Bringing The Global Web To India

A few weeks ago I blogged about search suggestions, a feature that made it easy to enter queries in Indian language scripts. Once you are able to do that and start searching, you'll quickly discover another barrier that non-English speaking users face in India - there just isn't much good content available online. No matter how good the search engine, it can't return relevant information if it doesn't exist! This situation is beginning to change in a few areas -news and entertainment for example - where lots of Indian language websites are being created. However we still have some way to go before the Indic web has enough high-quality content to satisfy all the information needs of users.

What can we do in the meantime? Well, Google has an interesting approach to this issue - automatic translation. If you do a search in Hindi and scroll down to the last search result on the first page, you'll see a link to a result that's been translated from English. For example, try querying for सरकारी नौकरी and scroll down to the bottom of the results page. You'll see a link to a translated query result. Clicking on the link takes you to a translated query results page. Here's how this works:

1) We will take your Hindi query - "सरकारी नौकरी" - and translate it into English - "government job".
2) We'll then run the English query and get back English results.
3) We'll translate those results back into Hindi for you.

All these translations are done automatically, using a machine translation engine developed at Google. This technology allows you to translate any text or web page instantly. Here's the Times of India homepage automatically translated into Hindi. Of course, because these are machine-generated translations they will never be as good as human translations (and they can even be quite funny) but the quality should be good enough for you to understand the sense of what you're looking for.

A neat and unique way of using technology to help bring information to users, even when it doesn't exist in their language.

Better Search in Hindi

One of the core value propositions on the web, and one that is certainly near and dear to Google's heart, is search. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

For our purposes, the operative words are world and universal. So how do we fulfill this core mission in India, for those who would prefer to interact in their local language rather than in English? Of course our core search technology works across languages and has been adapted to the specific needs of each language. Apart from this there are some specific features we launched on Google Hindi Search. I'd like to showcase one of them here. We launched this in response to the difficulty our users faced in entering Hindi text.

Problem: Hard to enter Hindi text on a regular english keyboard.
Solution: Easy Hindi search in 3 steps - Pictures say it louder than words.

Step 1: Start typing in English and you'll see Hindi suggestions




Step 2: Select your query from the drop-down list















Step 3: View the results of your search in Hindi





We have this feature available in seven other Indian languages:

• Bengali
• Telugu
• Marathi
• Tamil
• Gujarati
• Kannada
• Malayalam

Happy searching!

Chicken or Egg?

Google India had its first ever Google Developer Day, held in Bangalore on October 18th. I spoke about our Indic Transliteration API, which makes it possible to add Indic language tying to any website in a very simple manner. (more about this API and other Indic tools a later post).

What struck me as I spoke to the developers at the conference is a sense of uncertainty about the market opportunity for Indic language products and services, so I thought I'd set down some thoughts on how I look at this market.

The opportunity.

• In an earlier post, I outlined some of the demographic and socioeconomic statistics that set the context for this opportunity. Bottom-line: India is getting richer and more literate at a much faster pace than its learning English.
  
• In every country around the world, as the internet provided compelling content and applications in local languages, people found value in them. This is true across Europe, Asia and the Americas. There is no reason to think India is different.
  

The ecosystem

• The bottleneck is this: people won't go online until hey find value, and the value creators (content producers, application developers) won't make the investment until they find people online. How to break this logjam?
• If we look at how the internet developed in the US, it may provide a useful analogy. For the purposes of our discussion, we can break down this evolution into three phases.
• First came content. This was mostly produced by communities people who had a passion for putting up content they cared about. Traffic and monetization was mot the motivation.
• Second came growing readership as people started discovering this content. This set off a virtuous cycle in which content eventually because a viable, monetizatable business.
• Third (and final) were the application developers who could now focus on moving the online experience beyond passive consumption of information to interactivity, community building, service delivery and a host of other innovations.

The Indic market was stuck in phase one for a long time, and (I believe) has just recently entered phase two. There are some signs to back this up - the growing number of newspapers launching online editions in local languages, the growth in the number of tools available for entering local language text using an english keyboard (Google, Quillpad among others).

Are you ready?

Improving Lives Through Search

One of the most common questions I'm asked when I talk to people about building products and services in Indian languages is, "Why?" The unspoken thought behind the question: those who don't know English in India are dealing with more basic sorts of problems - web search is a luxury that can have only tangential impact in their lives.

I beg to differ.

