Blue Screen of Duds

In a lot of ways, the following 12 to 24 months are going to be very interesting times. Everyone wants to join in when there is a party going on. But, now that the party is firmly over, be it fat pay cheques, exits or IPOs, signs of panic are abound. A lot of it is sometimes even beyond what is required.

It was only recently that realization a struck me: 2008 is second major slowdown I've experienced in my career, the first one being the dotcom bubble bursting rather loudly around the year 2000. At that time I was what you could call me a 'n00b' in the industry, fresh out of journalism school, wide-eyed and trying to find my feet.

It was interesting to see everyone freak out, with results like companies throwing away their radio links (anyone remembers Primus?) to banish employees to the slowish lands of ISDN for accessing the internet and paper millionaires giving up their virtual millions. Though, on the brighter side, it also meant we no longer had companies that promised to deliver emails by hand.

In the years that followed, there was Napster, a new browser on the block called Phoenix (OMG, tabbed browsing!), Gnutella, PHP3, Kuro5hin and a long list of things that can fill up many pages. The point I am trying to make is that even as horrible as the bubble was, the world did not come to an end because of the downturn and the real, hardworking innovators and entrepreneurs kept toiling and a lot of them went on to do really well, while the flimsy ones fell away by the wayside.

It was during a rather interesting set of circumstances that I dropped by at IIT-Delhi for the second day of Barcamp Delhi 5. With the fears of an imminent recession sinking in, aided ably by the Sequoia presentation, hushed tones proclaiming doom was everywhere and this had even resulted in a session on the slowdown that was to have lasted for 30 minutes being extended to three times that duration. The generic naivety of the community aside (the downturn is only another cycle in a business environment. Prosperity, as a guarantee cannot ever determine the willingness to start or sustain a venture. If that is your perspective, then you have to rethink why would you want to be an entrepreneur), what I realized was that the prevailing environment also now comprehensively marks the crossing of the line where we have blown a tremendous opportunity to make a difference.

In the past two years, I've tired of telling leaders across a broad range of businesses, especially in the digital sphere, that we are, historically, in a very special purple patch. We have reasonably low costs, plenty of resources available to super-innovate and make major punts for the future and the talent to build it, in a market that is oozing with potential. They key determining factor in all that was to step aside, think different from what we are accustomed to and innovate with a local audience and reality in mind than to mindlessly copy-paste what has been done to death in the West.

But, we did not. And we blew it.

There is no dearth of posts proclaiming the death of start ups and the innovation space in light of the crisis that is gripping the financial markets and the global economy. If you ignore the doomsday pundits and keep your head, you will see that things are not that bad. Of course, the days of excess may be over for a while now, but the days of opportunities are far from over.

I have said this before too, but the difference in operating modes between a boom and a recession is that during the times of prosperity the market enables you to leverage scale and make plays based on that. During the lean times this shifts over to working the margins and trying to eke out every single penny from the margins you can make to stay afloat.

So, what exactly are the opportunities?

Pricing Disruption: Almost every existing player have to change their pricing structures to take into account lower spending by their clients. Considering that the boom time is still not a distant memory, pricing for products and services are still on the higher side. The same existing players also have to factor in employee retention and infrastructure issues that a new player would not have to bother with. They are much likely to be stuck with infrastructural and capacity that was designed for the boom times. Thus, it would be easier for a new player to come into the market with lower pricing for any product that will resonate with those clients who are looking to shave off costs.

SocialMedian is a rather interesting set up, not only because of the way it looks differently at news, but also because of the story behind the company. SocialMedian is another product concocted by Jason Goldberg, who was previously the CEO of Jobster. Where the story takes a different turn is with the team that is building SocialMedian alongside Jason -- comprising employees of of Pune-based True Sparrow Systems -- who have also been made partners in the venture. If the company gets a good exit with the product, it should kick off a new chapter on outsourcing work to India and this time on a positive note.

After a few months on SocialMedian these are some of my observations:

Consistent URIs: Before I started writing this piece, I had assumed that SocialMedian was storing URIs only once and then storing subsequent references to it as pointers. After a bit of poking around I figured that that the assumption was wrong, it was picking up the title and the URL and looking for matches in their database. This does, though, suffer from the eternal issue of crawling FeedBurner feed URLs, where crawlers end up storing the interim URLs than the destination URL, leaving a large window for possible duplicates wide open.

Good signal-to-noise levels: Since the service has only the early adopters on its network, the signal-to-noise ratio on the network is quite good, partly due to users curating the source lists quite well and also due to spammers not actively targeting the system yet. With increased adoption and mainstreaming of the network, this may change. Users could impact this by voting on the significance, but counting on mainstream users to curate the sources as well as the initial adopters is a path fraught with danger.

As a result of professional and personal life taking off in directions not accounted for, this blog has remained stagnant for a while now. But there is much movement underneath the surface and as it always happens, end of the year is always a time of change for me.

This year, I had moved a lot of out my favoured confines in my professional domain and stepped out much more into the industry. Work has also been interesting with learnings (good and bad) coming in at speeds that were often way too high for comfort.

So, will there be a major reveal as to what is going to happen? I am afraid, I can't say much about it at this moment. Things should be clearer as we get closer to the end of the year, till then it is a continuation of the massive milestone chase till significant ones are met.