Startup Jaipur also meets physically , a little infrequently though, since December last year. And I plan to do hackthons and stuff under this (I am one of the founding members and an admin on FB), a little short on bandwidth though, would like to take the lead and try a hand?
CEO Jaipur the first co-working space for/by/of the entrepreneurs started some time back. They have space to host other events too.
Then there were some events from TIE like 'TIE mashup' that recently happened.
more events:
Bringing startup weekend to Jaipur is in process.
Overall, it's heating up but agreeably not as mature or vibrant as Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad or Pune. ( Lived and experienced the first three cities and their meetups personally.)
I haven't seen such subtle observations of mind laid out so cleanly and perfectly, ever before. I was going all thru such "unnecessary drifting" disputes/money, for quite some time in recent past, but realised it just now. Feels like enlightened!
I need to change the top idea in my mind for sure. But as pg rightly noted and I quote:
"""Money matters are particularly likely to become the top idea in your mind. The reason is that they have to be. It's hard to get money. It's not the sort of thing that happens by default. It's not going to happen unless you let it become the thing you think about in the shower. And then you'll make little progress on anything else you'd rather be working on. """
I will still need to do something about it, without letting it become the top idea in my mind.
Can you give me some numbers to substantiate "costs will be low in Pune"?
I agree with events at Bangalore but I guess Pune is lately picking up on that too.
Add the prefix "Ask HN:" to your question, otherwise it will not get the visibility and attention you want.
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Here are my two cents on the issue:
Imagine the country going to vote without Identity/SSN verification (registration) and only asked to put down address (IP), how many times a fraudulent person would vote? once?
Even online registration is not fool proof 'coz one can register many times using many emails, but it does create a filter to keep the spam low.
By looking at your site's name 'BuyersVote' I was reminded about a controversy associated with ebay once (not sure of now), some of the the sellers were creating bogus buyer accounts on ebay and creating fraudulent positive feedback for themselves and this was a 'with-registration' system.
So I guess voting systems today are open to abuse, registration just creates a filter and keep the abuse rate low. This will remain the status-quo till the web gets a universal, neutral online identity provider.
(OpenID is there but doesn't seem to be catching enough attention and is not an ideal system in my opinion)
Yep OpenID offers a step in the right direction, but not a complete solution. I actually offer this now so people can login with an account they already have (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, etc - this uses rpxnow.com). This reduces the hurdle slightly since they can often login with just a few clicks instead of a full registration process, but it's still a hurdle. Thanks!
Well, this seems like an 11th hour announcement, many of the applicants might not be watching HN at the moment and may not be able to exercise their right to "unapply" before the deadline.
But those are problems for the fainthearts who get deterred with this kinda announcement.
For the rest of the bravehearts its 'ok', they should feel like they are at day 1 on the market and its all bare now. Just that they should gear up for a much quicker launch in case of a possible rejection, which they anywayz should be - "hope for the best and be prepared for the rest/worst".
Let's face it, trustworthiness, bias, plagiarism and wisdom are all human traits.
@PG: Just a thought from a novice. This kinda late announcements/disclosure may taint YC's image like those "conditions apply" advertisements. An announcement early on would be better. I hope you are not doing this intentionally as a first filter for the applicants and hence reduce the load of applications automatically.
I am not an expert at interpretation but I think he meant the following:
Doing better then others is what bring traction but not always, especially when the market is crowded.
Sometimes it just doesn't work, coz there are numerous out there doing the same thing - trying to do it better. Only if you do it the best you get the traction. Even then its a transient state, there might be someone who will do it better then you, tomorrow.
So in these situations an interesting and better bet could be to break the status quo of the market, make a few new rules and stick to them.
They might seem like friction at the onset but if they are really making things simpler and delivering more value it can result in a lot of traction.
Edit:
I think I would like to agree more to Alex3917's interpretation. Mine seems a bit amateurish approach compared to his. Point taken.
First things first:
There are too many checklists out there for telling you what it takes to be an entrepreneur, I am not talking about them.
Do you believe beyond criticism, reason and logic that you have what it takes to be an entreprenreneur??
If the answer is yes, read on. Be sure about it or you will regret this.
I think a good idea will be to take it slow. A phased migration over a time period of year+.
phase1:
For a few months at the start, maintain a status quo at current job just keep working right, but change your spending, living and saving habits.
Meanwhile prepare your family for the change, slowly. You have lived too long under the cozy umbrella of constant and guaranteed paycheck at the end of every month, that has to change over to a not so persistent income and amounting only to live well and keep the kids just happy.
Yes, as someone pointed out, convince and take along your spouse through this transition. Encourage her to take up a job if she is not already doing so.
Save money.
phase2:
Save more money :-)
Then move over to part time, at the same organization if they respect your work or some other organization. You can look at freelancing also, but that a different game, you will have to build that image slowly. Consider yourself lucky if you get good gigs at the start, which is not usually the case.
Meanwhile, during this 2nd phase transition, start developing a small fun/serious project or for open source in your part time.
As Gary[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4] says: work 9-5, come home, spend an hour with the kids and then 7-1 is enough time to do damage.
Second pointer will be start attending dev and entrepreneur unconferences[barcamp, headstart, etc], speak up, listen, you might make a few friends there who can appreciate what you know and vice versa. Do small weekend hackathons with them, to know them more. Not all weekends, some, spend the rest with the family.
Hopefully one of these friends will be the one you found your first venture with.
Zero on some idea that you are passionate about and a partner who shares the passion and vision. Starting out alone is not usually encouraged, but not ruled out.
Start developing a proof of concept and talk to people about it and get feedback.
