Sanity Insanity and Moi

I met at Abhishek Thakkar at Barcamp Bangalore 5. A guy i got to know better only on the second day. We were the two guys who came early for a BarCamp on a Sunday. So what we went to the canteen and were the first to start the breakfast for the day.We chatted on, he a Mumbaikar, big fan of north-indian food and a real techie. Infact he wants to shift the office to Chandigarh for two reasons - the food and the girls. I couldn’t agree more. Food and Girls what a combo. What a combo!!!

Now thats not the topic here.

We happened to talk about SMS Gup Shup, the company that he represents, and the amazing idea that they have. So the stats goes like this -

April they go Alpha
May they go Beta
Nov they are close to a million (if you dont know what a million is … its 1′000′000 users)
The number of users doubling every 40 days

Now thats a growth. What makes them click? What is so great about SMS Gup Shup? What made we mutineers start a Mutiny group in SMS Gup Shup as soon as he told us what it is?
The whole idea behind SMS Gup Shup is to get connected via SMS, its a blog, its a mobile orkut and its much more. It works like this.

You create a group
Invite friends to join in or they subscribe to you
You post SMS-es and it reaches all your friends
Whats you cost? 3rs
How many you reach? That many people, who have joined your group.
Catch? - No catch!
How to do it? - Just SMS for all the above steps

Now how does that sound??? Its cool i say. Imagine you want to tell all you friends how good or how shitty a movie is, right after you saw it? You start messaging and goes on adding people to the list and then you send.

By the time the last message is sent. They would have as well seen the movie.
Instead what if you can send in one message … cool isn’t it …

Here are the steps straight from the site…

GupShup from Mobile

Start a Group - 3 simple steps to start a Gup Shup from your mobile phone:

• Create your group by sending an SMS to 567673434. Example:
  CREATE mygroup123
• Invite friends to your group:
  INVITE 98200XXXXX 99203XXXXX
• Send group messages to 567673434. Example:
  Hi, am Arun and this is my group for movie reviews.

Join a Group - Get messages from your favorite groups on your mobile phone

• To subscribe to group, sms JOIN followed by the group name to 567673434. Start your GupShup now! Example: JOIN GupShup

Come lets start GupShupping - Staying in touch is now just a message away…

Saunday morning .. yaawwwnnnnnn!!!! .. But its the day of Barcamp… no sleep… So i dragged my ass out of bed.
Its the day of CAT exams and by the time i woke up, at around 8am all my roommates had in fact left for the test. I have to say that i was one of the first persons to reach.
After a quick lunch with Abhishek Thakkar , who is having this talk on SMS Gupshup, the SMS way of twittering, i’m back in front of the discussion boards.
What is with the WiFi???- It keeps failing at times, on systems for no reason at all and then comes up all by itself.
Now that people are finally arriving and rooms are getting booked up, i see energy again in the atmosphere.
Bloggers decided to have discussion at D4 - 11am. It turned out that Sky was already there. She was trying to set the time zone and the WiFi connection on her laptop. Then people started dropping in thinking its some discussion and Vola!!! everyone is giving a self intro.
Then Nitya of Muziboo, complained that generally indian bloggers are reluctant and unwilling to help someone. She quoted her own experience as an example.
They started the Muziboo and she personally approached bloggers and asked them to do a review on the site and its features. But unfortunately of the 100+ people that she asked only 2 did it for her. This eventually became a hot topic and there indeed some discussion on that. People started dropping by with the noise level that we created. So finally everyone was sorry for the state of affairs and promised to help each other, starting with Muziboo.
Before we knew it was Lunch time and off we go to hog like pigs …

I’m Speaking too

Getting the WiFi connection

The Mutineers …

E-Governance Session

Post Lunch ..

The bloggers collective has started at the L21 room (Cappuccino).

Amit Agarwal - Digital Inspirations, is talking on monetizing blogs. He is having no slides, no laptop, no geeky gadget, just talking. He is the first professional blogger in India.

So one advice from him - don’t use TextLinks in you blog as it wont help you in the long run. Rather than reblogging, write an original stuff at least once in a while, coz reblogging and linking will make people leave your site and go after the original stuff.

People are just walking into the collective and the strength is building up.

Now amit is getting swarmed with questions…
And i’m still looking for the 2 guys who approached me b4 lunch for the blog review.

Barcamp Bangalore is back. Its BarCamp Bangalore 5 - Winter Edition at IIM-B.

After the success of the Collectives in the last barcamp, this one too is made as a collective one. Registrations for the collectives is also open at this link :

http://barcampbangalore.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4