Dare to Dream?

PuneTech.com just posted an online interview about ApnaBill.com on how it started, challenges it faced and some tips for budding entrepreneurs. Don’t miss it!

[A snip from the interview]

There was this funny thing that set us back by almost 1 month…

We applied for a PAN card for Four Fractions. First, our application somehow got lost in the process. Then someone in the government department managed to put down our address as 108 when it was supposed to be 10 B (8 and B are very similar looking). Read more…

[/A snip from the interview]

PuneTech.com is an initiative from Navin Kabra - with an intent to bring together in one place all information about interesting software technology in Pune - the companies, the products, the people, and the technologies.

ApnaBill.com - Utility Bill Payments, Simplified!

Ever wondered that if you have a Prepaid mobile connection for Spice, Airtel, Idea, Vodafone, BSNL, MTNL, Reliance or other prepaid services like Dish TV or TATA Sky - how can you recharge it online?

The solution is simple!

Using ApnaBill.com, now you can recharge your prepaid mobile in just seconds. The process is very simple.

How to recharge?
1) Visit www.ApnaBill.com
2) Select a coupon
3) Click pay
4) Pay via netbanking or credit cards
5) PIN code is delivered via SMS

Some benefits of using ApnaBill.com
- 100% safe transactions
- No transaction surcharge - 100 bucks coupon for just 100 bucks!
- Great discounts!
- Netbanking for almost all banks - UTI, ICICI, HDFC, etc.
- Excellent and responsive customer support

Now can anyone beat that?

Drawing boards are so much more fun than paper’n pencil

Pushing ApnaBill.com into a Zarro Boogs state suddenly gave me the much needed time to start tinkering with other things in the roadmap. Hence the next obvious destination for me was OpenSocial - about which I’ve been hearing for quite some time now, almost everyone I know is writing some sort of social apps (FaceBook or Orkut)… moreover, these apps can bring a whole new sense of visibility to ApnaBill.com.

Thanks to Rohan, I started off with an inclination towards Orkut apps.

I must say, Google has done nice job of documenting the OpenSocial API’s. The starting point was ofcourse Orkut developer docs

• OpenSocial tutorial for Orkut
• Anatomy of an Orkut app
• Orkut Developer Guide
• API’s : OpenSocial, JavaScript and Gadgets

Ofcourse, to use any of these - you need the Developer Sandbox access to Orkut

The docs and the presented examples seem all good - but if you are a first time OpenSocial developer, the disconnect would be very obvious to you - specially how the OpenSocial API’s and Gadget API’s and JS API’s are all connected.

What I understood from all the reading was that OpenSocial is a set of API’s which all conforming web services expose. Each of these web service (Orkut/Hi5/etc) is a Container and each container exposes some proprietary API’s as well. So if you are developing an app which is to be deployed across multiple websites, make sure you do not use any proprietary code.

And what was the best way of understanding the codebase? Read the Examples! All of them! The more you read them, the more you would be able to the connect between all ingredients of OpenSocial API’s.
OpenSocial apps are primarily HTML and JavaScript - styled using CSS. The HTML forms the display of your app while the JS (bulk of your app) helps you fetch and render the data to & fro from your web service (Orkut/Hi5/etc).

There’s something interesting to note here…
Orkut’s sandbox environment requires your app to be stored on a publicly accessible location. That mean, if you have a website where you can host your JS/XML/CSS - you are good to go instantly. If not, try the Google Gadget Editor and save your files on google’s server.

I was lucky when it came to app hosting. Tata Indicom in Pune, gives static public IP’s for postpaid broadband connections. That means if I run apache on my server and dump my app files on /var/www/orkut folder (Ubuntu) then I can edit the files on my local machine while Orkut sandbox environment can fetch them straight from my machine - awesome! Now I get to use my favorite editor… yay!

App’s main view - Canvas

Profile view of the app

As you can see, my app does nothing intelligent - just lists my friends and their details. But what’s interesting is, I can detect at runtime that which view is being rendered - is it app’s main view or is the app being shown in my profile.

Think of this in more productive sense. If I am building an app for ApnaBill.com (lets say), I can display summary or something on the profile view and a more detailed analysis of the same thing in the app view - isn’t that interesting

What’s next? - Giving purpose to my app!

My example codebase - app.xml, canvas_view.js, profile_view.js
Please replace REPLACE_ME_1 with path to canvas_view.js and REPLACE_ME_2 with path to profile_view.js
Note - I am learning JS as I am proceeding with OpenSocial apps. Please use the above code at your own risk.

[update]
I am a big fan on “Emote” application on Orkut - so decided to examine how it works… loaded up Emote and inspected the “net” tab in Firebug and found this - http://www.rockyou.com/google_apps/emote_example/view/Emote_XML.php -if you can see, Emote is using completely different set of HTML for canvas and profile views. It also has included “dynamic-height” feature to hide the nasty scrollbars - interesting! You might also be interested in checking out the localization technique and the app headers - lots interesting information is there on how they should be used.

This is the sweetest possible message Bugzilla can ever show a developer
Tonight, I’ll be syncing live ApnaBill.com with the most stable version we ever had - the operations are still getting formalized but the code-base looks awesome!

If you come across any bug @ ApnaBill.com, feel free to ping us at our support channel - who knows, you might just save the day for thousands of users

Sameer leading ApnaBill.com pitch at Proto.in

Check him out - isn’t he just too much into the presentation?

Taking questions from the audience…

Finally the team together on stage - its so tough to get all 3 in one frame!!!
Sameer, me and Sandy

BTW - the ApnaBill.com Tee’s are ultra hot! I already have the next versions planned…

Source: Proto.in July Edition photo set on Flickr

Sameer, Sandy and myself - with the Proto.in momento.