One of the most powerful features of the web is the democratization of access to information. With the web, consumers can be free of value-extracting middlemen and brokers of information. With the web, consumers can reduce information asymmetry. That isn't a luxury - it's a powerful tool to improve lives.

Imagine a sick child, and parents who have no easy access to medical care. The web can yield information to understand symptoms and help parents provide basic treatment. Imagine a bright school student who attends a poorly-run and managed school that will ill-prepare her for college and the job market. If this student could access educational content online, it could transform her life prospects.

Search can improve lives. And it helps those people most who have the least access to alternative sources of information - typically those lower down in the socio-economic ladder.

One of the things I like to do is to read Google's customer testimonials from time to time. I've reproduced a few below. This isn't a pitch for Google - you can replace "Google" with the more generic "search" and the message is equally powerful.

Message from: Abigail

"Google helped me discover that my daughter's strange medical problems are part of a rare genetic syndrome that most of her doctors had never heard of. Her doctors diagnosed her after I brought them the information, and my discovery helped her cardiologist diagnose another patient with the same syndrome. Because of my daughter's new diagnosis, we have uncovered other dangerous but treatable problems that we wouldn't have known about until they caused her serious damage. So, I'm very grateful to the people at Google who made all of this possible. Thank you."

Message from: Ann

"I just wanted to let you know that Google may well have saved my life. My sons and I were walking home from having eaten out. A half block from my house, I felt this pressure building in my chest. Immediately, I thought, 'heart attack' and ran through how I'd been feeling that the day (I had been nauseated). My first thought was, 'confirm suspicions,' and immediately, upon arriving home, I went to Google and typed in 'heart attack.' I kept thinking, 'you only have minutes...' I found a site that listed symptoms. Indeed, I was having a heart attack. I was at the Albany fire station within minutes. Five baby aspirin later, and a few squirts of nitro and I was in the ambulance on my way to the hospital. The good news is, I have no residual damage. My heart is back to normal. Thank you for providing the Google search engine. I'm sure my recovery was complete because of the speed within which I was able to get help."

Message from: Laura

"Last year my daughter, who was a senior in high school, was afraid of failing her math final. I did a search on Google and came up with more than one method of explaining the formulas...She passed the final and ended up with a B in the class instead of a C. "

Onashamsakal

On this festive occasion, I'd like to wish all Malayalees Onashamsakal. To celebrate the occasion, Google just launched a News edition in Malayalam. You can learn more by reading our post on the Google News blog. Of course, if you're looking for more information on onam or on any other subject, in Malayalam, you can also use Malayalam search. It's very easy to type in Malayalam using a normal english keyboard: you start typing Malayalam words in english, and we will generate Malayalam suggestions for you to select as your query.

India by the Numbers

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the areas I focus on is Indian language products and services. The basic thesis is this: India has a huge population of people who should be using the internet but are not. One of the primary barriers to usage is language: the internet is a fairly unfriendly place in India if you don't speak English. Let's try removing or lowering this barrier, and the internet becomes useful for a much larger group of people. I'll elaborate on each of these points in subsequent posts, but for now, let's look at some numbers* (you could quibble about some of these e.g. literacy numbers supplied by state governments may be inflated, but they are in range of the true number):

• Total population: 1.2 billion
• Total literate population: 650 million
• Total middle class population: 350 million
• Total newspaper readership: 200 million
• Total vernacular newspaper readership: 180 million (90% of total)
  
• Total English-speaking population: 80 million (self-identified as speaking as first- or second-language in the 2001 census)
• Total online population: 40 - 50 million

If you (quite reasonably) assume that pretty much everyone who is online in India today speaks English, then the low internet user base makes sense - it's more than a 50% penetration among English-speakers, and zero among the other 93% of the population.

We need to build the Indian language web. Who's in?


* (Sources: 2001 Indian Census and 2006 National Readership Survey)

Hello? Testing.. 1... 2... 3

Is this thing still on?

My last blog post (before this one) was exactly sixteen months ago! It's amazing how time flies. I blogged back in April of 2007 about our imminent move from the Bay Area to Bangalore. Well, the move happened, and my wife and I have been in Bangalore since May last year. What with getting used to a new city, a new job (Product Manager at Google), a new social life (or lack thereof), blogging took a back seat.

