Gmail has solved spam issues to a large extent for it’s users, other email providers are still struggling with spam.

More than spam, it’s missing of legit emails which is bothersome.

We at Morpheus have some ideas and are looking for a few smart techies to solve a few problems around reducing the email overload.

Do you think you can solve a few? Then apply to The Morpheus program. You must be a guru in all of the following POP, IMAP, Hypertable/BigTable, Javascript, Java, PHP, and you walk on HTTP, web security standards, Firefox/Chrome Plugins, REST-ful APIs in your dream. Send some cool code of problems you have solved in the past and your vision around solving some of the issues related to user experience, information overload, organization, closing the loop, etc. and we may work with you in the next 4 months (and also put some money) to bring the product to life for the global technology market.

Are you game? Come discuss with us.

Update : It is the company we help you build. You are the founder/CEO whatever.  Thought we should clarify that we are not looking for someone to just “code”.

Please drop your name and preferred time slot in the comments, that would help manage everyone’s time. Also check the comments for time slots already taken.

See ya! business plans not required

Update: Morpheus team is hanging around late — just show up!

Just come over for a coffee if you would like to chat with us. To help us manage the time please drop a comment below with your preffered time slot.

Look forward to seeing you. B-plans not required

We have started a twitter account called “Friends of Morpheus (@fom_morpheus). This is a community of folks who are either working with us formally or have a good informal friendship with Morpheus or are just interested in startups. The idea is to share / discuss / publish – news, articles, wisdom and thoughts about startups,  more engagement activities will be added overtime.  Sometimes we will also share updates from Morpheus and from portfolio companies

If you have something to share please tweet it with @fom_morpheus and we can further share it with all the fom_morpheus followers.

Click here to follow Friends of Morpheus –  http://twitter.com/fom_morpheus

Don’t forget to spread the word and feel free to send us suggestions on what more can be done or should be changed.

Navkriti , a start-up showcase event was organized on 24 October 2009, in the beautiful campus of NITIE Mumbai. It was organized as  part of their annual entrepreneurship summit  – Empresario.  MVP supported the event as a partner for Navkriti.  We offered 1 month of free engagement with MVP to the top teams and I participated in the event as a jury member. I really liked the show that they put up. As a result our partnership – currently we are actively engaged with 3 teams from the lineup – which is the best result we got so far.

Navkriti is not just another B-plan competition in which students from MBA and Engineering colleges participate.  In most of these B-Plans competitions, it is rare to find a team that has intentions of starting a real company or have already started. Most teams are just interested in the prize money and the certificate. Navkriti on the other hand does not allow student participation at all. This event is only for real  startups and thats what makes it fun.  And since the shortlisting was done with the help of SeedFund, the quality of finalists was quite impressive. The line up included 8 companies across different domains like – health care, data security, consumer electronics,  entertainment,  SME services, micro finance.  The jury was quite good as well with representatives from MVP, Helion , Seedfund, Anand Rathi and NITIE.

The event started a little late because one of podiums broke but once started it was executed very well. I enjoyed myself in the company of intelligent jury members and good participants.  3 companies out of the lineup were kind of mature companies and 5 were startups. Out of the startups the following were most interesting:

• iDubba : A web and mobile based interactive platform that aims to revolutionize your TV watching experience by providing personalized recommendations. The consumer data will be used to generate viewer analytics, content consumption reports and trends of the TV industry. These reports will be sold to the players in the television industry like TV Channels, Production houses, Advertisers etc
• Data resolve: Generation data security company with products that help protect the computers from un-authorized access of USB Drives, IPODs, Digital Cameras, SD Cards, Cell Phones with uHook USB Disk Security. The next battle of security will be fought around these areas, market is still open and it will be good to see how these guys progress
• Saffron Labs: Building low cost and high quality consumer electronics gadgets like – a universal remote that you can really use, wireless digital photo frames etc. The team behind the venture is excellent with professional who have over a decade of experience each in various aspects of the domain.

Congratulations to the NITIE team for organizing a good event and we look forward to a long term association.

LPU has built a state of the art campus near Jalandhar with around 30k students already attending various courses.Aadhaar Invite

The MVP team will be doing an interaction about entrepreneurship and sharing the entrepreneurial journey with the audience at the “TiE Luminaries session” on Thursday 26 March 2009.

