There is some good news!
We have made it for the finals of the Headstart Conference Summer 09 to be held on June 20.

HeadStart is one of the two premium startup showcases in India (the other being Proto) – and we have been selected to present one of our products (EventShelf) – along with 15 other startups selected from all over India.

EventShelf is still in a very beta stage at the moment and we’re still building up some features and its database – but I think we should be in a very presentable and demo-able stage by June 20.

Getting feedback and seeing if the demo and presentation sticks will be interesting.

If you are in Mumbai on June 20, please feel free to drop in, check out our stall and chat with us.
The entry is free for the demo-pit area.

The event is going to be held at (updated):
Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research
L N Road
Matunga (Cr)
Mumbai, Maharashtra
India

and the demo-pit area will be thrown open from 12:30 PM till about 5:30 PM.

A map to the place can be found here.

More information about the finalists event can be found here.

We would like to welcome three new members to the ThinkingSpace Team.
45 grueling interviews and many, many coding challenges later, we were able to select three candidates to join our team at ThinkingSpace Technologies.

We will get these folks to introduce themselves in more depth in the coming days on this blog, but for now, I will briefly introduce them here:

[drumrolls .....]

The first person to join us (on 1st December 2008) was Nikhil Fuge.
Nikhil graduated with a Bachelors in Computer Engineering from the JS College of Engineering (University of Pune) in 2008 and ThinkingSpace will be his first company.

The second person to make the cut was Hardik Savaliya – again from the JS College of Engineering, Pune who graduated with Nikhil and also holds a Bachelors in Computer Engineering.

And finally, we have Anushree Patil from the Cummins College of Engineering who having graduated with a bachelors in Computer Engineering joined us along with Hardik on the 15th of January, 2009.

ThinkingSpace being the first company for all these guys, we wish all of them, all the best and look forward to working with them on cool, new and exciting things.

As a matter of fact, we are already cooking up something new to be launched by the first week of March.
Watch this space for more!

We have been asked this question time and again: How do you market yourself?  Our friends, cousins, past colleagues, budding entrepreneurs, people doing surveys have asked us the same question time and again since we started. To which we reply – “We haven’t, yet”.

Maybe they are under the impression that we are a core IT services company who do projects for clients from US, UK and India.  They are half-right, as we do Product Engineering services, providing end-to-end solutions for a business and helping it grow, particularly in the Internet space.

We started ThinkingSpace Technologies in April 2007 with our main goal to become a successful  Software Products Company from India. Hence we started work on ActiveCiti (v2) and launched it on 8th June, 2007. We got  good response for the site from many bloggers and reviewers, and of course, our older Activeciti users. After the launch, one client approached us wanting a tool very similar to ActiveCiti for sending out invitations and RSVP. Thus emerged www.rsvpindia.com – built on ActiveCiti engine. Similarly, one client wanted a professional networking site for TV Professionals with feature sets similar to ActiveCiti. Hence, we created www.imin-tv.com. And so on and so forth.

Did we make ActiveCiti with the intention of growing our Services?  No.
We did the best we could, to the best of our knowledge, to the best of our capabilities and launched ActiveCiti.

We got some projects from networking and some from word of mouth -  Viral Marketing. Updating your company/product blog, getting people to write reviews and blogs on your product, being active on forums and blogs, attending local start-up communities, seminars and conferences – all these help a lot. They go a long way in building your name and credibility. And the best thing is – it doesn’t cost much. You don’t need to allocate a budget for this channel.

Marketing specifically for our products and building traction for the same is a challenging task which we are learning. Will post our experiences in another post.

We’re really sorry for not having updated this blog in quite sometime now.
But there is an explanation – which is – we were terribly caught up with tonnes of work.

