Sushil Kumar Gupta

Dude, deactivate facebook instead of updating status. Switch off your mobile phone and get disconnected of internet for a month (oops!). Go  meet friends, go for hiking, or may be biking, hell, come to my place or call me and lets have dinner together someday, lets hangout, have coffee around my college sometime. I mean lets be social, you know what I mean? Don’t just click on the “like”, “retweet” or “+1” button and fake yourself (everybody!) thinking you are connected with me.

while (true)
{
   identify_and_fix_bottlenecks();
   drink();
   sleep();
   notice_new_bottleneck();
}

Source: http://highscalability.com/blog/2008/3/12/youtube-architecture.html

Making up another Google and Facebook is really hard. Believe me! Did you checked out the IPO the early quarter this year? How much LinkedIn got its evaluation? Or even earlier, what about facebook? Oh that’s alot of money!!! And I am not going to invest that much to compete with them. Check out the image below, it is from the NY Times 2006.

Okay, no kidding. Recently, Google launched Google+. You must be living in Amazon for last two months if you don’t know about it. From a random blog post, I came to know that Google has invested around 585 million USD to make that, which includes all of the cost. I am not going to explore how true that blog post was, but my point is, can we really invest that much money to make another Another Big Thing? No! We are peoples, not Google, damn. So, no more big things any more right? Lol! Google started with two peoples Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and they didn’t invested any comparable money that we  are seeing it has earned now. I assume you have seen the movie “The Social Network” by now. So, did Mark Elliot Zuckerberg invested any? Yeah, he did! He started the largest Social Network of the world, by asking 1,000 USD from his friend. And now compare it with what it is evaluated on IPO by today!

I guess you have got the point. Seriously, you don’t need a lot of money to start your own the Next Big Thing.

So, now comes the another point! Making the Another Big Thing is all about money, huh? No! It’s also about innovation. When Google guys started the Google as we see now, had no vision how they could make money from Google. They didn’t had any business model for what they were working on. Neither did Facebook had. They wanted to create something that will help people do things in easy way. The idea they had wasn’t even that unique. There was already Yahoo which had dominated the search on the web, and Myspace and Friendster as networking sites when Facebook started. They did these things, a little smarter way. Ranking pages with the incoming links was for Google, taking your entire social experience online was for Facebook. That’s all. They invented the Big Things we are using now and probably, a disaster might come if they suddenly went down, or vanished by some kinda black magic. Just kidding, they won’t go that easily, they are the Internet gaints, so called now!

And yes, I also want to talk a little more shit about startups. Excuse my foul language. Are you working for a company? Or wish you could get in some sort of company? Probably you may be thinking of Google HR Team or so of Facebook? I say don’t. If you have the skill, and the spirit of making things, go build on your own. Companies like Google and Facebook will pay you damn good money, only if you are a damn good hacker. But if you really are a hacker, damn the job, why the hell do you want them to build things? Build on your own. I know you talk about resources and shit. But, come on, once you get started, you’ll have them all. Enhance your skill. Go build a thing and change the way world works.

I recently completed making a website http://chitwan.info which is about Chitwan district in Nepal. The site is totally based on WordPress and it’s advanced plugins. Thanks to the plugin authors who had done really brilliant job.

I have aimed the website contents to be generated by users that are related to Chitwan in someway. Once the website has generated enough content, it will start serving peoples of various fields to collect and share information for various purposes such as, toursits can use the site to explore Chitwan, local peoples of Chitwan can use the site to promote their business and services, researchers and other peoples can gather information in very easy way.

Don’t ask me why would people submit articles or contents on my site. Well, that’s a really hard question to explain, for me specially. Simplifying it, users will be submitting their information in post/article formats so that they can promote themselves. Such as, if you are a business owner, why wouldn’t you submit it to my site if your article will be acting as a free advertisement to all who wants information about Chitwan? If you are just another normal people, you may want other peoples to know about what culture you have, or what place you live in what is the specialty of that area, wouldn’t you? Yeah, I will be earning money through displaying advertisements on the site.
Starting from the design, I have used the internetcenter theme! Not modified a lot of it, but yea, I have changed the way text appears on and removed the images. Also did a little more mockup with the CSS. I have used the custom fields options to some extents too.

