Connecting Groups
Back to SiteGroups!

SpringSters - Technology Savvy Bunch

Once a new technology rolls over you, if your're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road

Mangospring @ BarCamp Pune 4

Posted by anil on February 29, 2008 RSS Feed

Many of us at MangoSpring have been eagerly waiting for BarCamp Pune 4. Anuj, Vishwa, Shivesh, Basant, Ravinder and myself were all in attendance. It was an exciting day, as this was the first public demo and showcase of PurpleTrail, our first big project at MangoSpring. We have been spending a lot of time and energy getting it ready for public use, and we just recently entered it into beta stage. BarCamp was the right platform to showcase it.

BarCamp is not new to most of us. Anuj had already presented in previous BarCamps in Delhi, etc and I have been an organizer for some previous BarCamps in Pune. BarCamp is always a hit, as 99% of the people attending the event are very interested in the technology, unlike other conferences.

I chose a very interesting topic: “Git Introduction”. I have been using Git for the last two months in my free time. We don’t use it at MangoSpring yet, though I hope that will change soon. Overall, I have found Git to be an excellent distributed source control management tool and I wanted to tell others about it.

On the day of the BarCamp, our talks were scheduled for the first and second talks after lunch. The entire morning at the BarCamp was noisy. People were discussing with each other, and it created a quite geeky, techie and enthusiastic environment.

At 2pm, Anuj started his fast, though relaxing, speech. He has prepared slides and explained in detail and how it works? Initially people were listening as they did not have any idea about product. As Anuj started explaining the features, I was seeing “wow” in their faces. Almost everyone listening got excited about the product. As time went by, initial small whispering in the crowd turned into silence. The only talking was Anuj’s voice, and he had captivated everyone’s attention.

Next Anuj moved onto the demo part of the talk, and this turned out to be a big success. As decided, Anuj demoed the web version and most of the clients running (Symbian, J2ME, desktop, WAP). There are two great moments I remember best. The first was when Vishwa was using WAP and the Symbian client to chat with Anuj, who was using the web version. The second was when Anuj invited two guys sitting in the audience to a demo using their mobile numbers. Within no time they received invite SMSs. Both of these were even a “wow” to me, as it was a real world thing happening in front of me. I think that I was even more happy, as I have been responsible for working on the SMS invites portion of the product. It was very clear that our communication platform the power to change people’s daily life. After seeing everyone’s reaction, I am quite sure that Anuj’s talk was the best talk in this BarCamp. Even afterwards, some people told me that they liked the product very much.


After the it was time for my Git talk. The target of the talk was to inspire people to start using Git for their projects. It turned out to be a good talk, and I think I have inspired enough people to consider Git as their source control management tool.

BarCamp Pune 4 was a great success. Hats off to the BarCamp organizers and the presenters. We all are waiting for the next BarCamp which is scheduled to happen in September.

Riding the next wave

Posted by shivesh on November 5, 2007 RSS Feed

Much has changed in India since the mid-nineties. The opening up of the economy gave India access to foreign markets. One place India grabbed the opportunity was of course, IT exports. But even before all the hoopla of IT services, changes were already taking shape. Small schools in nondescript towns started introducing computers for sixth graders and business systems were being automated using computers. While, automation of systems such as payroll and inventory were not new to India even in the eighties, what was new (world over) was availability of cheap personal computers for everyone from a college graduate to big corporations. Things were chugging along in their own sheepish pace until the mid-nineties, when we realized that the rupee had depreciated to half it’s value while we were sleeping – from 18.1 on 2nd Jan, 1991 to 35.21 on 2nd Jan, 1996.

This is a story that has been told many times, and each time for a reason. The IT services exports boom is of course everyone’s favourite reason. The reason I am bringing it up today is that rupee went up in another curve to about 48 and is back to the level it was in January, 1998. The IT services boom lasted through this curve, and if markets are left alone, we will see a shift in economy towards a higher-value rupee. The rising rupee has the services giants nervous. Nobody likes to challenge status quo, much less a successful organization in an industry that has seen a 30-40% compounded annual growth rate over a decade and more. But we are at another inflection point in the history of India Inc. Rising rupee, increasing wages, foreign investment - all of them together are leaving more money in the hands of people, government and institutions, resulting in higher spending by all. The rising rupee needs to be looked at in its complete context of this new wave. To successfully ride this next wave, it is important to look at what was achieved in the last wave.

Some years ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about what US has gained from India and vice versa. We decided that US companies have been able to concentrate on creative, design, architectural and strategic stuff – the stuff that thought-leadership and dreams are made of. We were left thoughtful and humbled, and we didn’t really end up discussing what India gained. But what I realize today is that during the last decade, we built products that were world class. We didn’t do it for ourselves, so we never owned the intellectual property on what we did. What we did own however, is the intellectual capital in the form of people who built this IP (well most of them anyway). We have a large pool of knowledge-rich, smart folks who can build products. All we need is right direction and good leadership.

To build products, managers and engineers will need to adapt to some important differences from the services business. For example, the business cycle in a services company starts with sales and ends with product delivery. Most managers in the Indian IT business today started their careers with the IT services boom and are all too familiar with this model. As part of the next wave, when we see more and more product companies proliferating the market, these companies will need managers who are adept at building and delivering products not as an end in itself, but as the beginning of a longer and more complex business cycle. The difference is subtle, but has important ramifications for an organization.