We all took a much needed Diwali break and have had some time to catch up with other things.
So whats happening at ThinkingSpace of late you wonder …

UPDATE 1: We’ve been nominated for the TATA – NEN Hottest Startups Award!
Yes we have! We were at a particular time on rank 21 – but now are steadily slipping down to rank 50.
(This is out of 590 startups from India)

The ranking consists of an Experts rating (50%) and public voting (50%)
We have gotten a favourable expert’s rating and the only way we can move up is if you vote for us.

If we make it to number 30 (or lesser), we stand to gain tremendous exposure via online and offline press coverage. So we really need your help on this. Please vote for us.

Quick way (You will be charged Rs. 3): From India, send an SMS to 56767 with: “HOT <space> 327″ (without quotes)
Longer free way: Head over to this URL, sign up and vote for us online.

UPDATE 2: EventAZoo is now live!
We have been furiously working on EventAZoo and have released a live version online!
But until we have things stabilized, we’re giving out invite codes to try out the service for free to a select group of people only.

If you are interested, leave a comment on this post and I’ll send you an invite to try out our professional package – completely free for a month! (Invites open on a first come first serve basis to the first 10 comments)

Don’t know what EventAZoo is?
EventAZoo is a mind numbingly simple, no nonsense event website generator and registration taker!

Head over to EventAZoo at http://www.eventazoo.com to know more!

We have been graciously given the opportunity to present our startup and our products (ActiveCiti and EventAZoo) to the Pune Startup Ecosystem (The Pune Open Coffee Club) on Saturday, the 13th of this month from 5 PM to 6 PM at the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research.

The “Startup Spotlight” is a new initiative started by the Pune Open Coffee Club (or POCC) in which, one startup from Pune gets an opportunity to come up and showcase their company to the local startup community. It is an excellent opportunity for new companies to get some eyeballs and share their experiences.

We here at ThinkingSpace are super excited and really looking forward to the event.
This will be the first time we’ll be publicly demoing EventAZoo and are really looking forward to the feedback and suggestions.

The theme for this time’s coffee club meet is “bootstrapping your startup” and is a 3 hour session from 4 PM to 7PM this Saturday.

If you are in Pune and are interested with whats buzzing in the startup eco system, do drop in.
More details about the event can be found here: http://events.activeciti.com/pocc/
Entry is free for everyone.

I know we have a separate page where we list in all the press and reviews we get for ActiveCiti.
But I couldn’t help myself this time.

We just found out that ActiveCiti had made it to the list of the top 9 event management websites on the internet by Events Authority sometime earlier this year.

Really made our day at ThinkingSpace.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has recently released a report NASSCOM Software Product Study: Outlook for Indian Software Product Businesses.

Key highlights of the report:

Indian software product businesses are now approaching an inflection point in their evolution. The next decade will be a period of disruptive growth for this segment, with the annual revenue aggregate of Indian software product businesses forecast to grow from USD 1.4 billion in FY2008 to USD 9.5 to 12 billion by FY2015.

Leading Indian software product firms have strengthened their product portfolio through steady investments in organic growth as well as through overseas acquisitions, and have reached credible business scale

Of the existing 371 software product start-ups since 2001, over two-thirds have been formed in the past three years – of which ~100 companies have started their operations in 2007 alone. As a result, while the top 10 companies still dominate, accounting for 84 per cent of the segment revenues, there are over 200 midsized companies and start-ups that have started generating revenues and are contributing to its growth.

They have recognized our contribution! We (at ThinkingSpace) started  in April-2007 and its been an active 1 and 1/2 years of pursuing our products (Activeciti, Eventazoo), with positive response coming from the domestic and global market. We have also broadened our scope by providing Product Engineering to our clients (ImIn-TV).  NASSCOM-Mckinsey have further identified this area as ‘product-shops’. This comes from a fact sheet related to the report, which can be accessed from their site here.

Opportunity for Indian companies in the product domain

India’s potential to cater to this demand for technology services is demonstrated by the host of global technology majors rushing to establish back-end operations in India. The trend towards offshoring product development services is likely to grow as global ISVs continue to struggle to balance their development priorities and the offshore model proves its effectiveness.

