iAccelerator works with brilliant first time entrepreneurs to establish well run, technically excellent, profitable technology companies in India. We’ve been following iAccelerator closely since its inception. In its current year, iAccelerator has come up with the concept of EIRs (entrepreneurs in residence). These EIRs are people who want to be entrepreneurs, have basic understanding of technology but more importantly, have industry experience or managerial backgrounds. Not only do they come in early and help CIIE pick out the right startups, they also try and form a startup team by either joining in with a startup or finding the right people to work with for their business idea.

I got in touch with two of them, Amit and Pankaj and had a rapid fire interview with them.

Ujj: Hi Amit, lets start with you. Please give a little background of yourself.

Amit Sharma: I have done my B.Tech. in Computer Science in 1995. Since then I have been working with various companies here in India and US. I was with FIS when I decided to do something of my own in April 2008. I moved out and since then running an IT consulting business and working on some ideas of my own. I hope to find a team that can benefit from my experience and has the execution capabilities that I can leverage upon for shaping our products. Continue Reading »

On March 15, we watched riveted as Nawaz Sharif successfully led a mass demonstration forcing Pakistani President Zardari to reinstate dismissed chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Even as Pakistan stepped back from a precipice, uncertainties remain. Mutiny interviewed Munizae Jahangir (NDTV’s Pakistan correspondent) to understand where Pakistan is headed. Mutiny is grateful to Munizae for her time and insight. Interview excerpts follow.

Ujjwal: The situation getting resolved peacefully is great news and its perhaps correct for Mr Shahbaz Sharif to call it a great victory for the people in Pakistan, but what do you think is going to happen next?
Munizae: There are many things and issues that need to be resolved and it’s difficult to predict events in Pakistan, as the situation is always volatile and the stakes high. Nevertheless now that the Chief Justice has been reinstated, a battle for Punjab will begin, which is the richest province in Pakistan. Though it initially seemed like PPP would form govt with the PML (Q) ( a party once backed by Musharraf) in Punjab, it is now clear that the PML (N) is in a better position to form government. So once governor rule is lifted from the province, the Sharif brothers will regain control of Punjab. There have also been several petitions that have been filed in the courts challenging former General Musharraf’s 8 year rule. He has been accused of high treason and of savagely violating the constitution of Pakistan. Another petition will be filed against Musharraf very soon for the murder of Baloch leader Akbar Bugti. This petition, if entertained by the courts, carries weight and could land Musharraf into trouble. It would be interesting to see if the army can protect their former Chief of Army Staff against a series of petitions.

Ruchi: Pakistan’s power structure is fissiparous with parallel power centers in the military (four military coups in 60 years) and a weak civilian government. Now we have a rising Islamic fundamentalist belt in north-west Pakistan (Shariah rule in Swat valley). Where do you think Pakistan is headed?
Munizae: This is a very complicated question with no simple answer. It is true that we have a weak civilian government, but many in Pakistan and around the world are now convinced that democracy is the only way forward for Pakistan. The new Obama administration’s fresh approach to Pakistan is a very positive sign. They are now engaging with the people and politicians of Pakistan rather than the military. And that can only bring positive change. Moreover the Taliban do not seem to have any local support as they have targeted schools, hospitals and even mosques. People have little respect for them, and at best they are feared in most areas that they control. The politicians in power ( i.e. the PPP and the ANP, Awami National Party) have made it clear that they sincerely want to fight back the Taliban. But the onus of reclaiming territory from the Taliban lies on the military. If they genuinely fight the Taliban, Pakistan can be rescued; otherwise we are all headed for more turmoil and violence.

Ruchi: Pakistan has recently seen the highest inflation levels in the past three years, depreciating currency and depleting foreign reserves (which led to a $7 B loan from the IMF). In addition, there is strong US presence/intermediation, which angers many Pakistanis. In this situation, can any leader (military or civilian) successfully walk the tightrope between the Islamic hardliners and moderates?
Munizae: I think in Pakistan, like anywhere in the world, people want simple things. They want clean drinking water, electricity, job opportunities and a decent education for their children. So I think that the economy will be a priority for most politicians or even military leaders. But over the years Pakistan has become more conservative in many ways, and this has made it very difficult for secular leaders, like Asfandywar Wali Khan of the ANP.

