Poster:	jace
Date:	2005-01-01 23:19
Subject:	Q: Why has craigslist succeeded when similar business ventures have failed?
Security:	Public

A: One thing that people often don't get about us: We're a public service first. Most businesses are conceived as a way of making money. Our primary mindset is philanthropic -- to offer what we see as a public service. On our site you don't see banner adds, text ads, cookies, co-marketing agreements, selling user information to third parties -- all of those nuisances users encounter on majority of sites.

From the Craigslist press section.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2004-10-17 21:26
Subject:	Words worth remembering
Security:	Public

“We are in the twilight of a society based on data. As information and intelligence become the domain of computers, society will place more value on the one human ability that cannot be automated: emotion. Imagination, myth, ritual—the language of emotion—will affect everything from our purchasing decisions to how we work with others. Companies will thrive on the basis of their stories and myths. Companies will need to understand that their products are less important than their stories.”

—Rolf Jensen, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies

Poster:	jace
Date:	2004-02-18 17:42
Subject:
Security:	Public

The question remains: why?

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-08-15 19:47
Subject:	Why be an entrepreneur?
Security:	Public

There are primarily two reasons I can think of for taking up entrepreneurship:

1. Entrepreneurship as an end in itself: taking it up for the freedom, control and other benefits it offers.
2. Entrepreneurship as a means to some other end: taking it up because it is the most suitable way to get something done.

My original interest in entrepreneurship was for the former reason — I wanted to be able to decide for myself what I wanted to work on — but I've been drifting towards the second ever since. The time has come to ask the question again:

What does Seacrow Labs do?

I started with an interest in information management, in the areas between taking data out of a database and presenting it to the user — the machine APIs and human interface (vs. the guts of a database) — but that is just an interest, not a task at hand.

I've evaluated several ideas in the last two months and while some are very interesting, none of them are suitable for me as an individual to take up. All of them require either the backing of an established organisation, or a team and significant funding. I have two options to choose from now:

1. Insist on my independence and dump the idea(s).
2. Make the idea my focus and do whatever it takes to make it a reality.

Pragmatism asks that I take option 2. I'm moving to Synapse in Goa tomorrow evening to spend three months there working on my ideas and picking up necessary skills for their execution. If an idea seems executable only from within another organisation that is what I will do. The Seacrow Labs project is on pause indefinitely. I will however continue to update this journal as needed, so don't tune out already.

For the sake of explaining the gap in my resumé, I will also be working on a media server for Synapse — a repository of documents, images, audio files and videos, with a categorisation engine, search engine, and user interface integrated into the desktop environment (Windows first; X11 only if it is necessary).

The several thousands of rupees I've invested in degrading and non-degrading assets for my working environment will continue to serve me during this period. The portable items go with me to Goa; the rest await my return.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-07-14 17:41
Subject:	Visiting Synapse
Security:	Public

I'm at Synapse in Goa. In another half an hour, we are going to start a four hour session on branding, positioning and communication.

Goa is very green right now (it apparently rained for about twenty days non-stop until last week) and I'll probably post some pictures in my regular journal tomorrow. I'm back in Bangalore Thursday morning.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-07-08 01:31
Subject:	Deciding on a line of business
Security:	Public

As many of you have no doubt noticed, I have never mentioned in this journal exactly what Seacrow's line of business is. Some of you have assumed this is a continuation of the technology consulting work I was doing earlier, others asked me, but got no clear response. It is time to reveal a deep, dark secret:

There is no plan. There is only a hazy idea of what I want to be doing.

Which is of course no way to run a business. Without a plan, I'm directionless and potentially engaging in retrograde motion. I'm not only wasting my time, but also that of anyone associating with me.

And so it is time to make a plan: define goals, find a path leading to defined goals, chart obstacles on the path, put together resources needed to tackle them, and when all is set, get going with an eye always on the horizon. Except for one problem: I do not know what my goals are. I do know what issues I care about, but not what I can do about them. An appropriate analogy here would be the angry young man desperately looking for the root cause of the anger.

( Read more... )

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-07-06 01:12
Subject:	Building a website
Security:	Public

I'm spending this weekend defining requirements for Seacrow's website. I haven't decided on the base software for the site yet, but Plone is the leading contender.

