But don’t get me wrong, Iam not criticizing my own company, yes my own company which I have built with lots of khoon(blood) and pasina(sweat). I was reading a blog post from an MIT researcher whom I regularly follow, he said people like to read negative stories about brands. His post was so engrossing that he grabbed my attention for almost 20 minutes on this post. (Now his blog is a secret since I draw a lot of marketing ideas from this guy, and I know a lot of my competitors follow me, so I wont reveal him publicly here, but if you are someone whom I like/know, just comment and I shall reply you via email.)

So, this is my idea to bring some good press to Globussoft and spread word about it. The apt title about this post shall be decided after the entire post has been written since I myself don’t know now what should be the very apt title for this post.

I have so many things in my head right now and I want to jot them down at one go.

Here I start,

Globussoft as you all know is NOT yet another IT services start up or a freelancing oriented body shop which many people have started percieving us.

We are an end to end consumer product company with major product releases slated by end of 2010.

We have already released 2 products – TwtZilla and Gamebibo which have been huge successes so far and are being liked a lot in their respective consumer communities.

Also, why we are not trying to be another company in  Axis of Evil as correctly mentioned by Vishal Gondal, there are several reasons -

1. These stupid IT Services companies, or so called largest IT companies of India produce hordes of Autobots each year.  Although Vishal calls them outbots I would like to change the nomenclature, I call them Autobots. Read more about my post on Autobots in next few weeks.We don’t want to join the league, we want to create a group of creative people who can create unique softwares which have very high appeal to mass market and end consumers.

2. I personally am part of the group which thinks that the Axis of Evil of IT Industry has created a very wrong brand of Indian Engineering Talent.  Engineers are asked to do ticket solving, or maintain year old systems or document code written ages ago by some freaky American company which makes 10 times the money by selling the shelved product of the very code which we Indians working in these IT companies maintain. FYI, this work can be done by even B.Com. or B.Sc. graduates and I have heard that they have started hiring B.Sc. graduates since they are not able to get enough engineers for these so called challenging tasks.

What we are trying to do is not create autobots but smart people who do justice with the degree they have earned in their 4 years of education.

A lot of people who work with me @Globussoft do follow my vision and buy my idea of creating a difference and not be part of the millions of autobots who do hamali at the IT Industry.

But ya I would gladly accept that there are quite a few do not subscribe to my vision and like to hop jobs which is a trend in the Indian IT industry, again created by the Axis of Evil.

Ideally I would like, as many of my Start-up friends feel, they should be stopped from Hiring Engineering Students from Any Engineering college in India. They have already been banned in IITs and the top premier engineering colleges due to the low work quality they offer that IITians consider as bullshit and instead prefer to work with start-ups or go for higher education.

This would be a great move to boost up the start-up space in India where we find lack of talented people who are willing to work with start-ups and be creative and be part of an organization trying to create a difference.

There are several reasons why one should be working with a start-up-

1. A start-up can give you some real food for thought, where you can flow your brain juices and effectively utilize your grey matter.

2. You get a chance of making a large impact and get recognized for your feat. Just imagine with 200 engineers facebook is able to handle 500 million consumers, that’s 1 engineer to 40,00,000 Users. What an impact a single engineer is making to the user community worldwide.

In our company, myself and another engineer built a product called TwtZilla and today its being consumed by over 20,000 people. Just imagine how much impact that engineer is able to make and what sort of challenges we face daily and solve while building such systems.

Dont you think its more challenging than solving tickets ?

3. Some start-ups like ours, offer you equities . Working with these shitty Indian IT biggies you can never reach those luxuries which every Indian dreams of. But if even a single product of the start-up you are working with clicks and strikes gold, you are a rich man and worth millions if not billions within no time. Do I need to give examples here? There are plenty I guess….

4. A start-up culture is the most favorable culture for proper career growth both personally and professionally. You get to play multiple roles in a start-up and everyone does everything. It helps you to grow yourself via multiple epicenters of your personality. Apart from that, you work as a small team with zero bureaucracy and feel pleased to actually get rewarded for your own hard-work, where nobody can steal your credit for his own benefits.

This list can go endless, and I can keep on adding the benefits of working with a product start-up rather than just another body shop.

However, I feel I have written enough on why Globussoft rocks! and does not suck .

It qualifies with all the qualities of a great and a successful start-up to be a part of.

