Sai Ram's Blog

This practice is so widespread that a term, acqhiring, has entered the industry lexicon to describe it. Even for the skeptics, it’s difficult to argue that these acquis- itions are about anything other than people. In many deals, like Facebook’s acquisition of Gowalla, the technology was not even a part of the transaction. And when the technology is included in the transaction, it is frequently released as open source post-acquisition. The New Kingmakers

Source: money/studies/wp0028.pdf

Chronology of India’s exchange rate policies 

• 1947 (When India became member of IMF): Rupee tied to pound, Re 1 = 1 s, 6 d, rate of 28 October, 1945 

• 18 September, 1949: Pound devalued; India maintained par with pound 

• 6 June, 1966: Rupee is devalued, Rs 4.76 = $1, after devaluation, Rs 7.50 = $1 (57.5%) 

• 18 November, 1967: UK devalued pound, India did not devalue 

• August 1971: Rupee pegged to gold/dollar, international financial crisis 

• 18 December, 1971: Dollar is devalued 

• 20 December, 1971: Rupee is pegged to pound sterling again 

• 1971-1979: The Rupee is overvalued due to India’s policy of import substitution 

• 23 June, 1972: UK floats pound, India maintains fixed exchange rate with pound 

• 1975: India links rupee with basket of currencies of major trading partners. Although the basket is periodically altered, the link is maintained until the 1991 devaluation. 

• July 1991: Rupee devalued by 18-19 % 

• March 1992: Dual exchange rate, LERMS, Liberalised Exchange Rate Management System 

• March 1993: Unified exchange rate: $1 = Rs 31.37 

• 1993/1994: Rupee is made freely convertible for trading, but not for investment purposes 

Why you should be betting against the rupee now - Firstpost

clientsfromhell:

I’m a web developer/programmer, and I’m working with a web/print designer. During discussions of a website in development…

Me: For reference, to help you figure out what height to specify, the height of the Home page slide show (right hand) column, from top line to bottom line is 631px.  On the Portfolio Page it is slightly taller at 689px. 

Client: I am not going to deal with pixels.

There are lots of choices. Ruby on Rails is a famous choice in the US/England for fast development of websites. PHP is the most famous one for Indian startups (I think its mostly because of the number of people). There are many things that lead you to take the programming language for a startup / project lead. 

The ** Cart** on an e-commerce websites is the most important of all along with the **Wishlist**. Amazon.com used to use DynamoDB (not sure if they still do) for saving the shopping cart across millions of users. Simple: If you lose items from the cart, you lose the customer. You cannot show old data. (The paper on DynamoDB published in 2007 was famous because of the architecture it uses. DynamoDB is currently offered as a service as part of AWS).

I will be writing about the familiar part of the flow, the process of starting to build the website from scratch to launch, which comes at a stage after you have validated and ensured that you’d be working on getting the website up.

1. Get the idea right detailed in a 1 pager. Detail in what the service does and what its not supposed to do. StackExchange has a great example - Area51 (The Staging Zone) go through an elaborate process of where users define what are considered good & bad questions so that it clearly defines the scope
2. Find and Analyse the competition. You should think about complementing the existing services or do much better than them to avoid people saying “another e-commerce website”. Companies with deep pockets spend money in capturing users and new companies without funding can drain faster trying to keep up with competition.
3. The process for getting the site out live - I have seen many websites in this phase which I can explain well (both the good and the bad parts). Skipping (1) & (2) might cost you a visible hole in the financials if realised after the fact.

Since you have the functionality listed now, you’d need a lot of other things to get over.

Step 1 - Company and Domain Name:

Determining the name of the company is a challenge since you’d want the search result on Google to get your name rather than somebody else’s. Having the same domain name and company name helps for referencing (startups usually do, others do not).

This is the toughest one if you are looking for dotCom domain since most of the names you can think of are parked or already been setup, especially if you are starting another cloud based product. If you are looking for a local websites using ccTLDs (has impact on SEO), you might be in a better position to get the name you want.

Step 2 - WireFraming:

WireFraming helps you understand the essential items in each and every page that are listed along with the basic user experience of the website.

If you want a different layout for phones, ensure you cover them as well. (The wireframes would be different for phones based on the resolution).

Popular choice of tools: Balsamiq, Pen & Paper

Step 3 - UI Design:

The aesthetics and colours are decided here with dimensions of the components in each of the pages. The non-web designers who do not deal with interactions in the rich-web space do not care about hovers, dynamic content, screens when loading content, image aspect ratios, several font