Indian English

Every wondered why Indians drop Articles? I am coming from Office
Ever wondered about the joyous mixing of V and W? I am wery tired
Turns out there is actually a rationale. Read on...

LANGUAGE IN INDIA

English has been with India since the early 1600's, when the East India Company started trading and English missionaries first began their efforts. A large number of Christian schools imparting an English education were set up by the early 1800's. The process of producing English-knowing bilinguals in India began with the Minute of 1835, which officially endorsed T.B. Macaulay's goal of forming "a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern - a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect" (quoted in Kachru 1983, p. 22). English became the official and academic language of India by the early twentieth century. The rising of the nationalist movement in the 1920's brought some anti-English sentiment with it -- even though the movement itself used English as its medium. (more...)

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Strategic Focus - The Simple Version

Strategic Focus is critical in organizations - while having it may not necessarily lead to success, not having it pretty much guarantees failure.  You know a company has it when it has a clear and consistent vision, and has a well-defined strategy for executing on the vision.

Most approaches to strategic focus tend to follow one of two paths - Strategy as Trade-Offs (Michael Porter), and Strategy as Discipline (The Discipline of Market Leaders - Treacy and Wiersiema).

Strategy as Trade-Offs

There have been tons of books written about it, and it has pretty much dominated the "Strategy" discussion since the 80s, (with many rebuttals to - check out Blue Ocean for one of the major ones) Porter defines three types of strategy

1. Cost Leadership:  Being more efficient than anyone else. 
2. Differentiation:  Superior products or service compared to others.
3. Focus of the above in a market niche:  Meeting the specific needs of customers/buyers (either narrow or broad)

Porter's key insight (IMHO) was that each of the above required radically different approaches to markets and operations, and trying to straddle them was a recipe for disaster.  In short, Porter said that a company should pick one, and only one of the above, and relentlessly focus on it.  Trying to go with more than one approach would, at best, result in sub-par performance (compared to competitors), and more likely - market failure.  He actually took this one step further and claimed (with some research seeming to validate it) that straddling strategies was actually a sign of management failure, indicating that the relevant choices of markets, direction, and scope had not been made.

Strategy as Disciplines

In 1993, Treacy & Wiersema modified Porter's approach somewhat with Strategy as Value Disciplines.  These are customer-focused practices, based on putting a customer's needs first and foremost across all activities of a company.  They are

1. Operational Excellence: Streamlined, efficient, low-touch, highly automated operations (FedEx)
2. Product Leadership:  Product-centric, innovative, low time-to-market and potentially disruptive (Apple)
3. Customer Intimacy:  Customer service first and foremost - customer service. (Nordstrom's)

These do, admittedly, feel like a recasting of Porter's Trade-Offs based on a customer-centric view of the world.  In fact, Treacy & Wiersema, like Porter, believe that a company can only focus on one of the above as firms that mix strategies will end up being not particularly good at anything.  Unlike Porter however, they also maintain that regardless of which one the company focuses on, the others need to be up to par, i.e., at least at a certain minimal level based on market conditions.  

The reality of most companies is that they don't focus on any of the above, resulting in mediocre performance. To quote them

When we look at these managers’ businesses [complacent firms], we invariably find companies that don’t excel, but are merely mediocre on the three disciplines…What they haven’t done is create a breakthrough on any one dimension to reach new heights of performance. They have not traveled past operational competence to reach operational excellence, past customer responsiveness to achieve customer intimacy, or beyond product differentiation to establish product leadership. To these managers we say that if you decide to play an average game, to dabble in all areas, don’t expect to become a market leader.

To summarize, the only way to be truly successful is

1. Provide the best offer in the marketplace, by excelling in one specific dimension of value. Market leaders first develop a value proposition, one that is compelling and unmatched.
2. Maintain threshold standards on other dimensions of value. You can’t allow performance in other dimensions to slip so much that it impairs the attractiveness of your company’s unmatched value.
3. Dominate your market by improving the value year after year. When a company focuses all its assets, energies, and attention on delivering and improving one type of customer value, it can nearly always deliver better performance in that dimension than another company that divides its attention among more than one.
4. Build a well-tuned operating model dedicated to delivering unmatched value. In a competitive marketplace, the customer value must be improved. This is the imperative of the market leader. The operating model is the key to raising and resetting customer expectation.

