Appspiration

I was recently listening to a podcast which featured Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels . "Sometimes you have gifts that you don't know about untill you start doing them" Did you know: He studied radiology and worked at hospitals He was an Academic and had been a research scientist at the Cornell University In 2004, Amazon (the book company!) invited him to give a talk about some material he was working on and Werner seemed skeptical about visiting a "book" company After joining Amazon, in 6 months he became the CTO because the existing "Tech guy" at the company really wanted to be a developer! #DiverseBackground

While reading the book, 'The Psychology of Money', I came across these two lines: "Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in the world that had a computer" "During one of their late-night sessions, Allen recalled Gates showing him a Fortune magazine." And this got me thinking: Would Bill Gates be "Bill Gates" if he had not got access to THAT computer at Lakeside? Would Microsoft have been born if two kids (Bill & Paul) did not have access and end up reading  THAT Fortune magazine? Ofcourse, Bill Gates himself answered the question in a way. " If there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft ", he told the school's graduating class in 2005. Me Then I started to think: As a kid, even I had early access to a computer when in the year 1995, my elder brother got home a 386 computer! I would randomly play around with some games and some design tools. Pretty sure this helped me later i

T he last post in my personal entrepreneurship series  ( see the note on the pure coincidence at the bottom of this post ) . In this, I just wanted to share some useful tools and ideas which have helped me along this journey, for storing important things like Designs, Ideas and Book notes! Design repository When you work on so many products and screens, referring good designs becomes essential. Looking at some professional designs out there naturally inpsires us to improve our own designs or even carry some of those ideas over to our Apps and screens. That is why maintaining a place where I can store all the inspirational or nice designs comes handy and I use Google Photos for that! Some of the pictures which I have come across, stored as an album in Google Photos When I come across an app, instead of immediately jumping into using it, I take a moment to look at the design and other things. If its interesting or something which could be applicable to my own app, I store a screenshot in

I n my  previous post , I briefly mentioned what led me to quit my full-time salaried job with Motorola and jump into the world of entrepreneurship. The year is 2013 and I was starting off as a Solopreneur. I was skilled in developing Android apps as well as the technologies required to build a backend (server). But to grow the business, more had to be done. This is what I ended up doing, step by step: iOS Apps with no skills By this time, iOS was already a force to reckon with. So expanding the Apps to the iOS platform was the next logical step. For that I initially outsourced the App-work to a consultancy from Pune. After that relationship gracefully ended, I got a freelancer from Romania whom I found via freelancer.com . Interestingly, I was his first client on that website! I believed in his work even though he had no prior experience or reviews to show on that website. Hiring full-time engineers A year and a half later, I started hiring full-time Android and iOS engineers and we

In my previous post I wrote about how the Apps got me a job in Motorola . Now work on the Motorola MOTOACTV smart watch was going on well. On the personal front, I had also released 3 Android chess apps on the Play Store (no iOS apps yet, since this was still a side hustle using tech skills which I knew). Meeting Anand The year was 2012, and a team from Motorola with me as the captain, decided to participate in a Corporate Chess tournament in the month of July. The event consisted of team matches as well as an individual tournament. The highlight of the event was also a chance to play a game with none other than the then world champion Viswanathan Anand, provided one finishes in the top 10. There was also an option for a dinner with him (paid entry!). Although the team did not fare well, in the individual event I finished 4th, which meant I was eligible to play Anand! What a moment it was for me, not only to personally see the world chess champion face to face but try my chess skills a

This week, I take a break from writing about my own entrepreneurship journey. Instead, here is an inspiring journey of Ragunathan Pattabiraman, founder of kuyil.org ,  who quit his full time job to help his musician brother make apps for Carnatic music lovers! Ragu found his niche in Carnatic music and went on to develop 3 apps along with his brother. All together, the apps now have ~200,000 downloads, and all organically! I sent some questions to Ragu via email and he kindly replied with in-depth answers talking about his family and journey. Sit back and get inspired! Asim: What was your motivation to develop these Apps ? Ragu: My main motivation was to build something for my brother. He is a musician who studied carnatic music. He is also my favourite composer (You can listen to his old album   here ). I was working at a software company. We are all one joint family. Financially we were fine and there was no pressure on him to earn. I was very clear not to pressurize him so that he