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Category: edocr.com

Recruitment II – Early Observations of Sri Lankan IT Market

Published by ManojRanaweera on May 8, 2011

Idea Stage Having made the decision to build our product development centre in Sri Lanka starting with employing the first senior PHP and Drupal Developer, I thought it might be useful in capturing my experience so far, at least for my own reference. In my previous post, I spoke about the challenges we face at edocr.com due to lack of development resources. By March 2011, I decided to park my attempts to bring on board a technical co-founder on equity and concentrate on recruiting a developer from Sri Lanka. Friendly Recommendations The process started by inquiring from few Sri Lankan…

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Overcoming challenges

Published by ManojRanaweera on April 11, 2011

At edocr.com, we never had it easy! I have changed teams many times over the last 4 yrs. At the beginning, I had a great team, but due to various issues, the team under performed. Then there was a period of about 15 months where no real development took place. In 2008, I outsourced complete development to an Indian company. This relationship also came to an end in 2010. Since then I courted with two individuals. These relationships ended well before they got going. Not ready to give up, once again, outsourcing looked promising. But having to work through project…

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Ultimate Search Box

Published by ManojRanaweera on February 14, 2011

I have been exploring various search boxes of our competitors to understand the ultimate size and shape for our own search box. Here are few references: Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices 25 Creative Search Bar Designs

Business Plan #2 – The Team

Published by ManojRanaweera on December 29, 2010

Many investors will bet on the team than the product or the market opportunity. So what is the ideal startup team? According to Mark Suster, its 5 software engineers and a CEO. But edocr.com is now 3 years old, yet it has no full-time employees. What it has is a team, made up of freelancers and contractors. This arrangement has helped us to bootstrap, but we now need a major rethink on how we can grow as a business, in terms of market share, revenues, product and people. In terms of writing the business plan for edocr.com, I have chosen…

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Business plan #1 – Starting point

Published by ManojRanaweera on December 29, 2010

There are many ways to write a business plan. But how do you start the process? You could start by thinking of: Product – Where would you like to see the product in 18 months? Sales – How much revenues would you like to generate in 5 years time? Market – How much market share can you grab in 5 years? Capital – How much capital would you need to get to traction and subsequent break-even? All of the above, will get you start thinking. The overall plan will cover all of above, as you start developing a detailed plan…

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WorkFlowy as a Personal Task Management Tool

Published by ManojRanaweera on November 27, 2010

Since I was introduced to WorkFlowy by my fellow tech entrepreneur, Joel Gascoigne of OnePage, I have been using it daily as my personal task management tool. WorkFlowy is a simple outline tool that can be used in multiple ways, e.g. build your business plan. I have tried many task management tools since venturing into the exciting world of tech entrepreneurship in 2004, but never found anything that is as simple as workflowy. For many years, I used MindManager from MindJet, a licensed software application for mind mapping to plan my daily, weekly, monthly and annual schedules. For daily and…

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Becoming a Trustee of The Bridgewater Hall Community Education Trust

Published by ManojRanaweera on November 10, 2010

Today, I became a Trustee of The Bridgewater Hall Community Education Trust (BHCET). The BHCET maximises the education potential of the Bridgewater Hall which is a world class concert hall in the centre of Manchester. The BHCET runs a wide range of projects, programmes and activities taking the building and its rich artistic life as a stimulus. The Board of Trustees consists of many well known faces of Manchester and the North West, and how I would add value is yet to be worked out. I am hoping this may be in couple of areas: 1. Brand 2. Technology 3. Culture…

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What are the 10 most used social web applications by you?

Published by ManojRanaweera on November 4, 2010

What are the 10 most used social web applications by you and what are the primary reasons for their usage?? In my case, in order of frequency, i.e. first being the most used and 10th being the least used out of the 10: www.edocr.com – no surprise here! www.twitter.com – instant broadcasting, traffic generator and on-line collaboration (plus tweetdeck + tweetie + cotweet) www.facebook.com – access to 500 million user base with difficulty www.Linkedin.com – verify email addresses of new contacts and learn about individuals www.youtube.com – videos of our events www.stumbleupon.com – traffic generation www.digg.com – traffic generation del.icio.us…

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