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Startup Saturday Delhi was held at the American Center on October 10th 2009. This month, we had three great talks from Bipin Singh, CEO of MobiKwik, Manish Rathi from GlobalLogic, and Rajeev Kumar CEO of RockeTalk.

Bipin, started the afternoon off with an introduction to MobiKwik and their offering. MobiKwik launched just 2 months ago and currently is focused on mobile pre-paid recharge in India. MobiKwik wants to offer the first comprehensive list carrier agnostic PULL services. MobiKwik plans to add additional features and services in the future, some of which will be comparing plans across all Indian mobile operators.

Finally, Rajeev Kumar, CEO of RockeTalk was up to discuss his innovative startup. Rajeev’s presentation was only 3 slides but it also ran the longest. For a few minutes, I thought security at the American Center would have to walk us straight from the auditorium to the exit. However, Rajeev was gracious enough to continue the discussions in the atrium during the networking hour. RockeTalk has brought voice-based ‘chat rooms’ to smaller cities, towns, sub-urban and rural parts of India by developing a small downloadable app that allows people not connected to the Internet to use their mobile handsets to communicate with others, using voice and GPRS (sorry, no 3G in India yet and probably not for a while longer).

Being involved in Startup Saturday Delhi, I have come across a lot of entrepreneurs building Internet applications. Most of them being India centric. The problem, which has been discussed and reported numerous times is that broadband penetration is a miniscule 3% of the whole population. There are roughly 3 million broadband subscribers in India.

India being a highly price conscious country, I find it amazing that telcos like Airtel are busy hiking the price of metered “broadband” while degrading service levels. The latest move by Airtel has been to increase the price of their “unlimited” 512k connection to Rs. 1,599 (USD 34) per month. The real kicker is that the speed degraded to 256k after you’ve hit downloads totaling 100GB.

At the same time, they are introducing 16Mbps connections for Rs. 2,999 (USD 64) per month that have download caps of 20GB. A single Linux distro download is 4GB. A point upgrade to OS X is generally around 500MB. Buying and downloading a few shows from iTunes or watching a few videos on YouTube and I’ll blow right thru my 20GB limit in a week. If I download roughly 40GB of data in a given month, my Internet access will cost me upwards of Rs. 12,000 (USD 255) per month.

If indian telcos like Airtel were to offer unlimited 1Mbps connections at Rs. 999 (USD 21) and unlimited 2Mbps at Rs. 1,599 (USD 34), the willingness of Indians to spend on Internet access would be much more palatable. Other than those whose careers in some way, shape, or form are connected to the Internet, very few people are willing to spend more than Rs. 999 per month on Internet access. Those that spend Rs. 999 or less per month, get an experience that basically sucks. They are frustrated and completely turned off by the fact that it takes 20 minutes to load a 3 minute video on YouTube.

India will never be a country of mass Internet adoption while the government agencies like TRAI and DoT don’t adopt a definition of broadband that is more inline with shifts in Internet usage. Indian telcos continue to provide subpar speeds at exorbitant prices when compares to the rest of the world. India, touting itself, as the technology center of the 21st Century, must adopt an infrastructure and a coherent policy around broadband deployment and usage. Only with the government mandating the need for widespread Internet adoption, at feasible price points, will there be widespread broadband adoption by non-techies.

However, relying on the government to be so forward thinking is a pipe-dream. What the Indian telcos should do is adopt a model that was instrumental in driving mobile usage in India. Drop the price points so that even the average person (living on Rs. 100 per day), would find Internet usage compelling, useful, and not frustrating. If they were to adopt a mass usage policy and not price their broadband products based on margins, I believe that in 5 years, India could have at least 100 million broadband users (via DSL, cable modem, Mobile 3G, wiMax, etc.) Is it too much to ask the Indian telcos like Airtel, MTNL, BSNL, Tata Communications, Reliance, etc. to push the envelope of adoption? Unfortunately, I think it might be.

Startup Saturday Delhi is just around the corner. We’re holding our next event on the 14th of March at the American Center from 2pm to 6pm. The goal of Startup Saturday is to give startups a place where they can showcase their products and their businesses. Our goal is to also allow entrepreneurs and those considering a life as entrepreneurs to share information, learn from each other, and be a part of building the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

If you’re a startup or know of any Indian startups that would like to publicize their products/services, please fill out the Demo Nomination form so we can get you on the Startup Saturday Delhi agenda.

Looking forward to seeing you at Startup Saturday Delhi!

This is a little tip on how to get Perl(32bit) working with a 64bit version of MySQL on OS X Leopard.

I was working on a small project today that required MySQL 5.067 and I opted to do it in Perl 5.10. You may remember a post that I put up in August describing how to compile MySQL 64 bit for OS X Leopard. Well, since then I also compiled and installed Perl 5.10 (not replacing Apple’s system install of Perl). I wanted to take advantage of some of the Perl 6 features that have been backported to Perl 5.10 (the first Perl release in two years).

Back to today’s project, I decided to use the awesome Class::DBI Perl module to do my little project. I wrote all my code and began to run it in the perl debugger and realized that I need to install the DBD::mysql module. During the installation process for DBD::mysql, the Perl module is compiled using the mysql libraries and header files. Compilation wasn’t a problem. It’s when we got to the ‘make test’ step that all hell broke loose.

To cut a very long story short, I kept getting the error below:


# Failed test 'use DBD::mysql;'
# at t/00base.t line 21.
# Tried to use 'DBD::mysql'.
# Error: Can't find 'boot_DBD__mysql' symbol in /Users/pankaj/.cpanplus/5.10.0/build/DBD-mysql-4.010/blib/arch/auto/DBD/mysql/mysql.bundle


I dug around a bit and decided to run the installation manually. The problem here has to do with compiler flags that were used for mysql. MySQL was compiled as a 64 bit Leopard binary. However, Perl 5.10 was compiled as a 32bit binary because many Perl modules don’t support 64 bit out of the box.

To solve the problem, I had to recompile the mysql client libraries:


--($:~/src/mysql-5.0.67)-- export ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386"
--($:~/src/mysql-5.0.67)-- CC=gcc CFLAGS="-O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer" CXX=gcc CXXFLAGS="-O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer -felide-constructors \
-fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql.32 --without-server --with-extra-charsets=complex --enable-thread-safe-client --enable-local-infile --enable-shared
--($:~/src/mysql-5.0.67)-- make
--($:~/src/mysql-5.0.67)-- make test
--($:~/src/mysql-5.0.67)-- sudo make install


Once the mysql client libs were done compiling and installed into /usr/local/mysql.32, I changed my PATH to ensure that the newly compiled mysql libraries and binaries were picked up before anything else.


export PATH=/usr/local/mysql.32/bin:${PATH}


Once that was done, I went back to my DBD::mysql source directory and built it using the following commands:


--($:~/src/DBD-mysql-4.010)-- perl Makefile.PL --libs="-L/usr/local/mysql.32/lib/mysql -lmysqlclient -lz -lm" --cflags="-I/usr/local/mysql.32/include/mysql"
--($:~/src/DBD-mysql-4.010)-- make
--($:~/src/DBD-mysql-4.010)-- make test
--($:~/src/DBD-mysql-4.010)-- sudo make install


This time, make test ran beautifully with a few minor exceptions because I didn’t actually give it a mysql db to connect to.

The mysql 32bit client can easily connect to the 64 bit server. Perl, Class:DBI are now very happy and the application is running as planned.