Lately, I have been thinking that certain music genres correspond to the design, philosophy, practice and perception of certain programming languages. Let me know if you (dis)agree with me.

• Pop is Java and .NET
• Jazz is C and C++
• Hip-Hop is PHP and Ruby on Rails
• Electronica/Trance is Prolog, Lisp and other functional languages
• Nursery Rhymes is Visual Basic
• Classical is Fortran, Cobol and Assembly
• World Music/Fusion is Clojure, Jython, etc.
• Rock is definitely Python and Ruby

Have I missed any major genres and programming languages?

If you are like most of the entrepreneurs, you want to find a business idea which can change the world and make you a famous millionaire. Plus you want an idea which is not hard to execute so that you may have best of all worlds. There is nothing wrong with this thought, except that either it is impossible or you need heavy doses of luck to make it a reality.

Easy to start and execute businesses rarely make it big. If you are thinking of writing an application which will revolutionize the web overnight, forget it. If you are thinking of coming up with a business model which will rock the world and make you arrive on the scene instantly, forget it.

Look around yourself and you will find that most of the successful businesses didn’t happen in a day or a month or (heck!) even a year. All things in life take their sweet time, success takes a little longer. By working hard, day by day, a successful business creates a huge barrier to entry for other players; while at the same time creating value for the customer.

Imagine for a moment that a particular business is lucrative and easy to start. If you want to enter that business, you are not alone; why wouldn’t everyone want to do that. So many players in an area create intense amount of clutter, competition and a crack in your profitability. Eventually, the business becomes a commodity business and you don’t want that to happen, do you?

So you don’t really want to start an easy business at the first place. Instead, given your skills, time and money investment and other constraints, you must choose the hardest possible business. This is the golden rule for startups. Harder a business to start, better will be its eventual returns.

If you persevere, while building a tough business, you will make a moat around your business (as Warren Buffet puts it). This moat will make it harder for your potential competitors to enter your area, while allowing you to focus exclusively on value creation for the customer. Five or ten years down the line, you could then be the leading business in your area. (See related concept of The Dip by Seth Godin.)

Repeat after me. More operational the business, the better it is. More impossible-looking the business is, better it is. More technology-intensive the business, the better it is. More web 2.0 the business is, (chances are) the worse it is.

Now Good.

Stanford is providing some of its engineering courses online accessible to anyone. Check it out here.

I just watched first lecture of the machine learning course and I must say it is excellent! I hope that all good universities in the world start providing video lectures online.

Times of India has written an article on Kroomsa. Click here to read the article!

In no particular order, following are the people whom I consider greatest living thinkers today. These are the people who are trying to pioneer a paradigm shift in our thinking exactly the same way Einstein, Leonardo Vinci and other people did in their respective times. You will definitely find worthwhile to read about the (works of) following thinkers:

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: debunking economists and their arrogance
• Richard Dawkins: pro-evolution and anti-religion
• Paul Graham: advocate for startups and why it makes sense to startup a company
• Seth Godin: the unconventional marketing guy
• Stephen Hawking: the scientist who cares to explain cosmology, quantum mechanics, black holes and the origin of universe to lay people

Do you think I missed any thinkers worth mentioning? What are your opinions on above mentioned thinkers?

I am happy to invite you to the fifth avatar of BarCampDelhi, which will be held at IIT-Delhi on 11th and 12th October. With 100+ registrations already, the event is set to be super-exciting this time.

For those of you who do not know what BarCamps are all about, check this wikipedia entry. Barcamps are mainly user generated events with no fixed agenda. All the attendees are invited to participate in the talks and whoever wants to voice his opinion on anything, he can. As the word goes around, “BarCamp is an event where no one is barred from speaking.” [Courtesy: Prashant Singh]

To register for the event (it’s free!) and to know who all are attending the event, check out the BarCampDelhi 5 Wiki Page.

To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

More than for anyone else, this is most true for hackers. If they have learnt a new technology or a new methodology, they subconsciously hunt for where they can apply that new-new thing. When they have a so-called epiphany, they work like asses to come up with self-contained solution, which they like to call as a startup. Then they enter into a cocoon thinking that auto-magically their startup will be next big thing and probably change the world.

All the above is perfectly fine if the hacker knows that the chances of changing the world through his self-indulgent projects are slim. So, this is the single most important thing a hacker needs to learn: unless he is solving a real problem, it is unlikely that what he calls a startup would evolve into something serious.

So all you hackers, get this: problems are separate from technology. Set your priorities right and later don’t crib that the world doesn’t care about you and what you do.

I’ve been nominated for the TATA NEN Hottest Startups awards. Brought to you by National Entrepreneurship Network and TATA Group, in association with Helion, Mint, Seedfund and Wadhwani Foundation, it is India’s only community-chosen awards for Indian start-ups.

Vote for my startup Kroomsa (http://kroomsa.com/) online at NEN Hottest Startups or via sms by smsing HOT71 to 56767 (Indian numbers only!)

Looking forward to your support.

All you Indian hackers and startuppers out there, are you tired of trying to find a community where you could be yourself? Are you tired of keeping track of all the bewildering number of developments in the startup scene in India? Do you have the word “entrepreneur” written all over the place?

Well, enough. I’m proud to announce the Indian Version of Hacker News at http://news.startuplogic.com/. I hope this place can blossom into a healthy community and for that I would require your help.

All those who feel strongly about this thing, help the community by:

• Tweeting about it
• Writing a short and sweet blog post about it
• Finally, being active on the community

Hope to see you there soon!

The best article ever on basics of founding a startup. The article highlights all the legal things you have to be involved in if you are serious about your business idea and not just hallucinating. Fundamentals of startup financing is also there. Surely, a must read!