Here are 3 things to remember so you get it right -

1. Use JSONP – JSONP provides a way to specify a callback function in the calling document to consume the JSON data provided by the server.

2. Return plain ol’ JSON if no Callback is specified

3. Provide a shorter and a longer version of your payload

Please feel free to add your tips to the comments.

I’m impressed by the business model of Crederity and implementation of CommonFloor

You can view the content of this conference, just click on the title of the talk on the iPhone2010 link and if there is a presentation file it will show up in the right column!

Enjoy! Looking forward to your iPhone physics game ideas..

Finding cofounder is a hard task. Sometimes you are a technical guy looking for a business person or a business person looking for a technical guy. What is important is a good fit of complementing skills and a decent overlap of ideology!

In my personal endeavors I have found cofounders mostly through a personal network (friends, social network and co-workers) and a bit of e-mail list based recruiting. In case of WiseVoter, I had a mix of people helping me and in case of WalkMe I became a co-founder with a colleague.

In an effort to crystallize a set of tips to help you find co-founders, I would definitely list:

1. People you have worked with: Most of the times people you have worked fit the best bill in being your cofounders as the work experiences with them are most revealing than the social context.
2. Personal Network: You should definitely tap your personal network and find if any of the folks in the network would be good candidates for co-founding. Cofounders are not only about skills but also motivation and perseverance.
3. Entrepreneurial Organizations / Events: In many instances folks have found it immensely useful to connect with the right people through volunteering at Entrepreneurial organizations (like various startup groups, TIE etx.) and attending entrepreneurial events (Startup days etc.).
4. Advertising on Craigslist: I haven’t tried this but a most people I know have had a surprising success rate from advertising on craigslist!

What else would you add? Comment away!!

• Versant (http://www.versantventures.com): Situated in Bay Area, Versant funds 5amVenture which seeds in to HealthCare segment. They have a very interesting mix of  Bio and Device companies – http://www.5amventures.com/portfolio_profiles.htm
• MPMCapital (http://www.mpmcapital.com): Primarily focusing on Drug delivery and discovery.

Here is a small list of resources to look at current interesting ideas.

• Y-Combinator : http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
• Look at delicious tags
• Mark Cuban Ideas
• Buzz words : Cloud Computing, Internet Devices, ..

Redmond, WA (Kavita Kukday): Let’s face it, voting for most of us, is matter of flipping a coin. Go to the ballot run through the list and pick the name that sounds the least offensive — that’s unfortunately the usual rigmarole during elections. But don’t get us wrong it’s not because of lack of will to do research it’s mainly because of lack of data accessible in the public forum on electoral candidates and parties. All our knowledge of the candidates until recently either came from news media, hearsay or the big banners and campaigns run by the candidates themselves. Needless to say most of those have been biased to a certain extent.

“Lack of information on candidates has always been a problem in India, says Vaibhav Bhandari one of the founders of the thekarkhana.com venture, “I remember how frustrated I used to be going to the ballot every year with absolutely no means of digging up the actual information of the candidates”

Bhandari however, decided to do something constructive about the situation instead of idly complaining. He and four of his friends decided to harvest the internet wave of citizen journalism by starting a Wikipedia like website called Wise Voter (wisevoter.vitraag.com). The best part of having a Wiki like format is that it is an open knowledge store, which means anyone can contribute information about candidates or parties. So say a lawyer who actually witnessed a trial where a certain electoral candidate was involved might be able to give a full report which would not have been possible otherwise. This might help dig out the skeletons from the candidates past. But then again every good idea has to have a downside, the glitch with a Wiki format is that people can easily add misinformation on the website too. “Of course people will try to vandalize information, but then there will be tons others who will correct them and that way one should be able to get a balanced picture,” added Bhandari.

And guess what Bhandari isn’t the only one making use of the power of the internet; citizen journalism seems to be on a roll. Another website called Vote Report (www.votereport.in) is putting this phenomenon to use, this is a venture managed by the NGO called eMoksha.org. Vote Report nicely aggregates direct reports from citizens’ networks, human rights organizations and juxtaposes them with reports from journalists, news, blogs, photos and tweets in one place on an interactive style map. The map interface gives you the best way to quickly pull up information specific to your constituency or state giving more meaningful insight to help you make the right choice.

Not to be left behind the election candidates themselves are using the social networks and blogs to tell their own story. BJP leader L K Advani for instance has his own Facebook page where fans are flocking to support their chosen leader. From the congress party you’d find leaders like Milind Deora and Shashi Tharoor utilizing their Facebook and Orkut pages to create awareness about their work. While the former Karnataka chief minister SM Krishna  and Gujrat leader Narendra Modi and V K Malhotra have Twitter profiles which make use of the most alive viral communication medium on the Internet.

Google has partnered with organizations that had already existing initiatives such as Association for Democratic Reform (ADR), Indicus Netlabs Pvt Ltd., Janaagraha Center for Citizenship and more to form a common online resource (www.google.co.in/loksabha2009) in both english and hindi.  Similarly Yahoo (in.elections.yahoo.com) has a round up on their sites that tracks the election candidates. Then there are other ventures such as No Criminals (www.nocriminals.org/about_us.php), Voice of Nation (www.voiceofnation.com/forum/index.php), Gov Check (www.govcheck.com) and Bindass (www.bindass.tv/ichange).Although all these sites have a different spin to the information, they all basically have a similar gist of election info such as the basic data on all candidates and parties including information on age, constituency, assets, PAN etc.