It would have been my choice already, but for one serious issue: Plone is overwhelmingly oriented towards community websites, and I'm most definitely not putting up a community website at seacrow.com. I do not want random people "joining" my site and posting content for all the Web to see. I do not want to provide multiple "skins" to choose from. I do not want to display document metadata in a box alongside the document.

And so I'm now trying to undo those aspects so that what results matches what I want out of a content management system. If its too much work, I'll dump Plone entirely for something else.

Oh, and I'll try to lay out specifications in explicit words before frustration eats into the resolve. I've never seen a content management system that does exactly what I want.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-07-03 23:58
Subject:	Income
Security:	Public

First earnings are in the bank.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-28 13:30
Subject:	Seacrow's first client
Security:	Public

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I take great pleasure in presenting you Seacrow's first client, Mahiti Infotech. Mahiti is currently extending Plone to serve as a paperless office solution for eGovernance and I'm helping with some of the trickier bits. I can't tell you who the end-client is at this time, but I hope to be able to soon.

I worked with Mahiti for several months last year on internal training and projects for TaraHaat, Ashoka Fellows and GIVE Foundation. We are resuming internal training next week.

Expect more news on other projects soon (yes, there is more).

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-23 15:32
Subject:	What, no updates?
Security:	Public

It has been nearly two weeks since I last posted an update here.

The venture has not been derailed. I've merely been busy with a few projects that I can't discuss at the moment, but will soon. There are interesting times ahead: Seacrow Labs is all set for a running start.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-11 17:19
Subject:	My old business cards
Security:	Public

For the sake of reference, my old business card from 2002:

( See business card )

This was created using OpenOffice.org Draw. The font is Palatino and comes with XFree86. The rendering in this image has come out badly for some reason. I used ps2pdf to convert a PS file I had lying around so I could open it in Acrobat Reader and take a screen capture, and I've frequently had trouble with fonts when using ps2pdf before. Maybe it's time to pull down GV from Fink.

My intention then was to keep it as simple as possible but I frequently got asked why I didn't have a logo on the card. Also, all the other business cards I've ever used. The ZDNet India card is a lovely shade of red that the scan has failed to capture. It's the best looking card I've ever had.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-11 03:28
Subject:	Business Card, Trial 2
Security:	Public

I couldn't sleep without doing this, so here is trial 2:

( See business card )

The filling in the logo is called Mercury. Fonts are Optima (my name), Georgia (title), Andale Mono (Seacrow), Lucida Grande (website), Monaco (fingerprint) and Verdana (contact details).

I like this version much more, but I could do with a better font than Optima for my name, and the blank space at the top right is bothering me a bit.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-11 02:15
Subject:	Card redux
Security:	Public

After sometime looking at it, I've decided I don't like that business card design at all. The white logo on the coloured background looks totally out of place and the overall design is unbalanced. It feels like a lot of extra weight on the bottom-left corner. I'll work on a new version tomorrow. Time to sleep now.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-11 01:55
Subject:	Of rubber stamps and business cards
Security:	Public

I got those all important rubber stamps today. I'm still tickled pink that you can't run a company without a stamp. Here are sample impressions of both:

( See rubberstamp impressions )

I also designed myself a business card:

( See business card )

This will again go through considerable review before going into print because a business card is a very important piece of communication serving several purposes: to identify the company and the individual, without one overshadowing the other, to provide contact details, and to create an impression on the receiver that will remind them of the company with just a slight glance at the card. Expect what goes into print to look very different from this first trial.

The card size is a standard credit card sized 85×55mm. I think I'll make it a little more wider. The colours used are Maraschino (vertical), Tangerine (overlap) and Honeydew (horizontal). The fonts are Cochin (logo, website, my name), Georgia (email address), Monaco (PGP fingerprint) and Verdana (address).

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-10 14:13
Subject:	Double Entry Accounting
Security:	Public

If you ever have to handle finances, anything more than your monthly salary, you ought to be familiar with the practise of double entry accounting. This is important, so pay attention now.

You are no doubt familiar with the layout of your bank's passbook or monthly/quarterly account statement. There are usually five columns: Date, Details, Debit, Credit and Balance. Debit is money taken out of the account, Credit is money deposited and the rest should be obvious.

