When I first heard of Lokmanch.com earlier this year, I was intrigued.
“Lokmanch”(”People’s Platform” in Hindi) is an independent Hindi news aggregator site operating out of India. About three months ago, I got in touch with the two founders and was impressed by their enthusiasm, passion and obvious love for the business.
Although their position on (and perception of) “Globalization” is very different from my own take on it…I could not help admire the amount of work and energy that they had put in this effort. As it happened. I had the chance to meet with them a few weeks after the first conversation…and I came away from the meeting hooked!
Lokmanch’s vision is simple yet powerful – to make news and content available easily and freely in languages other than English and to be an alternative to current mainstream (English) media in India.
I would like to extend this idea a little further…and this is the dream – to make information/content available to anyone, anywhere and anytime, freely…In the context of India, other than the obvious difficulties in “anywhere” and “anytime”, you also face the challenge of “anyone” since a large number of people do not speak English* – hence the appeal of non-English online news aggregator(s) like Lokmanch. This is what I would call ”Democratizing Content“.
I am excited by this and will be watching them closely…and I wonder if there is any similar site (independently aggregating regional, local news content) catering to the Chinese speaking population?
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* Although by 2010, India will have the world’s largest number of English speakers and as Prof. David Crystal has memorably noted elsewhere, “When 300 million Indians speak a word in a certain way, that will be the way to speak it.”!
May 17th, 2007
Posted by
Shantanu |
Entrepreneurship, Globalization, India, Miscellaneous |
10 comments
I scored as low as it could possibly get*…which set me thinking – is this the right test for becoming a VC? (I can hear Tut tuts!)
Actually, Is there any right “test” for determining whether a person is well-suited for a career in VC – or more importantly, will he/she succeed?
The test misses one important thing; unfortunately it cannot be measured…and unlike the experiences and skills one has, it is entirely unpredictable and may desert you when you need it most – I am thinking *LUCK* 
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* Yes, I know this is post-facto rationalisation, but…
I think I screwed up “Background” in a major way…missing on all the +5s and being saddled with two -5s (for my sins at LBS and Monitor) 
Note to Guy: Can I get a bonus +5 for “unusual” background? Radio DJ, Comp Engg, Mushroom farmer, Diplomat etc?
May 15th, 2007
Posted by
Shantanu |
Miscellaneous, Venture Capital, What VCs really do |
4 comments
Earlier this week, my optimism about the infrastructure situation in India (see e.g. this) took a severe beating as I struggled to get to a meeting in downtown Mumbai crawling through what seemed like an endless chaos of traffic and road construction.
** Don’t get me wrong – I’m usually very charitable about these things…(and of course India is a weak spot!) but what really got me was not the 1hr 40min drive – I was far luckier than almost everyone else on that journey, travelling in comfort and not having to make this trip everyday – but the appalling loss of productivity and the drain on energy caused by this.
Keep Reading…
April 13th, 2007
Posted by
Shantanu |
Miscellaneous |
3 comments
An embarrassing (and sobering) story which some of you may have already read: “Misfired memo reveals tabs kept on journalist by public relations firm” – if not, worth a read.
It talks about how an internal memo from Microsoft’s PR firm inadvertently found its way to its subject, Wired Journalist, Fred Vogelstein.
Some excerpts:
…In February, during the course of reporting on a video blogging initiative at Microsoft called Channel 9, the Wired journalist, Fred Vogelstein, received a 13-page, 5,500-word internal memo from Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, a firm that represents Microsoft.
The document, which was meant to prepare Microsoft executives for interviews, contained frank details, including some less-than-flattering observations like “Fred’s stories tend to be a bit sensational, though he would consider them to be balanced and fair,” scripted responses to questions and a strong-arm list of the points the agency expected to see in the piece.
Vogelstein, a contributing editor at Wired, was described as “tricky” during interviews. “He looks deeply for any dirt around whatever topic he is focused on and generally is tight-lipped about the direction he will take for his stories, sometimes even misleading you to throw you off,” the memo said. “It takes him a bit to get thoughts across, so try to be patient.”
Ironically, “the article Vogelstein wrote was about a Microsoft project that permitted employees to blog about the company’s corporate doings – a concept called “radical transparency.”
As Fred noted on his blog,
“As journalistic windfalls go this is about as good as it gets. There I was writing a story about how Microsoft is on the cutting edge of using the Internet to become more transparent, and there in front of me are the briefing documents they are using to manage the story. The timing was so fortuitous that I wondered whether it was intentional. When I told Microsoft about it, they convincingly told me it was not.
Here is the 13-page memo and here’s Wired Editor Chris Anderson’s take on this.
Lessons learnt:
- If you are on a sensitive job/case/project, it is probably wise not to have “autocomplete” on
- Even if you do, the least one can do is to keep email addressses of the subject(s) of their investigation in a separatre address book (not the default one)
- Almost everything committed to an email is searchable, recordable, retrievable and has the potential to come back and haunt you (and possibly ruin your career and/or reputation
- It is wise to invest in content filtering software/ technology (full disclosure: we are one of the investors in Clearswift which has products in this space)
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Unusual find of the day: http://wikileaks.org/
April 10th, 2007
Posted by
Shantanu |
Miscellaneous |
3 comments
Someone I met at lunch last week asked me “So, are you an evangelist for Amadeus?”…
Then - in one of those mysterious coincidences - I picked this up on my feed reader this morning: “Under The Radar: Office 2.0” by David Hornik, which began,
“I want to be an evangelist. That seems like a great job. Your job description goes something like “run around and talk about what great stuff you do.” Sometimes you get to evangelize to big companies. Sometimes you get to evangelize to startups. And lots of the time, like me, you find yourself on the conference circuit, where there is critical mass of people to be evangelized.
Why this focus on evangelism? I was just looking at the list of panelists for the Under The Radar: Office 2.0 conference coming up next Friday and the first panelist listed is “Jeff Barr, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services.” Jeff is a great guy — needless to say, I’ve bumped into him at conferences. I similarly first got to know Robert Scoble on the conference circuit when he was still a tech evangelist and pontificating for a living (But that’s a big company thing. Now that he’s at PodTech, he has to do some work for a living.) Perhaps the best known evangelist was Apple’s Mac Evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. Now, best I can tell, Guy is an evangelist for Guy. But he’s damn good at it…”
Now, although I do sometimes speak at panels and conferences, that is not what I do for a living…and neither am I in the league of Guy Kawasaki (or Robert Scoble, for that matter).
I agree with David though, “it seems like a great job”!
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* By the way, Jeff Barr (the Amazon evangelist) has two incredible posts on presenting in Second Life – to be more precise, “virtually” presenting in Second Life which made my jaw drop: here and here
March 26th, 2007
Posted by
Shantanu |
Miscellaneous |
5 comments