If you are reading this post as a soon-to-be employee of Globussoft, I hope your stay with us will be equally challenging and enjoyable as I have promised here.

Whenever I write a blog post, I try to make myself as comfortable as possible, away from any disturbance, I close all messengers to stay away from some pissed off customers and get ready to write.

Now you must be wondering whats so special about this post that I’m taking so much time to lay down a “bhoomika” for it . Well this is probably the first post am writing about myself as an employer who sits on a chair and dismisses everyone who comes to him, without caring what he or she has done (atleast some people think so).

The day I started this company, the very first building block on which I wanted to build my company was zero bureaucracy. I never wanted any multiple tiered reporting organizational structure where people with bureaucratic attitude eat up all the credits of hardworking employees (which is a hard fact of all top Indian IT services companies). I wanted to implement a very flat organization with pretty much a startup culture where everyone is a colleague and there is no management or employee tussle. Everyone working with each other with equal respect to their colleagues. I hope I have been able to implement this largely in my company and I’m directly reachable to anyone for any issues and we discuss it face to face.

Now there is a typical dis-advantage of such a wonderful system. While on one hand it helps you to evaluate each of your people directly and tell them where they need improvement and how they can improve their skill sets for a better career, on the other hand if you are a hard person like me (which I think I have become), and you like to stick to your evaluations and tell your colleague that boss this is my evaluation about your results and its very POOR, chances are most of the times people may take it personally rather than professionally.

The results can be many – The guy/girl might resign with immediate effect, or he/she can take an offense on you and as a result you will have to face their aftermath at a later stage where they take an un-needed/un-wanted leave at the time of project delivery and doom your project and the client, or he/she can start creating negative propaganda about you and your company in various forums/blog/twitter/facebook etc, or or or .. this list can be endless.

There can be multiple repercussions of my kinda hard stay on attitude, where I want to be fair with myself and well as with someone who is performing well and vice versa.

Now I have my own reasons for this -

1. If I start following a bureaucratic approach where I announce that everyone is performing equal even if he/she is not, it will kill competition. We all know the reason why Corporate America is America today and what has happened to USSR/West Bengal due to communism/socialism. I want a competitive environment to prevail at Globussoft where people give their best and try to improve themselves as well as the company.

2. I don’t want a Job@Globussoft to be treated as a “sarkari naukri”, where your hard-work is not valued. People go to rest in govt. offices, since they know that it doesn’t matter if they work or not, they gonna get paid every month, and we can very well see what’s the plight of the country. Give me a single case where you have to get some work done at a govt. office and you have returned with a happy face without frustration? I guess there is none. I don’t want our customers to be frustrated when they deal with Globussians.

3. A fair review policy always helps someone with an open mind to improve his/her skills and grow in life. If your so called hard work is dismissed by someone, there has to be a reason for that.

Just because you as an employee are sitting 10 hrs in front of a comp at office, doesn’t mean your performance is very high. You can be facebooking, orkutting, chatting, roaming about or just passing time.

Performance is measured by the value of work you have delivered. A simple analogy is a school kid who sits 10 hrs with his book on table but is thinking of something else. When exam results are out he fails, same as your projects fail. Now if he cries to his mom saying paper was hard or he wrote everything correct or whatever xyz, how fair do you think he is? He should write a blog entry about the bad teacher who gave him a big zero since he failed the poor guy or should he quit the school itself?

Well whatever I have written above was as an employer, who likes his employees a lot. I try to be as friendly as possible with my pupil since I want this company to be one BIG family like a huge tree with many leaves.

But considering myself as a neutral person, I feel its wrong to grumble in public about your failures. If you have failed and some body has dismissed you, he must have a reason for that. If he doesn’t have any reason and he is dismissing everyone’s hard-work without any reason then you have no reason to be bullied by him everyday. Better find greener pastures for you.

However if you feel from bottom of your heart there is a reason, then in future one should learn to avoid those reasons, rather than failing and then grumbling.

As a person, as an employer and mentor I always want to use – “Well done, good job dude, excellent job man” more than I need to use – “what the f**k”.

What comes out from me is solely dependent on how someone performs. I have appreciated a lot of people personally for their hard work and I do it daily from the bottom of my heart since I really love people who are like me! Hard working and focused.

nuf said, time will teach the rest!

