Hindi Music at Hair Salon in France? Oui!

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So you must have seen all the blog posts that tell you how bad the service is in the retail outlets in France? We did too. We were very concerned about this after our move to France. Thankfully, we have not had such experiences except with bankers. Bankers are a different story for a different day.

 

But today, I had such a positive experience that I wanted to share it with the world. I normally go to a hair salon near our apartment. The people there know that we do not know French all that well. The entire process goes very silently with them asking only the most important questions and we answering in rudimentary broken French. But I keep dreading that they might ask something complicated in French and I will not be able to answer.

 

Today, I saw that they had new staff in the salon. I was a bit concerned about this but still went in bravely (having too much hair is any day a worse situation!). There was English music playing in the salon and this reminded me of how Hindi music is played all over India even in places where they hardly understand the language.

 

When my turn for haircut came, the music suddenly changed to Hindi! The lady hairstylist was actually humming to it. Since I could not believe this (and unfortunately did not know the song), I had to pull up my iPhone and use an app (Soundhound) to find what song this was. Seeing this, the lady told me in broken English that this was from the movie “Fanaa“. We then went onto having a conversation (of course in broken French and English!) about Bollywood, languages in India and how much she likes Kajol (a bollywood actor)! She told me that I can get all the bollywood music that I want from youtube.

 

Anyway, it was quite amazing that she took the initiative to play the Hindi music which made my experience so much better. Hopefully, people traveling to France can see this post and have such a positive experience too.

A new type of vacation rental company

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I had to travel to Brussels recently to participate in the Mobile Health Industry Summit. Thanks to my delayed planning for the trip, when I looked for hotels, the prices were pretty high (€100 and up). I also checked AirBnB and I found some good places but they were too far away from the conference location. Now I had to come up with a solution to make this work.

 

Fortunately, I knew the founders of MorningCroissant. This is a french version of AirBnb. The main difference between these two is that MorningCroissant offers personalized help if we do not find anything on their website that suits us. I was a bit skeptical of this claim since it is difficult to find suitable accommodations. I was also skeptical about finding accommodations outside of Paris, where MorningCroissant is based.

 

In my case, I did not find any rentals in Brussels. So I thought of checking out their claim of helping us to find the right accommodation. I contacted Laurent, one of the founders with my dilemma. He got back to me in half a day and got me an apartment rental 10 mins from the center of Brussels for €60/night! I was very surprised and impressed.

 

When I traveled to Brussels, I stayed at this apartment. Turns out that it was even better than I thought. It had awesome views of the city. It was also well connected to the metro and tram stations. The host was very hospitable who offered me maps and directions to the places that I had to go to. All in all a very enjoyable experience.

 

If MorningCroissant can maintain this level of service to their customers, I am sure AirBnb has a huge threat coming at them. It remains to be seen how they can scale up this personal help to travelers.

 

I completely understand that this experience can be biased due to the fact that I know the founders. But if they are capable of providing this type of service to me, I am hoping that they can provide this level of service to regular users of their site. This is the main differentiator for them.

Interesting New Children’s Educational iPad game

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One of the advantages of being part of the Founder Institute is that you hear about products being launched by other founders all the time. Recently, I came to know of a founder who launched an iPad game for kids called Grow Your Garden HD.  Since I am always looking for interesting and educational apps for my son, I asked and received a promo code to try it out (Ok, that was a disclaimer there!).

The app is a game to teach math for the kids. The objective is to water and grow the plants in your garden. As you grow the plants, they will give you flowers that you add to your flower collection. The education part comes in how you water the plants. You get some watering jars to water your plants (see image below). The plants can only take a fixed quantity of water to grow. If you give it more water, the plant will die. So you have to figure out the right quantity of water using a combination of jars provided in order to water the plant. When I saw this, I wasn’t sure if kids would understand or like the premise. So I gave the app to my son to try it out.

 

The first few minutes, he was trying to figure it out. Then he was on a roll. He liked the fact that the game becomes more and more challenging as you move through the levels. I was actually surprised that he played with it for more than an hour before getting tired of it. After a while when he wanted to use the iPad, he went right back to the app and completed all the levels! He did ask for my help with the last level though.

I was very impressed with the way the app is built. When I played with it, I could feel myself getting involved with the challenge. I think this is a great way to combine education and games. I am sure I would have loved to learn math this way!

Dear Google, Please Don’t Shut Down Aardvark

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You might seen this post from Google announcing their intention to close out a few of their experimental products. One of the products that will be closed is Aardvark. Aardvark is a social question and answer tool where you can ask a question and it will find someone to answer your question for you.

