Wadiblog

A new search engine created by former engineers from Google Inc. launched Sunday night, claiming to cover three times as many Web pages as Google. Cuil!!

Former Google engineer launches new search engine

Has anyone checked them out yet?

Venue: TENs Santa Clara Innovation Center,
2953 Bunker Hill Ln, Ste 400
Santa Clara, Ca.

Date:     Tuesday, July, 15, 2008. From 6:30 pm - 9 pm

Agenda:

6.30pm: Networking and Pizza (Thanks MyOfferPal)

7pm: Opensocial Update from Google by Chris Schalk, Google Developer Advocate. Chris has done extensive work with the adoption of OpenSocial in both the Indian and Japanese development communities. Chris also championed the creation of Google Technology User Groups (GTUGs), which now have several chapters internationally and hundreds of members. Before Google, Chris was a Principal Product Manager and technology evangelist at Oracle in the Java development tools group. Chris also co-authored the book “JavaServer Faces, The Complete Reference” published through McGraw-Hill-Osborne.

7.30- 8.30pm: Main Presentation: “Social Apps hosting”

7.30: Video demo of Tunnlr by Mike Mangino, which uses SSH remote tunneling to host your social App on your laptop..
7.40: Mano Marks of Google, Developer Programs Engineer at Google.
Mano helps developers with Keyhole Markup Language (KML) and other Geo APIs. He is also currently working with the App Engine team. He will present Googel App Engine for building facebook apps.

8.15 - Q&A Do you have a facebook App? Come share your App hosting experience. Do you use Google App Engine? How does it compare with Amazon’s EC2? What are the issues related to setup, cost and scalability?

8.30: DEMOS (Time clocked by Abbas Zaidi)
1. MyOfferPal by Julie Craft, Publisher Director, MyofferPal.

Julie is coming back to show us a demo of MyofferPal by popular demand after the monetization panel from couple months back.

Do you have a new Facebook App to show us? Ping Sudha Jamthe if you want to demo your App.

RSVP through the the Facebook Event page

Social networks are transforming the way brands and consumers interact. Leading brands and agencies are embracing their potential — are you?

SWAT Summit looks at how agencies and brands can harness the power of social networks. This conference is for anyone who wants to be a leader in the next generation of marketing and advertising — and for the publishers, developers, and ad networks who will work with them hand in hand.

When: Thursday, July, 17, 2008

Where: Westin St. Francis, San Francisco, Ca.

Sign-up today and get $100 off when using the wadiblog promotion code.

Wadiwallah is a proud sponsor of SWAT Summit.

May 2nd, 2008 marked the one year anniversary since the Silicon Valley Pakistani Semiconductor firm, Cavium Networks went public on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange [Read: Silicon Valley Pakistanis - NED to NASDAQ].

In commemoration, the Cavium Management Team has been honored with the opportunity of ringing the opening bell at the start of trading day on Monday, May 5th at 6:30 am (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).

The event will be telecasted live on major U.S. and International financial networks. To watch the live broadcast visit: http://nasdaq.com or http://cnbc.com.

Cross-posted to ScitechWire, Siliconstani, WadiBlog, OPEN SV

Outsourcing

In recent years there has been an amalgamation of many outsourcing marketplaces directed at entrepreneurs for hiring web development and design folks. Is this the right solution?

The answer depends on what you are trying to do, what you are willing to accept, what price point willing to offer, and what trade offs you are willing to make.

So what are you trying to do?

Is innovative technology a key component of your business offering? In general the success of a business based on specialized competitive technology requires a more innovative, carefully screened and informed team which will drive up the costs. If you skip this step, you could be faced with major delays and/or frustration and lack of completion.

If innovative technology is not a key component of your business offering and your unique selling proposition revolves around a new use case or better user experience of existing tech tools, you can create a fully functioning prototype quickly and cheaply by using a outsourcing firm that allocates its design/development resources across a variety of projects. Since such firms split man hours across projects, they tend to be much cheaper alternatives to outsourcing a team.

What performance you will accept?

Two major barriers when working with outsourcing teams are communication barriers and skills scarcity. The communication barriers can be caused by cultural issues, timezone issues, lack of face-to-face non-verbal cues, and lack of clear specification on your part. Sometimes these differences can be very subtle and go uncaught, until results prove otherwise. It is always a good idea to allow time for several iterations.

Skills scarcity can occur simply because of the different business environment abroad. This can mean differences in the technologies/platforms that are popular. It can also mean less experience and understanding of basics like US specific look and feel especially since what works for the business needs of their more local clients may not work for you

but the good news is…

that none of the cons are real barriers.

There are a variety of outsourcing options out there. Cast a wide net and make first cuts based on level of communication you are willing to accept. Post first cuts hire an outsourcing consultant from the culture of the outsourcing firm to coach you on specs and first few conversations with outsourcing firm. My friend Abdulrahman Rafiq provides this service.