Now an account statement of this kind tells you exactly what transactions have happened with your account, but tells you nothing whatsoever of how your money has been used. Did you spend too much eating out? Do you have debts needing to be paid off? The only way to find out is to run through the details column and when you see what you are looking for, copy it down someplace where you can later add up the figures to get the final sum.

Obviously, doing this every month to analyse all kinds of expenses is not feasible. There has to be a simpler way, and there is a simpler way. It's called double-entry accounting and it's really simple: instead of analysing your transactions when you receive your account statement, update that second table as and when you make a transaction.

For example, suppose you want to track your expenses on eating out and transport: maintain three tables, one for your bank account, one for eating-out expenses and one for transport expenses.

So now you went to Coffee Day and ordered an Iced Eskimo for Rs. 28 using your debit card. This has to be recorded in two tables: in the bank account table as as a debit of Rs. -28, and in the eating-out table as an expense for Rs. +28. When you buy a bus ticket for Rs. 5 to take you home, that again goes in two tables. Bank account, -5, transport, +5. You can see what is happening here: every transaction gets recorded in two places, once as a positive number and once as a negative. This also means that when you sum up all the numbers across all tables, the total figure should be zero. If it isn't, you missed an entry somewhere. A double-entry accounting system is inherently error correcting.

What about tracking income? That's simple too. It shows up as a positive number in your bank account and a negative number in your income table.

Any modern double-entry accounting package like GnuCash will let you organise your accounts — what I described as a table above is called an account in financial jargon — into a tree structure so you can have greater clarity on your expenses. Some also support journalised transactions, allowing you to split a transaction into component parts. This is useful if, for example, you bought a bunch of books and want to record the transaction as one figure in your bank account table but as each individual book in your books table.

Double-entry accounting is an excellent way to track where your money is going and I urge you one and all to take up the practice if you aren't already. Keep track of accounts is hard work, as hard as sorting mail (non-mailing list) into folders, but if you can keep the discipline, you stand to gain immensely.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-10 02:08
Subject:	Stamps
Security:	Public

Plans are on hold for a couple of days. I'm still finding it hard to accept that in the year 2003, you need a rubber stamp to start a company.

I get mine Tuesday evening at 5 PM. There are two stamps actually. One has two lines: "For Seacrow Labs" and "Proprietor" with some space in between where I sign. This is needed for the bank account. The other stamp has the company's address. I haven't the faintest clue why this needed, but HDFC Bank won't let me open an account unless I get these two stamps and the registration papers. The two stamps cost Rs. 70. I'm getting them made from a place just outside the Jayanagar 4th block shopping complex on 9th Main road.

I used my time at the bank to apply for a credit card. My three accounts with them are all just above minimum balance (since all my money is sitting in a Bank of America account, and fast losing value as the rupee gains against the dollar), but the personal banker helping me with my papers said I was eligible for a Gold card. Maybe it was because I gave her a check for $2000 to put into my NRE account just before asking for a credit card. I refused the Gold and asked for a Silver card. She couldn't tell me about the credit limit on either (said the credit department decided that) but the annual fee on the Gold card is Rs. 1,500 while on the Silver it is Rs. 500.

I'm not very particular about the credit limit because I don't intend to use the card as a financing tool. My only interests in it are (a) for security when making online payments, and (b) for making small international payments quickly. And yes, contrary to popular perception, a credit card is the safest way to buy online. With the current policies of all major providers, you the customer are totally safeguarded from online fraud. If a merchant fails to deliver, you can cancel the payment. If a merchant leaks/loses your credit card information, you can cancel all those transactions too. With a debit/check card or NetBanking service, there is no such safety. I recently discovered this buying a VSNL renewal using a check card. Citibank (VSNL's payment gateway) eventually refunded the payment, but did not refund the 3% transaction fee Bank of America charges on all non-dollar transactions. I was the loser for no fault of mine.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-09 00:08
Subject:	Letterhead
Security:	Public

I spent the evening designing myself a letterhead. Here is what I came up with:



The font used for both logo and address line is Cochin. I used it because I like the large ascender over the x-height (for the typographically challenged, Mr. M. G. Moinuddin's monograph on typography for non-designers (Zipped PDF) is a good place to start).