Do love your job and not your company! But at least learn, or try to appreciate someone who is working hard to create a difference! – Sumit Ghosh

Watch this video (with audio) if you have time, to understand what I mean to say above –

1) Find keywords. Pick a list of words relevant to your business.  Think about which words are most likely to get people to do what you want them to do (convert into leads) and focus on those words.  Then pick one word (or phrase) to use on one page of your site.  For more detailed info, Google this : Detailed Internet Marketing Keyword Tips.
2) Put keywords in Page Title. The Page Title is one of the most important things that Google and other search engines evaluate to determine what is on a web page.  Put your keyword or phrase in the title, keep it short.

3) Put keywords in Page URL. Google and other search engines also use the text of the URL of the page to determine the content of the web page.  You should use your keyword or phrase in the URL of the web page – either the folder/directory structure or the HTML file / page name itself.

4) Put keywords in Meta Data. While the page metadata (Page Description and Keywords) are not nearly as important as they used to be, they still count.  Take advantage of them by putting your keyword or phrase there.  The description should be readable by a person and make sense and the keyword metadata should focus on your keyword or phrase – do not make it long, less is more.

5) Put keywords in your H1 text. The H1 text is usually the title of an article or some larger bold text at the top of your page.  Google and the smaller search engines can see this and they put extra importance on the words in the H1 text.  Make sure your keyword or phrase is there.

6) Use keywords in the page content. Putting the keyword in your page content also signals to search engines that the page is actually about the keyword and should show up in search results.  I have heard from “experts” that you should use your keyword anywhere from 4-6 times to 10-12 times.  My advice is to just write naturally.

7) Monitor your rank. Give the search engines some time to do their thing (couple days) and then keep checking your rank to see what happened and track your progress.

Recently I have been receiving quite a few emails from colleagues and my buddies all across the country working at some of the top notch Tech. firms expressing their strong desire to migrate back to Chattisgarh for some IT related opportunities. No, not because a lot of Global MNCs are moving to C.G .. read along..

A year ago, I decided to quit the well known IT giant TCS to realize my long cherished dream of a startup here in my hometown Bhilai. Since then we have been taking up a lot of steps to contribute to the IT innovation landscape in C.G. Just like me, there are many others who after gaining ample exposure from the captive R&D centers or the so called MNCs want to return home and be a part of something adventurous, something they have a reason to feel proud of!

It’s my good fortune that I have been endowed with overwhelming support from my well wishers all super excited to join forces with us in the various mind blowing (if I may) initiatives that we are working on, here at Globussoft.

Globussoft – the startup founded by me is now a 100,000$ company in total revenues and we are looking for smart and determined individuals like you who would like to be a part of this rapidly growing IT company and contribute towards the growth of IT and Software in C.G, our home state.

Excuse me for being a little blunt, but the government of the state of C.G is not taking many efforts for the upliftment of IT in the state nor is the local STPI society (Software Technology Parks of India) here in Bhilai any friendly to entrepreneurs and startups (believe me, I have been through it all!!). It’s difficult to retain local talent and candidates flee to metros and other prominent cities the moment they get a chance for reasons which I feel sorry to accept, are true. It’s high time that we take necessary steps to ensure that our state too can match up to the southern states and attract lucrative IT investments.

In the mutual benefit of the state and individuals, I on behalf of Globussoft request one and all to extend helping hands via project sponsorships, direct or indirect equity and be a part of India’s next IT revolution. We know we have the potential; it’s time to put together our collective minds.

It’s not compulsory to be employed with Globussoft to participate. You can contribute as an individual who wants to make a DIFFERENCE – it’s as simple as that!!!

And no, we don’t need any money. By God’s grace and our hard work and will, we have ample of that; all we need is your skills, your ideas and your precious time .

This sounds interesting, how do I proceed?

You need to send us an email with willingness to contribute your time. Right now Globussoft has envisioned 10 business units which have been incepted in 2010. Some are already functioning (Namely, NetVaani and TweetMati), while others are still being conceptualized.

Other than these 10 business units we have around 50-55 products which are at various stages of maturity.

You can take part in any of these business units OR you can suggest a product or an idea which can be incepted as an entire business unit of its own. Recently a guy, Virender from Rajnandgaon contacted me with his idea on device drivers. Our team is collaborating with him and soon the product will hit development roadmap and then head straight to the markets.