Ujjwal: Do you think a democratic system of governance is difficult to implement in Pakistan, in other words, is a coup always a possibility? On the other hand, this is the biggest civil disobedience demonstration in Pak history. Is this Pakistan’s citizens way of finally asserting democratic ideals?
Munizae: I think the ground had already been softened for asserting the people’s will. Let us not forget that it was the lawyer’s movement against Musharraf that paved the way for democracy to return in Pakistan. It was only after the lawyer’s took to the streets, that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif ordered their party workers to join the movement. The chaos and the challenge to Musharraf emboldened them to devise a return to Pakistan and negotiate with America for a return to democracy. So I think what happened on March 16^th was a build-up and it was encouraging to see that when a democratic government was pushed into a corner it behaved better than a military one. I also feel that the media has played a crucial role in creating awareness and building a democratic culture. Pakistanis now jealously guard their democracy and I think that in this new Pakistan, it would not be that easy to swallow another military takeover. There is no international or national appetite for a military seen as corrupt and soft on militants.

Today we have with us Nandini Narula, founder of GreenMango, that is a startup working towards connecting users with small business entrepreneurs. According to their site,

Everyday, we comb the streets of Hyderabad to find you the best carpenters, tailors, plumbers, mechanics, repairmen and other service providers in your neighborhood. We also know how important recommendations from others are when hiring a service provider, so we offer you reviews and ratings from their past customers. We want to make your life a little easier by bringing you the information you need everyday.

Ujj: Hi Nandini, thanks a lot for speaking to us. To start with, tell us something about your team, how was it formed? How did you people come up with something so unique, when the rest of the world wants to develop fancy web applications?

Nandini: Yasmina McCarty and I co-founded GreenMango in 2008. While working in the microfinance sector for several years together, Yasmina and I often talked about the need for a new, innovative, scalable way to help low-income entrepreneurs to grow their businesses. While brainstorming different ideas, we often thought about a woman named Malou Bacani. For the past 15 years, Malou Bacani has sold green mangos in Baguio City where Yasmina grew up. Yasmina used to see her everyday on her way to school. Malou worked 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, but still struggled to save enough money to send her daughter to school. Malou represents so many of the hard working, resourceful, smart, deserving small business owners who struggle to make ends meet. So, in 2007, we went to Hyderabad to conduct research with other microentrepreneurs and the people who use their products/services to find a solution, to find a way to help these small businesses increase their earning potential. The entrepreneurs confirmed our hypothesis: one of their biggest hurdles to growth is finding new customers. Traditional sales and marketing channels are too expensive for small businesses so they generally rely on “word-of-mouth” referrals and wait for customers to find them. Without marketing support, microentrepreneurs are essentially invisible to many potential customers. We designed GreenMango to address this challenge, to help entrepreneurs like Malou increase their income. That’s how GreenMango was born!

Continue Reading »

A couple of months ago we had blogged about Grassroutes, a unique fellowship where selected youth from India would go on a road trip to interact with NGOs. Grassroutes is the pilot project of Yofa.org, a not-for-profit start-up based out of Bangalore. I got the chance to interview the Co-Founder of Yofa, Keerthikiran (or Keeki) who is all of just 22 years old.

I had taken this interview a couple of weeks ago.

Hi KeKi. I know you’re a busy man, so lets jump right into it, shall we? What is YoFa all about? 

Hello Rishabh. You see, the spirit is captured in its name Youth Factor (Yofa). It is the imagination to dream of the impossible, the idealism to believe ‘we can change the world’ and the energy to conquer our dreams, this is what we believe youth factor is. We want to channel this to bring about a social change. We want to work with youth like us in changing our world.

And you’re kick starting your activities with your first initiative: Grassroutes. Could you summarize Grassroutes for our readers?

Sure, would be happy to. Grassroutes is a fellowship program where in interested youth (we’re defining youth as anyone below the age of 25), in teams of 4 to 6 embark on a ten day road trip. For the maiden edition, the judging panel shall select 3 teams and these teams travel to a pre-decided NGO. They stay there for 10 days, travel with activists and volunteers at the NGO, get interviews, record their story and implement small tasks apart from finding out other ways in which they could help out. After these 10 days come back and process the footage put it up on the website along with all the interviews and the journey, there logs and so on. These fellows shall continue to work with NGO on helping them out with things decided during their stay and act as ambassadors of these organisations for up to four months after the fellowship.

 So will skills like video editing hold a lot of importance in determining if your team makes through?