ApnaBill.com Team - checkout the slant in the seemingly created skyline

Pictures courtesy Pravin from LifeBlob (one of the 15 finalist at Proto.in)

The atmosphere was electrifying at Proto4 - and the talks were doing everything to make the conference even more interesting!

The presenting startups didn’t got much time to attend the conference talks - we were quickly rushed for the rehersals which were to prepare us for the upcoming showcase on 2nd day of the event. Helping us all along was the great team of Proto - which made sure that we had everything we needed to be ready for those 6 minutes of showcase - a big thanks to the Proto Team.

A quick presentation from ApnaBill kicked off the rehearsals - we fumbled alot, were mixed up alot - and the feedback was all worth it. Just a quick work of advice - never go to a presentation unprepared. ANY preparation is better than NO preparation

After the day of reharsals, we mutually decided that Sameer would head our pack onstage. He did a nice job with the presentation and I guess our point got communicated across to the audience pretty well.

ApnaBill.com Presentation

Sameer presenting ApnaBill.com to a hall packed of audience

ApnaBill.com team (Sameer in front (second from start), Me and Sandy)

Before the day ended, each startup demo’d their products on the stalls. Checking out the stalls were potential users and investors alike.

Me posing with ApnaBill.com (ghosh! that right click…)

Here are some goodblog articles which described the event pretty well.
Rishabh from Mutiny.in - Proto.in goes North
Amit Ranjan from Webyantra - Proto IV at New Delhi: Impressive show for startups, entrepreneurship & technology
Slideshare - A list of startups showcasing at Proto4, Proto4 pictures
AlooTechie - Proto 4- A Winner’s Showcase

* More pictures and videos to follow…
**Pictures courtesy Amit from Slideshare.

All the hard work of almost 9 months culminated with an invite from Proto.in to showcase ApnaBill.com at Proto.in’s July 08 event.

Proto.in is India’s premier event for startups. Going to be held in IIT Delhi on 18th and 19th July 08 - its one of the most promising events that a startup can begin with. With more than 30 participating investors and almost 20 media houses covering this event - this is something to be very proud about. The fact that more than 100 startups applied for July’s Proto.in edition and ApnaBill.com was amongst the 15 who got selected - makes it even more awesome.

I feel jubilient to announce that ApnaBill.com would be presenting itself (for full 6 minutes) in the startup showcase on the second day of Proto.in - to a hall packed with potential investors, future channel partners and our dear current/future users.

If you are attending Proto.in, make sure not to miss this!

Hurray!

The current week is just halfway through, but it has already been one of the most eventful week for ApnaBill.com - with some definite advances towards the release. We’ll be launching the live pilot mode release in just days time.

More good news - we’ve expanded our network coverage from a handful of operators/cities to a pan India coverage.

We’ll be supporting 16 different prepaid vendors across 14 different geographical locations - I must say, that is a mighty list!

And to give you a small hint with what’s in the store, I present to you, bits and pieces from ApnaBill.com UI - all this and much more is just waiting to go live!

All the hard work that has gone into cross browser support…

A self-explanatory teaser on the front page

Another teaser

The prepaid coupon types we’ll be selling…

  
Secure transactions - with subtle hints on the UI

And of course, the ubiquitous help!

Please do signup for our Beta Release if you have not done so. The Beta Signup is still open.

Its been long since I last blogged - and I was kinda missing the blogging scene.

Days and nights are as usual - super hectic. At 4:45am, with “Summer of 69” running at full volume - work on ApnaBill.com is going on in full swing. Last week, we completed integrating our Payment Gateway and Coupons Manager modules into the developer codebase. This was the last blocker bug holding us back from a release. Effort now is targetted on consolidation.

After spending endless days and nights (and full weekends - upto 20 hours each weekend), seeing everything coming and working together as one cohesive and functional unit - is like watching a kid grow and graduate! Bits and pieces of code which were written as long back as 6 months ago are suddenly coming alive all together. Assumptions which were made back then, still hold good - I guess, a bit of future planning always helps.

But as wise men say - “The end is just the beginning!” - there’s still a ton of work left before we can go Live - though we are very seriously thinking of announcing the dates now. The project is expected to go into pilot testing mode anytime now.

Just before ending - a teaser as usual

Mobile operators we would be supporting across India.

& now …back to Summer of 69 and styling ApnaBill.com

PS: Saturday morning, The Chronilcles of Narnia is up at 10:40am at Gold Adlabs - and we have 4 tickets booked for just INR 200

As we speak, CSS goodieness is oozing out of ApnaBill.com developer codebase. I just wish if I could paste some screenshots of our work here…

Anyways - that time would come!

Nothing is more rewarding than watching beta singups grow on ApnaBill.com.

We just completed 600 signups.

We are planning some awesome schemes for our Beta users. So please signup if you havn’t already.

ApnaBill.com SVN repository has seen some real hard work in past few days. We have had over 300 svn commits and 87 live bugs - 22 of which are still open (in new/assigned/lingering state).

These figures make me feel elated, happy - and confident that our release would be devoid of atleast these 87 bugs

Time and again, people have questioned me about these bugfixes in ApnaBill.com code - “Is your code that buggy?” - erhm, well no.

We track both bugs and new feature requests together (a skill that I picked up while working with Red Hat), thereby giving us a uniform outlook of the pending tasks. Besides, new features when tracked via bug reports produce a quality changelog. What was done, how and why - its important that these changes get documented while the feature is still in development phase. Makes future debugging a whole lot easier…

The road ahead, now has a crystal clear view of the destination!
All what we need to reach there is - “Focus“.
We are planning a special discount program for our Beta registrants (though cannot promise on that yet!) - So please signup for our Beta Launch - if you havn’t done so.

Back to squashing more bugs for now…