Your sample space consists of two kinds of people, the ones who are you customers and buy your product and the ones who are not your customers. Guy Kawasaki during one of his talks at Stanford University said that, although, your customer may not be using your product in the way you had intended it to be used, just accept it and think that it is a good thing. Because your product can only go in two ways, either its capabilities can be exploited and used in ways that you never perceived or it may be completely ignored and it will eventually fail. So which one of these groups of people does one target while pushing their product? Does one have to approach their non-customers and try to find out why they wouldn’t buy your product or does one approach their current customers and try finding out why they like and buy your product? At least in the words of Kawasaki it would be wise to go after your current customers, find out what they like about your product and then give them more reasons to keep coming back to you for more. It would save time and money to completely ignore the ones who don’t buy your product since they would always find a good reason to not like your product.

Steve Blanks, Serial Entrepreneur and Angel Investor, described the standard Canonical model of product development during his talk at the Stanford Technology Venture Program. He mentioned that there was a pattern in the way early startups functioned, however, some startups were a success while some were a failure in spite of them following the same model. The model was something like this

Idea –> Raise Money –> Develop –> Alpha –> Beta –> First customer ship

Save every penny and cut unwanted expenses

He went on to mention that marketing and sales guys are hired during the alpha and beta stage of the product development phase. When the startup ships to its first customer they are extremely excited and they burn valuable cash at a very early stage of the company to celebrate this moment. They tend to forget that every penny counts at this point in their company’s growth. He also highlighted how only 10% of startups fail due to bad technology or engineering. Majority of the startups fail due to their inability to capture customers or markets. In Silicon Valley the success to failure ratio is about 1:1000 and the media lime light is always only on the ones that are successful. This gives budding entrepreneurs the wrong idea about startups and its growth potential, and many dream about becoming the next Google or Facebook. The stories of those who failed rarely make it to the media.

Start with Customer Development process

Helps to check if your hypothesis about your company or product is true outside the perimeter of your company. Answers questions like, does your product really solve a problem, does it cater to anyone’s need, does it have a market or a customer base.

Customer Discovery –> Customer Validation –> Customer Creation –> Company Growth

Sell Sell Sell …By all means possible

Learn to sell you idea to be a great entrepreneur irrespective of whether you are the engineering guy or the marketing guy.

Avoid PR at early stage

Getting any PR or press attention at an early stage isn’t necessarily a good thing. Since your business model, pricing, etc are bound to change once you interact with your first customer. The PR that the startup gets must be part of a strategy and not some random incident.

Find right people to lead the company during the Growth Phase

In the final ‘Company Building’ stage it happens quite often that the skills of an entrepreneur that made the startup successful in its initial stages may not necessarily be the skill set that is required to grow the company. This happens to be the primary reason behind why many founders are sacked when a company goes public.

Customer Feedback is vital

Allens Michael’s deal making is a good example here. During the Customer Discovery stage he would go from one customer to another trying to figure out what they needed in the product. Whatever he would learn from one customer he would later pitch that as an added feature of the product to the next customer. Founders need to interact with their customers and get feedback from them. Hiring someone from outside to do it or outsourcing the entire task is a completely wrong move for startups.

Eric Ries mentioned about early Visionary adopters who buy the product not for what it is today but for what the founders had envisioned it to be. These customers are smart and sometimes even smarter than the founders, they have broad vision and very creative suggestions to improve the product or service. Their feedback is extremely valuable.

]]> http://nuclearstrike.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/key-ideas-approaches-and-strategies-either-followed-or-adopted-during-product-development/feed/ 0 60.189054 24.826993 60.189054 24.826993 nuclearstrike http://nuclearstrike.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/privacy-on-facebook/ http://nuclearstrike.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/privacy-on-facebook/#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:50:30 +0000 nuclearstrike http://nuclearstrike.wordpress.com/?p=221 ]]> Like many people out there I’m a huge fan of social media and have truly benefited through the vast array of features and functionalities it has got to offer. I have used Orkut for a brief period in my life and then was also on Facebook a little later. Within a few months of using Facebook, I knew they were way better than the dumb, poorly built and ugly looking half brother of theirs, Orkut. So I felt no need to exist in two mutually exclusive virtual worlds of social media and decided it was time to let Orkut go.  Two things to bring to the table at this point, one, I said mutually exclusive because the majority of the fanboys of Orkut were from India and Brazil while most of the west was using just FB and each of these groups had made their choice of social network and had largely kept away from the one they had not chosen,  two, I do not repent closing my orkut account till date, infact I recently saw my friend using it and was just looking at its user interface and was more than happy that I had taken the right decision. In recent times I have become an evangelist for Facebook and I try to influence people’s perspective of FB. Sometimes I’m there reassuring people that being in FB is a good thing and at other times I’m there convincing them that quitting FB wasn’t making their life any better.