Not really, we have been scouting for people who can help us with production. But teams will be active participants of this phase too

Wonderful, so all you need is the determination and the enthusiasm to go on that trip.  Tell me another thing; in an age where every other start-up is looking to make a profit how did you land up with an idea like this?

We, at Yofa, believe that money is never a constraint if you have an idea that adds value to all the stakeholders involved in the project and also, society at large. We are building a model that will make the Fellowship Program sustainable from the future editions.

Which all NGOs have you roped in as of now?

For this edition of Grassroutes we are working on three issues viz. Rural health care, Weaver crisis and wildlife protection. On the issue of rural health care, we are partnering with an organisation called Jan Swasthya Sahyog which is working in tribal areas of Bilaspur, Chattisgarh. To cover the weaver industry crisis, we have partnered with an organisation that is working at ground zero of the weaver problem, Pochampally in Andhra Pradesh. The organisation is called Aksharakriti. On the issues of wildlife protection and adivasis in the Nilgiris, we are working with WWF and Accord.

How was the response to the first edition of grassroutes fellowship?

The response to the first edition of grassroutes has exceeded our expectations. We have got support and help from all quarters. We hope to multiply this over the next editions.

So what’s next for the YoFa team?

Yofa team is currently thinking of more ideas which can engage youth into social activism. There are couple of ideas which we are working for the coming year.

One last question before we wrap up. What’s this fascination with chai/kaapi? I see it all over your portal.

Ideas tend to flow freely over cups of Tea or coffee. The whole idea of yofa was conceived over three cups of chai and from then on endless cups of coffee (Discussions) has got us here. Most of our meetings happen at coffee houses and we at yofa call it coffee house activism. Needless to say we survive on caffeine(ideas). So the next time you come to Bangalore, do give us a ping and the coffee will be on us

For Sure. Thank you so much Keeki for the interview.

For more information on Grassroutes or Yofa, do mail Keki at keerthikiran@yofa.org 

Baishampayan Ghose is one of the founders of the Ubuntu India. He has been an active user & developer of Free & Open Source Software for as long as he can remember. He is currently very busy bootstrapping his startup oCricket.com.

In this conversation we talk about Ubuntu India and the latest features in the shiny new Ubuntu 8.10, released earlier this month.

Ujj: To start with, tell us something about Ubuntu, which is being talked about as *the* most popular distros in the open source world. How different is it from its counterparts?

GOSUB: Indeed, Ubuntu is the most popular GNU/Linux distribution in the world right now. I think the most amazing thing about Ubuntu is the community. Right from the very beginning the Ubuntu community was welcoming towards new adopters of Ubuntu; people who have switched from Microsoft Windows, people with absolutely no idea about the very basic concepts of an UNIX-like operating system. While other communities would shoo them away or discourage them in many ways, the Ubuntu community would  painstakingly explain all the intricacies of the system and help them solve their problem. This was, in my  opinion something that set Ubuntu apart even from its very early days and it prevails now even today.

Of course the popularity of Ubuntu has a lot to do with the underlying technology and I think we need to thank the Debian project for that. Ubuntu is deeply intertwined with the Debian project and the relationship exists even today. The whole project management tool-chain of Ubuntu, Launchpad (http://launchpad.net) which was developed from scratch by Canonical also plays a major part in this. Launchpad is an excellent set of tools which comprises a BugTracker, a Localisation manager, a community Q&A system, a specifications management system, code hosting system and a lot more. It has tight integration with all the Ubuntu desktop applications and make the job of a bug reporter or translator easy. Lastly, Ubuntu’s various mailing lists, IRC channels provide an awesome mechanism for users to ask for help or coordinate projects in more or less real time. They are great. Ubuntu also has Local Community teams which coordinate projects, provide support, etc. in a region-specific way. So if you have problems in typing in Malayalam in Ubuntu, you might want to hop into the IRC channel of Ubuntu India (#ubuntu-in) and get help there, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, projects like Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, etc. are excellent too but Ubuntu kind of like caters to the `common-man’ among all computer users and that’s what really sets it apart. Continue Reading »

The Indian IT industry has its share of young entrepreneurs spread throughout the country. It also has a handful of open coffee meets and barcamps but there was always a dearth of guidance for starting up, especially for young hackers who would probably associate operation cost with some sort of medical expenses.

iAccelerator, a startup summer school by IIM A is one such initiative that is built on the lines of Paul Graham’s yCombinator. The idea is simple, young aspiring hackers get enough time to build their products and then are helped, to turn their products into viable business venture, by the in house management talent of IIM A. Ujj’s previous post on iAccelerator.

