Yesterday, we had an internship meet where HOD’s of the college were invited. The purpose was to speak about  XtremeHeights and introduce our internship Programme to them. We thank everybody who made it to the party and also to those who could not make up.

For those who missed the event let me introduce Interns 2.0 program - Interns 2.0 is a program launched by Xtremeheights, India and Appointy, Inc USA with a view to meet their manpower requirements. Every year XtremeHeights trained 15 people and absorbed about 30% of the trainees after completion of the program. Now  we are expanding and in order to meet our future requirements, we have started training on a large scale in the form of Interns 2.0. The idea is to create true professionals and also meet our future manpower requirements. So Interns2.0 is going to be a win-win situation for everyone.

Party started at 7:30 PM with the introduction. The idea behind Intern2.0 was encouraged and appreciated very much. We extended the introduction from Interns 2.0 to Xtremeheights and Appointy as everyone got more and more excited about our ventures and journey. We are glad that our efforts were being liked by our guests and would like to thank them for their support.

Our special thanks to Mrs Roopali Soni M’am, Varsha M’am, Bhoge Sir and Sanjay Sir who took keen interest in our ventures.

Then came the special moment when we got to meet the chance to our college time teachers who are now HODs of some of the colleges. Mrs. Roopali Soni M’am showed special interest in concept discussion of Interns 2.0 and actively participated in it. She was very much excited about the whole event. All the Ladies and Gentlemen were patient enough to give few hours to our plans, from their busy schedules. It gave us immense pleasure in sharing the knowledge regarding our internship program with them as they were genuinely interested in knowing how we can benefit their students. They were seriously concerned for the betterment of the career of their students and felt the responsibility.

In the last I would like to say that the vision of interns 2.0 is very different from the commercial companies into the market. We aim to grow big while making everyone grow big with us. There is lot of talent lying here in our city. We just need to give them the direction and they can really create the difference. Even during recession market is never down for the talent. Let’s find and nourish that talent so that there can never be any recession. Let’s make Bhopal a better place to work, live & compete. Let’s prove it to the world that we are here to take challenges and make success stories.

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I thought to write a short story as many people are interested in us. I would be glad if I am able to motivate atleast one person who can create opportunities for others.

December 2004, I just wanted to do something different and that’s why XtremeHeights was born. Initially, with 1 PC gifted by my father, I struggled for many days and our bad debt ratio was 90%. It was hard to survive in such conditions as people were not serious about investment into software. Clients who were interested initially did not bother to implement the software and many times did not even pay for our hard work.

I always got support from my family and friends. One of my very close friends even fetched us a good project and client paid it on time and this made my belief stronger to continue as an entrepreneur. Things started moving somewhat but not exactly how I wanted too until one day I saw an advertisement in paper from a company who wanted people to work on projects. I contacted them and to my surprise it was handled by a person of my age. He instantly paid us advance and I was surprised. I asked him about his business. Like every businessman he was a bit hesitant but his talks gave me an idea and I started researching on the concept. He was basically working on Search Engine Optimization techniques. After few days I got a client who was interested in SEO and I did whole research for him and brought his website on first page for a very competitive keyword. The client was happy and asked us to handle his IT area. He asked me to replicate the server scenario in-house which he had rented from a Bangalore based company. He gave me 3 days but I did it in 1 day. Not only I saved my entrepreneurship but also his as the server cost was killing him and he was about to shutdown his business.

He started paying me 6000Rs/month for server maintenance and this is how it all started. I started researching for our client but actually we were working for ourselves. I found my first client Gaby, from USA. She is one of the most beautiful ladies I have come across. She is very soft spoken and true business woman. We both helped each other to climb the ladder of our success.

It was time now to add more team members. I wanted someone who can match my skills. Khushal, came to my mind who worked with me in a project in 2002. I told him the idea and it took me 2 months to convince him to join us. At last he joined and we moved ahead. We got 2 new clients from Germany & UK and within a year we started earning respectable amount.

It was time to increase our team. Gautam, Rajesh, Puneet, Lokesh and many more joined our team. We did lots of projects for our clients. We started providing turnkey solutions to our clients and instead of developing projects we even helped them with their product development and marketing. By working on our client’s product we learned lot of things. After so much of experience we started our own product called “Appointy.com” which is an appointment management system for businesses and a service search engine for users. The idea was simply to link business with internet users by utilizing the power of social networking.

