About

In Brief 

Digital Intoxication blog is located at http://hi.fi.vc.Blog is maintained by entrepreneur Anjan Bhushan.

The Long Long Story

Most likely, you must be curious about both the elements of identity of the blog i.e name of the blog and internet address. There is a story behind this, of course.

Why Digital Intoxication :  Author Anjan Bhushan is a civil engineer by education. He did his BS in Engineering from BIT Sindri, Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India.He did choose civil engineering by choice. Like any traditional family of then eastern state of Bihar he wanted to pursue Civil Services exams conducted by UPSC to get selected as top rank government servant in India. Coincidently, he did appear for GATE exams conducted by IITs for Master in Engineering program for higher education in engineering. Even to his utter sunrise he got decent score and got selected in Building Science and Technology course conducted by Structural Engineering section of Civil Engineering department at IIT Roorkee.

Now there were options, prepare full time for Civil Services exams possibly for 2-3 years, studying 16 hours a day. And still there is a possibility that you wouldn’t get selected. That seemed daunting task to me at that stage. I downgraded ambition of Civil Services to ambition of Engineering Services while doing ME at IIT Roorkee. All cost of education was covered by government, still life was tough. Whole day had to attend classes and lab, in evening needed to finish assignments. After that used to study for Engineering Services syllabus. I hardly used to sleep more than 5 hours on any particular day. Second semester was about to end, IT Services industry was peaking up, a lot of software company used to visit the campus. They used to conduct Aptitude test for screening. I decided to go for it. Almost used to clear all Aptitude tests, but was hardly known anything related to computers or software. There was a subject on FORTRAN programming at undergraduate level. But no lab, no hands on. Engineering services was not a sure shot thing; this thought encouraged me to opt for all campus selection. Finally, I did get selected for a Tata company but whole campus interview stuff took toll on final touch of Engineering Services competition. And when result came I missed the interview by 10 marks. Not a big deal, I did have a job with Tata company. However, there was something important happened between selection at Tata Infotech and Engineering services result, which encouraged me to choose IT as career.

Engineering services exam was over and did got selected at a Tata Company, so decided that I would do a software development project in final semester. I persuaded my guide and he did approve the project. But, I do have to admit, it was my friend Nishant who did inspire me to write code and innovate. Finally, when I submitted project I did wrote more than 6000 lines of code in Turbo C on DOS platform. Did even use Mouse API and image API for the project. It was immense learning experience and I did got INTOXICATED by computers. It was beginning of “Digital Intoxication”. Now I wanted to learn everything about computers. How hard disk works, how FAT is different from NTFS, how one can restore data on FAT file system and God knows what!

Internet was still something accessible at dumb unix terminal at computer center. There used to be command line browsers and no command line based search engine that I was aware of. So it didn’t fascinate me at that time. Joined the Tata company in July 2008 at Noida center. The Tata  company provided about six months of full time classroom and hands on training on wide spectrum of topics like C,RDBMS concepts, Oracle, Unix, OOPS concept, data structures using C, Unisys based mainframe training etc . It used to be very tiring .After training there used to be written test. Networking was not covered during training, in spare time I started reading books about networking topics. In a few words, it did further fuel my appetite of Digital Intoxication. When project was allocated I got a project on Mainframe based technology for an American Client in Airlines industry. Probably, understanding the architecture would have been fun but just doing the code in 3 decade old technology was not something I was excited about. However, positive side of it was I wanted to work in something contemporary, I heard about how Powerbuilder can be used to create rapid client server application. I was assigned second shift in office from 2pm to 10 pm. Two of the friends put money to buy a computer. After dinner I used to study Powerbuilder and Oracle and doing hands on for whole night. At 5.0’O clock in the morning used to go for sleep. For self confidence appeared for PowerBuilder certification and came out in flying color. At the Tata company, only application which was some way related to internet was company email. Only some of managers did have access to internet from their desk. I did register my first public email account in 1999 at cybercafé. Dot com boom was starting; Use of Java was peaking up. Also started learning Java language at the time. One colleague had returned from USA after 3 years assignment. He talked about how Mahesh has developed BhaaratEkKhoj.com and has become popular among Indian Diasporas in USA. Three of the colleague decided to start an online shopping portal for Indian audience. So first thing we needed was an internet address or a domain name, all three contributed equally and registered my first domain name for two years. Its other story all three of us got separated soon to different geographical area and project never took off. But that was my introduction into domain name. Got an assignment at an Airlines company in Illinois and my visit of USA happened in May 2000.It was a new country but I was not excited about everything around me but was more excited because was able to get dialup internet at very low cost. Surfing internet for knowing more about different technology became “digital addiction” in new form. Enom had a scheme of giving away domain free for a year all they needed a unique email associated with each domain name. Email was an application I was fascinated about, like fancy domain names, catchy and personalized emails are easy to remember. Everyone.net had cobranded email a solution for websites. So what I did I registered hundreds of domain name thinking would configure all to everyone.net service. But I didn’t know how to build traffic so that user can be visit my email services. Also, there was not many monetization services were available that I was aware of. So guess what I dropped all names after free registration period. That was my first adventure in internet world. I did register a few domain names for my personal use and some because I liked. One day to my utter surprise I did receive offer to my domain name. It was low, but I did realize internet address is something people want to pay for, if they like it. It’s an opportunity.

Later I moved to New Jersey and after a short instinct at Telecommunications Company, joined a start up. I thank myself for a making a decision to work in a startup. It was an Enterprise Product development company. I got exposed to a wide spectrum of technology here.J2EE,Java Swing,JDBC, Linux,Solaris,Windows Server,AIX,Oracle Database, SQL Server, IBM DB2,Objectivity,Apache, IIS,Tomcat,IBM Websphere,MQ Series,Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange,Crystal Enterprise,Packet Sniffer,Probes,Routers,Vbscripting and Shell scripting based automation etc. There used to be a technical challenge every day. I enjoyed my Digital Intoxication. I knew one day it would be easy to start my own venture. If this much Digital Intoxication was not enough I did setup four PC lab in my home. I did experimented a lot with LAMP – Linux, Apache,Mysql and PHP. It was era of start of many LAMP based CMS that is successful in the market.Intially, there used to be two project PHPNuke and its fork PostNuke. Then later I did play with XOOPS, Drupal, Mambo Server (now Joomla), Wordpress, Moodle and many more CMS. I also learnt tricks of Internet Marketing (SEO, Affiliate Programs, Adsense, Adwords etc). I did also bought around 20 gadgets PDA/phones,Linux PDA and played a lot with them.

In a few words I become Jack of all trades and master of few. When I moved India, only thing I was missing was managing a team. So, worked as Test Lead for a health care based portal solution.

its right time to start my entrepreneurship journey. Since I have very wide range of interest you may find some of the topics useful to you as well.

I did have flare of writing since childhood but in Hindi Language did work as chief-editor of college magazine during Bachelor Degree Program.I consider, English as my fourth language and still there is a lot of scope of improvement.So, bear with me!

Welcome to the world of Digital Intoxication – HI.FI.VC.

Thank you for reading such a long autobiography :-)!

version 0.1 10th April 2011