somebody’s gonna get a hurt real bad 
– Russell Peters, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzKHQX59Wso

So I’ve decided to start making a list of those companies, would be interesting to look back and know how it fairs a couple of years down the line. To start with, here we go with people putting photos online and needing boat loads of money in the process.

These two are pretty similar

http://instagr.am/ – USD 7.5 million in funding.

http://picplz.com/ – USD 5 million in funding.

both of them are photo sharing apps. the big USP seems to be, they allow you to apply a filter to your photo before you upload it to facebook, flickr etc. Huge. Totally worth it. Isn’t it. If I had dollars, this is where I’d bet my money on. No brainer.

http://www.cooliris.com/ – USD 28 million in funding. They make a pretty slide show visualization. They also have a live group photo sharing yada yada web service. And yes you’re reading that right.. 28 million moneys.

http://1000memories.com/ – USD 2.5 million in funding. This almost made me spit out my coffee. This is a service to host free obituaries. Whoa! Didn’t you just think why you didn’t think of this awesome idea before. Yeah.. me neither. They are somehow supposed to not only make money for themselves, but to multiply and return that 2.5 million to the investors too.

hence the phrase – somebody’s gonna get a hurt…

Sources

• http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/16/greylock-invests-2-5-million-in-1000memories-tctv
• http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/10/imeem-founders-raise-5m-from-andreessen-horowitz-for-social-photo-app-picplz/
• http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/instagram-2-million/
• http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/cooliris/

Building a product, and dealing with its consequences can teach more, than getting paid to build for someone else’s vision and washing hands off it. The courage to put one’s weight behind a single product, envision the business behind it, iterate until it is done right, is what makes for a great product in the end. It is a reward worth pursuing.

So, if you’re a freelancer, I urge you to find a product that you love and get married to it. It may be a welcome change.

I decided to color up the rather drab list here with some visualizations. While this does not make for an accurate representation of the trends (it is too small a dataset to derive conclusions), but it still has some interesting information. I think it may come close to representing what’s hot these days. Read on.

Cities in order of number of selections

On the Map -

The size of the circles represent the number of startups selected from that location

The sectors in order of popularity

Observations :

• As expected, IT/Web rules the roost. IT is a younger lot too, while healthcare, cleantech, social enterprises fall a little above the overall average age.
• The NCR region combined makes for the most selections.
• Overall average age – 34.3
• Median age – 32
• Ahmedabad is the youngest city at an avg. age of 28.4 (amongst cities with more than 5 selection), and Hyderabad is the oldest at an avg. age of 42.0

Interesting visualization of what these startups are talking about can be done with tag clouds (courtesy the awesome tag-cloud generator wordle.net), so for the top 5 categories, here we go -

IT/Web

Healthcare / Life Sciences

Education

Mobile/Telecom

Cleantech/Energy

Measuring by just our pay seems short sighted. We have to take into account the tax of lower satisfaction from a job that maybe pays much more but isn’t what we want to do. So maybe, when we feel, “I’m not paid what I’m worth”, the counterintuitive step that makes us happier could be getting paid even less but doing what we love.

Moreover, I don’t even think practicing our most disruptive skill will necessarily fetch more money. In business I do not find skill and profits to be proportional. Maybe the correlation is more in salaried professions, but I’d argue it is still nowhere close to being proportional.

As Paul Graham mentions

A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times as productive as an ordinary one, but he’ll consider himself lucky to get paid three times as much

So, aren’t we better off not measuring our worthiness by how much we earn (we’ll always fall short), but by how happy we are.

A. Light text on dark covers

B. Dark text on light covers

Just write A or B in the comments. I am leaning towards B.

I’m not showing names of book stores anymore in the main search results now. This not only makes the UI less cluttered, but has a nice side effect (something intended), that no book store names are appearing on the search results, and it won’t appear that Bookstore A is better just because they have a certain book at only Rs. 10 less than Bookstore B, and are appearing a whole lot more in the search results. For eg. see the previous screenshot. You can see a lot more Infibeam’s despite Flipkart not being all that more expensive (for this particular search).

Clicking on a cover shows details in a modal window now. A modal window is a good pattern to use here as I can now add more stuff like book reviews and recommendations here.

For Rs. 15000 ($300), you’ll get a guaranteed extra 2 working days per month. If you’re a developer or have developers working for you**.. get the wonderful magical device now. The economics are in overwhelming favour for it. I wonder why it is still not prevalent. Even amongst so many smart developers I know.

Getting an SSD _now_ makes even more sense as it probably buys you a competitive edge in case you’re selling your services (read time) for money, which will start to vanish once it is common place.

** or designers for that matter

Now I’m grouping books by ISBN. So the UI is much more scalable and can accomodate a large number of stores now. The best pricing is shown by default along with the name of the store. To see prices for any particular ISBN for all stores, just click on the [n other matches] link.

I’ve added a status bar on the right which will update in case there are any errors from retrieving books from any store. It also works well as a progress bar and gives a sense that something is happening while the results stream in. I think it does a good job of keeping the user engaged and informed.

I’ve also updated the main page now to be more descriptive of what this search engine does. I quickly realized after seeing the high bounce rates from the previous main page, that I ain’t no google, so just a logo and a search box won’t quite cut it. I better not waste my visitors time in asking them to figure me out. So I hope to see some improvement with this new page

Tasks to do :

• I missed out on the in stock / out of stock info. Will be adding that in a couple of days.
• Have to make the UI behave better in case cover images are not found for a certain book. It looks ok in Firefox as of now, but chrome and IE are a little ugly.

You can follow my updates on twitter or facebook.

One particular need that I have is the option to select different taxes on different line items, a lot of apps miss out on this. Also, at iTasveer we need a large number of clients, but can do with limited invoices monthly as we raise ‘external invoices’ only for offline orders or some other services. Most of our orders are online and invoicing is built into iTasveer to handle those.

So here’s a quick pricing comparison amongst some of the prominent services -

1. Unlimited invoices per month, Limited clients, monthly charges increase with number of clients. Popular apps in this category

* Invoicera seems to be a good offering, met all my needs, has reasonably good UI. Although I’ll have to go for their highest plan, in case I decide to use it, as I definitely need more than 25 clients.

2. Unlimited clients, Limited invoices per month. Monthly charges increase with

* In this case, Zoho was the only one that met my needs. Liked Zoho’s user experience even better. It is faster to work with as compared to Invoicera.

** Ballpark is outrageously priced. A dollar for an invoice.. c’mon guys!

3. Free or opensource

hosted and free – http://www.billingboss.com/ 

There are a few opensource alternatives too (one can self host these)

• http://www.siwapp.org/
• http://www.argentuminvoice.com/
• http://www.simpleinvoices.org/
• http://bambooinvoice.org/

I may have missed out on some prominent services, but the competition is intense in the invoicing space and I had trouble differentiating one service from the other. Only trying them out for the particular features I needed gave me the knowledge to select/reject one.

For my needs only Zoho and Invoicera seem to fit the bill. If anyone knows of anything better.. do let me know in the comments.

The default view will show you the four most relevant results. There will be a link to fetch more results. Clicking/Hovering over a title will bring up more details..

How do you like this one. I am in favor of incorporating cover images. It seems to improve the experience significantly.