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.

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

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

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…

The day was very hectic… was up @ 10 AM, saw “Horton hears a who” @ 11 AM, had a quick breakfast @ 1PM, started for LCG meeting @ 3PM and then finally met the Entrip.com guys at 6PM - all as I planned yesternight

…and by now I am dead tired - just enough of me left to write this post

The meeting with Entrip.com founders was special because we were kind’of resonating at the same frequency, the same enthusiasm and that energy. Of course, the thread which tied us all together was Rails

EnTrip is an integrated travel utility which enables you to:

• Plan or map out your entire trip, using our intuitive map-based interface
• Capture the experiences and vivid memories that make up your trip, within their geographical context
• Easily share your adventures with friends and family around the world, in a meaningful way

If you are interested in how it works, try out the founding team’s trip to India.

I wish them a ton of good luck for their project.

Its almost 4 AM now & past 3 hours saw a lot of commits going into ApnaBill.com code. After realizing that we were not generating (X)HTML code, the effort was targeted at containment, if not eradication

Many thanks to Zundra for pointing this out to me.

Due to an open div tag, the new (& slick looking) navbar wasn’t showing up on IE. HTML cleanup frenzy atleast solved that problem…

Here is what’ve changed in the code so far (straight out of our changelog)

• Fixed a typo in recharge layout, a div tag was left open…
• Added type=text/css attribute to many style tags.
• Corrected CSS markups, removed dups.
• Added type=text/javascript attribute
• Cleaned up recharge layout, removed closing slash in self ending tags.
• Moved critical developer comments into ruby comments
• Moved hover box font=+2 to CSS
• Added invite section to navbar, removed the top-left badge.

Phew! Thats enough work for the night… onto some hollywood flick now!

Oh yes, btw, tomorrow’s a pretty hectic day. I’m watching “Horton Hears a Who” at 11AM, then going for LCG Meet at 3PM and meeting folks from www.entrip.com at 6PM. Wow! Now thats some schedule!

A quick refresher on Newton’s laws of motion

• “An object will stay at rest or continue at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force”
• “The net force on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by its acceleration”
• “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”

Yesterday, I was pushing Sandy to fill up some forms when it suddenly hit me that it was actually all working exactly according to Newton’s laws of motion.

Dodge this!
An idea always remains an idea until someone (or a team) pushes himself to take the pains of getting it done. In other words, the object (the idea) would remain an idea until an external force (effort) is applied to it. Once the effort comes in, the idea starts taking a shape - steadily.

The amount of effort put in by all the team members combined, can give a fair idea bout the output. This output can be a deliverable or a beta release.

Force = Mass * Acceleration
is analogous to
Release = Team * Effort

But it is to be kept in mind all the time that this force (effort) is a vector quantity - ie., it has a directional sense attached to it. If all team members work together towards the same goal, the effort would be additive - otherwise subtractive.

No market is good enough for a business which does not has a competition. More the amount of existing competition, the better product/results a new team would plan to deliver.
Market forces would then determine which one goes on to live and which one perishes.

The similarity I found between the laws and the way we work at ApnaBill.com, made me sit up and write this blog post at 2 AM in the morning…. now thats some force

The only other time I felt this big a kick… was when I first wore Red Hat’s shirt!

You had to be in that moment to feel the kick as I felt it!

Apparel printed at Rottees