While over 60% of the top global ISVs already leverage India for maintenance services and new product development, the opportunity is further fuelled by entry of focused Indian “product-shops”.

I guess we are ‘product-shops’ then :) Anyways, I am thrilled to read this report. Finally, there has been a detailed study on the Indian software products business. NASSCOM  is taking active steps to identify this business environment in India. I hope this is first of the many steps to come in recognizing the other aspect of Indian Software Companies (other than IT Services and BPO). ThinkingSpace was started with a vision to be a successful Indian Software Product  Company, and this report just fuels our desire to become one.

For our latest project – I’m in TV, we used VPSLand to host the website. We were using VPSLand for the first time, and after a few initial hiccups, we thought we had everything in place. Or did we?

About a week from launching the first private beta version of the website, we realised that our emails to hotmail accounts were vanishing into thin air! This was extremely weird – because hotmail would accept the delivery of our emails and then just eat them up.

Emails would not get delivered to the members – nor would we get a bounce email back.
Hotmail would just quietly eat up all the emails that we threw at it – and not even give us any indication. No wonder as none of the users who signed up with a hotmail account were able to verify their email addresses.

We were extremely concerned with this issue and were at our wits’ end as to what was going wrong. This had not happened before. We had to finally, temporarily suspended hotmail signups for a week until we figured out what is wrong …

We spent an entire week on researching this issue. We tried permutations and combinations of email headers, what encoding to use, sending purely text and purely html emails, validating or SPF records and revalidating them again. Trying various permutations of our SPF records — but nothing worked. We were back to square one.

Then finally, frustruated – I decide to write an email to the hotmail support staff and see what happens.
I was hardly expecting a reply back – when they actually did. I was pleasantly surprised.
A few more email exchanges later – they told us that they were blocking our IP for no apparent reason at all! Hotmail does that.
Any new IP that tries to send it email – it blocks it assuming its spam.

Finally, after letting them know of our intentions, they agreed to open up a small window to allow our emails through. They would then monitor these emails for reports of spam – and if they found nothing suspicious, they would open up access permanently.

Phew! It finally worked!
After a painful week of researching, all it took was to ask them to do it manually — add us to a temporary white list.

However, for those of you who face the same problems, here is what you need to do first before hotmail will give you that small window of opportunity. Also, the application matters.
We were actually not spamming our users. All emails sent were either verification emails, password reminders or friend notifications.

So, your mileage might vary.

Make sure your SPF records are in place and are accurate.
If you don’t know what SPF records are, check out the following links to get you started:

1. Information about SPF and why it is important:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
2. SPF Record generator tool by Microsoft
   http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/
3. Validate your SPF records:
   http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html
4. Sender ID validator from ReturnPath
   http://senderid.returnpath.net/how.php

Make sure your server is actually sending mail without problems to other providers.
In our tests, GMail was a peach – and accepted everything we threw at it. Mostly in the Inbox and sometimes in the SPAM. But it did accept it and never bounced any of our emails.
Yahoo too accepted all our mail – but put it in the Spam folder. The easy way to get out of this mess is to get as many people as you can to mark your email as NOT SPAM and also add your sender email ID to their contacts list.

A cool mail relay testing tool that we used was:
http://www.abuse.net/relay.html

Make sure you are following the Microsoft Postmaster Best Practices.
These can be found here:
http://postmaster.live.com/Guidelines.aspx

Finally, if you are doing more or less everything mentioned above, and your email still refuses to go – write to the postmaster.
https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsmsbl&ct=eformts&scrx=1

This is a long form but needs to be filled.
Once you have done this, a hotmail support person will get back to you generally within 24 hours and help you from then on.

In our case, we had to make some corrections to our SPF records according to their policies and when they were satisfied, they let us through.