You could also hire an internal team known for their communication skills to delegate or to get more ears on your interactions with the firms to make sure more people catch possible miscommunication earlier. Make sure to choose people who are patient.

When faced with skills scarcity question your assumptions. How important is one platform compared to others for your product? Can you compromise with something which has only slight limitations but a big pool of low cost outsourcing resources. Be creative about your process and execution. There are many different ways to slice the outsourcing baby to make it work for you. Here are a few I have heard about:

Outsourcing marketplaces

For coding and some design –

• Buyerzone.com
• Elance.com (great source low cost projects as is popular among small outsourcing firms in India)
• GetAFreelancer.com (European focus
• GloLance.com
• Guru.com
• iFreelance.com
• myTino.com
• Rentacoder.com
• Sologig.com
• YourCoders.com

For design–

99designs. I have had technical issues with their site though.

Kluster–fairly new about 3 weeks old at time of this posting. Founder Ben Kaufman says about 10k users and majority of them are graphic designers. I have had technical issues with their site as well.

Programmer Meet Designer–what it sounds like.

Can you think of any options I am missing? If so comment below.

Had prior experience outsourcing? Got helpful tips? Do share on my facebook group associated with outsourcing (Ultralight Startups).

Hi Wadiwallahs,

It’s been a long time since I last posted. Mainly because of the many conferences that I’ve been attending (NYC BarCamp, Snap Summit), wrapping up the day job prior to vacation and a fabulous vacation in Yosemite (will post pics soon).

Over the next few days I plan to update you on all the neat ideas I and news I gathered at my conferences.

But before I do that a little followup note, as you know I covered ShowBeyond a few weeks ago. In SF I came across Slide which allows you to personalize, touchup, and add videos, slideshows, and photos on your social network profiles.

I sent Steven a quick email asking him how ShowBeyond’s focus varies and he replied saying:

“Slide focuses on self-expression, good deco for social network. However,Showbeyond focuses on storytelling, good for content presentation. Showbeyond is a tool and media for blog and social network when users want to show and tell a story. It is a mini, portable, vertical 3D (image, audio, and text) blog.”

Wow, a new way of looking at the possibilities of expression on a blog.

Take care,
Spunky

1. State your name and title:
Steven Li, CEO, Engineer, CPA, Amateur Photographer

John Yan, CTO

2. What are you currently up to? If entrepreneurship tell me about your startup.
We are currently developing ShowBeyond—an online show and tell tool that provides users with a real time easy and flexible way to combine video, pictures, music, store, and link so tell others a story or simply share ideas.

3. Why are you doing this? You could be doing so many other things in the world, what about this particular idea strikes you?
Steven: being an amateur photographer I was always interested in ways of expression. It occurred to me that there is no tool out there that allows you to incorporate various mediums to tell stories in an easy, real time manner. For instance, many people develop slide shows, but adding music, text, and embedding the final product to a blog to share it online is not as easy.

Continue Reading »

On Wednesday, March 5th OPEN Silicon Valley kick-started preparations for it’s 5th Annual, premier global OPEN Forum 2008 with the launch of the conference website. For the last four years, OPEN has successfully put up a compelling conference, attracting attendees and top-notch speakers from the business community, both from here in the Silicon Valley and abroad.

This years conference intends to do the same, in fact with a more aggressive mandate. The conference theme is in line with the theme of the year, not to mention the Democrat Presidential nominee Barack Obama’s campaign theme.

Cross-posting from The Siliconstani

Recently I was browsing through the sitemeter account of my personal blog. Here, one can view site visits from all across the globe - from Australia to Europe, North American, Africa and the Middle East. The site has been visited from all corners of the globe where internet connectivity is available. Amongst all the various location, one country, that you don’t see a whole lot to often stood out - Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, a wore torn nation, where basic amenities and luxuries much of the world take for granted are hard to come by, none can imagine there would be Web surfers, or for that matter decent internet connectivity. However, the proof is in the pudding - there was one hit from this dissolute region of the world!

Upon further investigation, which led me to the Afghanistan Ministry of Communication and Information Technology the following “somewhat surprising” statistics can be found,

Statistics

The following statistic updates every after 3 months.
Last updated on 02, Oct 2007

Landline Phones:	39,608
GSM Subscribers:	32,85,332
CDMA Subscribers:	43,646
ISP Companies:	17
GSM Companies:	04

Who would have imagined, a nation such as Afghanistan would have 17+ ISPs! This may seem like a small number, it however shows great promise for this nation - paving the way for innumerable entrepreneurial opportunities. It is only a matter of time before the Silicon Valley Entrepreneur and VC community cash in on the the innumerable opportunities in this far off land.

Just discovered this:

http://damnsmalllinux.org/

Interesting…anyone used this? Comments? Input? Gotchas? This-is-cooler-than-sliced-bread’s?