100% improvement in site performance after a data center movement.

It goes without saying that having your data centers and hosting servers close to your clients gives the best performance. This is not always feasible for companies using cloud services, especially for companies with client base in India. Often the cost of  hosting and bandwidth can be lesser for cloud services with data centers located in US than for other locations. For startups this opportunity to save little money can look tempting and many, like us, will opt for this less optimal configuration. But what is the real cost the companies are bearing for this?

The stocks that matter to a retail broker

For a given period, which are the stocks that matter to the customers of a broking firm and which are stocks that matter to a retail broker? Are they the same stocks or are they different?

Finahub - One of the top 10 startups to watch out for in 2013

We have been shortlisted as one of the top ten startup to watch out for in 2013 by Startup Village. This was came in as a total surprise. It felt really good to be acknowledged for what we have done so far. As a startup, acknowledgment and appreciation rarely come your way, so this was a welcome change. The fact that the award was presented by Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Chairman of Infosys and Chief Mentor Startup Village made it more rewarding. Sijo Kuruvila (CEO, Startup Village) and Sanjeev Vijaykumar (Chairman Startup Village and CEO of MobME Wireless) were also present amongst other dignitaries.

The award was presented to us last Friday, 28th Dec 2012 at Startup Village by Kris Gopalakrishnan in a ceremony held at Startup Village, Kochi. The award ceremony was attended by the members of other startups and there was a good number of media folks covering the event. Given below is snap of our Cheif Geek, Ajith George receiving the award.

 We thank the Sijo Kuruvila and the team at Startup Village for putting us up in the list of the those cool startups.  This award is a great encouragement to put in more sleepless nights,to improve our product, meet with more prospects and come up with solutions that will help us serve our customers better.

We would also like to thank our customers for their support and faith in us, without which we would not have come this far.

Last but not the least we would like to thank the team at Startup Village for arranging the event and making it a grand success, you guys rock.

Team Finahub

Impressed with Impress.js

Impress.js is a small open source javascript library that we had used to create our "Why Kinship" presentation available on our site. Impress.js uses the power HTML and CSS3 to create stunning presentations that would the give the likes Prezi a run for its money.

We have always been fascinated by the power of Prezi presentations. It was a great relief from the world of boring power point slides (read death by power point). Prezi enabled your slides to come into life with zoom-in or zoom-out transitions that can augment the core idea that your slides are conveying. Using the Prezi designer tool one can layout the slides on an infinite canvas and it allowed all the transitions to be visually designed too.  In short, Prezi was damn cool but that was until Impress.js happened.

To listen or not to listen that is the question

When it comes to building a product, designing an user interface or adding a new functionality there are two schools of thought at work in the start-up world. One, pioneered by the likes of Apple and 37Signals,  says not listen to your customers because they don't know what they actually need. What they say they need is a what they "think" they want and which may not be true. The other school of thought pioneered by Steve Blank who is a serial entrepreneur, academician, author of the much acclaimed book "The Four Steps to Epiphany" and proponent of the "Customer development model" say one should solicit opinion and feedback from the customers and build your product accordingly.

It is obvious that both these approaches are right and can work as evident from the success of Apple and 37Signal and the numerous startups that have used the customer development model effectively.So the question is not whether one approach is better than the other but rather the question is which approach is right for us as a start-up company. To listen or not to listen that is the question.

Retail Broking: Customer relationship that outlive market crashes

Stock market has its ups and downs, the cycles of boom and bust and times of high volatility. The mood of stock market investors also tend to go up or down with the market. This creates some unique challenges in customer relationship management for the stock brokers. We are trying to look at some of that and see if there are any best practices one could adopt to tackle these challenges.

See the real picture, Invest wisely.

There are lot of free investment advice going around these days, celebrity anchors and investment gurus giving investment/trade tips on TV, broking firms suggesting stock selections on social media and TV, investment advisors and analysts giving out free tips through SMS and other means. All this should make investing in stocks very easy and millions of people should have become millionaires by now. Somehow that doesn't seem to happen. It seems more people are losing their money than gain it, why?