What's pretty neat is that in the time that I've been away, I've actually been working on many of the themes that I've blogged about: product innovation in developing countries. My focus during the last sixteen months has been on Google's Indic language strategy and figuring out how best to bridge the language barriers that make the internet so daunting for the vast majority of India's population.

I hope to pick up where I left off in May last year. Is it possible to resuscitate a blog after a year? I hope so. I'd like to revive this blog, share my thoughts and ideas, and get your feedback. In the meantime, take a look at some of the stuff Google is doing in India.

Survey of India's Consumer Market

McKinsey's Global Institute has just released a report on India's consumer market. There is an executive summary as well as the full report, available for free download (although you may need to register yourself to access these). The study projects the growth and changes in the composition of India's consumer markets from today through 2025. The highlights include the following projections about the market in 2025:

• India will be the fifth biggest consumer market. If India continues on its current high-growth path over the next two decades, income levels will triple, and India will climb from its position as the twelfth-largest consumer market today to become the world's fifth-largest consumer market by 2025.

• The middle class will increase tenfold. As Indian incomes rise, the shape of the country's income pyramid will also change dramatically. Over 291 million people will move from desperate poverty to a more sustainable life, and India's middle class will swell by more than ten times from its current size of 50 million to 583 million people.
  

• Marked shift away from basics towards discretionary spending. Indian spending patterns will evolve, with basic necessities such as food and apparel declining in relative importance and categories such as communications and health care growing rapidly.
  

The full report has a wealth of data that will be a useful reference for anyone interested in the Indian consumer market.

The 2007 e-Readiness Rankings

The Economist, along with IBM, has published this year's assessment of the state of information and communications technology in 70 different countries. The rankings, which have been published since 2000, measures a wide range of factors that collectively aim to measure the ability of a country to benefit from investments in information technology and communications infrastructure. The complete report is available here (it's free and you don't need a subscription to the Economist). It's an interesting read.

A couple of facts from the rankings:

• Denmark is the highest ranked, while the US and Sweden are tied for second place.
  
• The highest ranked developing countries are Estonia and Slovenia, at 28 and 29, respectively.
• Among the large developing countries, South Africa is the highest ranked at 35, followed by Turkey at 42 and Brazil at 43.
• Among the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, Brazil is the stand-out at 43. India, China and Russia are grouped more or less together at 54, 56 and 57 respectively.

The methodology used the generate the ranking is interesting and illustrative into what drives adoption of technology at a macro level. The rankings used the following six criteria, listed below along with their weight in the overall calculation:

• Consumer and business adoption (25%). Per capita spending on IT, levels of e-commerce activity.
• Connectivity and technological infrastructre (20%). Access, availability and cost of internet access.
• Business Environment (15%). General business climate, including political stability, taxation, labor policies and opennes to investment.
• Social and cultural environment. (15%). Literacy, training, and more generally, the "capacity" to ulitize the technology if it is available.
• Government policy and vision (15%). Government adoption of information technology, online procurement, public services online.
• Legal environment (10%). Ease of new business creation, intellectual property protection.

Interestingly, India ranks higher than China or Russia despite having a significantly poorer score for connectivity and infrastructure. It scores much higher in the legal environment and government policy and vision criteria, pushing up its overall rank.

Living La Vida Local

Things are different here. The first thing I noticed were the number of "IIT " bumper stickers. Around here there are more IIT bumper stickers than for all other colleges put together! The pool in our building is full of Indian kids splashing about while their parents call out to them protectively in Hindi, Gujarati or Tamil. And the once-familiar sight of clothes hanging out to dry on window ledges and balconies, is once again common.

We can walk to not one, but two, different Indian grocery stores. Steaming hot platefuls of idli and dosa are available in abundance - and cheaply! My wife and I love Keralan food, so we were delighted when we found a great little place with fantastic pepper-fried chicken. Even though we don't have kids, our friends in the neighborhood tell us about the cultural center they take their kids to on the weekends - to learn Indian classical music and dance. For us less cultural pursuits, like watching Guru, suffice. Or, if we feel like staying in, we can go pick up an Indian movie at the local video store.

No, I'm not back in Bangalore - we live in Sunnyvale, CA! Although it wasn't planned this way, it's turned out to be a great transitional place for us when we moved from San Francisco last year, and get ready to move to Bangalore next month. Sunnyvale and Fremont in the East Bay are the two centers of Indian life in the Bay Area. Everyone planning to relocate from here to India, whether Indian or not, should come and spend a couple of months here to make the transition smoother!

