We have been trying the get the best talent in and around Delhi/NCR to One97.

I am firm believer that a company is worth the company (of people) it offers !

Seeing a good target group, I asked my audience on how to get great talent to join in. There were many suggestions including trying out startup lunch, trying some PR 2.0 and internal references.

I think we are not going to be only the best place to work. We want One97 to be the *cult* destination to work. A place, where if you did not work, you missed something in your life.

I love the energy that flows in the air. It’s lovely. The place, the platform and the people: it is a potent mix.
Let’s talk more about it sometime later.

I shared some of my experiences in early days and later, the opportunity in telecom application space (I do not like calling our business VAS or MVAS :)

The event was blogged live (!!) here.

If you want to work with us, check out links on the right side.

Cheers

This is an interview with Sunil Bharti Mittal. Probably the latest available on internet.

I have seen and followed Mr Mittal & his work since 1998 and I have been an ardent fan of his.

In our early days when I had started One97. I wanted to work for SBM (as all of us fondly call him). I could not take up a job in Bharti, still Bharti was the first (and for a long time, the only) customer of our company.

Fantaboulous has been that experience and lot of it has been ingrained into our One97 culture. First generation’s enthusiasm, speed, go-get-it spirit and never settling for less.

I will write in detail on my experinces and leanring of working with Bharti.
For now, won’t keep you from the video and do let me know how did you like it.

Social or web 2.0 apps have changed the way we live virtually. The more we “hang out” the more we need to fulfill our appetite of the new.
This always-on content hunger can only be fulfilled by social / user generated content. We have seen when broad band era came (has it come yet, in India ? ) there was such a big dearth of content. Internet took two routes.

1/ Those who had a lot of content were sharing with others using file sharing systems. All of us wanted to download most of what we liked. There were GBs of downloads everyday. MP3 music was everywhere and on every disk.

2/ We started broadcasting what we had. So there is broadcast of video (Youtube), Status (facebook, twitter and Jaiku), pictures (Flicker/Picasa) and obviously our thoughts (blogs and more blogs).

Incidentally web started to look like an OS and instead of one of application all those who had audience, want to them as generic application platform and give access to these-users-of-the-social-platform to all other developers. We saw facebook connect/open social. I am sure Yahoo is opening its 500+ million user access to developers and Google will open more of its core offerings to developers.

So from content sharing to utility and applications to a more generic operating system, the philosophy is moving ahead and should there be search powered by social logic ? (see www.zook.in) Should our enterprise become more 2.0 oriented?

The play ground is open and ideas are flowing. Enterprise should embrace more of 2.0 tech.

Just in case, did you know Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing?

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” Zuckerberg said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”

So we are going more into it. Cheers!

Secondly, I have worked a bit on Category and Tagging. Though I do not know that in an era of tagging what use is Category? I have limited the number of categories by merging them into few.  To make content discovery easy, we will be adding Tags lavishly.

Seeing that there are tags now, I have added the tags also on sidebar.

There are few cool tools on inserting multimedia in blog posts. I just used Slide show, and feel that it makes images look pretty cool.

The template still needs some work, for one, the logo still is missing. Additionally, I will be doing a few static pages and mobile sites’ template too.

Thanks Anagat for suggestions. I cannot wait to start writing on One97 business and work. Do you know of few apps or plugins that are useful? Let me know.

Before
Impressions! One97 gives you the signal for a complete U turn on this one. Having been around for two years, I can say so without feeling like a sore thumb. We were less than 100 when I joined. We were of course family back then. Work would happen overnight on projects with horrid deadlines like it happens for weddings in a family. We would greet each-other like cousins. Space crunch forced us to have mega-lunches each day, which caused a lot of chatter like what happens over huge dining tables. If we had problems with each-other, we would sort it out among us. Any eventuality like someone falling ill met with people offering their cars, cash, credit cards and full-time help with movement to hospital. One hears stories of when fire struck an old office, how everyone gathered in clusters working from somebody’s home. We would share our joys as we shared our sorrows.

After
We are almost 500 now. We are spread across buildings, or at least floors. It is natural to imagine that now we cannot be family. But we can! The only difference is that now the one big family has branched out into many small units. So the teams have become the branches, with members supporting, standing up, and watching over each other. Tiffs happen. But people never stay sore with each other beyond a day or two at max. Teamwork, eh?

The culture spreads with our first name policy, majorly subsidized travel together, the bus trips to and from the office and having fun on Fridays. What really makes us one big family are things like the waves of applause originating from one end, and spreading all over the floor for reasons unknown to the other corner, but the enthusiasm of this other corner is no less: truly a One97 phenomenon!

Extended Family
When I was growing up, there would be days when my dad would come home obviously stressed out. He would depend on his family to de-stress, but never shared his work-woes.

Cut to today. I see how the extended family, i.e. the spouses at One97 and in certain cases even the children indirectly or directly participate and contribute.

•  We have had people having their spouses test our apps and point bugs and flaws in the user experience.
• A little girl came in handy when we needed a child’s voice. Voiceover fee: a couple of chocolates.
• A little boy had his views on what kind of apps would work with kids and so on.
• How can one forget the rigors of waiting for their spouses to turn up when late, and support in general?

So you see, dear family: family we were, family we stay and family we will always be.

So says Smita

Goa, a dream, which comes true for some lucky ones like us! All thanks to the fantastic spirit of One97. If the company believes in working hard, it leaves no stone unturned in partying equally hard. Whatever trips we have been on so far in the last few years — be it rafting in Rishikesh, or adventure at Shoghi in Himachal — the office has subsidized them, most of the times 50% or even more of the cost, enabling more and more of us to participate.

Goa was something else: Dad of all trips!! About 60 of us went together. We flew from Delhi on the 9th October morning and back to Delhi on 12th night, stayed at a hotel for all those 4 days and 3 nights, with food and even a boat cruise up the Mandovi thrown in. For many of us this trip symbolized many firsts: Some flew for the first time in their lives; some saw a disco for the first time, and most of us were stepping on the “holy” soil of Goa for the first time!

What a trip punctuated with laughter all along! We moved in groups in two hired small buses and several cars, and had every ounce of fun that was possible. We frolicked at the beaches, sat talking in coffee shops till the first light of the morning, danced in bathroom slippers till the discos closed, danced to live music being played at a restaurant while sitting, among many more crazy things. The only one thing people did not do over this trip was to sleep enough. But no one was complaining. See pics here.

When we got back to work after this trip, despite the Goa-hangover, it was all full-steam at work back again. Oh, what a happy ending… or only a pause until we go somewhere again?
One more picture set from facebook post:

Over the last six months we have struggled to get more and more people involved in the “Fun Initiatives” that we undertake every week. Having a team with the average age of 25 does help, because once you get them in one place they will create a lot of excitement by themselves. So we decided to let people decide how they wanted to have fun and we would just act as facilitators.

Eureka! Though it is early days yet we feel we have a winning formula!

So the last fortnight has seen one dance night, one evening of fun and games ….including some street cricket and a visit to an amusement park.  And next in this series is a trip to Goa followed by a rafting trip. Not everyone attended every event but every one did attend one or the other event.

However, this does not mean we will do away with events where everyone gets together!