Mr J S Bedi, Chairman Gian Jyoti Institute of Management and Technology has coordinated with TiE Chandigarh to have the session at their campus:

Address: Gian Jyoti Institute of Management & Technology,
Phase-2, S.A.S Nagar (Mohali)

The session will start at 3 PM. In case you are planning to attend, we request all of you to be there on time.

Looking forward to meeting some interesting folks.

Idea list

A collection / repository of all ideas that pop into heads of team members or come as suggestions from someone outside the team. Goal of this list are:

• Ensuring that no idea escapes without proper consideration
• People dont have to leave everything and start discussing a new idea as they know they can go back to it later

As soon as any team member gets the idea or comes to know about it, make it mandatory for them to put in the idea list asap. One good way is to maintain idea list as a online document in google docs which all eligible members of the team have access to.

Review the list time to time to pick new tasks for execution, specially while planning new projects or product releases. Its the best collection of improvements, features, tasks you will have.

Knowledge base

A collection of information (documents, links, videos etc) which is relavant to a specific business function or the business as a whole. This should be created while team members are working on a particular task and come across useful information, they need to add it to the Knowedge Base of the company in form of a document, video or a link.

Assign one person in the company to maintain a table of all information which is part of the knowledge base. This will be extremely useful to bring new people upto the speed or when some one is  taking up a new task. This way they dont need to start from ZERO.

Yesterday while working thru the list of items on the agenda the topic of “Efficient Project & Task Management” came up. I shared with them the simplified philosophy that I have kind of settled with during the last few years. This philosophy has worked for me with some modifications in various places like madhouse, seventymm and now MVP. Vaneet and Sarab from fachak also shared their thoughts and experience on the topic.

Initial setup

This can be done using spreadsheet, documents or a online tool like deskaway. At MVP we use deskaway to manage all projects and all portfolio companies.

• Make a MECE (Mutually exclusive Collectively exhaustive) list of all projects that require active tracking
  • For example at MVP we create one project for each portfolio company
• Make a MECE (Mutually exclusive Collectively exhaustive) list of categories that can appear within each project and add the categories under the projects. See the image below for categories used in MVP’s project for one particular portfolio company

• Make a list of people who will be working across all projects

Task identification

• MOST IMPORTANT: As soon as a new task comes up, identify the category to which the task belongs and add the task to the appropriate project, under the identified category.
• The tasks can pop in your head, come via e-mail, via phone, during a discussion or some other way, but ensure that they are captured. This is the step where most teams fail. When they start they list all tasks but fail to do it continuously . So maintain the discipline if you want to make this work.
• See some sample tasks added under categories below

• Assign task owner , priority and expected deadline (ensure every thing is realistic)

Daily / Weekly planning

• Look at list of all pending tasks
• Walk thru each task with following guidelines
  • Ensure correct priority
    • Urgent/P1: Work on it today
    • High/P2: Work on it today if no P1 is pending or work can not be done on any P1 task
    • Medium / Low / P3: Do nothing, this is laundry list of all identified tasks and all pending ideas that have been collected
  • Ensure proper ownership ( the owner should know what to do and should have time for the same)
• Budget enough time for unplanned activities don’t assume all time can be given to planned tasks
  • For example if you are a startup founder and work 12 hrs a day, you can easily assume that 50% of your time will go towards unplanned activities. So only 6 hrs of planned work.

Execution

• Start of the day every one in the team should have list of P1/P2 tasks and should work only on those for most of their time
• As tasks get done , mark it on the list as done and continue working on other P1/P2 tasks
• Add update notes on tasks which were fully or partially done or attempted

Progress review

• Do periodic reviews with each team member
• Have a list of all P1/P2 task which were to be worked on
  • One by one review each task
    • Done : confirm completion
    • Partially done: understand what is done and what is pending and why? What are road blocks , create  action items to fix it
    • Attempted : same as above
    • Not attempted : same as above

Share your experiences on Project and task management below..

Today we are officially starting the MVP (morpheus venture partners) blog. “Sri ganesh” means “Let’s begin”. Ganesha is a hindu god who is remembered/worshiped while starting something new.

In this blog we plan to cover the following:

• Give you updates on things happening with MVP
• Give you news about MVP portfolio companies.
• Post essays, thoughts, ideas and other things about creating, building and running early stage start-ups
• Make a case for each of one of you take up entrepreneurship as a full time career
• Some more fun stuff…

We are very keen to make this blog a discussions forum on various issues that concern the early stage companies in India or in other parts of  the world. So go ahead and share your thoughts, suggestions, questions, concerns  in comments….

Sri Ganeshai Namah.