CricketHighlights.com
The cricket world cup was up in 2003 and then unless you bought some
expensive dish network subscription there were hardly any options to
watch the games. Online videos were non existent. And even if one
could watch the game at some friends house, the time zone difference
between USA and cricket playing nations was such that one would have to
watch the game are really odd hours (i remember the world cup games
used to start something like at 3 am). So i always used to wonder,
wudnt it be just easier if one could watch a 30 minute highlight of a
cricket game (the one-day versions are 8 hrs long) online?
Solution Goals:
1. To develop a website, www.crickethighlights.com (i still have the domain) to showcase the game highlights
2. To develop a software solution that would automatically extract
highlight segments from the video broadcast. This would require fair
bit of video processing but wudnt be terribly difficult. One could
check the signal for the score and determine points where a player gets
out or hits a four or a six (just think of them to be like home runs in
baseball).
Status:
1. I didnt do much till 2005. then found a digital video processing
guy who was doing a PhD in the area of video summarization. Sounded
like a perfect guy to build the technology. After many mths of trying,
we cudnt really get the software going. Mainly because he got busy with
his PhD.
2. 2006. Pitched crickethighlights.com as an online video site for a
b-school course on launching new ventures. The idea was very well
received but since this was not cricket and not baseball, the feedback
was that the market is too small.
3. Nothing since then. In 2007 the BCCI, announced it would develope
a portal for doing exactly this for the global cricket audience. Seemed
like this was the end of the road for crickethighlights. However, the
BCCI site never really took off
4. then Youtube happened and suddenly one could see 2-3 minute clips of the cricket games.
So perhaps, crickethighlights.com is now an idea that should retire to the deadpool. What do you think.
UPDATE On May 15, 2010: I have been getting more than 200 or so odd unique visitors on this domain, i am embedding a widget to help awareness of new diabetes treatment trials
You can find more such trials at TriaX.com
August 23rd, 2008
Grubia.com is a social way to discover and know what to eat and where to eat what you want to eat?
As a foodie, i have had some real information needs which translated into the idea for grubia.
Idea Date: Somewhere around Jan, 2008. After many hours of brainstorming with my co-founder, we nailed this down. We wanted to do something in the online food media space. But we wanted to solve a real need and also build something cool and different (read not another restaurant review site, food blog or recipe site).
Site URL: Grubia.com
Blog: http://grubia.blogspot.com
Motivation: Consider the following scenarios
1. Have you ever been in a situation where you have gone to a restaurant and looked at the menu and wondered, what to eat there? What is good? Perhaps, yes (specially if you go to eat food you are not very familiar with ). You may has asked the waiter/waitress and heard them say, “Oh, everything is awesome here!”. Wow, that surely helps. So you know where to eat, but not what to eat?
2. Similarly, you may have had a burning desire to eat one of your favorite foods (hmmm, i just love the classic north indian dish, mutton biryani).
3. You just walked into some place to grab some food. And it turned out that the place has an awesome cheeseburger. You want to tell the world. “folks, you cant not miss the burger here.” You know where one should eat and what one should order but dont have a place that you can do exactly that.
Existing Solutions Landscape
1. Restaurant review sites - such as yelp.com, zagat.com However, these focus on restaurant reviews and not the review of the dishes being served.
2. Menu listing sites - such as menupages.com. Again, they provide what is available but not what is great at a place
3. Blogs - well they do everything but cant answer the specific question, what to eat at a particular place?
4. Recipe sites - such as ifood.tv which provide recipes but that is not that helpful.
Innovation Factor:
1. Focusing on just the real stuff, food!
2. Crawlers that get the menu and restaurant data
3. Grub ranking algorithms that use several parameters to rank the different dishes across the restaurants so that when you lookup a place, you know what are the three most recommended appetizers, drinks, entrees and desserts
Current Status (as of 08/01/2008):
1. In active development since may, 2008
2. Submitted for techcrunch 50.
3. Interviewed for tc 50. Invite for the demopit
4. Site launched (alpha) on August 20, 2008.
Stay tuned! Will be posting many updates. The site will be launching in private beta in a few days.
August 23rd, 2008