Coda

Now that I'm moving to India in a few weeks, I find myself reflecting on the fifteen or so years I have spent in the US. When I left India in 1991, it was a country that bears little resemblance to the country I will return to next month.

The most apparent changes are the superficial ones: glitzy shopping malls (there were none in 1991) and the profusion of cable TV networks (there was no cable TV in 1991), among others. There are deeper changes too. The one that strikes me more than anything else is the sense of possibility and confidence I see in today's high school and college students. When I was in high school, the limitless possibilities that follow from rapid economic expansion was not something we really conceived of in any meaningful manner.

A nice little illustration of all this can be found in the foreign exchange situation then, and now. In 1991, right was I was getting ready to leave for the US, India's balance of payments weaknesses suddenly caused a crisis. The government was close to defaulting on its debt, and foreign exchange reserves had dropped to about three weeks worth of imports - about $6 billion. As part of a package of reforms, India moved from a fixed to a floating exchange rate, which immediately caused a severe devaluation. I remember my father being quite upset, as my education in the US suddenly became 50% more expensive than it had been a month before!
(If you're interested, you can read more about the 1991 currency crisis in this IMF paper).

Contrast that to today. For those of you who deal in India-US cross border issues, you're probably already aware of the rupee's appreciation against the dollar over the last six months. In fact, the rupee is at an at an 8-year high against the dollar.

Take a look at this exchange rate chart from Oct 06 to today:

The rupee has appreciated from 45.7 per USD in October last year, to 42.6 per USD currently. Foreign exchange reserves have ballooned to almost $200 billion today. It's a world away from 1991.

Sector Watch: India's Entertainment & Media Industry

At a time of flux in the entertainment and media industries in the United States and elsewhere (declining subscriber base for print media, disintermediation from internet video hosting), the Indian market is experiencing heady growth.According to a newly-released report, co-authored by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the Indian Media and Entertainment industry is expected to grow from its current size of $9.7 billion to $22 billion by 2011, a compound annual growth rate of 18%.

The table below summarizes the components of this growth. Some of the numbers are almost certainly understated. For example, the size of the music industry is probably distorted by piracy, while the internet advertising market is distorted because of a lack of reliable reporting services.

I'm Back (With News)

My apologies for the long silence. I've been working through some recent developments in my professional life. In fact, they pertain to the focus of this blog, so I will share them here. If you've read this blog with any regularity, you know that I am very optimistic about India's growth prospects over the next 25-30 years. Sustained growth for 25+ years is transformative - we've already seen how 15 years of growth (since the 1991 reforms) have utterly changed the urban landscape. This is arguably the most profound development globally that I will witness in my lifetime. I'd like to participate in it, and help where I can, rather than watching from afar (in my case, from the Bay Area in California).

With that in mind, my wife and I have decided to move to India. We will leave the Bay Area in a couple of months, and move to Bangalore. I will join the Google office in Bangalore (they're hiring!) as a Product Manager. It's an exciting role, in a great company, at a time of enormous opportunity. I can't wait to get started!

I intend to keep blogging, during and after the transition to India. I hope that the changed perspective I can bring from being on the ground in India will be useful.

Thank you all for your patience during the long period of silence. I'm back in the blogosphere and would love to hear from you! Send me your comments and thoughts! In particular, if any of you have moved from the US to India, I would love to get your advice as we plan our move back.

This Just In: Indian VC Investment Doubles in 2006

From a new report produced by the US-India Venture Capital Association, Venture Capital firms in India invested $508 million in 92 deals in 2006. That's an average deal size of $5.5 million, which shows the bias towards growth capital rather than risk capital. These numbers are just about double the 2005 numbers of $268 million in 44 deals.

India Poised

Some of you might be familiar with the "India Poised" ad campaign organized by the Times of India media group. It's an ambitious undertaking, and basically amounts to a nationwide call to action that consists of three points:

• Think big. Think scale.
  
• Don't ignore social inequality.
• Build an engaged civil society.

The website is an interesting combination of the positive (e.g celebrating unsung heroes) and the cautionary (e.g. underperforming sectors). They even have a slick TV ad that's worth a watch.


This is the second large scale branding/nation-building campaign I've seen out of India in the recent past. The first was meant for an external audience, the India Everywhere campaign at Davos last year, while this is targeted domestically. It's an interesting use of marketing to drive economic growth & empowerment. I wonder if there are analogues in other developing countries, and if so, how effective these campaigns tend to be.

