Anand Nataraj

Archive for the ‘Cogzidel’ Category

After a week of thinking, to and foe changes on strategies we finally decided on two things yesterday;

• Deliverable to the investor…
• Business Model for the investment pitch…

Thought that is just a start from today have to plan a lot of parallels and still we have a lot of things to do like;

• Forming Intermediates (Brokers / Affiliates) to sell the project.
• Meet more people like Investment Bankers, Serial Entrepreneurs to understand the legalities and challenges we might foresee and work on solutions.
• Start working on Business Plan to show it to investors.

From now it is going to be interesting as it is going to be a test for our patience, leadership, team-work and skills.

It is going to be 2 years and it has been a great two years run. When i sat to prepare on my future plans or next milestone for the company; I realized I’ve been standing on the same foot for almost 10 years. Even with my previous company I started feeling about stagnation and I came our by that time. Now again I’m feeling stagnation and not sure about the Value as a company we are going to office. After much brainstorming i couldn’t think much. I think it is time to jump out of the comfort zone and take some chances and work on some cutting edge projects and slowly step into R & D. After making up my mind to step into next challenge and make life more exciting like how it was during 2002 & 2008 I’ve decided to work on raising funds.

In fact finance is one department which I haven’t explored and i want to try my hands on that too. So, we have decided to work on two types of fund raising;

• Raising capital through Private Equities…
• Raising through Crowd Funding.

It has been hardly a week since we have started and after starting it is like opening the pandora box. Every day i’m struck with something and I’ve to work on new tasks to facilitate the progress of core idea. I sleep every day without contention. I feel the day was half complete as i’m not done with my pursuit. But this is what making my life meaningful. I use to have the same feeling when i started my first company & with Cogzidel Consultancy Services. Today I’m happy with the progress of CCS & all those thought of half baked days are making today a contented day.

I’ve lots of personal lessons where perseverance has paid yields… For now i’m working on strategies for crowd funding and withing a week we are planning start our first pilot campaign…

If any of you have any knowledge or information about Crowd funding kindly ping me… I might need your help on it…

For long I wanted to install an all-in-one messenger tool. But because of work compulsions & other commitments it took a back seat. Now i’m planning to take more responsibility on the entire operations of the company. So after reading a lot of reviews and trying other messenger. I’ve settled for Adium. Following are protocols or IM it supports;

• AIM
• MobileMe (formerly known as .Mac)
• ICQ
• XMPP (formerly known as Jabber)
• Google Talk
• Facebook Chat
• LiveJournal
• .NET Messenger Service (also known as MSN and Windows Live)
• Yahoo! Messenger, USA & Japan
• Bonjour
• MySpaceIM
• Gadu-Gadu
• Novell GroupWise
• Lotus Sametime
• Tencent QQ
• MeBeam with a plugin
• Tlen with a plugin
• Xfire with the XBlaze plugin
• Skype with a plugin
• IRC (beta only)
• Twitter (beta only)
• NateOn with a plugin
• StudiVZ-Plauderkasten via Nimbuzz with a plugin

So from now I’ll be available on almost all famous messenger. Ping me to collect all my messenger handles.

It is a Challenge everywhere & it is so much fun having a Challenge. Last couple of week it has been issues of;

• Delivery Delays
• Shrinking Profits
• Server Issues
• Productivity Leaks
• Escalating Costs

And can add more to the list. After reviewing the situation the findings are wonderful and after cracking the problem and working on the solution is always the best thing to do. Now I’ve a aggressive plans & programs to improve our performance on all aspects and move up the value chain quickly and effectively.

it is going to be a hectic days ahead as I’m revisiting some process & dusting back some tasks that needs a re-look. So, my tasks for next month is going to be;

• To train a webmaster who will be starting his tasks from tomorrow to update / manage following things;
  • Blog
  • Case Studies
  • Portfolio
  • Social Media updates on SlideShare, Youtube, Twitter & Facebook.
• Start Leadership training Program.
• Audit closed projects of the month to check if standards are followed.
• Revisit SEO strategies.
• Meet Recreation Club representatives and work on their functioning.

