

The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur (2008) - KonaB
http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/22/mitra-zoho-india-tech-inter-cx_sm_0222mitra.html

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ibsulon
I've thought about one of those ideas for a while: promise 6 months to highly
motivated high school kids and for an exchange of working for two years at
lower wages, you'd train them. Then, you could have them working for 20 hours
a week fairly quickly on QA, automated testing, and other positions as they
learn your system. Then, place them in a mentorship system with good senior
engineers and keep the good ones.

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sramana
Folks, Sridhar Vembu was unknown, or certainly lesser known in 2007 when I
first interviewed him :-)

Since then, and especially after this Forbes story, he was in the Economist.

So no, he is no longer unknown.

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romland
The page is trying to render something from my LAN in an IFRAME.

It does not look malicious, just a silly mistake. Boy, how I love thee,
NoScript!

(the url:
[http://192.168.0.164:8581/feeds/PopularSciencehtml/PopularSc...](http://192.168.0.164:8581/feeds/PopularSciencehtml/PopularScience.html))

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sganesh
Sridhar Vembu is a fellow hacker here :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sridharvembu>

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ramanujan
This article made me give Zoho a try. We use Google Apps/37Signals, but wanted
to kick the tires and see what's up at Zoho.

First impression is that they need UI polish, but overall the individual Zoho
apps are astonishingly fast. I don't know how they'll hold up after loading
data into them, but try out some of the Zoho Business apps in Chrome on OS X
(use your OpenID so you don't have to sign in).

Is it just me? Performance seems so amazingly fast for just clicking around
that I want to do a side-by-side benchmark with Selenium and some real data
just to make sure my eyes aren't deceiving me.

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hariis
Any thoughts on what other products can be done with this model? or in other
words, what other SaaS products currently have fat margins that can be
undercut?

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mtw
not necessarily SaaS products, but I'm thinking of software for professionals:

\- software for lawyers, accountants

\- software for the health industry

\- graphic software such as photoshop, 3DSMax or Final Cut pro

the overall market is smaller, but you can sell the software for more. Also
might need a little bit more topical knowledge, but imho it's the same
quantity of work as doing a Microsoft Office clone

another market with fat margins is MMO video games. I'm sure there are lots of
niche markets out there wanting their own game

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ivenkys
Not really unknown - wasn't there a mention by Google of Zoho sometime back
and that article was linked here as well.