Cultural Context in a Global Era (Part 1)

A few weeks ago, there was an interesting article in CIO magazine, advising American tech leads how to manage relationships with their Indian vendors. While there is no question that the values and work ethos of an increasingly globalized elite are converging, these cultural differences are real, and should not be underestimated. The article starts out with a very broad generalization:

...it helps to look at the cultures of India and the United States in broad strokes. India is a deeply traditional group-oriented society; tightly knit extended families place a premium on harmony. Survival depends on interdependency, on keeping each other happy. “Your first goal is to make sure nobody is upset by what you say,” says Storti. “If the group is not strong, if it is upset by confrontation, you are in trouble.”

Compare that with America’s fractured families scattered throughout the country, an ethos of individualism and lore filled with Wild West cowboys and a promise that anything is possible if you work hard enough. The United States is a land of grab-for-it. Subtlety is the exception, in both speech and manner. And when an American talks, it’s usually to get his point across, not to create harmony.

While obviously very broad and sweeping, this strikes me as a pretty accurate representation about how business in conducted in either place. Anyone looking to work with an Indian service provider would do well to read this article. In my last post, I talked about the importance of social networks (the physical kind) in conducting business. I pointed out one reason for this: as a way to bypass non-functioning institutions in the redress of problems. The more general reason is brought out in this article: the difference between group-centered and individual -centered cultures.

Articles of this sort tend to go in one of two extreme directions: either dismiss any differences at all as an outdated concept for knowledge workers in the information age, or emphasize the differences to such an extent as to "exoticize" the other. This article has struck the right balance in accepting the global nature of work, while acknowledging the tribal nature of human relationships.

This article obviously begs the question: what cultural advice could you give Indian vendors working with US companies? More to come on this topic.

SMS is the Platform

A good friend of mine, Rishi Bhargava, recently returned from a trip to India. He shares my interest in technology, innovation, and the emerging Indian market. We had a long chat after he returned and he had some very interesting observations, which I'm going to summarize here:

• SMS is the Platform. We already know about the importance of mobile devices to technology adoption in India, but my friend made an even more pointed observation: your product or service has to be accessible via SMS to have any chance of gaining a large user base. Even when people buy data-enabled smartphones, they often have no interest in mastering a new interface when SMS is familiar and easy-to-use. For example, jewelers are paying for SMS-based alerts for price changes in precious metals. These same people are not familiar with the internet and are unlikely to be early adopters of an internet-based marketplace for precious metals.
  

• Lack of Trust Hinders Adoption. The medium for social networking is the clearest indication of the generation gap. In India, for people in their 30's or older, social networks are largely physical. Business is done in this way and social relations are conducted in this way. It's a perfectly rational response to the lack of effective remediation and redress. If you got cheated out of some money, how would you get it back? The police are often inept and/or corrupt and the court system is notoriously slow moving. The only rational thing to do is to minimize your risk by dealing only with people in your social network. Today's teenagers are comfortable moving their social networks online, but this generally tends to reflect their physical networks. The same issue of trust, just in a different medium.

• Internet Connectivity is Cumbersome. Beyond a small number of tech-savvy users in large cities, the internet has largely not touched people's lives in a meaningful manner. Even when people sign up for email accounts, they don't check them on a regular basis (and certainly not at the frequency that has become the norm in the US). Setting up and managing a broadband connection can still be cumbersome. Customer service at providers like BSNL and VSNL are universally acknowledged to be terrible. Even providers such as Airtel are getting poor reviews in this department. This has resulted in a cottage industry of "computer service" technicians who often do nothing more than apply the latest Windows patch. Still, they are needed to provide peace of mind to the non tech-savvy. Pricing plans are still archaic in terms of pricing by bandwidth usage (as if people actually know their expected bandwidth usage!) This entire process has to become a lot more streamlined before we can expect wider adoption.
  

Hardwired for the Web

I recently came across the wonderful "Hole in the Wall" project, run by Sugata Mitra, a computer scientist in New Delhi. PBS has an eight minute video segment you can watch here. It's well worth watching. Yes, the sociological implications are significant, but its also just a wonderful, heart-warming story of some impressive young kids realizing their unlimited potential.

