Uhooroo derives from Uhuru - the Swahali word for freedom. And that is exactly what they set out to find with this website - freedom for the musicians.
India was always a singing and dancing community, though the music was lost somewhere in the din of the cities. Uhooroo plans to bring the music back into the limelight by giving the Indian musicians a stage to showcase their talent, network, hire, join and compete with other musicians. That’s really a lot of todos for a startup where the founders are not yet working full-time as yet nor are they physically present within 10,000 kms of their target audience (They are based out of San Francisco)
The core team consists of two engineers who are currently working at McAfee. According to their website, one of them excels at engineering and the other at reverse-engineering. But the slick graphic you see here comes from Nikita, who handles the web design at Uhooroo.
The website has been built with PHP and uses a negligible amount of javascript. Even though the team has some strange answers in the faq, like - Why can’t I login even with the correct credentials?. They somehow blame this problem on the way browsers handle PHP. (Killer tip of the day : Browsers only handle html, js and stuff like that)
So vven though I wouldn’t recommend their web dev skills to anybody yet, the design and aesthetics will keep you at the website for quite some time. Besides there is a lot of magical flash on the website which has been done really well.
You can find quite a large number of musicians at Uhooroo including a Tamil Christian hip-hop artist from Norway. And if you are the adventurous kind, you might even find documents like this and a resume on the website.
But as Ted Dzubia with all his wisdom says, “Every person who lives in San Francisco has the intention of starting a nonprofit organization of some sort”. And it looks quite true in this case as well. One look at the literature on the website and you can find out what the website can give to its musicians and its audiences, but you will never understand what will the founders will eventually get out of it, other than maybe some peace of mind for having started what they were passionate about.
More details on the Uhooroo Blog, Startup Dunia, Watblog and Just Jo
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September 25th, 2008 at 2:45 am
Hello Sudhanshu,
Thanks for taking the time to review us.
We concede that we are not working on this project full time, that we don’t have a web background and that we are based out of San Francisco. However, none of those things have been impediments to our progress. Incidentally, our users are demographically diverse - something that we value a lot. Our India focused branding differentiates us from other generic music websites out there and we have a user-base that happens to agree with that point of view.
Thanks & regards,
Vinay & Bharath
(Co-founders)
P.S. Regarding the browser bug; there’s an overlapping area between browsers and PHP - session cookies. It so happens that a version of IE occasionally forgets to clear the previous session cookie before it sets a new one, and that confuses the PHP session. Feel free to write to us if you’d like to discuss this offline.
September 26th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Hi Bharath,
Thanks a lot for getting in touch.
First of all congrats on doing such a wonderful job with Uhooroo.com. In the last few days, I have spent a lot of time on the site and have quite enjoyed myself.
I’m quite sure none of three things are hampering Uhooroo in any way. You guys are coming from a systems background, so PHP should really be easy!!
While writing the post, the one thing that I could not really figure out was monetization. It would be great if you can shed some light on that. Since most web applications are about solving problems than innovating in the technical space, most of the actual innovation in websites happens in how they take money from users. So I’m very curious about how are you guys willing to go ahead on this.
About your issue, I run a small PHP development shop here in Pune. So in case you need some help to fix the problem, do let me know. I’m sure that is one place I would be able to help you.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:48 am
Thanks Sudhanshu for the follow-up.
As a rule of thumb for web services, it is hard to achieve monetization in any meaningful sense unless you achieve scale. Having said that, at this time, we are focused on scaling to the next order of magnitude of user-base and engineering the feature-set that is going to help us get there. This could potentially take a year or more. That’s when we will roll-out our monetization plans. What we can share is our opinion on what would not work for Uhooroo. Incidentally, our previous stint was into music services and selling indie-music. It was DoA. We had pitched the idea to several indie musicians, and also to a few investors, and it was clear that paid mp3 downloads were not the primary need/focus of indie-musicians. Likewise, it should be clear from the Indian startup ecosystem that consumers don’t pay for non-essential services (essential services would be property sales, matrimony, etc).
Regards,
Bharath