Indian Startup Timeline is an initiative + application to build a single-point reference of the milestones and events that make up the lifecycle of any startup. The beneficiaries would be startups, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and practically everybody in the community. As I write this, the idea of IST is just 2 days young. It is an implementation of only my thoughts and I hope it garners support from startup bloggers/event organizers and startups themselves, to achieve it objectives.
The [Add Startup Milestone/Event] link will pop out a form to fill out some basic details about the startup and the past or future event/milestone. (If you think some additional fields or change in existing fields will help, feel free to let me know.) To avoid spam and junk, I review the entries before they show up in the timeline and views. Though I have said “New additions will be reviewed within a day”, I can assure you it will be much faster. Email addresses will not be exposed and I might only use them to establish contact to validate the data.
Behind the scenes: After I visualised IST, I started off with an agenda to accomplish it without writing backend/server code! I had watched the interview of ‘Mr. Office 2.0’, Ismael Ghalimi in the WorkFast.TV show and this charged me up. I tried a few apps I knew and those I found in the Office2.0 Database. Did I meet the agenda? End of day, I managed to meet the agenda by about two-thirds. Zoho Creator powers the database, forms & views while MIT’s Simile Timeline plots the timeline. Zoho gave a RSS while Timeline expects a custom xml format. I expected Yahoo Pipes to do the plumbing. Unfortunately, pipes only outputs to any of RSS-related outputs. EditGrid was another candidate that could have replaced Zoho since EditGrid lets me define a format of syndicated data and hence no intermediate plumbing would have been required. However, EditGrid lacks the powers of forms. So, finally its Zoho Creator + XSLT with PHP + Simile Timeline.
To-Do List:
- RSS feed (Using Yahoo Pipes)
- Email notifications (Built-in Zoho Creator)
- Zoho Creator hiccups (JS errors + Favicon missing)
You can get it touch with me at rajiv @ rajspace.net or rajspace in GTalk.
Update: World Startup Timeline, in the same lines as Indian Startup Timeline with the same purpose but at a global scale.