How Innovators Connect

Some say it’s all about the idea. Some categorize it as an invention. Others question the validity of an innovation that is based on imitation. Irrespective of the view one may take, we can all agree that Innovation is paramount to our existence. Without it, we would be living rather stagnant lives.

How Innovators Connect is an attempt to showcase Innovation through the experiences of about 40 successful innovators in Silicon Valley and India. Among the various conversations with Innovators who’ve made a difference, there was a resounding confirmation that the process of innovation demands connectivity, and cannot be performed in a vacuum. We discovered that each of the innovators we spoke with shared connectivity traits. And, although they all had different approaches to connecting and valued different types of connections, there was a common set of principles shared by everyone. We’ve used these core principles as the framework with which to explore the process of innovation and to share some very thought-provoking stories of innovation.

Rohit Agarwal, techTribe's CEO and Founder, is co-authoring an upcoming book, How Innovators Connect, with Patty Brown, former executive editor of Optimize and Information Week Magazines. The book is scheduled to be released in March (and will be exclusively available in India). This Tribe will contain the latest and greatest updates on the book (as we make available select passages and notes that you might enjoy reading). We encourage you to ask questions or otherwise interact with Rohit on topics featured in the book. Rohit is currently doing a lecture series around the book.

The book contains examples from the nearly 40 interviews that he and Patty did with Sillicon Valley and Indian entrepreneurs to draw upon their experiences as they went about innovating and set up some very successful and some not-so-successful companies. There are lessons to be learnt, esp. at this juncture when we are seeing the first generation of entrepreneurs in India.

For More Information CLICK HERE

Founders at Work - Stories of Startups' Early Days

2000 was basically the year of fraud, where we were just losing more and more money every month. At one point we were losing over $10 million per month in fraud. It was crazy.

—Max Levchin, founder of PayPal, page 6

All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really
great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.

—Steve Wozniak, founder of Apple, page 36

Microsoft made a buyout offer for Excite in late '95, and even then I had Microsoft's CTO, Nathan Myhrvold, yelling at me, "Search is not a business. People are just going to search a few times and then bookmark what they want to go to."

—Joe Kraus, founder of Excite, page 68

I originally had my parents moderating, since they were retired, and after a few days I asked my dad how it was going. He said, "Oh, it's very interesting. Mom saw a picture of a guy and a girl and another girl, and they were doing..." So I told Jim, "Dude, my parents can't do this anymore. They're looking at porn all day."

—James Hong, founder of HotOrNot, page 380

Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful one, to learn how it's done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

For More Information CLICK HERE

Joost is Here to Juice up your life...

Joost is here to juice up your life.The cool new way of watching TV on the Internet.Joost is the new service started by the founders of Skype and Kazaa.

These guys are crazy about P2P or Peer to Peer and so am I.They believe that this technology has a lot of potential and they have proved this thing time and again.First through Kazaa, then Skype and now Joost (pronounced as "Juiced").Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis who founded Kazaa and Skype have now come up with a new way to watch Full Screen HD quality TV on your PC.The concept behind Joost is that of P2PTV that is the content is distributed in a Peer to Peer fashion where there is no central server rather each "peer" is both a client and a server, a consumer and a distributer of content.Past few years have seen a rise of P2P technology with the likes of Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella(Bearshare and Limewire), Edonkey and BitTorrent etc. P2P has revolutionized the way data transfer takes over the Internet. The earlier service provided by them, Skype is the most popular VoIP application which was acquired by eBay for US $2.6Billion.Joost is all set to revolutionize the way Video content is distributed on the Internet.It is still in its Beta version and available as an Invite based service.However you can get invite from here.
The technology which is used is based on CoreAVC H.264 video decoder which is becoming popular video codec.There has been news about Joost signing up distribution deals with Warner Music,Viacom and MTV Networks etc. for distribution of their content via Joost.So Joost is all set to give the Youtubes and Google Videos a run for their money but only time will tell how successful these "P2P Entrepreneurs " are in this venture?
JOOST HOMEPAGE

Check this Joost Advertisement Video from Youtube

My First Blog Entry

So this is my first blog entry.I heard a lot about this buzzword called blogging so i thought i should also have a blog of mine and here I am writing my first blog entry. At this point of time I really don't have much to say but I would definitely have lot more in the time to come.I have many things to say and convey to others about my view on people, life and technology.I guess I can have an opinion on many things and this blog seems to be a right place to express that.So keep looking at this space coz I truly believe that Salvation Lies In Technology...