But with any good technology that is offered for free, especially with the ones that are offered for free, there is usually (or should I say ‘always’) a catch. Maybe with FB this ‘catch’ would be the amount of private information that is being exposed to the public or to be more specific, to the Ad Network.  Now, I do understand that these are two different set of entities and the way people feel about these two entities differs from person to person. Some may be comfortable sharing information with all their friends, while some may prefer sharing with a specific set of friends and some may totally detest giving out any information to the ad networks and some may never care about this whole invasion of privacy thing or even worse, may never have thought about it and may be in total darkness.

It atleast appears on the surface that FB wants to make personalizing the privacy settings a little cryptic so that only the greatest of minds can crack it and take advantage of it. So this is my attempt to provide the selected few who are privacy conscious with some tips and tricks that I use.

* Now would be a good time to start organizing your friends into groups. Go to the ‘Friends‘ option that you find on the left side of the News Feed page. You would now notice that there is a button names ‘Create a List‘ on the top of the Friends page. Click on this, give your list a name depending on what you are categorizing the members of this list as and then finally choose the friend who would go into this list. As simple as that. Repeat for every list you would like to create. The best part of these lists is not the organization of your friends itself but the fact that you could customize the privacy settings for each of these lists individually.

*  Accounts->Application Settings, Over here you can mess around with the privileges granted to your FB applications. You can choose which applications are allowed to post information on your wall, which applications are visible as tabs on the page and to whom are they visible (Previously created Lists come in handy here), etc. I leave it to the users to play around and explore this setting’s page.

*   Accounts->Privacy Settings is probably where you have to spend a great deal of your time to get that privacy issue just right. There are two sections that are distinctly shown, “Basic Directory Information” and “Sharing on Facebook”. Under the Basic Directory Information click the View Settings link. Here you can work on a whole range of issues like

• who all can send you a friend request
• who can see your friend’s list
• who can see your education, work, current city, hometown
• who can see your Interests and Pages you have liked
  

You can totally mask all your above information from your friends by choosing Custom edit -> ‘Only Me’ under the ‘Make it Visible to’ heading.

Under the Sharing on Facebook section you can edit what profile information and wall posts are visible to your network by clicking on the Customize settings link. One important feature of this section is the ‘Preview my Profile‘ button that lets you see how your profile may appear to a particular friend after all your privacy settings have taken effect.

I’m going to have to crowdsource as much of the tips and tricks from you guys who might have something interesting to contribute. Please feel free to share, add to my list of things or write to me and I will add your suggestion and give credit to the ones who have originally contributed to this article.

Anyways, back to the GA and brand building. The EMA alumni, including me, wants to create a Erasmus Mundus brand that brings value not only to us but also to our future members. But the question that still lingers in my mind is, whether such a brand would be sustainable in the long run. Why would I be skeptical about a brand which chooses only 5% of the total applicants that want to be a part of it ?  I definitely do not doubt the quality of students that get picked, but my problem is with the fact that many choose to be a part of the Erasmus Mundus solely for the purpose of money they get from the EU. There is definitely no passion and desire left when the monetary benefits are stripped off.

