I leave this morning to head to Tokyo for the week. I’m meeting with some ecommerce companies there.

This is my first trip to Japan and I’m way excited. I might try to post from the road, or if not, until next week: Sayonara!!

Now we get to the real reason I flew nearly the circumference of the earth in order to get to India. As cool as the Culture was, that wasn’t why we went.

The real reason that Dave Gray (Doba’s CTO) and I went to India was so that we could spend 26 hours meeting with 5 different companies over 4 days in 4 different cities. We met with Aditi Technologies in Bangalore, ValueLabs and AppLabs in Hyderabad, Persistent Systems in Pune, and Impetus in Noida.

Doba is kicking off plans to open an offshore development center. This is a decision that we’ve come to after careful consideration of lots of different factors. The main driving force behind these plans is a need to have access to additional capacity and flexibility with our development efforts. We have a development and technology team based in UT that is amazing. And that team will continue to grow over time. We also want the benefits that an offshore development center offers us. There are definitely challenges with this strategy, and that’s why Dave and I talked with and met with everyone we could to talk about the pros/cons of this decision. We talked to other technology companies, we talked to Venture Capitalists; basically everyone and anyone we had contacts with so that we could educate ourselves on what to do and what not to do with an initiative like this. Dave spent the good part of 3 weeks getting referrals for companies that manage the development for you and checking on their references so that we could make sure our offshore partner was the best of the best. In the end, we picked 5 companies to meet with in India, and are in the mid-stages of picking our partner overseas.

India was a great experience for me. I think I finally caught the vision of globalization. There are so many opportunities with the way the world has changed in the last 15-20 years and with how it’s continuing to change at increasing rates over the next many years. I’m excited for Doba to engage in global commerce in a new way. I’m excited for our current technology/development teams to further their careers by helping Doba embark on this new road. In the end, I’m excited for me to be able to gain experience with something new, exciting, and challenging–and full of opportunity for Doba, our customers, and our employees.

Where to begin talking about the culture of India? Good question. And after thinking a lot more about this topic, I realized that Dave and I experienced very little of Indian Culture. We were too busy and traveling too much.

This is what I can tell you: India’s culture is very diverse and very interesting. And very different. But in a good way. India is a country of over 1 Billion people. It’s a country with a red hot economy and growth. And it’s a country with a lot of problems to solve, and from what I could tell, some of those problems will result from the shifting and changing of historical cultures as they clash with the ‘western’ way of looking at the world.

Probably the most ‘cultural’ thing we did (and also the most touristy) was to visit the Taj Mahal.

The Taj (as the locals call it) is one of the coolest man-made things I’ve ever seen, maybe the coolest. We mentioned to almost everyone we met (whether travel guides, drivers, company reps, etc.) that we visited it and almost without exception everyone quickly said, “You know that it was just voted onto the new list of the 7 Wonders of the World.” Apparently a company in Switzerland started a new contest in 2001, and they just announced the ‘winners’ July 7, 2007. I guess people from around the world voted and in India it was a national campaign of great importance to get enough votes to get The Taj on the list. It seems to me that The Taj is THE definitive symbol of national identity and pride for Indians, and I can’t say I blame them. It’s dang cool.

(Apparently Americans are cool too as evidence by the photo above, they REALLY wanted their picture taken with us. )

Another one of the things I noticed right away is the culture of service that pervades the country. Everyone we met and dealt with was incredibly nice and did everything in their power to serve you and make you feel important and comfortable and taken care of. You can see that in these two pictures. The one on the left show approximately 17 Kingfisher Airlines employees helping 6 customers. The one on the right shows a budding Indian entrepreneur ready to serve customers with a shave at his shave parlor.

Here are 6 photos that show some example of that cultural shift, the new and the old running into each other:

Cows and cars and cows and motorbikes.

Elephants taking on bicycles.  Brand new building construction interspersed amidst slums of Pune.

Modern toilet (notice the porceline and auto-flush sensor), just different style to say the least. Salute to the international culture clash that is McDonald’s.

One of these days, I’d like to visit India again but with more time to see and experience this very diverse and interesting place. The bonus is that with such radical and fast-pasted change afoot you could go back every 10 years and visit, in essence, a different country.

And that’s how our trip to India started. A 1 hour air traffic control delay at the gate, and then both of us sitting on a partially loaded plane showing us that we were not going anywhere really fast because the delay was extended. (The only good thing about it was that although it was 103° outside, the inside of that plane was COLD, and it was great!)

It was an ominous start to a trip that involved A LOT of flying. 2 flights to get to India. 4 flights in country once there. And 2 flights to get home. To make matters worse, the front page of the Times of India on the day we got there showed this article:

And we were flying into and out of Pune! I don’t like to fly all that much, and the delays to start the trip and then this article didn’t inspire peace of mind to say the least.

All in all, our travel went off pretty well. Every flight in India was at least 30 minutes late, but that’s not that different than the U.S. come to think of it. When we flew back into Delhi from Pune, the pilot informed us we were going to spend 55 minutes circling the airport and that we were number 22 for landing. It reminded me of Die Hard 2 where the planes have to circle forever and are running out of gas. I’ve never seen a landing delay like that before. Delhi is very busy in the evenings.

Here’s a summary of our travel:

• from the time we left to the time we returned, approximately 192 hours passed.
• we spent 44.5 hours flying and covered 21,432 miles
• we spent 14 hours in trains and cars and covered 387 miles
• we spent over 22 hours sitting in airports or train stations
• all in all, that means we spent 42% of those 192 hours actively engaged in what you’d call travel
• finally, we travelled almost 22,000 miles. The circumference of the earth is 24,900. You do the math.

Next post, I’ll talk about the culture we experienced.

Meanwhile, here’s a few more pics related to travel to and in India:

Lots of ways to get around. I personally wish we’d have used the horse-pulled rickshaw at least once.

We flew on Kingfisher Airlines twice. Great service, all new planes. Imagine my surprise as I was walking in one of the airports and I saw some bottles of Kingfisher Beer. Come to find out, Kingfisher airlines was started by the owner of the world’s 2nd largest spirits company, The UB Group. Do you think ‘flying the good times’ has something to do with that combination? I’d probably enjoy flying more if I had some spirits in me too. Maybe we should have Anheuser-Busch Airlines here in the US?

Can I contract some of my travel on the back of one of these babies? Or AT LEAST get a Quarter Pounder w/cheese delivered piping hot to my front door here in the US?

We got back from India last Friday morning. On the one hand it was a great trip, on the other it was a very challenging trip. I’m going to break my report into 3 posts since otherwise it would be WAY too long. The first post will talk about the abundance of Travel we experienced over 9 days. The next post will talk about the Culture. And finally, the last post will go over the Work part of the trip: the reasons Dave Gray and I went over, what we learned, and how things are progressing specific to Doba.

I still have to process some of my images and finalize everything, so watch for these posts in the next few days.