The logo shows four planes overlapping such that no one plane can be considered to be at the bottom or top of the stack. I originally discovered this several years ago when learning about Binary Space Partitioning for high-speed 3D rendering in games and eventually realised that it is also representative of real-world problems: oftentimes, any one step in the solution to a problem will affect all the others; the only way to solve it is considering all at once ("the big picture"). The logo is simple and therefore flexible for future modifications or sub-branding. It was also more difficult to draw than appearances suggest. To create the current version using an illustrator program (I used OmniGraffle), I had to cut one plane into two halves, place the halves at either end of the list of layers, and paste one final "patch" plane on top to hide the overlap.

I'm not fully satisfied with how the text places next to the logo and will probably twiddle it for many weeks to come. For now, I need a letterhead to continue with the registration process, and this will suffice.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-08 17:50
Subject:	Starting with accounting
Security:	Public

I have GnuCash working on Mac OS X now. Version 1.8.2 from Fink. I'm going to be keeping separate accounts for myself and the company. This is not legally required, but I want to keep my accounts clean.

I have some basic understanding of double-entry accounting systems, having used FreeCoins for several months last year, but I can see that there is a lot more to be learnt if I want to use GnuCash for anything more than just keeping records.

Tomorrow I go open a current account. I've banked with HDFC Bank for over four years now and they are my first choice, but I've also heard that they need a minimum balance of Rs. 25,000 in a current account, and that doesn't look too good. Still, if I can open a savings and current account with them and get a debit card and Internet banking, it will make expense management a lot easier.

I'm also going to upgrade my brother's machine so that his existing box becomes my network/data/backup server. Lucky bum's going to get a 2GHz processor. He has a Celeron 600 right now. Thankfully all the components I need are lying around at home, except a motherboard, CPU and monitor, and I can live with a headless box, so the expense won't be too much.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-08 14:20
Subject:	Why a proprietorship?
Security:	Public

So of course the answer to the question burning in your minds: why am I registering Seacrow Labs as a proprietorship? To many of us in the open source community, the word "proprietary" is dirty. It connotes images of unethical practices, of hiding your source from customers, of locking them into business with you.

The word means other things when registering a company.

There are basically four types of companies legally possible in India: proprietorship, partnership, private limited and public limited. They fall into two categories, of unlimited liability and limited liability. Herewith, a concise explanation of each:

Unlimited Liability - Proprietorship:
This is the simplest of all. In this model, the proprietor (owner) is the company. The company's profits are the owner's income. The owner is fully liable for the company's actions.

Registration is a relatively informal process: open a current account, print a letter head and a rubber stamp, and register with the departments of income tax, sales tax and service tax.

Since I will not be selling material goods, I will be skipping sales tax registration.

Unlimited Liability - Partnership:
This is very similar to the proprietorship model, except with two are more owners. All partners are fully liable for the company's actions. This model is generally considered a difficult one to maintain.

Limited Liability - Private Limited:
In the limited liability model, the company is independent of the promoters. The company is considered a legal person, with all the rights that a human has. The company comes to exist through a formal process called incorporation, and has a board of directors (minimum two) and a constitution. All major business decisions have to be approved by the board through a majority vote. I'm not familiar with the specifics of this model, so if you have something to add, please drop a comment below.

Private Limited companies are easily identified by the "Pvt. Ltd." suffix to the company name. There used to be a requirement that the name also contain an "(India)" tag, supposedly to ensure there was no naming conflict with any company in the world. I do not know if this is still required.

Limited Liability - Public Limited:
Again similar to a private limited, except the public is invited to invest in the company via the stock markets. This is the post-IPO stage of a private limited company. This also imposes requirements of transparency on the company — minutes of board meetings must be made public, an annual report must be published detailing the company's financial performance, and salaries of the board and top management must be revealed.

Unlike American stock exchanges, a company cannot be listed on an Indian stock exchange unless the company is profitable. Once again, I do not know much about how this works and any additions or corrections to this brief summary are welcome.

Professor Rajendra K. Lagu at IIT-B has slides from his lectures on entrepreneurship online. Lecture 2 (PPT) deals with what I've described above with a little more detail.

Poster:	jace
Date:	2003-06-08 03:58
Subject:	Hello, World!
Security:	Public

Watch this journal to see a baby company take baby steps.