Making better products

I was at the Bangalore startup lunch last Saturday at the NSCREL, IIM Bangalore. It was a good event overall, with participation from about 8 startups. The agenda of startup lunch was to provide a platform for Startups and Job seekers, so that they can get know startups better, their work culture and the works. Went to the event with no specific goal as a job seeker, but ended up having interesting conversations with many founders. The organizing team has a nice scoop of the event here.

Kudos to the organizing team for putting up a great show!Great job guys - Sridhar, Ashish and Pradeep !

If you are interested in working for a startup - here’s a list of startups in Bangalore along with positions that they are looking for.

If you were at the event, these are pics from Pradeep.

Stuck in Seattle with the rain and a marathon requirements gathering session :). So no barcamp for me this time. Damn! the collectives were really good this time and some very interesting topics.

Anyways if you are at barcamp and are blogging/liveblogging or microblogging, leave me your link as a comment, I’m going to be following this from here And of course kudos to the organizers, impressive list of sponsors!

And yo! found some really nice badges on the BCB5 site, so if you are blogging make sure that you use them.

For Microsoft, Sharepoint and MOSS 2007 have always been dear products, with a lot of sales and marketing activity happening on this front. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s idea for ‘web 2.0′, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).

Microsoft is going Web 2.0, and what better way than to go with Sharepoint. Some of my previous posts talk about MOSS 2007 and building Web 2.0 sites using MOSS.

Microsoft recently announced two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software  company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The   partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint.

The big picture which Microsoft is of course looking at is to sell SharePoint as a social collaboration platform rather than just an enterprise productivity platform by adding more Web 2.0 features such as collaboration, user generated content etc. The other IMHO is of course the limited out of the box functionality which Wikis, blogs and other web parts provide in MOSS 2007 and customizing these can take quite a hit on the timelines and cost of a project.

According to this source,  Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers. So this definitely seems to be a win win relationship and a great advantage for SharePoint users.

There is in fact a new connect launched by Atlassian which is available for download.