I hope this helps and provides some insight for all those stuck with a similar problem.
Please do note however, that this is not always guaranteed to work. It worked for us and I am posting this from my experience.

If you have gone through any of these project bidding and freelancing sites like RentACoder, Guru, etc., you will definitely come across hundreds of projects in which the clients have the following requirement:

The application must be of very good quality and very cheap also.

This is generally followed by a line which states that if “you deliver timely, good quality software which is also cheap, we will give you more projects in the future”.

I thought to myself – cheap and good quality… How does this possibly work?
(In my opinion, quality never comes cheap!)

There can possibly be two reasons for people posting this:

1. People posting on such sites have extremely low expectations of the end product.
   If their definition of good quality is something which plain works, then I guess this point holds true. There are lots of companies out there doing really shoddy work – believe me – I have seen (20+ developers) software sweatshops which produce such low quality applications that some kids learning a new technology, hashing out their first application over a weekend would do a far better job.
2. People posting have truly no clue …
   In this case, the people really want good quality software – but they have no clue on how much it actually costs to develop it. These people would be the most disappointed of the lot because more often than not, some desperate company or freelancers choose to do the project in the measly amount they’re paying and what they get in the end is really shoddy software (which eventually drives them to the category 1 people above).

Writing excellent software is a decently intensive process with thousands of things going into it.
At a birds-eye level, you need to do your research well, work up a good architecture, code well and finally test it thoroughly.

Moral of the story is that you cannot have your cake and eat it too!
If you want to get something done cheaply, you either have to cut down on the features (a highly recommended option) or settle for something which you need to cross your fingers hoping that it does not crash and burn.

If you have been following our blog, you will know that sometime ago, we had filed a copyright infringement case against another Indian company from Nasik for blatantly copying the entire user interface and functionality of ActiveCiti.
I agree that imitation is the best form of flattery – but blatantly downloading pages from someone else’s web property and then just doing a search-replace to put your name in — is just wrong!

Anyways, even though many people have told us that we’ve gone overboard with actually filing a criminal case against the accused company, I beg to differ. We have spent time, money and effort in developing something and we are going to defend it to the best we can.

During the entire case – which is already 8 months old, we have learnt quite a few things about Copyrights – and more importantly, “Copyrights in India”. In this post, I want to share some of this information with you…

The Berne Convention
The Berne Convention was an international agreement governing copyright issues and India is a signatory in this. What this means is that India will respect copyrights given by other signatory countries and other countries will respect the copyrights on works that India issues.

Copyrights in India
Copyright protects the artistic expression of an idea.
To put it more simply, ideas can be patented and expressions can be copyrighted.

As software cannot be (thankfully) patented in India, the best you can do is to get your work copyrighted.

Technically, all you need to do to copyright a website is put the words – “Copyright [Company Name]. [Years for which the copyright is valid]“
However, this does not work at all in the court of law – for obvious reason.

Hence, even though it is an expensive process, we went ahead and filed an application for obtaining the copyright – the legal way. To do this, we had to send all the material that we wanted to copyright (i.e. the entire website) in triplicate to the Copyright office in Delhi.

The Copyright office is located at:
The Ministry of Human Resource Development
Department of Secondary Education & Higher Education
Copyright Office

B2/W3, Curzon Road Barracks,
K.G. Marg, New Delhi – 110001
Tel: 3384387, -2549, -2458 / Extn. 31

Once they received this, they immediately issued us a receipt for the same (stating that our application is in process). The process generally takes 3 to 4 months to complete after which you will receive your copyright certificate.

Once done, you own the copyright for your work for 60 years.

Major changes made to the work warrant another copyright.
However, we are not very sure whether making subtle changes to the original work requires this.

Anyways, the process for obtaining a copyright is slightly complicated with quite a few forms to fill.
And the only copyright office being in Delhi, it makes sense obtaining the help of a lawyer or a firm which specializes in this.