 

You might wonder why Aardvark is so important considering that there are so many Q&A sites like Quora, Yahoo answers etc. The reason is this – Aardvark is the only one that could find someone who knew the answer to the question (however esoteric) that you throw at it. It also pings the people to answer your questions so it has a dynamic and personal nature to the answers. If you have further questions based on the answer, Aardvark will get those answered too (by the person who originally answered your question).

 

Since people like me got so much value from Aardvark, we always chose to answer random questions that Aardvark brought for us. Even if I did not know the answer to a certain question, I would research it so that it could help the person who asked that question. I wanted to make sure that I had a positive karma balance with Aardvark (more questions answered than asked). I am sure there were many others like me since the quality of answers that I got was so high.

 

In our move to France, Aardvark was a very critical tool for our integration into the country. It was like having a close friend who knew all the answers to your questions about living in France except that this friend was available 24X7.

 

Here are some of the ways in which it has helped us:

 

1. Once we had to send a very urgent letter on a weekend and everyone told us that we have to wait until Monday. I asked Aardvark, and voila! I came to know that a La Poste was available near the Louvre in Paris. We were able to mail our letter on a Sunday!

 

2. We consume a lot of Tofu since we are vegetarian. When we came to France, we could not find fresh tofu in the grocery stores. We did find the dry variety which isn’t as good. Many people told us that we should go all the way to Bio stores in Paris to get fresh tofu. I turned to Aardvark, and found that there were three stores within 5 kms of where we live that carried fresh Tofu!

 

3. We wanted to find an alternative to the local French banks that charge a bomb just to give you a current account. I got referred to Fortuneo, ING Direct etc thanks to my anonymous friends on Aardvark.

 

4. We are learning French using Rosetta Stone. Since there are no explanations in Rosetta, I always turned to Aardvark with my questions about French. At any time of the day or night, I got answers from my trusty Aardvark that helped speed up our learning.

 

With Google sunsetting Aardvark, I feel like I am losing a close friend. I think Aardvark addressed a gap in the market and the gap still exists. So please dear Google, please do not shut down Aardvark. Heck, give it to me and I will keep it going!

My Experience at Founder Institute

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I graduated from the Founder Institute’s Paris Spring 2011 program. I want to write this post so that anyone interested in joining the program can get an idea of what the program is like. If you have any questions, please feel to reach me at gangadhar at sulkunte dot net.

 

Founder Institute is a Silicon Valley based startup incubator which has branches in many cities/countries in the world – Paris, Singapore, Chile, Indonesia, Brussels, Berlin etc. These branches then recruit many of the local entrepreneurs to serve as mentors to the founders. The local directors of the institute will themselves be entrepreneurs. The goal of the program is to take founders with ideas to start a viable business at the end of the program.

 

The application process involves a intelligence test which is a standard IQ test. Once you get through the entrance tests, you will pay the fee for the program before joining the program. The program is a series of sessions where the mentors (local and visiting) will talk about different aspects of starting your company – how to validate your idea, how to write your business plan, writing and executing marketing plans, fund raising etc. You will take this and apply to your company as part of the work for that week.

 

At every session, the founders get to pitch and hone their pitch about their company. The sessions are one evening a week and take place over a period of 3-4 months. They are very rigorous involving meetings with your teams and assignments.

 

This is probably the only incubator program that accepts solo founders. They will try to help you find co-founders in the program. They will also point you to the many startup related programs taking place in the local community. I know of a couple of founders who found their co-founders in the program.

 

The advantages of the program as I see it are:

  • Getting a cohort of founders with whom you can bounce your ideas and get great feedback. Personally, this was the best part for me since it instantly got me a community of founders which I would have difficulty getting to since I moved here recently.
  • Connecting to the local startup community and the investors community
  • Great feedback that you will receive about all aspects of your idea or startup as part of the program.

You should be aware of the following:

  • You should be serious about working for your company at the end of the program.
  • The program is very rigorous. If you are a solo founder, you will be working on all the assignments by yourself apart from your day job. This can be over whelming and you might drop out of the program.
  • Have funds to spend on your company since you are building your company as part of the program.
  • Have some technical expertise since you will be doing many technical things like setting up your domain, email, blogs etc as part of the program.
  • Check out the local mentors to see who will be a good fit for your type of business.
  • The program is mainly for technology startups. If you starting a different type of company, your experience will be very different and you might want to check the local mentors list to see if anyone will fit your company’s profile.

I hope this post helped you. Please let me know in the comments or by email.