Come to think of it, what would happen to all the Erasmus Mundus programs once the EU decides to stop its funding. There is probably less than 1% of people who would say that the Erasmus Mundus programs will continue to get the same attention as they used to. Clearly, this 1% is delusional. Lets take my program for example, we get about 400 applications each year. Of this some 100 get shortlisted for the course and about 18-20 of them get a scholarship. But its surprising to note that only those 20 students who get the scholarship, choose to pursue the program. I was among the handful of them who decided to take up the course by paying out of my own pocket (which clearly wasn’t one of my sound decisions in life, but you learn from your mistakes). So what was the reason for the remaining 80 people to drop the program in spite of being offered a place. If someone says it is ‘money’ then i would say it is a bunch of bullshit. I don’t know how much you know about the students who go to the States to do their masters. Im speaking of those kids who are willing to get a bank loan to cover their 40000 dollar tution fee. This never really happens in the case of getting admitted in the Erasmus Mundus program. Very few of us would have met people who are self funded.

This just proves my theory that people are in it for the money. So the moment EU wakes up and realizes that they have been throwing their money for nothing, they would stop all or most of their funding. Now, this would clearly damage the Erasmus Mundus brand and slowly over time we would become a dying breed. A lot rests on the success of the current and past EM students. The prospective students must be convinced that the R.O.I by taking a EM program by paying from their own pockets, isn’t a bad deal at all. For this, it is not sufficient if the EU alone participates, but also full cooperation from local governments is necessary. We require the local governments and companies to encourage the EM students and support their work in any ways possible. If the local governments are very much focused on sending the students home the moment they are done with their studies, believe me these countries will never progress. The hard reality is that, most of Europe has an aging population and the only way they would survive in the next 20 years is by recognizing talent that may actually come from outside their own country. If they decide to simply close their doors to immigrants then there would be no innovation, creativity, tolerance, job creation and important of all no value for the EM programs that the local universities have got to offer.

At this juncture, one has to find out why several students either choose or drop out of EM programs. Any survey that is conducted in which students genuinely state the reason for their choice would be greatly beneficial to building that sustainable EMA brand. However, if EU is willing to fund the EM programs for the next decade or so, we have a lot less to worry about and focus more on uplifting the EM graduates.

Mini Europe

Roman Architecture’s influence witnessed

Royal Palace in Brussels

Atomic Structure, Antwerp

Maybe if I look longer, I will figure out what this is

Town Hall reaching out to the sky

Market Square by night

Cobbled Alleys

Den Haag

An obsession with canals …. one seen from my friend’s apartment

More forks than food ???

My fear of heights kept me a mile away from doing this

A bicycle friendly city is as good as a scrap yard

]]> http://nuclearstrike.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/netherlands/feed/ 0 60.189054 24.826993 60.189054 24.826993 nuclearstrike Den Haag Canals everywhere Pan cakes or "Pan Kaka", as I lovingly call it Bungy Jumping Delft - A bicycle friendly city http://nuclearstrike.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/trondheim-norway/ http://nuclearstrike.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/trondheim-norway/#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 07:49:11 +0000 nuclearstrike http://nuclearstrike.wordpress.com/?p=167 ]]>

Hogwarts School of Wizardry

Home Sweet Home – Herman Krags 24

Fiery Sky

Hiking @ Bymarka

Shallow Nidelva cutting through the city

Art Projections on Nidaros – On a cold and windy night

Munkholm guards the entrance to the city

If the Chinook tools repository is enabled in the catalog list on the mobile device then the user can install Oprofile from the terminal using the apt command.

Nokia-N810:~# apt-get install oprofile

Now that Oprofile is installed on the device, the user can measure the required hardware performance counters. Start Opcontrol when the monitoring of the performance counters must start and stop it when the monitoring must end. The data that is collected can be viewed using the opreport command.

Nokia-N810:~# opcontrol –init
Nokia-N810:~# opcontrol –reset
Nokia-N810:~# opcontrol –setup –event CPU_CYCLES:100000 –event DCACHE_WB:100000 –event TLB_MISS:100000
Nokia-N810:~# opcontrol –start

<After the required period of monitoring issue the stop command>

Nokia-N810:~# opcontrol –stop

A snippet of the output from the opreport is provided below. The report contains the measure of three hardware performance counters, namely CPU_CYCLES, DCACHE_WB and TLB_MISS for the various processes that are running in the system.

