Author: Praval

Categories
Events

Social Media Club – Delhi

While social media agencies continue to help brands create strategies and leverage social channels, there is a need to share learnings, talk about best practices, and stay up to date with the trends. Social Media Club is a platform that facilitates this and more while helping industry practitioners connect and engage offline.

Social Media Club’s primary mission is to promote media literacy, promote standard technologies, encourage ethical behavior and share best practices. We bring together journalists, publishers, communications professionals, artists, amateur media creators, citizen journalists, teachers, students, tool makers, and other interested collaborators.

If you’re interested to know more about the Social Media Club initiative, check the global website.

Social Media Club has 230 chapters worldwide with chapters in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore in India. Last week, SMC Delhi had it’s February’2011 meet at NASSCOM office in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi.

I’d like to thank Gaurav and Avinash for reviving the SMC initiative.  It was great meeting Rahul Narvekar – Co-founder at Fashion & You, Sumit Goyal – Editor in Chief at Food & Nightlife, and others who came up for the session.

This week, Rajesh spoke about IndiaSocial, a community of social media practitioners in India. We’re looking forward to seeing more action at the next session of Social Media Club, Delhi which is tentatively scheduled for 4th of March’2010. 

Follow SMC Delhi on Twitter to stay tuned!

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Paul Graham’s essay on Ramen Profitable

I was reading an interesting essay by Paul Graham and these insights got me thinking.

At any given time there tends to be one problem that’s the most urgent for a startup. This is what you think about as you fall asleep at night and when you take a shower in the morning. And when you start raising money, that becomes the problem you think about. You only take one shower in the morning, and if you’re thinking about investors during it, then you’re not thinking about the product.

Whereas if you can choose when you raise money, you can pick a time when you’re not in the middle of something else, and you can probably also insist that the round close fast. You may even be able to avoid having the round occupy your thoughts, if you don’t care whether it closes.

Is there a downside to ramen profitability? Probably the biggest danger is that it might turn you into a consulting firm. Startups have to be product companies, in the sense of making a single thing that everyone uses. The defining quality of startups is that they grow fast, and consulting just can’t scale the way a product can. But it’s pretty easy to make $3000 a month consulting; in fact, that would be a low rate for contract programming. So there could be a temptation to slide into consulting, and telling yourselves you’re a ramen profitable startup, when in fact you’re not a startup at all.

Categories
Life

My first Mac!

I got myself a Macbook.

Love how it adds to my iPhone 3GS. Oh, and am I loving the 10-hour battery life and the crisp graphics?

After getting hold of a few apps like office, Adium, Evernote, and Dropbox, I am now looking for a Windows Live Writer alternative for Mac. Any leads?