First the bad news. For the past 4-5 months or so, I have been working on a top-secret ideas(outright) project that was to fulfil my life-long dream of entering the indian e-commerce market  – Without giving away too many details about this top-secret project – , I was working on building a shopping search-engine for the Indian e-retail space.

There was never a thefind or shopzilla in India, and the Indian e-retail consumer never really had a one-stop search engine where they can browse all online stores for whatever they want. I wanted to fill this vacuum with the said top-secret project.

Today, I learned that Amazon, the Internet’s largest e-retail company has launched today a product specifically tailored to fit the India e-retail market – it’s called junglee.com and a lot of it is like some of the things my team and I are working on.

Amazon has launched it’s first shopping search engine and it’s for the Indian market. That’s also the good news – Amazon, a company that I really really like; is entering India for the first time, and it’s going to set a standard and spread awareness – for me – about my future business! How awesome is that?

Junglee takes products from Indian e-retailers, lists them on their search engine and let’s the consumer do the price comparison, product discovery, etc. It’s pretty cool – it’s the Indian version of shopzilla marries thefind. it’s also free for sellers, while they are selling amazon product ads on junglee, that’s entirely optional and sellers don’t have to pay for clicks or to have their products listed on the search engine. I’m really looking forward to people discovering and starting to use junglee …it’s pretty exciting that e-retail in India is beginning to mature.

Basically, people it looks like can’t post their opinion on social networks concerning religion, politics or other people, but it they do, and some take offence, it’s the social networks who are taken to court for that! This is not just the government harassing new media companies but also democracy and free-speech.

To make things sound scarier, a High Court judge threatened:

Like China, we can block all such websites.

Wow!

Things like this have happened in the past, and I would think that India is a new democracy, only 60 or so years old, and eventually it will mature to become more like the US and other older democracies in the west, but with SOPA and the protect IP act created to bring censorship to the Internet in America looking more and more possible each day, I wonder if the idea of free speech and democracy exists within the very borders of the world’s ‘democracies’ any-more.

Full story on the India situation at Reuters

It’s been a while since I have published a blog post, a long time, actually – almost three long years. I used to blog a lot about e-retail, affiliate marketing and technology on a blog called Final Tag, I also had a personal blog – pranavchavda.com – for posting other stuff. FinalTag I sold on flippa two years ago when I found myself not blogging at all for over a year, The other blog’s domain, pranavchavda.com – I let expire a few months ago – again because I wasn’t really writing anything – I thought I’ll re-register the domain once I am back in the mood to start blogging again.

Turns out, someone else purchased the domain once it expired – someone else who isn’t even called Pranav Chavda, and posts what is apparently translated non-sense from some foreign language about apple’s mobileme service which does not even exist any more.

Anyway, This, then, ideas(outright), is my new home on the web; now that I have decided to start blogging again.

About ideas(outright)

My  linkedin, facebook, etc profiles claim that I am the co-founder of a brand-new company called ideas(outright). so what am I doing using my company website as a personal blog? I will try to explain that in the next few sentences.

See, a long time ago, I started a little Internet company called “General Internet Pvt. Ltd.” in Mumbai. I was 17, and the company became a “family business” with my parents managing the finances and me working on the tech, products and day-to-day operations – basically everything else. Like some of my earlier ventures, this company too, evolved into an e-retail, affiliate marketing based business. It grew to about thirty employees at its peak.

In 2006 there was this idea to form a group within General Internet, consisting of the most talented people from within the organization that would take the company to the next level – create new ideas out of thin air and then execute them to make products, amazing next generation Internet products. We did come up with some cool ideas about what to do with and at ideas(outright), but as fate or whatever-you-want-to-call-it would have, none of these actually materialized and the focus remained on General Internet – the would be e-retail/affiliate marketing superpower.

In 2008, to save money on rent and salaries, we moved General Internet to a quieter, cheaper place called Ahmedabad in Gujarat state – see by this time, Bombay/Mumbai was booming, real estate and salaries were already through the roof and if we wanted to stay profitable, we had to cut down on these expenses. We did, successfully.

Ran the business from Ahmedabad for two and a half years. Remember, this was at the end of the day, a family business. Trust plays a major role in family businesses and some times, when bad investment choices are made, you look the other way. Several bad investment decisions had already been made since the start, but nothing that would stop my company from growing, but so many years of looking the other way, you realize one fine day, that all these wrong choices, they pile up and you are left with a profitable but cash-starved company that has been dead for a while now.

In late 2009, General Internet Pvt. Ltd. had to be shut down and for the fist time ever in my life, I was unemployed!

Around may 2010, I started a new business called “Idiots Marketing” with Irfan – an Internet marketing company run by “Idiots” as we liked to call ourselves.  This venture was full of hope, ideas and half-finished code for the future of webkind, but it was short-lived and in 2011, shut shop.

Unemployed again, I decided to start something all by myself, well not entirely, I enlisted the help of my wife, Ruchika, who would quit her job and would sit with me for hours at the new bru café in Andheri smoking gudang garams, sipping on mocha cold coffees and we would talk about what to do with life now. Ruchika had been sort of my right hand man during the General Internet days, project manager-ing our primary e-retail store. hundreds of packets of cigarettes and dozens of coffee glasses later, we came up with the master plan – to reboot ideas(outright), not as a group of talented people within a company, but as a group of talented people with ideas and the ability to turn those ideas into reality. Over the past year, we got associated with Amit – a long time friend and competitor of General Internet – with whom we successfully (re)built a GiftShoppingZone – a Gift ideas search engine and a Fashion search portal and are now building a smart new online shopping system. Earlier this month, ideas(outright) welcomed Mihir – My buddy since high-school, a former DJ and an expert on video games – who will be spearheading with us a new niche technology publication and social network.

So then, ideas(outright) is not a company or a group within a company, but a vague sort of idea by itself that is personified and strengthened by the amazing people who choose to become a part of it – and since the domain belongs to me, I will use it as my personal blog -  where I will post “stuff” sometimes important, sometimes informational, but mostly not. Of course, don’t rule out the possibility of blog posts here from Ruchika, Amit, Mihir and future members of this “idea”.