Facebook clone

Success of every entrepreneur lies in the thinking process of his people. When his folks start thinking about new products and when they succeed in executing them in spite all odds it is a special feel. Such an entrepreneur would the happiest person to have such people in his team. And i’m one of the proud entrepreneur.

CogzidelTemplates.Com has launched its first product which is a clone of famous social networking site Facebook and they have named the product as DolphinBook as the script uses Dolphin as the framework.

Users must be thrilled that all required modules & a facebook like theme is bundled and sold as a turnkey script. Also such a wonderful product is sold for as low as $24.

To know more about the product kindly visit DolphinBook Page.

It is always a nice feel to get covered on the press. It is a double bonanza when people come to you to cover your story. ToI covered our story on April 20, 2010 for the topic Start-up companies share office space to cut costs.

Click here to read more.

At Cogzidel we have never documented all the solutions we solved for every challenge. I wanted to press folks in writing a case study and I wanted to lead from the front and wrote the first case study. There are more to come in future;

Challenge: We as a company didn’t believe on having a separate testing team to test our products. Because the projects were of short duration we always felt a testing team would make sense only after the development team unable to deliver results in spite of doing unit testing. But we were facing lots of challenges because of poor unit testing and many times we get a positive test report from our unit testers and our managers would pass the product to the client believing the words of their subordinates.

Most of the cases client comes back irated as there would be obvious bugs.

Solution: After doing a lot of counseling and giving reprimands nothing worked out as this thing got continued. We finally thought and got a suggestion from out CTO that;

• Every unit tester must be given a target to find bugs in a product and we must have the bug report before sending to the client.
• Team leaders must also be given a specific target for testing.
• Team Managers also given a target on testing.
• Final report goes to the CTO before sending project closure to the client.

Based on the number of bugs and size of the project CTO will analyze will recommend if the project can be sent for project closure.

We always learn from past mistakes. We took lot of lessons from Office Warming Experience of CCS which happened by September’09. So this is how it happened and how we were tangled into a new mess;

• Kept all the Pooja things in office the previous evening.
• Kept a key with me as last time we all reached office and we had to wait for a person to come and open the office and it got delayed.
• The morning woke up took my bath and went to office as second person by 4.25 AM following the priest who came by 4 AM.
• To our surprise there was a grill gate for which i didn’t have the keys.
• Had to call the responsible person and falling prey to my parents piece of mind.
• Had to hammer and break the lock.
• Then things started after a delay of one hour.
• Then folks like Kannan, Bala, Vimala & Boopathi joined.

Overall what ever things we learn from experience there are always new things that happens unexpected. Finally everything went fine and we started operations of Cogzidel Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Chennai.

Stated with high energy from the temple city of Madurai. Cogzidel Technologies Pvt. Ltd. has accomplished a milestone in its journey to glory. Here are some of the synopsis for CT;

• Started by a team of 7 energetic individuals.
  • Major Karthik
  • Sathick Basha
  • Senthil Guru
  • Bala Krishnan
  • Boopathi
  • Bala Murugan
  • Anand Nataraj
• Developed 2 Open-source products RBS & Beatz with more than 50,000 downloads till date.
• Developed Low cost specialty template selling website CogzidelTemplates.Com with more than 1,00,000/- downloads of free and low cost templates.
• Benefitted by low overheads in a Tier II city and passed the benefit to the customers.
• Inducted Mr.Kannan as director and into the core team.
• Served more than 400 customers in a short span of 18 months.
• Today we are into expansion spree and we have inaugurated our Chennai office with 30 seats.

I’d like to thank all the clients, all present and past employees, vendors and all stake holders who have contributed to this success. I wish to get same support from all the Cogzians to reach more milestone in future and reach great heights.

Here are some snaps taken during the office warming ceremony and inauguration by our CTO Mr.Kannan;