Sorry for crushing your dreams but your web app for tracking happiness levels (or for “social-aware” todo lists) is probably not going to make enough money to let you retire in Hawaii. Many programmers and web developers find making a web app very satisfying and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as you are doing it for fun, it is OK. But making web apps is the trivial part. After all, most web apps are nothing more than a slick interface for CRUD operations. The key to making money is to find a market where people are willing to pay for those simple CRUD operations.

The usual approach for making web apps (or “startup” as some would like to call it) is this:

• Have a “cool” idea
• Implement it in X number of hours
• Try to justify its need by finding users who may use it

I am just making up a statistic here, but I have seen 9/10 efforts losing hope after the third step and the web app just languishes with the creator given up on it after initial euphoria.

That is a wrong approach.

If making money is the objective, I suggest going with the market-first approach (as opposed to idea-first approach). If you are confident that you will be able to make a good enough product/prototype, I suggest taking the following approach:

• Find an industry (ideally, an old fashioned one) where people are making money
• Find the single differentiator which will put your app apart in the already established industry (read or research what pain points are still not addressed by top 3 solutions)
• Make a web app, market it, refine it based on feedback, monetize the app
• Slowly incorporate all standard features expected out of a solution in that industry so you can shoot to be a market leader

Note that I never talked about the idea here. That’s because I believe in market-first approach. Any sufficiently big market will give you tons of interesting ideas. Why do you need to come up one of your own?

As far as finding industries that make money is concerned, I will blog about it in next post. But I will leave with an example: Survey Industry. Did you know Survey Monkey makes $45 million a year in this (boring) industry? Then there are other players who are most likely profitable: Wufoo, Survey Gizmo, Kampyle, etc. So, instead of an image-gallery app, why not make a survey software specifically targeted at, say, event attendees. Once your app is ramen profitable, fire all your engines and pivot as full-blown survey software.

Aim is to make money, not justify your “cool” idea.

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• How to find startup ideas that make money
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I just thought of sharing a technique I have been using lately for collecting knowledge on target industry or a new tool/startup idea

For example, you have been trying to something in online backups (a purely hypothetical example).

First, come up with top 3 relevant keywords that people search for while thinking of online backups. You may use Google insights for search.

Here are the relevant keywords I found: “online backups”, “data backups”, “server backups”

Now here is the juicy part. Go to Twitter search and for each of your keyword, search on following themes:

• What people like: search combination of keyword with words “like”, “love”, “great”, “cool”, “:)”. Example – “online backup” “love”
• What people dislike: search for “hate”, “sucks”, “:(”, “bad”, “worst”
• What people want: search for “want”, “wish”, “if only”, “lacking”

This will give you a pretty good idea of what people like, dislike and want in this particular industry. And if you spot patterns, you could have tremendous insight.

Further exploration:

• Expand your set of keywords
• Do the same three sets of searches for competitors/leaders in that industry
• Don’t just limit till Twitter, do Google blog search also

Any more ideas? More terms for searching likes, dislikes and wants? Now if someone could just make an app for simplifying this. Anyone?

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ReadWriteWeb had a nice, long article written on Wingify’s ContextSense. Read the article titled Identify Any Website’s Sentiment with ContextSense.

To quote:

To test out ContextSense’s accuracy, we put in the URL for ReadWriteWeb.com (but of course). The end result was mostly on target, identifying our main concepts as a top ten list including things like software, Google, iPhone, news and media, commenting, semantic web, and more. The last three items in the list – AJAX, class libraries, and JavaScript – were off base. Perhaps that’s why they were greyed out while the rest of the list was in black, though. There isn’t any explanation as to what the shading means, but that’s a logical leap.

The categories list was similar to the concepts list except it showed more of a drill-down as to what broader topics the concepts came from. For example, for “Semantic Web,” the associated category was “Reference > Knowledge Management > Knowledge Representation > Semantic Web.”

The tool also ranked our site as “slightly positive,” which makes sense since we’re passionate about technology and don’t (often) post negative reviews – we tend to just skip product reviews for those sites and services we don’t think much of.

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HT Mint ran an article on Pluggd.in and Wingify was featured as one of the few startups that the blog helped (which was very true). To quote:

Meanwhile, some very young firms have gained from Pluggd.In’s coverage. For six-month-old Wingify, a New Delhi-based firm that offers website optimization software, the biggest challenge was in getting early adopters. The firm is yet to launch its product, but was pleasantly surprised when, within three weeks of being featured on Pluggd.In, it got 10 early users and possibly its first customer. Pluggd.In had profiled the firm in July, says Paras Chopra, chief executive, Wingify. The start-up had approached Sinha for using its optimization software on his website.

He used it, liked it and profiled it, says Chopra, adding that Sinha continues to use the software. The firm is now in talks with a Bangalore-based venture capital firm, which has a portfolio company looking for the kind of technology Wingify offers, said Chopra, adding that the talks are at an advanced stage.

“Having early adopters is crucial for a firm like ours. We need validation, some early users, before we make an announcement to the world. A lot of positive things have happened to us since the coverage,” says Chopra.

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For those who are not aware of digital evolution, I am writing a quick short summary. Digital evolution means evolution of computer programs who compete for limited resources such as CPU and memory. In short, it goes something like this:

- You define a universe, which is virtual memory (space) and CPU (time)
- You create energy (CPU cycles)
- You define an extremely limited instruction set for Virtual Machine (Physics). Instruction set being limited is important because you want to mimic physics, not chemistry or biology
- You seed randomly generated programs of varying length
- You start parallel execution the random programs
- Each instruction eats up energy and at random times you feed energy into universe
- At random times mis-execute program instructions
- Run it for a long time and Voila! finally self replication gets evolved from very simple instructions
- Then arms race gets started between programs and things get interesting

Some people argue that digital evolution is not merely an emulation of real thing but is indeed a real manifestation of evolution and I tend to believe the same.

To download the digital evolution simulator written by me in Python (called PyPond), head to: Download: Normal version or With graphics version (requires PyGame library)

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I randomly stumbled across many interesting April Fools pranks on the Internet today. So, I thought of sharing them here:

• Youtube’s Flip
• Opera’s Facial Gestures
• Google’s 3D Browsing
• Pirate Bay’s acquisition by Warner Bros.
• Guardian’s decision to publish only on Twitter
• Amazon’s helium baloons hosted on clouds

Enjoy! I will try to add more as I come across them. Do let me know if you any interesting pranks.

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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?

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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.

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

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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.

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