This is not to say that the era of services is ending. Far from it, it will evolve into better things and higher-value-chain work. But before we know it, everyone will be talking about the new wave and Indian software products will start selling globally. A decade ago, we joined the IT services industry blissfully unaware of what was brewing and were fortunate to have been part of an incredible boom. In today’s India of choices, the question is, do you foresee another wave and can you catch it right at the beginning?

Find the core and focus on it…

Posted by anup on June 10, 2007 RSS Feed

In this multi-part blog, I am hoping to capture some thoughts I have had for a while regarding MangoSpring’s strategy. First some background:

Assertion #1: The Internet is a beautiful platform enabling unparalleled value creation everyday.

  • The Web is a frictionless environment enabling innovation and new business creation at breathtaking speed. There isn’t a day that goes by without some news-worthy innovation.
  • Every year there are 3-5 blockbuster innovations (MySpace, YouTube, Skype etc.)
  • There are 100s of other mid-size innovations and services around which very successful companies and services are built.
  • There are 100s of services that don’t make it and end up in dead pools. Yet thousands of others never even get talked about.

Bottom-line: The Internet is a vibrant and thriving medium for service and business creation. The amount of energy & innovation, both successful and un-successful, everyday is unparalleled to any other medium that has ever existed.

Assertion #2: Mobile is a terrible platform to innovate & create data application-based businesses in.

  • Minimal service innovations over the last 20 years.
  • Beyond voice, SMS is the only other wildly popular service. A quick look at where operator revenue comes from is enough to illustrate this point.
    1. WAP, Data services, games, personalization (ring-tones etc.)
  • New service discovery and associated behavior changes need to happen on a very constrained environment (small screen size, limited navigation, limited resources etc.) making it harder for the platform to lend itself to innovations.
    1. OEMs are good at creating hardware and hardware/design oriented innovations, but are not good at creating end to end network based services.
    2. It takes years to launch anything because of the long value chain and industry dynamics.
    3. By the time a need is identified and a solution is designed, developed, tested and deployed, it is easily 4 to 5 years later.
    4. Because of the time it takes to make a service available to millions of users worldwide, in a meaningful way, the cost to innovate is very high.
  • There is a lot of scope to build 10-20 million $ businesses in mobile because of the intricacies of the platform. To build a blockbuster, you have to start on the web.

Bottom-line: Don’t try to innovate a new data service in the mobile space first; your chances of success are small. Only a handful of mobile focused companies will be successful because of the amount of inherent friction.

Assertion #3: Mobile is a beautiful platform to establish a deep, always connected, relationship with your users

  • Unlike PC, Mobile is a very personal and a SPECIAL device.
  • 3 Billion+ mobile users worldwide as opposed to 1 Billion or so PC users.
  • Mobile gives users “freedom”.

Bottom-line: Although most value creation will happen on the Web/PC side first and then extended to mobile, mobile is super important to becoming an integral part of the user’s life and is a huge service differentiator.

As MangoSpring is aiming to create a god-send service that will become an integral part of millions of user’s world-wide, like Google Search, what better platform than the web? Having established that, MS now needs to figure out the areas it wants to innovate in and have a strategy that will ensure it is one of the top companies on the web.

At a high-level, MangoSpring product strategy is SIMPLE! - Relentless focus on its core.

This doesn’t mean that MS needs to do multiple separate products. Actually the exact contrary – to excel in its chosen space, MS needs to be focused on the “core” and features that strengthen the core. To be successful, MS will need to package these features along with the core in unique ways. You can easily find “small” companies like MS that do a lot of different things and advertise many different products. It is very easy to get swayed by the power of numbers - oh, wow, look they have 6 different products! However, spreading yourself too thin rarely works.

Building good products requires the dedication and focus of a sports team at an international level - you have to be at the top of your game. Just like you can’t have the same team play Cricket and Soccer for your country, you can’t have a successful company trying to do multiple products. A startup has to be a one-trick pony to succeed. From initial concept to requirements, wire-framing, prototype, product development, testing, maintenance, support, pricing and marketing - it takes a lot to have a successful product. Very few companies, if any, that I have seen succeed without relentless focus on its core.

MS is well aware that some other fine folks are building companies around what MS thinks are features of its flagship product. Are these entrepreneurs crazy? Are Venture Capital firms crazy to invest 10s of millions of $s in them? Of course not! However, this brings me back to my assertion #1 - a lot of innovation happens on the web everyday, but only a handful of them succeed. At a minimum, most of these companies are part of that innovation cycle.

In summary, MS product strategy should enable the company to package and deliver unique innovative services built around it’s core - better, faster and cheaper than anyone else!

Let us know (feedback@mangospring.com) what you think?

- Anup

Technologies @ MangoSpring

Posted by vishwa on November 18, 2006 RSS Feed

Few of you asked if you could get a big picture view of what technologies we use at MangoSpring and how different roles/career profiles fit in. So, here you are…the diagram below does a decent job of capturing how different technologies are used at MangoSpring to bring a seamless user experience across platforms and devices.

Technologies @ MangoSpring

Hopefully this gives you a good idea about some of the major technologies we play with at MangoSpring at different levels. Contact us at info at MangoSpring.com for more information.

©2007 - 2008 MangoSpring. All Rights Reserved.