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.

Jason from 37signals had a blog post on questioning your work. I think that everyone startup or for that matter any company doing anything worthwhile should ask these questions. Here’s what they propose. The image below is from Jason’s presentation at SXSW.

The above tenets make a lot of sense and it’s worth looking at this the next time you decide to start doing something.

This video is incredible. Don’t know if you have seen this before - but watch the lyrics - they are way too cool. A spoof of Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start this fire” (can we get more apt!)

So here’s to another bubble - Cheers!

This is a very interesting snippet of information. The table on the right says it all, of course it is heavily based on the valuation from the Microsoft deal, which happened a few days back.

The $15 bn evaluation makes Facebook No. 5 on the most valued pure Internet based companies in the US. Only Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon have larger market capitalizations than Facebook. This is quite incredible, considering the other honchos on this list.

The list of other top valued firms are below and Microsoft of course tops the list. Quite amazing that Facebook is valued more than AOL, MySpace and a bunch of other long timers.

Image courtesy : Techcrunch

Xobni, a new email-management service offered by the San Francisco-based startup company Xobni Analytics aims to empower the email user and help them “take back their inbox”. Xobni provides data on things like how much time you spend on email, how long it takes you to respond and what times during the day have the most important emails coming in. They are funded by Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, YCombinator, and a group of angel investors.

Xobni claims that it will help you manage time spent on your email account much more efficiently.The new “Email me instead” allows you to send Facebook messages directly to people’s inboxes, saving the extra step of having to go into Facebook in order to read them. Users can sign up to receive news and updates on the Beta release. Until then, users can visit the site’s blog to correspond with the Xobni team.

They have a button for your blog and claim that users using this on their blog will get priority access for their release. Check this out.