This way you too can have your ideas realized with us and in turn help generate IT jobs here in C.G, make it a better state for IT incubation. By working with Globussoft, you have a great marketing team at your disposal. We will help market your product and create business out of it via an established business model which is bound to succeed.

At Globussoft, a business unit is a mature product cum service which has its own eco-system and is able to function independently from the parent company.

Ok, I am in, what do I get in return?

In return you get equity of a product, of a business which YOU own. Your product will literally be your baby. We simply help you find the chance to plant the seed, nurture it, see it maturing and take pride in calling it your baby. It’s an out of the world feeling

Globussoft marketing team helps you with all the latest marketing techniques and you get your share of the overall income the product generates. This helps us hire more people to maintain and grow the product into a mature competitive business unit of its own.

A product sold 50x for less than 100$ is 5000 USD i.e. 2.4 Lakh INR. This is our worst case scenario for sale of any of our products. We normally sell 200-500 copies of our best products very year! Don’t be surprised if this amount turns out to be greater than your annual “package”

So why wait? Time to give momentum to your ideas, see them come to life! Come join us and be a part of this revolution!!

Sumit Ghosh

(The Ideator!!!)

The word S.A.L.E.S has a very deep and prominent impact in my life since I embarked on my career as a Sales Man for Home Security Systems at a local computer shop in Bhilai.

That first job taught me a lot of real lessons that I value today in my entrepreneurial life.  It made me realize the importance of sales in business and how a bad sales team can actually cause a business to go from everything to nothing in a matter of time. I concluded that only goods when marketed and sold right can help build great companies. Whatever I am today as an entrepreneur is due to those very lessons I learnt from that job as a sales guy!

To be honest, I was a bad sales man during my first job as I made zero sales in the first month or rather all of the subsequent months. In fact our entire sales team made no sales, not a single one and the business eventually shut shop just in 3 months due to unsuccessful operations.

One important reason (which I do feel strongly even today after all these years) for that business going down the drain like that was their bad management policy towards sales and salesmen in general. Salesmen were not treated as men and people but only as the ‘numbers’ they generated. For them business was all about numbers. We were just some numbers having no individual identity.

After the first few months of an unsuccessful job as a sales person, this is what my senior boss had to say about sales people they employed - “Jisko Kuch nai aata wo sales me ghus jaata hai.” To be more precise, he meant all sales people are junkards, worthless and should cease to exist. As if they were good for nothing and added no value.

While resigning from that job, I tried to make my point clear to my boss why there were no sales and what was going wrong in my opinion, but he clearly had no interest in hearing a word. Probably he was under the notion what can a 20 year old guy know a thing about sales?!! His total experience in business was greater than my age!

Anyway, this failed job, yes I call it a failure since I was not able to achieve what I was paid for, what I was hired to do opened my eyes to something valuable and I made a few resolutions to myself.

That very experience turned out to be the stepping stone leading me to the entrepreneurial success I envisage today as the CEO of Globussoft where I primarily manage the sales and marketing of my company catering to customers all across the Globe – right from the comfort of a desktop/laptop, sitting in a small town in central India. We make excellent sales, we sell high end products, and we sell technology. All of this without any physical interaction! Everything is virtual and yet we are successful – this is the power of good sales strategies!

That very first failed job of my life actually threw me a challenge. Yep! I challenged myself that ‘SALES’ was no Mt Everest and I can master it in MY ways, out of my own experience. This was in the first year of college,  it was somewhere around September 2007.  Those months I used to search news paper classifieds especially for sales and marketing jobs.

Basically there were 2 reasons for this –

1. Since I was a student I couldn’t afford to bunk college and take up a full time day job ( remember this was in my first year. After third year, I rarely attended college lectures )
2. Only sales and marketing was an area where you could work at the luxury of your own timings since any company hiring you for sales was only truly interested in the numbers you raked in ! They see the number of sales you made, and give you a commission based salary.

I found sales to be very exciting, and at the time a suitable, job opportunity for me. The next few months saw me selling Mobile phones (for a Reliance India Mobile Direct Sales Agent), Cold drinks (for a local cold drink brand), and even Gutka and Pan Masala Brands (yep can you imagine a to-be engineer selling Pan Masala.. lol, it was real fun those days!!).  CDs, soaps, detergents followed. I sold every damn thing I could get hold of and made money out of it. The list is endless!