Coming down to the features, I have used a lot of plugins, as mentioned above. I have used around 40 plugins which lets users register easily, sets user access, enables them to post from the front end of website instead of requiring to go to the WordPress back-end for posting new updates. I also have used plugins to restrict unauthorized users to go to the backend, limit login attempts. Of course I have used the popular plugins such as All in one SEO, Contact Form 7, Bit-defender. I have used the Relevanssi plugin to power the search on the website that produces search results based on relevancy and also helps the admin know the search stats. Admin Bar Removal is the plugin that works for the removal of admin bar from the front end when a user has logged in to the site. Few more are Disqus, Google Analytics, Wp-PageNavi, WP Fancy Zoom, Widget Logic etc. I have used the WP Underground plugin to show up the weather forecast on the site, of course a really nice plugin.
I would be happy if you could help me by reviewing my website and throwing up some of your comments on me.

Disclaimer:
I have not listed out the complete information about the plugins and other components, because SECURITY issue! Of course, I don’t want hackers showing their ass on my website.
Yes, I have removed the credit to the theme maker from the website. I am sorry, but do you really think anyone will put it on their professional website? And if I was willing to pay for the theme, I would of course have got professionals to design my own template or bought a nice theme from themeforest.

As I said in my earlier post, I am going to list out few of the startup ideas that are roaming in my mind and will talk around it. Before I list out the ideas, I am still confused whether I should really share these ideas or not. Basically, peoples in Silicon Valley say, “Ideas are worth nothing. If you don’t code, get the fuck out of here.” And well, after the movie “The Social Network”, we have seen a really good example of an Idea being stolen away. Well, though the idea of Facebook was stolen, my support still goes to Mark because he is the one who have done the whole bunch of coding and stuffs to take it where it is now. Well, it might not be too appropriate to talk about Facebook at this age where the Yet Another Social Network GOOGLE+ has already arrived between us. This too tells me ideas are okay to share, after all it is not safe at any point, the idea can be stolen/copied even if your company will reach an valuation of $50 Billion at IPO or even more.

So what are my startup ideas? Starting from the big one, which I have in my mind for a long time, may be for a year. I will continue to post my other simple ideas in my upcoming posts.

Peoples Directory – Professional Profile

So as the name implies, it will be a place where one can find most of the information about a real person or a company. It will not be like the directory that we used to have in earlier days. I am talking about a website where we will be able to instantant search peoples by their Names, Work, Contact Number, Address and all reverse too. On search, we will be able to list out the persons all details which he wants to show up according to his privacy. Remember, this is not a social network profile. We will show up much more things than the profile that we see on social network site. It will be kind-of professional profile. In the least case, it will be like a visiting card. At the most, it could be like a whole resume if it is personal, or if it is a company, it could be their contact page (if they have their major website already) or a mini official site. I know there are already sites like, about.me and dropmycard.com and others too. A user he can add another user to his contact list, message internally, get notified about the reply message in email and sms. People can also chose to be online, so that they can chat with other peoples in their contact list. Of course there will be options of grouping which will enable users to appear online/offline to certain peoples only. We can use twitter/facebook/foursquare/google+ updates and show what those peoples latest updates are on their profile page. Users can customise there profile to get surveys and feedbacks from their visitor/customer, add their blogs/websites, social networks, phone number, profile/logo picture. So listing out the key features that it can have,

- Professional Profile
- Instant/Reverse Search
- Add Contacts/Internal Messaging
- Online Chat
- Personal Domain Name
- Surveys/Feedbacks
- Updates from Social Networks
- SMS Alerts
- Other Contact Details
- Analytics of Visitors

We can obviously add more features such as reminders to contacts, automated replies, sharing calendar, public rating/expertise etc.

How will I earn?

Basically, earning can be done by upgrading the account to premium versions which will include features such as SMS Alerts, Online Chat, Personal Domain Name, Feedback/Survey Quantity etc. Also, on the free version of users which do not include these premium features, we can generate money by showing up adverts on their page.

What do you see here?