CPU: ARM V6 PMU, speed 0 MHz (estimated)
Counted CPU_CYCLES events (clock cycles counter) with a unit mask of 0×00 (No unit mask) count 100000
Counted DCACHE_WB events (data cache writeback, 1 event for every half cacheline ) with a unit mask of 0×00 (No unit mask) count 100000
Counted TLB_MISS events (Main TLB miss ) with a unit mask of 0×00 (No unit mask) count 100000
CPU_CYCLES:100000| DCACHE_WB:100000|  TLB_MISS:100000|
samples|      %|  samples|      %|  samples|      %|
————————————————————————————————————————————————
6830     62.5974         2      33.3333         3       50.0000     no-vmlinux
1472      13.4910         1       16.6667         1        16.6667       ld-2.5.so
1187      10.8789        2       33.3333         1       16.6667       libc-2.5.so
908        8.3219          0           0                  1       16.6667       busybox
451         4.1334           1       16.6667         0            0              oprofiled
41           0.3758          0           0                 0            0              ophelp

For the mobile device the olsrd package can be found in the application manager. The package is automatically installed with a single click. For the workstation, the latest release of the protocol implementation can be found in the website: http://www.olsr.org/?q=download. The tar file has to unpacked, compiled and then installed.

# tar zvfx uolsrd-0.5.6-r4
# cd unik-olsrd-0.5.6-r4
# make
# make install

Once the installation is complete, the configuration file olsrd.conf can be found within the directory /etc. The configuration file must be edited to match our requirement and testbed setup. The values in the configuration file can also be overridden with the command line options that go along with the olsrd command. Some of the values that need the user’s attention are the Debug Level, IP Version and the interface on which the protocol will be functioning. Initially the Debug Level can be set to a non-zero value so that the protocol runs in the forefront and not in the background. This will help the user figure out if the protocol has been configured properly and if it discovers other nodes within the network.

# Debug level(0-9)
# If set to 0 the daemon runs in the background
DebugLevel      1

# !!CHANGE THE INTERFACE LABEL(s) TO MATCH YOUR INTERFACE(s)!!
#Interface “eth1″ “eth0″ “wlan0″ “wlan1″ “ath0″ “ath1″
Interface “wlan0″

# IP version to use (4 or 6)
IpVersion       4

After configuring OLSRd, it can be started by simply issuing the olsrd command in the terminal. As mentioned earlier, the configuration parameters can be given at the command line. Once this is done, the OLSR daemon begins to listen on the specified interface.

# olsrd -i wlan0 -d 1 -ipv4

[sbox-CHINOOK_ARMEL: ~] > apt-get update

[sbox-CHINOOK_ARMEL: ~] > fakeroot apt-get install rx-34-kernel-oprofile

[sbox-CHINOOK_ARMEL: ~] > ls -l /usr/share/osso/kernels/
total 1508
-rw-r–r–  1 guestuser guestuser 1536876 Dec  7  2007 zImage-oprofile-rx-34-200749

By copying the image to outside of the scratchbox chroot environment, you’ll be able to easily access it when you’re ready to flash the image. Download the flasher-3.0 from the website: http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/maemo-dev-env-downloads.php. Now copy the flasher-3.0 and the new image file compiled using scratchbox into a /tmp folder on your workstation. Proceed with the flashing of the device as indicated below. The user will be prompted to connect the N810 device to the workstation using a USB port and this has to be done in order to complete the flashing process.

$ sudo tmp/maemo_flasher-3.5_2.5.2.2/flasher-3.5 -f –kernel tmp/zImage-oprofile-rx-34-200749 -R

Suitable USB device not found, waiting
USB device found found at bus 002, device address 008
Found device RX-44, hardware revision 0805
NOLO version 1.1.7
Version of ‘sw-release’: RX-44_2008SE_2.2007.50-2_PR_MR0
Sending kernel image (1500 kB)…
100% (1500 of 1500 kB, avg. 15634 kB/s)
Flashing kernel… done.

# ssh root@<ip address of the N810 tablet>

Both the mobile device and the device used for the remote login must be within the same network. The ip address of the N810 device can be one that is received from the DHCP or set manually by the user. When performing a remote login for the first time, the user will be asked if the device must add the new entity to the list of known hosts. On confirming this, the user can continue with working on the mobile device remotely.