These small part time jobs led me to discover some real fascinating secrets about Sales which later on became the strong pillars of foundation for my own entrepreneurial journey which was soon to begin.  It gradually descended upon me that Sales is not just about numbers, Sales is about connecting people, knowing them and building trust and faith between each other!

Business is not about profit and loss statements, business is about people! Bringing good people near you and making them great people along with you, that’s what business meant to me.

While I was enjoying my new found success as a ‘successful’ sales person who could sell anything he got hold of to anyone you ask him to sell, I always felt there was something missing. There was always a missing link; I used to wonder what it is.

I was a geek at heart and a coder by passion, so any time that I could save from my college studies and my part time job would be spent reading stuff on latest technologies and coding projects. All this landed me my first freelance project for a local company in Raipur. The owner was so happy with my work that he wanted to hire me part-time for his projects and I gladly accepted his offer. This was still the 5th semester of my college.

And yes, I discovered the missing link too . All those years I was working hard selling almost everything, but the fact was – I was slogging selling products manufactured by others. This was the first time where I got a chance to sell something which was manufactured by ME. Yes, it was software that I wrote, my own baby! This was the first time I got to sell something which I produced and it really matched my passion as well – coding.

So I bid farewell to all my other part-time jobs and focused mainly on software development and selling my own creations to customers. They ranged from custom built software in VB6 , C++ or web sites in classic ASP in those times.

A lot of people prior to me had taken this path and failed, so I too was very skeptical at first. I had heard numerous ghost stories of software ventures failing in their very early days in Chhattisgarh at the time. However with my by-then delectable Sales skills and coding abilities which I could vouch upon, I plunged in without caring about the results.

Though I saw initial success and decent sales of my services (not softwares), I noticed that people in my city or nearby cities couldn’t care less about IT and my software offerings.  Suddenly I started feeling like it’s going to reach me nowhere.

All my Sales skills were leading me to a pit hole as people then had a common notion that all software should be given out free. It could mainly be since here we mostly get the entire windows OS (pirated) for free.

All those stories about IT companies closing down shops in Chhattisgarh kept ringing in my head. There were nights when those thoughts would keep haunting me keeping me wide awake in the middle of the night. Finally I decided not to waste any more time with the local market and carved a fresh dimension for my venture.

It was a totally new experience, out-of-the-box kinda! In fact, I have reasons to believe that Globussoft was the pioneer in entire CG area in this kind of a business concept. I am not aware if anyone before me were even aware of online market places and ways of taking their business to the next level – the virtual one!

Selling your business online is an entirely different ball game! The media, the communication channel, and payment ways – everything changes. But as usual, Sales is fun! This concept seemed to work for me and today I have one of the largest and the fastest growing software companies in entire Chhattisgarh. And without a doubt, our strength is our overtly talented sales teams who I can proudly say understand and appreciate what Sales is all about.

I made it a point to keep sales and marketing under my direct visibility since I strongly believe Sales to be a coherent part of any business and every savvy entrepreneur must master its tips and tricks to be successful in his/her venture.

Concluding words – I dedicate this post to my favorite employee Subeer who is actively helping me with our Sales. But sometimes I get the feeling that he feels he is not doing much of a “worthy” job.

He is not aware of this, but he is one of most sought after employees and truly an asset to me.  I can train 10 coders but to generate sales intelligence in someone is very difficult. I wrote this post putting in days of thoughts recalling all those earlier days, since I strongly believe Sales is not in any way a worthless job and a salesman is by no means a worthless creature.

Sales is an Art, not a skill which can be developed with run of the mill training. It has enough power to make or break an entire lifetime of a business.  Don’t you think it’s time we treat sales people with the respect they deserve! – Sumit Ghosh

Here at Globussoft, we seek genuine techmaniacs!

So, if you are fresher dreaming of whipping up some cool software, please visit our campus with a copy of your -
1. UPDATED resume.

2. Final Year Project with code and documentation.

We will ask you to setup the project in our test labs and do a run through for us. Most candidates get rejected at this phase since they have bought their final year project from somewhere or merely copy pasted some body else’s existing project.

We ask you to explain your involvement during various stages of the project development, the challenges you faced and your overall participation will be evaluated based on your responsiveness. Hence unless  you are genuinely prepared, you are going to find it a tough round to get past.