In this interview Ujj talks to Aditi, the Senior Associate at the Center for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship IIM A.

Ujj: Hey aDeSe (thats Aditi’s twitter id :)), nice to have you on mutiny. First thing, how was the whole thing conceptualized? I understand its inspired by the Ycombinator model but I am sure you people had to change a lot of stuff.

Aditi: The iAccelerator was conceptualised between CIIE, Kuruvindum, Microsoft and NASSCOM.
Identifying innovations in the Web and Mobile domain and creating an ecosystem to support them, brought about the need to conceptualise the program. YCombinator was an inspiration because they have managed to float quite a few successful companies out of their short duration incubation program and India needed this at the earliest. Continue Reading »

Today we have with us Alok, CEO of Novatium talking to us about netPC.

The netPC is a simple and affordable computer without a hard drive. It is a complete desktop with in-built internet access, chat webcam reaching your home just like cable TV service. It costs less than a 100$ with monthly rental plans beginning at $10 for a broad band connection. Heres a little talk with Alok on the netPC

Ujj: Its great to have you on mutiny Alok first of all, how is netPC different from other 100$ computer projects like the OLPC in terms of technology, target audience or any other aspect?

Alok: The primary objective of netPC is to make computing simple and economical without compromising on the user experience. Uncompromised computing implies that the users are able to do everything he/she expects out of computer without being affected by performance and features of the applications available. Novatium’s netPC allows the user to work with the desktop of his/her choice - Linux or Windows. The user can use any of his/her preferred applications.

Continue Reading »

Pulse Polio Vaccination is a medical programme organized with a lot of publicity and awareness by the government. You might remember the TV advertisements where the Hindi cinema super star Amitabh Bhachan calls people to give polio vaccination to their little kids. In this interview with Dr. Hari, he questions the credibility of this programme. Dr. Hari is a social activist and a practicing homeo doctor from Vayanad in Kerala. He is actively involved in Anti Polio Vaccination programme and raising awareness on the subject.

Incidentally just some time before I did the following interview, four little kids died because of the anti-measles vaccination in Thiruvallur in Tamil Nadu state. Also fifteen kids are hospitalized for the same reason.

The government itself is raising awareness through advertisements to promote pulse polio vaccination with showing it’s positive results. So what prompted you to work against polio vaccination?

It is the same kind of advertisements that you talked about which eventually lead me to this. It is widely known that all existing vaccinations have dangerous reactions and this information can be seen even in our medical school textbooks. But the government is insisting that our little kids should take vaccination. Knowing the consequences of vaccination, I decided to talk against it as a doctor and as a social activist.

What are the prime accusations against the polio vaccination? What are the side effects?

The vaccine that is used for polio vaccination is OPV (Oral Polio Vaccination). This OPV is a live attenuated vaccine (LAV). It means that the vaccine contains weakened forms of the organism that causes the disease. Because of that this vaccine could cause dangerous reactions in kids who have low resisting power and can even cause death. There are two types of side effects which is officially acknowledged - VAPP (Vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis) and VDPV (Vaccine-derived polioviruses). Also some sudden deaths due to allergic reactions have been reported.

It should be noted that the doctors like Jacob John, Jacob M Puliyil, Rinu Patel etc who head this vaccination programme in Kerala are aware of the dangers of VAPP and VDPV and have admitted it. That is when the government itself is advertising this programme and slaps it on our children. Even if we agree just for the debate sake that the vaccination theory is correct, there is no justification in medical science about giving this medicine continuously or more than once.

Continue Reading »

I went with a long list of questions. I entered his room, like I have done a hundred times before, and sat on the chair with his permission. I told him, “Sir, I am here for your interview, it will be published online on mutiny.in.� Then he asked me what mutiny.in was and made me explain the concept of blogging and group bloggers. I was only happy to do it for him. What more would you want when you get to teach such a great man! At 87, he is very active and still had his charm and amazing sense of humour.

Mutiny: Sir, we have heard that you were asked to step down from your post at Prasar Bharathi…

Kamath: Yes, it is true. But will you please listen to me before you ask those questions? (Pointing out to the list in my hand with a wide smile) I want to tell you the entire story.

Continue Reading »