One of Apple's strengths

Following post on PCWorld talks about even though Sony and Dell had laser thin notebooks way before Macbook Air hit the market, they never gained traction. This snippet sums it up.

 “Our customers told us this is what they want, and our market research says this is what people are buying, so we made this great product to address that market!” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but you’ll never set any trends that way. If you want to make the product that everyone else compares their product to, you have to go outside the envelope. You have to take a risk to build something nobody has told you they want, because they don’t know they want it yet, and then you have to invest in it and stick with it until you get it right. The real irony here is that their marketing departments are constantly striving to find differentiators: ways to set their products apart from the pack. If every company is building products to address the same set of market research data, you’re not going to get differentiated products. src

I think this is where conventional business strategies break and it take guts to do this.

"Switch" book : Rider and elephant

I am reading this book nowadays. It talks about long and short term goals. i have always struggled how to find balance between the two. One of the things that has picked up from it is "some is not a number soon is not a time"


WSJ Review Amazon 

What I want on Google+

An ability to have informal video chat with my colleagues who may be in the building as I am, working from home in same city or are offshore. But video chat never caught mainstream for all the good reasons.

I started pondering on the creating solution myself: www.remoteoffice.me. And right then Google announced WebRTC. It was a happy co-incidence and I thought this would do it.

Now that Google+ APIs are in the pipeline I am looking forward to build an app that would allow meeting rooms, white-boarding, taking/assigning actions items, sending status updates, knocking on the "door" to see if you are available for a minute ...

Stay tuned.

EDIT: Chris Brogan on 50 things that are with Google+

Google+ invite

By now you’ve probably heard of Google’s latest effort in the social space – Google+ (pronounced “Google Plus”). You can read more about this ambitious project on the official blog post.

Thanks to David Webb I was able to get an invite and I am offering one to everyone provided you do following

1. Follow me @ktundwal 
2. leave your email address in comments below.

Have fun.

Lesson learned from CircleDoc project

CircleDoc started as a hobby, born out of frustration with inability to work with others collaboratively when one team member has opened the "file". I was impressed with Google Docs and thought what if such a feature would be available in widely used application such as Microsoft PowerPoint. Using open source technologies such as Openfire Jabber server and IKVM (thank you), product quickly started taking shape. I launched it and LifeHacker picked it up which resulted into decent number of signups.

One lesson I learned from the entire process was that before launching a product, give a serious thought about how you are going to acquire your customers. Technical folks tend to ignore this and go with "build first and they will come" (read Vivek Wadhwa's Entrepreneur: You’re No Steve Jobs, So Look Before You Leap).

Having launched CircleDoc, this is what I am doing, listening to my early adopters and iterating.

Startup idea: Personal Dr.

Real world application I would pay for. Meet Michael, your personal Doctor. Michael knows lot about your lifestyle, your medical history and your goals. If you are about to feel sick or just wanna know about a disease you heard of, pull up Michael and get your questions answered. Frequently Michael comes up in between your TV programs to suggest may you should go for that run.

Designing Business Model

In his talk about Why Accountants Don't Run Startups, Steve Blank highlighted Alex Osterwalder's work on 1 page business model. Its very similar to design patterns in software development. 

Here is my initial take.

Idea is to have many of such business models sketched out. It helps keep all moving parts within context.

Download business model template from slideshare.net.

Download 1st chapter of Business Model Generation handbook (Amazon)