3. An algorithmic test – We ask you to code 5 programs in our campus.

4. HR round – Last and Final round to see if you are really employable

Please read about Globussoft before coming for this round…

Our business has doubled in last 2 years from 25000$ in first year as revenues to $65,000 in gross revenues in the fiscal 2010. (Source – Software Technology Parks of India – Annual Reports 2009-2010).

Our team strength has quadrupled from a 5 man team in 2007 to a 30 man team in 2010 in bhilai. All in all we are growing superbly fast and we need extremely talented souls to work with us and take part in what they do best.

To be a part of this fastest growing IT firm in Central India we look forward to have following qualities in you.

1. Be a motivated self starter.
2. Be a self learner and a fast learner, we need the fastest to be the fastest in this planet.
3. You should love what you want to do! (3 Idiots , Aamir? Does it ring a bell, if not go watch 3I again), for those you just hate coding, Iam sorry this is not a Good place to work
..
..
And yada yada …

Life @ Globussoft is awesome with weekly cricket matches on Saturdays,quarterly outings and an Annual Picnic. Work timings are flexible since we need to accommodate the whole world as our customer base. Infact to be true Globussoft never sleeps and the Sun never sets for us too

All in all its a fantastic start up to work for , be it a fresher or be it an experienced pro in some cutting edge technology.

Read along following sections based on your professional level.

Hiring for Freshers @ Globussoft

Hiring for experienced professionals @ Globussoft

To all those who know me and have made some assumptions by now -

You all are wrong because -

1. No I was not ultra busy @ Globussoft cooking up code or marketing my company online , or generating leads for my business (as a lot of my friends were thinking) , Just so that you know I used to do the same amount of work earlier when I used to regularly update this blog as well, so being ultra busy is definitively not the reason.

2. I lost interest in “whats latest in technology” and hence I had nothing to write ? Lol, If you really know me, Can this ever happen in my life until Iam dead ?? ha ha, not a good reason again.

3. Probably I tried to follow path of the latest emerging trend of bloggers blogging shit everywhere who even don’t know what they are writing about and now since I feel enough is enough lets gets back to business and leave this shitty blogging business . It was just a trend in time, since every one in my (community, business, peer-group has his blog , I should also have a blog and write some shit in it and read it multifarious time and giggle lol.

For all those who thought this, probably a lot of my competitors, its a real shame that you failed to estimate my flair for writing mates…

Keep looking there is lot more to come…

PS: Some one whom I Admire a lot said that I sound rude and bold in this post

Yeah , she is partly correct since I forgot to add the fun element….

So friends what was something which stopped me from writing all these months other than the most obvious reasons which you might have been thinking.

Well you will laugh to death once I tell you. It was my BAD ASS – WEB HOSTER

Yeah I was using the services some some bad ass indian hosting company called as pradiphosting, he is some bong from west bengal and is such a bad ass. There is no way you can reach him, no phone calls, no address nothing. Only way I can contact him was email and Iam on his mercy whenever he feels like he can answer me , there was no professionalism as such , most of the times my blog was down, sometimes it went down while I was composing a new post.

All this made me so much frustrated that I gave up writing up new posts and start waiting when will this hosting cycle end and I will shift my blog to some new host with better service and timely support.

Now the fun part starts here -

I waited for almost almost 5 months for the billing period of pradiphosting to end without being wise enough to transfer my domain to a different provider.

After 5 months when my hosting expired,I was bombed. I had no way to get my blog back

I sent tons to mails to this pradip hosting guy but he never responded.

Such a big fool Iam, I was made to pay the renewal fees again to pradiphosting and also to the new hoster where I wanted to move the blog.

So I paid double the hosting fees just to save my love, Technomlounge Anything for you my love!

So finally I could login to my cpanel, take backup of everything and move my domain to a new control panel.

Currently my blog resides on one of India’s best hoster’s servers, call me if you want to know and Iam a damn happy customer

The key difference between social networks and more traditional online communities is the friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) trust model that exists in social networks. Users maintain direct connections to their friends, but they also have some level of access to the direct connections their friends maintain to other people. The FOAF model enables users to interact with network users to whom they are not otherwise directly connected. Users can establish different rules of engagement for different types of connections in their network; the closer the connection to a user in terms of degrees of separation, the more trusted that user is. For example, privacy settings can be made more stringent for a FOAF than privacy settings for a directly connected friend.

Just imagine , if 100s of social users keep telling their friends about your fantastic new website… what a killer volume of traffic will it generate for you.