(hat tip Principles of Management - Carter, et al)

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Tom Freidman is full of s**t

The world may be flat, but only from space.  Down at sea level, you have rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys, and yes, oceans.

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SysAdmin Syndrome

The only you ever have with the sysadmin is when something goes horribly disastrously wrong.

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Checklist for Startups...

Hat-tip Scott Walker on Venture Beat

Startup checklist:

1. Form a corporation, not an LLC (see post here) or a partnership (see post here).

2. Incorporate in Delaware and qualify the company to do business in the state in which its principal office is located (see #2 here).

3. Set-up vesting schedules for the founders (see post here) and file 83(b) elections with the IRS (see #3here).

4. Button-down IP ownership and assignment issues (see post here).

5. Split the equity based on prior contributions and expectations going forward, not necessarily equally (see post here).

6. If you hire any employees, make sure you don’t misclassify them as an independent contractor or fail to pay them at least the minimum wage (see post here).

7. Only raise funds from “accredited investors” (see post here) and don’t pay anyone a commission for raising funds for you unless they are a registered broker-dealer (see post here).

8. Put proper privacy policies in place and make sure you adhere to them (see post here).

9. Don’t issue stock options unless a proper option plan is in place and a valuation has been done in compliance with Section 409A of the Internal Revenue Code (see post here).

10. Regarding lawyers, don’t give them equity (see post here); don’t use your investors’ lawyers (see posthere); and there are ways of cutting legal fees in half (see post here).

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Corporate Vision - Back to the Basics

Back in 1996, Collins & Porras wrote the book on corporate vision.  I read it back then, and go back to it every couple of years.  Each time, I discover that some lesson I learnt (painfully) over the last few years had already been described in their paper.  It deserves the moniker seminal, and I strongly urge you to go read it.
In their worldview (and in mine!), corporate vision has two components - a core ideology, and an envisioned future. To use their own words,

Core ideology defines the enduring character of an organization—a consistent identity that transcends product or market life cycles, technological breakthroughs, management fads, and individual leaders. In fact, the most lasting and significant contribution of those who build visionary companies is the core ideology...  

Visionary companies use BHAGs as a powerful way to stimulate progress. All companies have goals. But there is a difference between merely having a goal and becoming committed to a huge, daunting challenge—such as climbing Mount Everest. A true BHAG is clear and compelling, serves as a unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines

Core ideology serves to inspire, not differentiate.  It is most certainly not the same as core competence, which actually defines the capabilities of the company, not its reason for being!  This ideology has two parts, core values (a handful of guiding principles by which the company navigates), and core purpose (the fundamental raison d'etre for the company).  Taking these one at a time

• Core values:  These transcend product/market life cycles, tech breakthroughs and management fads.  The key is not what core values an organization has, as much as the fact that the organization has core values in the first place!  These values have everything to do with who you are, as compared to where you are going, since the latter will almost certain change over time (while the former will not, and should not!).  In fact, if market conditions end up conflicting with core values, it is better to change markets than to change these values - almost a truism as changing core values essentially negates the essence of the organization.
• Core Purpose: These reflect people's idealistic motivations for doing the organization's work, the very reason for being of the company.  And once again, it should not be confused with product lines, market segmentation etc.  A good way to look at this is to use the 5 Whys method, i.e., keep asking Why till you get to the core purpose.  The core purpose needs to be idealistic, e.g., Disney's "Make people happy", not materialistic as statements like Maximize shareholder wealth really don't resonate with most employees.

Envisioned Future, on the other hand, is the direction that the company is (currently) moving in.  It consists of two parts, a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), and a Vivid Description of this goal, in passionate - even emotional - terms.  The BHAG needs to be a long-term one, i.e., at least 10 - 30 years out in the future.  This ensures that the short-term detours that all companies take do not detract from the unity of purpose within the organization. Think of it as the General saying "Sergeant - take that hill!".  The fact that getting to the hill involves detouring around a lake does not negate the core objective - "Taking that hill".  BHAGs are invariably paired with vivid descriptions, i.e., an emotionally resonant and engaging portrayal of the BHAG that can be carried in  employee's heads.

So, ask yourself

1. What are your company's core values?  They should be few in number - if there are more than five, you are fooling yourself
2. What is your company's core purpose?  If you believe you know it, ask yourself, Why is this my core purpose.  When you hit bedrock, you have arrived
3. What is your company's Big Hairy Audacious Goal?  Can you achieve it next year?  If so, you are fooling yourself
4. What is the vivid description for your BHAG?  Does it resonate emotionally?  If so, you've got it.