We were not having environment like Silicon Valley and so only thing left was to imitate it as we were in Silicon Valley. I once read somewhere “Fake it until you make it”. I used to read blogs daily and used to motivate team daily during tea time sessions. It was the best part of my life. Even I started thinking like that we are next Google. I don’t know if I was too much ambitious but I just know that it helped me and my team to stay together and execute a million dollar concept.

We even managed to get the Angel funding for the project. After launch, Appointy was covered in nearly every web2.0 blog including mashable which included appointy in 270+ best business tools of 2008. On the first day of launch we got 2000 unique visitors which was an achievement for us.

In parallel, we were developing social applications for facebook, Orkut, myspace, hi5 etc. Our first 2 applications were “Chess 2.0 league” and “Its my life” which has more than 1 lakh users in 2 months. We are learning quickly and trying to grow very fast.

We even got nominated for India’s hottest startup award 2008. Even economic times covered us because we are trying to execute our idea from a non-metro city and till date are successful. (Even in recession too.)

We are still working on our client’s project for monthly expenses and trying to execute our ideas. We are looking for next round of funding for our project “Appointy.com” and our fingers are crossed.

Nemesh

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We got approved today on Facebook.

We were unlucky again this time as we were not listed on Facebook’s newest application section due to some issues in Facebook and we were not able to utilize the benefit of it. We wrote to facebook and they replied after 5 days which left us with no option as we did not have any proof to prove it after so long. Many applications were added and we had no option expect to thank them for their reply. Anyways, we know what we can do and nothing can stop us

Here are few of our thoughts on both the social networking sites

Growth from Viral Channels: I must say Facebook has more powerful and effective viral channels than any other social networking site. Applications can grow very fast on Facebook provided that the viral channels are utilized efficiently.

Growth from Application Directory: Orkut has few applications and users on Orkut still have charm in new applications. On the other hand, Facebook has so many applications that people have lost the charm in new application section. We can say this by seeing the number of monthly visitors shown besides each application listed in new application section. Orkut can give you 1200 visitors a day and on the contrary you will only get 50 visitors per day from new application section.

Growth from paid advertising: Facebook provides paid advertising option to promote your application which is not there in Orkut. You can create an effective ad campaign and can get good number visitors by spending about 5 dollars a day.

We will be improving our viral channels further to get its maximum benefit. Only way to do that is to learn from other successful applications on Facebook .

You will soon see this application on myspace. So stay tuned

Do not forget to play Chess 2.0 League on facebook and leave a feedback :)

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Sep 25th 2008, all requests started spoofing which utilized the .NET implementation of oAuth. It not only affected Orkut but all open social containers. So we started to find the problem as we can’t rely on others for the solution as it was affecting our application’s performance and all the data was insecure because we stopped checking the authenticity of the request.

Anyways, we started working on it and within 3 hours we had the solution. The problem was that Opensocial made some changes to their architecture and it started to send value in Token instead of Null and the which affected the base signature because it started adding the value from token to generate the signature. We have already submitted our solution to Google and you will soon find the code in Google Opensocial oAuth wiki page. But for now you can download the code from here:

http://www.xtremeheights.com/oAuth/oauth-net.zip

This is plug & play code. Just add the 2 CS files into your project and copy the code provided in text file in every page which you want to authenticate.

Please feel free to ask any questions you may have. We would be more than happy to help you.

If you don’t know anything about this then please have a look at on Orkut Developer’s forum here:

http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-orkut/browse_thread/thread/c38fc11c6838f330

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It is 2:00 am now and our application went live on Orkut and the response was tremendous. In the first hour we had 190 people trying to make their life popular. This application utilizes the power of cloud computing so we were not worried about the load. We just want to make sure that our application stays in newest application for at least 3-4 days and our viral channels should be fairly used by our clients.

Everything was so perfect and within 24 hours we got 2200 users using our application. To our amusement 90% of the users were girls. Girls really like to tell about their life and they surely do want to get famous. And this was good for us because our application sends updates to all friends and everybody has a soft corner for girls. Boys want to know what the next door girl is doing and girls always want to know who is doing what.

So why don’t you give it a try and start promoting your life. Be ready to live a glamorous life.