I write the tools to achieve the same. My bots can be a real automated traffic engine for your new website.

The dealer shuffles a standard 52-card deck.

(In casinos, the dealer never plays. A round disc — known as a “dealer button” –

moves clockwise from player to player with each hand. The button marks which

player would be the dealer if the deal were advanced from player to player as the

game went along.)

Games start with the two players to the left of the dealer (the button) putting a

predetermined amount of money into the pot before any cards are dealt, ensuring that

there’s something to play for on every hand. This is called “posting the blinds.” Most

often, the “first blind” — the player to the left of the dealer — puts up half the

minimum bet, and the “second blind” puts up the full minimum bet.

Each player is dealt two cards; face down and unseen by the other players. These are

known as their hole cards.

Betting Begins

A round of betting takes place, beginning with the player to the left of the two who

posted the blinds. Players can call, raise, or fold when it’s their turn to bet. A call

(known as a check when the amount to call is zero) means that the player will match

the highest bet so far put into the pot, minus whatever they have already contributed.

A raise means that the player will call whatever bet has already been made, and raise

the bet by a further amount. A fold means that the player forfeits all money in the pot,

throws in their hole cards, and waits for the next game. The round of betting continues

until every player has either called or folded the last bet/raise, with the consequence

that a player can’t re-raise himself.

The Flop

After the first betting round, the dealer discards the top card of the deck. This is called

burning the card and is done to ensure that no one accidentally saw the top card, and

to help prevent cheating.

The dealer then flips the next three cards face up on the table. These cards are called

the “flop.”

NOTE: Eventually, a total of five community cards will be placed face up on the table.

Players can use any combination of the community cards and their own two cards to

form the best possible five-card Poker hand.

After the flop, another round of betting takes place, beginning with the player to the

left of the dealer (the button). During this and all future rounds of betting, players

have to choose whether to check, call, raise, or fold when it’s their turn to bet.

The Turn

The dealer burns another card and places one more card face up onto the table. This,

the fourth community card, is called the “turn” or “Fourth Street.”

The player to the left of the dealer (the button) begins the third round of betting.

The River

The dealer burns another card before placing the final face-up card on the table. This

card is called the “river” or “Fifth Street.”

Final Betting and The Winner

Players can now use any combination of seven cards — the five community cards and

the two cards known only to them — to form the best possible five-card Poker hand.

The fourth and final round of betting starts with the player to the left of the dealer (the

button).

After the final betting round, all players who remain in the game can reveal their

hands. The player who made the last raise in the river round shows their hand first. A

player can choose not to show their hand if they can’t beat a hand already shown. The

player with the best-ranked hand wins.

Split pots in betting

It is possible for a player to run out of money whilst betting, rendering him unable to

continue betting even though other players might wish to keep betting. In the event

that this happens, the concept of split pots is introduced. The main pot consists of all

money so far contributed by the other players to the pot up to the amount that the

player has so far contributed, plus any other money that was bet by people that have

already folded. This is under contention between all players. Then, a side pot is

created for all the people who still wish to bet. This pot is only filled by money from

those players that still wish to bet and have enough money to do so, and is therefore

also only under contention between those players that contributed to it. If the situation

arises again, a further side pot is created, and so on.

1.Reasoning under uncertainty (opponents’ cards)
2.Dealing with probabilistic outcomes (future cards)
3.Decision-making with multiple options (chips used for bets)
4.Individual differences (different styles of play)
5.Inference of intent (from opponents’ bets)
6.Intentional deception (bluffing, sandbagging)
7.Pattern recognition (detecting trends from flow of game)
8.Economic behavior (factoring impact of amount of bets)

Because of the range of cognitive activities involved, poker provides a broader and more challenging test for cognitive modelling than other games such as chess that focus on a more restricted range of mechanisms (e.g. search). Despite the complexity of aspects involved, it remains a highly tractable domain, partly because it abstracts away from computationally demanding perception and interaction problems. Poker is increasingly being played in online gaming communities where the need for challenging, cognitively plausible agents is increasing. Poker therefore provides a challenging domain at the intersection of fundamental research questions and
potential mass application.

To this end, it is desirable to build a no limit poker game, playing Texas Hold’em, which displays evidence of these cognitive activities. Our project attempts to build such a poker application, with the hopes of competing to the best of poker platforms built to this date.