Oh, one tricky bit, do not confuse core ideology with envisioned future!  You will eventually get to the future, but your core purpose can never be completed!

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GroupOn and self-fulfilling panics

Rocky Agrawal makes a nice point about the people that get hurt if GroupOn collapses.  

Groupon bears a lot of similarity to the subprime mortgage crisis:

• No one knows how much value is out there in outstanding Groupons. No one has kept track. Groupon is working to improve this, but many Groupons are still tracked by pen and paper or not tracked at all.

• Groupon issues big checks to merchants without any credit check or due diligence. Groupon is taking on a lot of risk of merchants not honoring their obligations. See my earlier VentureBeat story on the challenges that relying on small businesses poses for Groupon.

• It’s impossible to tell with certainty who will owe money to whom if Groupon fails.

• Banks don’t fully understand the risk they are taking on.

• Groupon merchants don’t fully understand the service that they are buying. Groupon is pitched to merchants as a “no risk” way of reaching consumers. There may be no money down, but running a Groupon has a lot of long-term risk, including losing money on poorly targeted customers and damaging your Yelp ratings.

• Much like housing market models that relied on housing prices to continue to grow, Groupon’s model relies on continued revenue growth. With the latest S-1, we saw that once Groupon slows investment in marketing, revenue growth slows down substantially.

Leaving aside the issue of whether GroupOn has an inherently flawed model, what we are left with is a classic example of the Diamond-Dybvig model.  In short, you have a feedback system where -
for a bank - any rumor of difficulties will create a self-fulfilling panic.

Picture it - if you feel that the bank is unsound,  you run to get your money out first (since only the first 10% will get their money back). Since everybody does the same thing, you have an automatic self-fulfilling panic.

The solution for banks was the FDIC - since you now know that your money is assured by the FDIC, you don't rush to the bank to get your money back. In fact, nobody does, squelching the panic.
The solution for GroupOn? Something similar, i.e., they need somebody with large enough pockets to guarantee the major parties involved - the consumers, merchants, and the credit-card companies.

I'm fairly certain that we're not going to have a FGIC (GroupOn Insurance Corp?) anytime soon.  What GroupOn could do, however, is buy insurance on this risk - a GroupOn Default Obligation (GDO if you will!).  Let the market price this risk - let Chicago bear what Chicago created (for the Econ types out      there, the Efficient Market Hypothesis came out of Chicago too).  If the insurance is too expensive, then, well, we're back to the original point about GroupOn having an inherently flawed model!

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Context Defines Capability

Curse you GigaOm!  Once again, some thoughts that I have been noodling over re: Social Interaction in the Enterprise have been already put together by someone else!

Anyhow, read this article.  In case you don't feel like reading it, it can be summarized as follows: 

1. The ridiculous growth in information collected by organizations
2. The increasing inability of "traditional" systems to deal with this data ("traditional" =:= Client/Server, Monolithic applications, and Application silos)
3. The necessity of "centralization" of data and content in the Cloud, instead of in a specific vendor's on-premise application silo (think SAP, Oracle, etc.)
4. The accessibility of cloud content across multiple devices, and multiple behavior streams, in a manner not restricted by traditional boundaries.
5. The ability to leverage this access by using tailored applications (light and heavy, single-purpose and multi-purpose) across the entire organization
6. The dramatically increased productivity as people can focus on the results that the need to achieve, and not on the tools that they use to achieve these results

Or, to summarize the above summary (because you can never create a short enough summary!)

1. Organization's data/content are growing at a tremendous rate
2. This data will, increasingly, end up in the cloud
3. Organizations will - eventually - end up having more effective access to this data
4. They will work with this data with a multitude of applications (and end-points)
5. Productivity will increase
6. Profit!

Or, to summarize the above summary of the summary (see!  really short summary here!)

Context Defines Capability

To expand on that last line from the perspective of a Service Provider, the benefits of your service should be tailored to the end-point that is being used, as well as the context that it is being used in.  

Or, to put it differently, you can not, and should not force the user to change their behavior pattern to work with your service (unless there is a material improvement involved!).  Instead, your should insert yourself into the User's behavior stream, by providing different hooks, features and capabilities that can be naturally and intuitively used as part of the user's ongoing business processes.