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We are doing great with this application with over 200 new clients registering daily. Below are some basic facts about Chess 2.0 League:

1. New application launched on the same day and we remained on newest addition page for less than 24 hours. Within 24 hours we managed to get approx 1200 new visitors on the first day and got a placement on the third page. If we would have been on the newest section for about 3 days then I am sure we would have made to the first page in Orkut Apps directory.

2. After the application was removed from newest apps we had to use these 1200 visitors to help us spread our word virally. We had very little hope to get new visitors from Orkut app directory as 90% of the people do not browse each page.

3. Good point was that nearly 80% of the people updated their email address which means we could send them emails whenever their opponent would make their move and in this way they would be reminded again of the game they are playing on Orkut. The strategy worked well and every day we execute about 600 games.

4. Our motive is to build an application with consistent traffic and we are glad to say that we are constantly increasing traffic everyday by about 5% by utilizing viral channels effectively.

5. We provide support through community on Orkut and it feels great when chess lovers say that we are the best on Orkut.

It does not need to be on the top to be the best but to get to the top you need to be the best. So lets wait and see in how many days we get to the top. Our fingers are crossed. .

Play Chess 2.0 League on Orkut now.

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Appointy is our first software as service product centered towards social platform to help businesses to grow their business exponentially. On 6th September we executed our first strategy and everything went as we thought. We got about 800 unique visitors on the first day followed by another 850 visitors on the next day. Within 4 days Appointy was seen by 3340 visitors from 96 countries and the conversion ratio was better than we thought. Below is the screen shot of our stats.

These are the websites talking about Appointy.

- www.go2web20.net

- www.killerstartups.com

- www.feedmyapp.com

- www.listio.com

- www.stumbleupon.com

In short everyone believes that this is a great tool to manage and market your business and its free. So why not give it a try and see for yourself.

Appointy.com, Grow your business exponentially.

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As you all know that NEN has nominated us for India’s Hottest startups 2008. Our listing is live now and you can vote for us.

To vote follow the link below:

It would hardly take 2 minutes to register and vote for us. So please vote for us. Thank you in advance for voting.

XtremeHeights Team

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Google has silently released its own browser named Google Chrome. Their logo colors are very googlish and they have incorporated security features that we have only seen so far in the beta releases of IE8.

The user interface is well designed and it gives lot of space to websites. You will feel like you have opened a website in full screen mode yet you will see headers. There is no status bar but still it manages to show the loading message perfectly.

Speed of the browser is faster than Firefox 3.0 and it is indeed next version browser for web2.0 applications. It uses a Skia graphics engine developed by Skia Inc., which Google acquired in 2005. Google is not only planning to capture the desktop market but also mobile market. This vector graphics rendering engine makes high end visual effects possible. It is tiny in size and is capable of delivering very high quality.

Default page is yet another Google break through. It shows you most visited links and you can click it and open the page directly. This is really going to save you lots of keyboard typing. You will definitely love this feature. I wonder why anyone else can’t figure it out.

Cross browser issue is yet another concern for software developers. But the good thing is that Google has thought well on these issues and their engine is based on Webkit engine and to our surprise it rendered all of our applications very smoothly without any changes. This is a great move by Google.

From Developers point of view Google has embed developer console which is definitely not going to replace firebug but at least it will help them to debug codes better than IE. In future version you can be sure to see some great development tools.

And finally browser war will get more intense and this will only make browsers better.

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We have submitted our second social application “Its My life” to Orkut and waiting for approval.  “Its my life” is all about sharing your life with others. But concept is not so simple as it seems. It not only shares your life but it can help you get famous by spreading your word virally.

It is just like Scraps concept on Orkut but with a difference that as soon as you post something all your friends gets an update. Your friends can comment on your story and whenever they make a comment their friends would get an update about your story. The whole concept is to promote your story to the entire network on Orkut.

So, Join if you …
- need someone to share your emotions.
- want to tell the world about your achievement.
- want to document your life and get famous.
- want to tell people what you think.
- want to help your friends.

Let’s make everyone’s life happy. Share your daily short stories and help your friends learn something from your experiences or read others and learn from their experiences.

I hope you would like this application. Please send us your comments. We love to get admire after so much of the hard work.

Our idea is to build a social network of applications which can be accessed from Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5 etc. By the end of this year we will have 12 applications with more than 1 million users using it and we are trying to develop some meaningful applications which can change your life.

Don’t forget to check “It’s my Life – Let’s make everyone’s life happy”.

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