Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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Other than the main feed, there are now separate feeds for Work related blog items (Technology, Software development, etc) and Spiritual items(Yoga, etc). Miscellaneous items such as Personal Development, Northwest are still only in the complete feed.

Here is the list.

• Complete blog feed
• Work items blog feed
• Spiritual items blog feed

Greg Kroah-Hartman, author of Linux Kernel in a Nutshell writes on his blog: Free Linux Driver Development!

Yes, that’s right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. ….

… you will receive a complete and working Linux driver that is added to the main Linux kernel source tree. The driver will be written by some of the members of the Linux kernel developer community (over 1500 strong and growing)

…. If your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device’s specifications, we have arranged a program with OSDL/TLF’s Tech Board to provide the legal framework where a company can interact with a member of the kernel community in order to properly assure that all needed NDA requirements are fulfilled.

This offer is in effect for all different types of devices, from USB toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards. If you manufacture it, we can get Linux drivers working for it.

There is also a FreedomHEC unconference equivalent of WinHEC conference with an fairly large list of device driver developers participating.

This means times are changing.
It could mean better support for hardware out of box for Linux. It also means for Software Developers like me and many of my ex-colleagues who have done linux device driver development for corporations in the past, some of the work is going away. Interesting…
HatTip: Slashdot Linux Kernel Devs Offer Free Driver Development

Greg Linden writes in Is Microsoft’s Web war lost? and believes that Microsoft can still win the internet war with Google.

The key though as far as I see is in perception, Search though an important part, is not the Internet neither is it the Web. Here are some numbers of Microsoft (MSN, Live) service users from Microsoft TechEd 2006 where Microsoft is ahead in quest for Internet users:

• 240 million Hotmail users
• 230 million MSN messenger users
• 72 million MSN Spaces (blogging, photos etc)

And in blogging it started after Google’s own service (blogger.com)

Google and others know this and so does Microsoft, we the audience sometimes forget.

Update: ReadWriteWeb has a blog entry on the topic: Web War Not Won Yet

From the Fortune The Midas List

No. 4 Ram Shriram of Sherpalo, the angel investor in Google.
HOT: The growing, consuming Indian middle class. Tech that powers mobile phones, which are the PCs for many Indians. Clean water in India.

NOT: New consumer Internet startups in search, social networking or video.

No. 20 Mark Tluszcz of Mangrove Capital Partners

HOT: Russia, especially administration, encryption and security software. Technology that bridges the Internet to mobile devices. Targeted advertising. Intuitive search. Internet TV. Security for mobile devices; third-party attacks on phones will surge in coming years.

NOT: Copycats in VOIP, music and photos.

No. 32 Peter Barris of New Enterprise Associates

HOT: Technology services companies that handle business functions like printing or logistics. Communications services companies. Bringing mature offerings, like dish TV, to emerging markets in Asia. Wi-Fi.

NOT: Security is overfunded. The old models of delivering enterprise software.

No. 37 Arjun Gupta of TeleSoft Partners

HOT: Biometrics for identity management in mobile commerce. Location-based wireless services. Strained silicon for low-power, faster chips. Mobile advertising.

NOT: Most enterprise software and semiconductors.

My thoughts:

-I believe that consumer internet startups will do well, though they will have to provide real value to users. As always, except the year 2000.
-Because there are a large number of these (web 2.0) startups, quite a few will not make it in the next 2-3 years

-Mobile is getting as crowded as the internet consumer space and it is more difficult a space due to the service providers being the middle man and risk averse, that typical consumers particularly in the US are not on a mobile lifestyle like in Asia and many existing companies are targetting the mobile market.

Questions to ask about your startup or idea from TechStars, the Startup bootcamp from Boulder, CO.

Actually from the TechStars application, but apply when thinking about your startup or idea

• What’s new or different about what you’ll be doing?
• How will your company make money?

• What excites you most about your idea?

• Who are your competitors, or who will they be? Provide any relevant details about them.

• What are the risks in your business? What could go wrong?

• Are any of your ideas hard for competitors to duplicate? Why?

• How long will it take you to complete a working prototype? How long will it take you to complete a marketable product?

• If somebody offered to buy your company at the end of the summer program, how much money would it take to get you to say yes?

• For each founder, please tell us what makes them special or demonstrates that they have what it takes to succeed in your market and company.

• How and when did the founders meet? Have any of the founders worked together before? If so, where and on what? Provide URLs if possible.

• What does entrepreneurship mean to you?
  

Summary of Rajesh Jain of Emergic blog’s article on moving From Employee to Entrepreneur

• Contemplating entrepreneurship is like a N+1 syndrome. It keeps getting postponed to the next year and that next year rarely comes.
• It is an intensely personal decision. It is one which needs to be discussed and debated with family and friends. It depends on each one’s appetite for risk.
• Once decided, the parachute needs to be cut. If we know that there are always the options of going back to the safety and security of the other world, it will be much harder making the entrepreneurial option work.
• To create a roadmap, create a mental model of the industry instead of an idea as ideas will change
• To develop a mental model, start blogging and create a one page vision document. Discuss this with friends and experts in the field.
• Entrepreneurship is a life-transforming experience. Give it a try at least once in your life.

True face in the mirror

In the yogic world, an air of unreality permeates discussions about the real. What is the use of being able to dissolve body into light, to lose subject-object separation in deep states of samadhi, if we cannot even bear to see our true face in the mirror? Ch. 13 in in Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope

Victory or defeat

Far better it is to dare mightly things, to win glorious triumps, even checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. Theodore Roosevelt., Ch 7 The Portable Personal Trainer by Eric Harr

First law of success

The first law of success is concentration, to bend all the energies to one point, looking neither to the right nor to the left-William Mathews. from the book: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy

HDR Image courtesy petecarr on flickr.