The war for talent

If you've followed the labor market in India, you probably know that it's a red-hot market for job seekers. This is not a new phenomenon - this BusinessWeek article from 2005 talks about the issue - but it has taken on an added urgency as the shortage becomes increasingly acute. There's a huge scarcity of people with the required technical or managerial skills to fill the positions that the fast-growing knowledge industries require.. Attrition rates are high, wage inflation is sky-rocketing and poaching by rival firms is a full contact sport.

At the macro level, the only solution is to increase the supply of qualified workers. Everyone understands this, and the education sector is booming as a result of this. At the micro level, companies (at least large ones) will increasingly shoulder the burden themselves. Some already do: Infosys runs what is probably the world's largest and most sophisticated training operation. Other companies are looking to follow suit. However, attrition rates are still high at Infosys (many hires leave after their training period).

I've been involved in the dynamic first-hand. Based on what I've seen, here are three recommendations I would make to alleviate the problem, at least at the micro level.

• Select for fit. This is as much a mis-allocation problem as a supply and demand problem. What I mean is that prospective employees often don't look at "soft" but important factors such as the work environment, the dynamics of their future team etc, when making their decision. The decision is usually based on compensation and, in some engineering positions, on the programming tools used and the complexity of the problem to be solved. This is a myopic view, and can often result in dissatisfied employees that are a poor fit in the new organization. Company recruiters do not focus on the "fit" either, and hire based on skills and experience, with the same result.
• Use better recruiting metrics. Today recruiters are often able to measure "yield" - the number of hires made from a specific source, so that they can focus their efforts on the highest yielding sources. However, in an environment where attrition rates are so high, yield is not enough. Recruiters should track the progress of personnel, and add a "longevity" metric to their "yield" metrics. Better yet, try and isolate those characteristics that describe the employees that end up staying longer. Select for those characteristics, and focus on those sources that provide the most people with them. Reinforce success.
  
• Build recruiting feedback loop. In addition to isolating those characteristics that tend to be associated with success at the company, find those that don't. When people leave the company, follow a standardized exit interview process and collect the data in a form that can be analyzed (the advantage of high attrition: you'll have a lot of data!). Isolate patterns to try and determine retrospectively what could have been done differently. If there is a consistent "fit" problem, start screening for those characteristics during the interview process. If there is a consistent "dissatisfaction" problem, try and remedy it by either adjusting expectations during the recruiting process, or by changing the company's practices.
  

India is not the only country facing this problem. Its a global war for talent, and fast-growing emerging economies are the vanguard. How India and other developing economies tackle this problem will provide valuable insight to the rest of the world in how to manage and nurture talent.

India Startup Tracker: The Wisdom of Crowds

As someone who follows the goings-on in the Indian start-up world, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the activity in this area. This is great! That's a good problem to have. In an attempt to keep track of it all, I've decided to start tracking companies, investments and exits in a spreadsheet. No big deal, you say. True, but wait - there's a twist. The spreadsheet is online and I'd like to make it available for everyone to update. Like a good software design, let's parallelize to scale up. You can view the spreadsheet here. The spreadsheet has two worksheets:

• Silicon Valley 2.0: List of Indian start-ups, and funding details, if applicable.
• Wall Street 2.0: List of M&A activity and IPO's in the start-up world.
  

I'm open to changing the names - please send me suggestions! I will continue to work on it; I hope that if we all keep this updated collaboratively, we'll have the best, most up-to-date source of information available in any one place.

Some ground rules, and a mini FAQ below.

Ground rules

• Restrict the list to start-ups: This is meant as a listing of start-up companies, not larger companies getting funded by late-stage private equity. What's the exact definition of a start-up? There isn't one - use your judgment.
• When listing funding details, please provide a source. And it goes without saying that the spreadsheet should only contain publicly available information.

Other than that, let's build this together and see what develops.

FAQ

Q: How do I edit the spreadsheet?
A: Send me an email at: rahul [dot] roychowdhury [at] gmail [dot] com and I will give you permission to edit the spreadsheet.

Q: Why use Google Spreadsheets rather than a wiki?
A: Good question, and its something I thought about. Wikis generally provide better collaboration than Google Spreadsheets currently does. On the other hand, having the information in tabular form will allow some interesting trend analysis and summary displays once the data set gets large enough. And even if Google Spreadsheets doesn't currently provide charting and analysis tools (#1 on my Google wish list!) you can always download the data to Excel and do the analysis. In general, I think this capability outweighs other considerations.

Q: The format looks pretty awful. Can I change it?
A: By all means.