Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

If you are starting up a venture and you are not very competent in terms of writing code, should you outsource the development work or set up a tech team to do it. I am often asked by business entrepreneurs if they should outsource the development of their initial prototype. Outsourcing is considered cool as it can be a relatively inexpensive and fast way to create a product.  Though cost savings are real but there is level of risk associated with it. There could be scenarios where entrepreneurs can find themselves with a product that needs to be rebuilt, often from scratch. The cost and time savings can go for a toss completely and all your plans of initial launch will be blacked out .  But having said that I know many entrepreneurs that successfully outsourced development.

So question arises how do you decide whether to outsource the early development of your technology?

There is no simple and straight answer for it, there are a few considerations which could help you make that decision. If your technology is an original technology or depends on complicated logic or algorithms you may want to avoid outsourcing at least that portion of the project. The vision for the product is always partially lost in translation when a business team tries to communicate with a tech team. This dynamic, however, is further amplified when describing the product via video chat and even more challenging when there is a middle man or a development team with a limited mastery of your native tongue. While these challenges can be mitigated by robust product specifications and wireframes, an already challenging process is even more challenging.

This isn’t to say, however, that you can’t get a great product from an outsourced shop. You can. The key is to outsource elements or even entire projects that are more limited in their logic or algorithmic complexity, to over-communicate your specifications, and to practice careful, diligent project management.

Your sensitivity to this risk should be heightened if you don’t have a technical lead inside your company. If you consider your outsourced provider to be your CTO, you’ll have a difficult time vetting the progress of their work and may find that they’re off course too late in the development cycle. Furthermore, evaluating the product will likely be challenging without an engineer on your side, making it even riskier to completely handoff the development of complex logic.

To summarize, if you are planning to build a very simple technology, outsourcing development work can be a great strategy. If your venture requires a great deal of technical work you may be better off building it in-house.

-This is a guest post by Nitin Yadav, Nitin held various senior engineering positions in companies like Microsoft, PiCorp and lastly he was CTO of Seventymm

KineticGlue, an enterprise focused social collaboration company today announced the acquisition of Injoos, a company building social media tools for the enterprise. The acquisition expands KineticGlue’s offerings and will accelerate its own product development. KineticGlue is Bangalore based company founded in 2008 by design expert Meeta Malhotra and Vivek Paul(formely CEO of Wipro Technology)

Injoos was founded in 2008 by Jagdish Vasishtha and Srinivas Seshadri, both formerly with Infosys.  Injoos team-ware organizes both content and collaboration technologies around team-based goals and enables contextual use of these technologies.Teams can quickly start working on projects and collaborate with friendly tools to achieve their goals while creating valuable knowledge assets.

Enterprises across the world have turned to social applications to retain and engage talent, make information flows more collaborative, and unleash innovation. KineticGlue is a leader in this space in India and has already built strong industry expertise in Banking (Yes Bank, ICICI Bank), Healthcare (Fortis), Infotech (L&T), Retail (Future), Telecom (Airtel) and Education (BITS). In addition, KineticGlue already has over 200 medium to small sized companies in its network.

“KineticGlue has built a strong installed base in large and medium sized companies in India over the last year and we have received terrific feedback on our product features and usability case studies” says Vivek Paul, adding that “The Injoos team and their product will strengthen and enhance our offerings for the Indian market across multiple industries. I am pleased to welcome the Injoos team to KineticGlue”.

Jagdish and Srinivas will both join the company’s board and respectively be COO and CTO of KineticGlue. Says Jagdish, ‘There are few products that can improve productivity, enhance employee morale, and deliver on the innovation promise – all at the same time – so we are very excited about this opportunity. Customers from both companies have already endorsed the value we bring and this combination of technical strengths of Injoos and market reach of KineticGlue will create a global leader in social business”.

Companies have used social applications to improve sales pursuits through real time collaboration, engage distribution partners through specialty communities, improved project management through common document repositories, reduce attrition by giving employees a chance to express their creativity, and enhanced new product development by increasing cross department connections.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Blue star Infotech a provider of software solutions for the global mid-market space has launched a new Web 2.0 based Enterprise Social Computing (ESC) platform that will act as a catalyst to empower enterprises to innovate and facilitate co-creation of products and services, achieve better collaboration, information sharing and knowledge management. BSI will target enterprises primarily from the manufacturing and consumer goods sector.

The ESC platform, targeted towards the Indian mid market segment, is built on BSI’s Visibility, Control and Optimize (VCO) vision for the mid-market space. The platform has elements such as ‘Open Minds’ that will facilitate ideation, innovation and employee recognition across the enterprise in a highly organized and structured manner helping them to adopt best practices of their larger enterprise counterparts. Better information sharing will reduce duplication and encourage creation of information assets and their reusability, which will help medium sized enterprises gear up to scale up faster to compete in the current marketplace.

The ESC platform inherently carries strengths of fast paced and structured communication by way of Wikis, Forums and Workflows. The platform can also be integrated with external ERP systems and Office applications. Shared Calendars, Online meetings and effective workflows can enable remote offices/factories, etc to also work in a virtual office environment.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

As a product manager/developer how many times you have been surprised by how user uses your system. From my own product management experience, I have noticed that users sometimes use products in scenarios that product managers hadn’t necessarily considered as primary use case and users are hooked to your secondary or not so relevant use case in your product.

There are endless ways to innovate in design and new technologies are offering more and more opportunities to do so.  Lets us briefly go through the 10 simple guidelines for Good design I firmly believe in -

Good design makes a product useful

A product is meant to be used. It must satisfy certain needs, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product and removes anything that can detract from it.

Good design is aesthetic

Products we use every day affect our personality and our well-being. Hence, their aesthetics are critical. However, and this is very important, only well-executed designs can be beautiful.

Good design makes a product understandable

Gone are the days of RTFM. You didn’t need a manual to operate the iPhone, did you? I firmly believe good design can make the product talk and be self-explanatory.

Good design is unobtrusive

Products are neither decorative objects nor works of art. It’s important for the design of products to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Good design is honest

Our favorite! Good design does not make a product more valuable or innovative than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with false promises.

Good design is long-lasting

Do you know the IBM logo? Did you know it was designed 43 years ago? No need to change it. Like Paul Rand (the designer of the IBM logo), I believe that good design avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears old fashioned. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years.

Good design is thorough, down to the last detail

In good design, nothing is arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in designing a product show respect towards the user.

Good design is environmentally-friendly

Good design conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Good design is as little design as possible

Less, but better. Good design concentrates on the essential. Everything else is left out. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

-Marina, vcBytes.com