Creating companies on the cheap

It started by reading in John Cook’s Venture Blog: A $50,000 burn rate which talks about Newsvine which claims to have a $50,000 burn rate with 6 employees.
The above blog entry was in turn triggered by the article: WallStreet Journal: Tech Start-Ups Have Money to Burn, But Choose Thrift which talks about Silicon valley companies having a typical burnrate of US $150-200k per month, it does compare unfairly with Paypal which used to give money away for opening accounts or referring another user.

Interestingly, most of the startups mentioned in the WSJ online article was in nice locations: Membo, Riya and Sharpcast.

Two interesting view points

• glinden(Greg Liden of Findory) writes in a comment on Doing it on the cheap

O, sure, you can build some Web startups around two founders with a good idea and $50k in seed capital for the first year if the founders forgo their normal salaries, but, assuming the founders normally make ~$150k/year in salary + benefits, the real cost of that startup in the first year will be closer to $350k.

• Shelfari: Launching for under $10k - It’s the PEOPLE!

Capital efficiency, in and of itself, isn’t an achievement. The achievement is building a great team and great product on a shoestring budget.

My thoughts

Some basics should be there once you have outgrown the founders only (proof of concept) phase and are in round one funding. These might vary for each, I would include:

1. Good location (Reduce commute, Have atleast one conference room, etc)

2. Furniture which is Ergonomic (No Herman and Miller chairs, but no making tables from doors like amazon.com either) as one sits for many more hours and Fast computers.

3. Small break room (Coffee, Tea, Microwave, Refrigerator)

4. Competitive salaries to be able to hire good staff, Decent benefits.

Finally, it comes down to thinking what scale are you going for: Thinking in context of a startup, Do you want to start a MyBlogLog or Facebook. Sometimes you can choose, sometimes your idea and product space will decide it for you.

An event on bootstrapping

On the same topic, consider there is a TIE Seattle event on 24th Jan 2007 Wed in Bellevue, WA

Bootstrapping: The secret to entrepreneurial success

Update:

A different point of view in Fractals of Change: Web 2.0 – Greater Initial Investments Required and Changing Ingredients for Web 2.0 Success – Continued with Reader Help.

A indeed.com salary comparision for startups v/s venture backed (Idea from Fred of A VC Blog)

On an average, venture backed startups openings seem to have 10% more salary.

Update 2:

You might also be interested in Brad Feld’s article: Bootstrapping Top 10 List

Using Google Maps in Wordpress blog

• Create a separate html page that uses Google MAPS API containing what you want to show in your wordpress blog entry. Link to a Google Maps example with marker, listener and info window.

• Include this html file in a iframe tag in the blog entry as shown below. This is best done by disabling Wordpress’s visual rich editor under Dashboard, Options->Writing.

          <iframe width="500" scrolling="no"
           height="300" frameborder="0" align="
           middle" title="Google Maps Example"
          src="http://www.rajgad.com/wfiles/code/gmaps_hotyogacenter.html">
          An interactive Google Maps example </iframe>

• Here is how a custom interactive Google Map looks in a wordpress blog entry.

• If you need more details techrageo.us has them in adding Google Maps to your wordpress blog entry.

Google Maps API links

• Sign for Google Maps API key.

A Google MAPs API key is needed per top level directory where the html pages containing the Google Maps will reside on your web server. The API key generation process is automated and you get the key right away.

• Google Maps API tutorial and Google Maps API reference

The main documentation page that covers the basics and has examples for many features like marker (to show a location), info window(the popup), etc

• Google Maps API groups

For discussions by developers and ability to search old posts.

• Google Maps plugins for ruby

• Articles on Google maps and polygons (Areas like hike or jogging track highlighted on Google maps)

* Polylines from database (MySQL) Example and Polylines from database tutorial

* An interactive Google Maps Polygon creator, click on two points or more on the map to a create a polygon.

• Articles on Google maps and GIS\Geocoding (Long\Lat and zip codes)

* How chicagocrime.org shows zipcodes on Google Maps: Gets free GIS data from the City of Chicago, uses PostgreSQL’s PostGIS spatial-database package to import it and uses a Python script that encodes latitude/longitude points into Google’s proprietary line-generation format.

* Drawing zipcode boundaries on Google maps and tutorial on who to retrieve zip code data from maps.huge.info

Sierra club published a list of which Gas companies are better than others and reasons for that.

The environment record is a good reason to decide where to fill up gas from. Till now for me, location or credit card acceptance use to be the primary reason, but not any more. So, no more filling up gas at 76, I will be trying Arco and others.
Here is the summary list with links to Google’s local US search, just add your location.

First Tier (The Best):

• BP (Gas Pump Brands: AM/PM, Arco and Amoco Ultimate)
• Sunoco (Gas Pump Brands: Sunoco, Ultra Service Centers, and APlus)

Second Tier (The Average):

• Royal Dutch Shell (Gas Pump Brands: Shell)
• Chevron (Gas Pump Brands: Chevron, Texaco and Caltex)
• Valero Energy Corporation (Gas Pump Brands: Valero, Corner Store, Diamond Shamrock, Shamrock, Ultramar, Stop N Go, and Beacon)
• Citgo (Gas Pump Brands: Citgo)

Third Tier (The Worse):

• ExxonMobil (Gas Pump Brands: Exxon, Mobil and Esso in Canada)
• ConocoPhillips (Gas Pump Brands: 76, Conoco, Phillips 66 and JET in Europe)