The Horror That New e-Passport Site Has Been
To
Dear Dr Manmohan Singh,
Prime Minister of India.
I have been trying to renew my passport for the last one month. I could not have imagined the ordeal that I would go through, when I first started. First off the official Government of India site redirects you to a dead link for Chandigarh passport office. Can you imagine it says the DNS record is not found? After doing some research and a trip to the Chandigarh passport office I got to know the changed URL to the new site. When I opened that site to my horror I found out that the site uses https with an invalid certificate. How much does it take to buy a valid cert when they are wasting Crores on such stupid endeavours.
Anyhow I managed to register myself and the whole site experience looked like a college project to me. Although it has been designed by the topmost IT company of this country. The frustrated experience included frequent page timeouts and such bad layout that is beyond belief. After I submitted my filled form, I tried to create an appointment. The site said that all the available slots for the day are filled and I need to choose another date. To my astonishment there was no date field to choose another date. After wasting some more days trying to create an appointment, I finally called the toll free number. There I got to know the voodoo magic for booking an appointment. At 8AM they open the booking slots for the day. You have to be lucky to get the few slots opened for that day.
I have been trying to do exactly that for the last few days. At sharp 8AM when there are probably hundreds of people like me trying to get the few slots, the site becomes practically unresponsive. Every single page times out and after multiple reloads you move from one step to next to find out that the slot has already been taken. At this point I am so fed up and have started to like the previous system of standing in the queue for 4 hours to get an audience with the Passport Gods. At least there was a guarantee!
Dear Dr Singh, we are one of the most taxed countries and it just saddens me to no extent to see this money going waste like this. Please stop this non-sense of spending public money in the name of improving citizen facilities and doing the most shoddy job. Had this system been reviewed by some decent industry professionals, it would not have been allowed to go public.
Regards,
Amit.
Fork in the Road
There comes a time when one reflects on the direction they are heading. I have been doing the same thinking for the past couple of months. Running the consulting business has been on of the most learning and enjoyable experience. I have met really nice people and clients along the way. They supported and encouraged me whole heartedly. But the question of scaling up the business kept coming back. I did some effort in that direction and results were no better. That led me to this fork in the road.
I have been consulting with Winshuttle for quite some time and got big support from Vishal, who heads the India operations. It was apparent from the dynamics that if I ever had to make a call going back to a full time association with other than IKWorks it would be Winshuttle. So after 2 years of this exciting journey and some soul searching I am now a part of Winshuttle team as VP of Engineering. Once one is bitten by the entrepreneurial bug it’s hard to get out of the symptoms. The platform that I am getting by joining the team at Winshuttle throws open possibilities that opens up once you are part of a strong team.
It’s fun sailing alone if that’s the right thing for one. But the wind that you catch when you are a part of a bigger boat and strong team opens up multiple possibilities of bigger horizons.
Thanks to all who helped along the way clients, partners and colleagues alike. The journey is still on though stronger and faster with the new team 
.
We are Growing and Some Updates
I have been quite busy last few months and have not updated the blog in a while. All that hard work and well wishes are paying off and now we are moving to the next stage of our evolution. We and our clients have some open positions. Details are provided below. Please contact me in case you are interested. Here are some of the things to consider before contacting.
- We are looking for people from reputed colleges only.
- You are actively coding and interested in coding for a while.
- Your coding proficiency is way higher than your colleagues and you are looking for challenges beyond your capabilities.
So here are the positions in not any particular order.
- Senior Developers with 3-6 years of experience in .NET technologies and hands on coding experience in Web and Desktop technologies.
- Senior SharePoint Developers with 3-6 years of experience.
- SharePoint Architect who has done some serious enterprise grade product/solution development and willing to demonstrate and discuss.
- IT Manager who has experience in managing infrastructure for an organization that has about 50-100 desktops and servers.
- A Software Configuration Management (SCM) professional with 3-5 years of experience, person should be actively managing team development process and solid InstallShield experience.
Nivio and Airtel Broadband’s Net PC Launch
Today Airtel and Nivio launched their Net PC. They are charging Rs. 7999 for the hardware and there are three broadband plans @ Rs. 699, 899 and 1199 per month for 3 GB per month data transfer limit. This another iteration of the kind of fraudband that is being peddled in this country. Today any customer can go out and buy whitebox CPU+CRT combo for Rs. 10,000 or CPU+LCD combo for Rs. 12,000. Combine that with BSNL’s Rs. 250/month broadband or for higher requirements Rs. 500 unlimited plans. It’s left to one’s imagination which will result into a better offer. This kind of nonsense must not succeed. More details at this link.
In my conversation with friends this topic repeatedly comes up. Android with its Java development environment has ready developer ecosystem in India. Blackberry has decided to keep themselves high priced and out of reach for majority of customers including enterprise customers. It seems to us that there is a huge opportunity for a Rs. 8000 – 10000 device that customers and enterprises can afford and has a strong developer community backing. Microsoft is making inroads in to the mobile enterprise market and there is strong need for competition. As we are a price conscious market any company that takes the lead will have a strong lead and hold for time to come.
iAccelerator 2009 EIR Profiles on Startupcentral.in
Snigdha from Startupcentral.in has profiled the EIRs for this year’s program.
Freeman on iAccelerator
Freeman has interviewed with ChubbyBrain.com on iAccelerator program and his involvement. There is information about Freeman also in the article.
iAccelerator 2009
I am really excited to be the part of iAccelerator 2009 at CIIE at IIM Ahmedabad. I have been selected as one of the three Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIR). The details can be found at CIIE Blog and iAccelerator. We are currently in Ahmedabad working on selecting the start-ups for this year. It is going to be a fun and educational ride. The campus is buzzing with energy and it’s an honour to be a part of this program.
Where is the Innovation
There is an article in Economic Times on how Indian IT majors are “innovating” to protect margins. This is no better than the current real estate scenario where the developers are throwing in freebies rather than waking up to the realities and cutting rates. There is no innovation in this, just plain old trickery. They need to wake up to the realities of smaller IT budgets, more efficient employees and not pushing bodies. Indian IT industry had last 6-8 years of phenomenal growth and nobody paid attention to real innovation. Time to wake up to the reality and start acting.
Another Good Read on Indian ISP/Bandwidth Scene
After my last post on where NYTimes is doing the three part series, I came across this article by Tarun Dua. It’s an interesting read.
Mythbusting the assumptions of the ISP ecosystem in India with regard to current F/AUP changes