Once you are sure that "this is it" and you have saved enough money for you and your family for 1year, or your spouse earnings will help in that.
phase3:
Get in ramen mode.
"""Startup!!"""
Now you are on a complete uncertain rollercoaster. No turning back. Remember this is a result of the "choice" you made not something that was forced on you, so persevere and may the luck with you.
The answer is - "It depends", on a lot of parameters like:
1. Do you need a dedicated box or a virtual OS on a shared box will do?
2. What are your avg monthly usage requirements- box and bandwidth? And how these requirements shall change of time.
3. You want to customize you box's configuration before u rent it?
4. You want to pay monthly or yearly or more?
5. Will you need additional throw away on demand computational nodes? How often?
6. Do you just wish to use servers or other services like S3, SDB, SQS, cloud-files(rackspace)?
Many more ....
So I think if you describe you requirements and budget better, the suggestions provided will be better.
About problems like low speed, outages, etc. Yes both have their own set of problems, but still a more relevant answer can be given when you have illustrated you requirements.
I have been using EC2,S3,SDB for one of my projects(last 4 months) and Rackspace/Mosso cloudserver for another (last 3 months). Since the durations are short I may not be able to explain everything, but will try my best. :-)
We will be looking for a cloud server that we can self administrate, vs. a cloud site that the host administrates. The budget will be what it has to be to get what we want and need.
1. Q. Do you need a dedicated box or a virtual OS on a shared box will do?
A. Virtual on a shared box will do right now.
2. Q. What are your avg monthly usage requirements- box and bandwidth? And how these requirements shall change of time.
A. Currently we are still in development, so these are still to be determined. Part of our service will be serving video content.
3. Q. You want to customize you box's configuration before u rent it?
A. Yes, we will need to mod apache and harden the OS.
4. Q. You want to pay monthly or yearly or more?
A. Cash flow currently dictates monthly.
5. Q. Will you need additional throw away on demand computational nodes? How often?
A. “Computational Nodes” as far a grid hosting no. I’m not a cloud expert but if it is handled by the scalability of the cloud probably. How often would still need to be determined.
6. Q. Do you just wish to use servers or other services like S3, SDB, SQS, cloud-files(rackspace)?
A. Yes, probably except for SQS.
Just a note: We are leaning towards RackSpace because of their connection with LimeLight because of Limelight’s focus on video delivery to the end user.
Most of you requirements except the need for SDB and S3 are well satisfied by Rackspace. Rackspace is also coming up with a new feature, similar to S3 called cloud files.
But no equivalent for SDB.
Since you are in development Rackspace's low end boxes (like 256M with 512 bursts, etc.)charged nominally for bandwidth will do fine. Whereas Amazon has got fixed boxes with 2G or something as far as I remember, I took it like 5 months ago.
For a dev box where there is no/not-much user traffic, a low end shared box from Rackspace if a good option. Its highly efficient on the budget. Once you have used it for dev phase you will have more knowledge and confidence on what Rackspace can do and what not. So you can decide whether to use it for prod or move over to something else.
Rackspace has got a monthly billing and anytime cancelling option. It works fine on budget as well as it gives you control over things if they are going beyond what you initially thought, as you can see the usage in real time (may be a few hours late at max). They had a money back policy too, about 4 months ago when I signed up, for the first month if the user is not satisfied.
About problems:
EC2: very less problems. But remember these are commodity hardware, measly boxes, the moment you start too many process (if doing any mutli processing) the box's response time mounts exponentially :-). Multi-threaded is fine.
S3 - have been using for storing images and haven't had a problem so far. You have options to save your EC2 image to your S3 space regularly to keep backup server images.
That costs you in terms of the space required on S3.
SDB: I hope you are aware but will still iterate that this is a key-value datastore, not relational.
I will say it is very much in the works. It does a lot good at most of the times, but lack of a group-by, only text data, only lexicographic sort (which forces the user to put even numerical data in special formats to sort on it), a bit ill defined mutli-valued attributes, number of attributes allowed to put at each request and overall number of attributes for a item are a few bumps in the road.
But once you read the docs and be regular with the AWS forums most of these get solved.
Rackspace cloud server: Only problem I have faced SSH is slow sometimes.
Rackspace cloudfiles: haven't used. But I know that you can automate your cloud server backup to cloud files, that costs.
Again, as you mentioned LimeLight, that's another factor, that makes Rackspace more suitable for you.
So I guess you best bet is to start off with Rackspace for now and see how it goes.
I asked the same question on HN 1450 days ago, see the responses I got: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916622
Jaipur may not be the best place to start at this point in time but it definitely seem to have some future promises to offer.
I would like to bring to your notice that Entrepreneurship/Startup radar has picked up in Jaipur lately. Several events, groups have come up:
Some examples are:
groups:
startup jaipur: https://www.facebook.com/groups/jaipurtechies/
ceo jaipur: https://www.facebook.com/CeoJaipur
startup saturday jaipur: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ssjaipur/
events:
Startup saturday event is happening every month
Startup Jaipur also meets physically , a little infrequently though, since December last year. And I plan to do hackthons and stuff under this (I am one of the founding members and an admin on FB), a little short on bandwidth though, would like to take the lead and try a hand?
CEO Jaipur the first co-working space for/by/of the entrepreneurs started some time back. They have space to host other events too.
Then there were some events from TIE like 'TIE mashup' that recently happened.
more events:
Bringing startup weekend to Jaipur is in process.
Overall, it's heating up but agreeably not as mature or vibrant as Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad or Pune. ( Lived and experienced the first three cities and their meetups personally.)
I am from Jaipur too and I run a startup ( http://startuplabs.io/ ) here.
Let me know if you would like to meetup and hangout.