I am not that much into Internet entrepreneurship very much yet. So this may sound a bad idea, or worst idea, or a good idea, or a very ambitious idea to you. I would really appreciate to know what you think. Is it good or bad? What improvements should I make to the way I think about a start-up and specially this one?

Will I do this?

Well, at some point of my life, sooner, I may be starting this project. I am not sure how much it will take, effort, money and time, all values here. I would love your suggestions/feedbacks on this.
Want to do this?

Oh, you are certainly welcome to do, whether with me, or on your own. If you are going to do this for certain, why not send me an email notifying about it. I would be happy to listen from you.

It’s already been a week now since I have had internet at my home. It works pretty well. Though I couldn’t stream video directly, I can wait for respectively 1.5X times the video length for smooth playback. Well, since I have been thinking on getting into web and stuffs of computer and internet, I have always wanted to make things of my own but somehow I have managed my self to not to do so.

In the last few days, I went through different websites and blog of different peoples on the internet. Found most of them inspiring. Basically because they are/were building applications of themselves. I went to Hacker News a lot and followed up the links as far as I could and tried to read almost all of the articles that I found interesting, basically those were related to startups, announcements of new services, attack made by LulzSec and other security articles and stories like that. I am afraid to say that I almost never tried to follow those links that were leading me to GitHub or were talking basically about the functions of Python or what is with the Node.Js. I don’t know why. May be because I found those links totally not understandable. I mean, hey I am interested in programming and these stuffs, but I am so afraid to get into the real core part of programming, real time programming specially, those the peoples in Silicon Valley are talking about because at this point I simply don’t get what they are talking about. I have done little programming with C and C++ and also later with PHP, MYSQL, HTML but hey, I got to get the basics before you teach me the black majic of those! I also went to some cool websites I didn’t knew they existed. One of them is Quora, one of the most cool Q&A site on the internet. Mention me if you want an invitation to sign up. Introduced myself a little about HTML5 and jQuery. I also tried to use the Vanilla CMS to make a forum at hamroweb.com but then I stopped due to some issues like there already was kind of a website that I wanted to build and I had to come up with some better idea instead of making up a clone of something. I Googled a little about PHP Frameworks and found CodeIgniter and Zend are some how active at this time while I was thinking of getting up with CAKEPHP. I was with Omegle for sometime and found it freakishly addictive specially when you are procrastinating and in misery and not sure what to do, it can take a lot of your time and make it worth nothing but procrastinate more.

At the mean while time I am a little confused which language should I get expert into. I mean seriously, I want to be an entrepreneur, and I know learning a single language and even getting to its advanced level and being an expert won’t make me. I had a little discussion with one of my friends on twitter about how much it is important to Code to be an entrepreneur? And finally we headed to a conclusion that, A guy who have an Idea, can surely learn how to code. But a guy who knows how to code won’t necessarily come up with an Idea. Well, may be it is some how against what @msuster says, but at least I think it is what in reality. As I am already familiar with PHP/MYSQL, C & CPP and a little with CAKEPHP, now I was thinking about learning some front end languages like HTML5 and JavaScript, basically because I guess it is going to have a great impact in the coming years in the web industry.

In the next post I will come up with some basic idea I got for my startups while wandering here and there.Thank you for reading this post. You may want to follow me on @deSushil if you like.

Now that I just (today) have connected Internet at my place (before I used to go to college for internet), I am much happy. I always wanted to have internet this way but was unable to do so. This was one of the main reasons why I hadn’t started a blog yet, or may I can say I hadn’t continued blogging. Now I want to say everyone, wait and watch me breaking off the limits. I have got everything I needed to work.

So, but seems “1000 and 1 things are always incomplete – Osho” to be true here. I have like many ideas in my mind, that I have to work on for long and to build up and get them running, but I am wondering where do I start with. Yet, I have done one thing lately today. Guess what? This blog. I was planning to get a blog from long. And now I have started, this is my second blog post. More to come. If you are reading this blog, you might be the very first visitors of my blog. You are welcome. Please leave your comments, if you think you have anything that could help me.

I’ll be here soon. Thank you for coming.

So, here I am. Now started a blog. I know it’s already late. But it’s never too late, as the quotations says. Anyway, hope to get good readers as you, as I go my way through this blog. I would love to hear your comments.