Additionally (and more importantly!) these websites also give information on: statistical data about candidates involved in criminal cases and parties fielding criminal records, past track record (positions held, work done, promises fulfilled etc) and the candidate’s and his/her party’s position on key issues. Then there are also sites targeting another major area that prevents the actual democracy prevailing in India – the problem of educated voters not casting their votes. Sites like Jagore (www.jaagore.com/unregistered.php) are trying to reach out to this particular group of voters and asking them to pledge to cast their votes this time. All in all if the online statistics of these websites were to be believed, it looks we might actually see intelligent votes being cast during these elections. Jai Ho!

What is WiseVoter?
WiseVoter is a free demopedia where people can collaboratively keep track of politicians. Most of the data associated with a politican’s profile can be edited via a form (look for “edit with form”) link. The data comprises elements like Networth, Criminal Record, Education etc. This enable to write a lot of analytical tools which give you various facts about your politicians.

How is WiseVoter different?
Currently WiseVoter has the most comprehensive data of politicians contesting in the Indian Lok Sabha elections 2009. The data is spidered using Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha websites, NoCriminal.org and various internet resource. Other wesbites don’t have this comprehensive data, and we aim to keep adding new data each day. However what sets us apart is that we are allowing this data to be editable by any one, in Wikipedia style. We aim to be around and serve this database for more than one election, unlike most other websites.

WiseVoter is of the people, by the people and for the people in every true sense!

Why Now?
This release of WiseVoter is targeting India Lok Sabha 2009 elections. A profile of a politician can be marked with appropriate candidature field and this information could be used by State or City elections as well!

How can I help?
Please help us -

• Add more politicians to the demopedia! – Its simple just click add politician in left column and fill the forms.
• Keep information of the current politician up to date. Just click on the “edit with form” link on top of each profile and change any discrepancies you see!
• Spread the word – use our badge in your blog, website, facebook – http://www.wisevoter.org/wiki/SpreadTheWord
• Give us feedback and discuss the information on the website using the bottom bar!!

Vivek was the CTO of District of Columbia earlier and he was very successful in introducing technology to clean up the age old processes in the government. He particularly opened up government data sources, and ran a competition Apps For Democracy – inviting citizens to build innovative applications making use of  these data feeds. As part of Obama administration the top focus for CTO is to :

• Introduce transparency in awarding and execution of Government contracts by making the relevant data available to people
• Make as much government data – from organizations like FDA, CDC, etc available as feeds to citizens – e.g http://www.data.gov
• Open up the conversation between the government and individual citizens using the wonders of modern technology – http://www.recovery.gov/

Now, this is really leads us to the question at hand, can we do something like this for India? And more so over can we introduce the wonders of transparency for the upcoming 2009 Indian parliamentary elections.

Let me elaborate.

I’m envisioning of building a data platform which provides me information on candidates in each constituency. I’m interested in a one page (Wikipedia, style) – which has semantic data about the candidates:

• Education
• Tax Records
• Religion
• List of issues they are fighting for
• Parliamentary bills they have supported
• Past political offices
• Party Affiliation

One system, GovTrack, is a great example. It tracks the statistics around the US Congress. We would like to achieve a similar system around electoral candidates.

If we can compile such a Wikipedia style entry of all the candidates in each constituency decorated of course by RDF style semantic tags, and have a system which exposes this information as an API. Well viola! we have apps for India 1.0 – Indian Elections 2009!

I’m willing to fund such an effort (up to $25,000). So if you can come up with prototypes achieving the above system and impress us, there is money!!

So…fire up your editors and lets see some competitive juices..

Interesting Links:

• Gov 2.0 Summit - http://www.gov2summit.com/
• Apps For Democracy – http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/
• Government Of DC Data Catalog – http://data.octo.dc.gov/
• Economic Recovery Accountability – http://www.recovery.gov/
• GovTrack – http://www.govtrack.us/
• HackingCongress – http://www.hackingcongress.org/data

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sunlight Hackathon at Web 2.0 Expo (radar.oreilly.com)
• Related Startup : TopChalks

• Non-required consumption / wasting energy – like using inefficient devices or just leaving them on without using them.
• Inefficient grid management – The exorbitant cost of storing electricity and doing capacity planning for the consumers.

With advent of better devices and smarter electronics and electrical engineering we should be able to tackle the above problems. However the question remains is how are these startups going to play in an already monopolistic and rigid market.

My concern is especially for developing nations like India where these changes are most needed but the energy ecosystem is grappled between government and monopolies. I want to take example of solar power, lets say you are a startup providing infrastructure for solar energy – who will be your  customers? Currently, solar power is very successful in India, but the extent is only to consumers. Typically, higher middle class families wanting to reduce their electricity bills and installing these just for water heating purposes. However it is very clear, that solar power can go much further,in fact a smaller company should be able to operate a relatively tiny plant providing solar based energy to a village. However, the market forces (government bribes and the bigger coal/hydro-electric based monopolies) have kept the innovative startups to build the solutions for smaller energy players.  Do have ideas, how power of startups can tackle this? Please leave suggestions in the comments…

Next time – growing up in a village where water is a precious commodity and available only twice a week from the grampachayat, I will outline the startup utility problems around H2O.