A lot of times you will need to connect to Flash Media Server , where there is lot of code avialable for AS 2.0 , I was not able to find much code on AS 3.0 . I hope this helps other fellow Action Script programmers out there.

package
{
import flash.net.NetConnection;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.text.TextField;
import flash.events.NetStatusEvent;

public class FMSManager extends Sprite
{
private var nc:NetConnection;
private var rtmpNow:String;
private var msg:String;
private var connectText:TextField;
private var posX:Number;

public function FMSManager ()
{
nc=new NetConnection();
nc.addEventListener (NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS,checkConnect);
rtmpNow=”rtmp://timfuzos.rtmphost.com/one2oneChat/room1″; //change the host name to your host
//rtmpNow=”rtmpe:/one2oneChat/room1″;  // if your FMS is hosted in local use this
nc.connect (rtmpNow,”sumit”);
}
private function checkConnect (event:NetStatusEvent):void
{
connectText=new TextField();
msg=event.info.code;
trace(msg);
connectText.width=250;
connectText.text=msg;
addChild (connectText);
posX=connectText.stage.stageWidth;
connectText.x=(posX/2)-((msg.length/2)*(6));
connectText.y=175;
}
}
}

The screen would look like this

Connection Screen

FMSConnect

In the last article we saw that we finalized our research to three technology platforms.

Now before finalizing any particular platform we need to see the pros and cons of each.

Before starting lets recall the requirement of this project.

1. The final game should be deploy able in all Operating Systems (MAC, Windows and Linux).

2. It should be deploy able as a Desktop Application as well as Web Based thin client.

3. It should be easily extended to mobile platform with no or very changes to the server code.

4. It should provide Audio-Video interaction of clients in a particular room.

After analyzing the requirements and the three platforms I came to the conclusion that Adobe Flash, AS3, Flex, AIR and related technologies would be the best to meet all our requirements.

The reasons are listed as follows -

1. Adobe provides Flash Media Server which provides a lot of inbuilt functionality for easily game state management.

2. Flash Media Server makes it very easy to add Live streaming audio video to the game rooms.

3. The same code can be reused for a web based client as well as a desktop based client in AIR with almost negligible code changes.

All in all Adobe Technologies proved to be the best to create such an exciting platform for rich entertainment

Next Step

The first step in developing any successful project is choosing the correct technology stack. Dunno how many software evangelists second this idea, but I have known this with experience in many of the projects whose part I have been.

The technology platform or stack can actually depend on lot of points -

1. Team Competency – How competent is your team in the particular technology, It will be quite an herculean task to roll out something in time if you plan to learn and master the technology and language along with developing the product. You should choose a technology which your team has either masters or at least has fair exposure to.

2. How stable and ripe is the technology – I would not prefer to write a commercial product based on some beta technology or product which is not backed by some reputed vendor. Its better to always base your end product with professionally supported technology stack which has a good developer community and decent vendor support. Else if you are stuck somewhere, you will be stuck up for ages with no support or help.

Open Source can be an option many at times, but again make sure its supported with some premium support.

3. Will it support the Architecture you propose  and how easily?-  This is the most important question the Lead Architect of the team should always ask himself. Its very  important to figure out whether the technology and programming language that you are choosing has all the important aspects and features which will be required by a complex Multiplayer game like online poker.

Typically I would expect the language to support OOPs fully, else it will be very difficult to implement proper design patterns and the end result could be spaghetti code.

Along with this I would prefer that the framework has pre built classes for Server-Client implementation (ease of use).

4. Deployment – The last thing you should bother about the most is how and where your application is going to be deployed. In our case, we want to deploy it to all platforms (Windows, Linux and MAC), make it run as a standalone desktop client and also as a web based deployment inside the browser. Along with this we also wanted the possibility of easily porting the client code for Mobile Deployment, without any changes in server code. Along with this, we wanted to have live poker experience where users can see each other in real time with their web cams and speak over microphones in their respective rooms.

I did my research across the web, scanned through tons of sites , books and stuff, I came up to these final technology stacks.

1. Microsoft – .NET and related technologies

2. Adobe – Flash AS3, Flex , AIR , Flash Media Server and related technologies

3. Sun Micro systems – Java, JavaFX and related technologies.

There were lot many others which made up in my list but these three were worth comparing and mentioning.

I have compared the anomalies and advantages of each and shown how I finally arrived to my chosen platform.

Read on…..