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The perils of a dated platform

Blackberry users are fleeing the sinking ship - Data from Enterprise Management Associates (hat-tip InfoWorld) shows that 30% of users at companies with > 10K employees will end up ditching their Blackberrys.
I'm not exactly surprised - a huge percentage of Blackberry users that I know walk around with 2 phones (usually an iPhone :-) ), and given the increasing popularity of Bring Your Own Phone (BYOP?) at companies, I expect the dual-phone types to rapidly ditch their Blackberrys.  And this isn't just me talking - the Economist went into gory detail on this recently.

So whats the underlying issue?
You hear the usual suspects - outages, slow pace of releases, tone-deafness at the top, etc., but the real issue is quite simple - the platform is passé.

Technology progresses in fits and starts - an interval of steady growth is interrupted by sudden spurts of (disruptive) innovation.  You've probably seen some variation of the disruption curves above (hat-tip ca-blog).  New tech is usually under-estimated, as the effort necessary to achieve lesser performance is greater than with the old tech.  However, the performance ceiling is much much higher, and pretty soon the new tech has far outpaced the old tech.

To translate this to Blackberry-world, RIM stayed put as the world changed (disrupted!) around them, and consequently got caught on the old tech end of the technology curve.  They then spent the last few years incrementally updating their existing tech to little avail.  To add to their misery, the friction associated with switching phones has been decreasing steadily - with the average user holding on to a cellphone for only 18 months.  Its no surprise that BB is losing market share, its only surprising that its taken this long.

The bottom line - be aware of your platform, and do not get caught on the wrong end of a disruption...

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Voice - the synchronous complement to our async world of communications

There is a small article on GigaOm about the future of Voice being 'apps'.  It is somewhat content free, but it does, tangentially, make two interesting points

1. A Juniper study that sez. 80% of the VoIP users in 2016 will be doing it through apps on their smartphones
2. These apps are not necessarily specific 'phone' apps  (e.g., softphones)

Which pretty much ties in with a CounterPath blog post that made the rounds earlier  which pointed out that 

Softphones are really passé. They are a thing of the past. It’s all about endpoints that are device shiftable...communications has revolutionized itself through the hands of end users driven by technologies and innovations not in the plans of the legacy care takers of the telecommunications sector

Or, to put it differently, the focus is shifting away (at an increasing pace!) from soft-phones, and into various endpoints that happen to incorporate calling.

This is - obviously - particularly relevant to those of us in the communications biz. The world of communications is increasingly breaking down into a mix of asynchronous (e.g. email, IM, Facebook) and synchronous (voice, video) channels.  The two are different, but are also complementary.  You can - very poorly - emulate one with the other, but genuine value is provided by services that can allow users to seamlessly move across sync and async channels as their needs change.

Within this context, the 'apps' mentioned in the GigaOm article make sense - i.e., we will see more and more places where an async communication will be given the opportunity to go synchronous, as part of the user's behavior stream.  (Or, to translate, you can make a voice/video call as part of some existing asynchronous conversation, without going out of your way)

• Google+, where you can start a Hangout (video conferencing for the uninitiated) while live-blogging the latest Apple event
• Facebook, where you can skype your friend when you see the picture of their oh so cute cat
• SalesForce, where you can click-to-connect the level two tech into the support call that you are on now, while simultaneously chattering with the level 3 tech.

well, you get the picture...

Note:

I'm defining sync/async slightly differently from the common usage.  The key differentiator isn't whether the message gets there immediately, but whether the other party responds immediately.  If the other party on a phone call walks off to answer the door, you pretty much know it, but if the same happens in an IM chat, its pretty much understood...

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Sticking with the basics works - especially during bubbles

I've always admired Arista - they know what they want to do, and they have a bit of a relentless focus on accomplishing it.

The idea is very simple — as we start to depend on cloud-based applications and services for our computing needs — you know, from trading stocks to business analytics to running cloud apps — we would need a way to move data that has no delays and at pretty rapid clip. And that is not all — these new higher-speed networks would need new kind of operating system software and  networking management capabilities to adapt to the different kinds of the network traffic. (more...)

Sounds pretty obvious right?  Well, it is, except that Arista figured it out in 2004, and have made out like bandits as the rest of the world caught up.
Or, more to the point, there may or may not be another gold-rush (bubble?) in the social space, but regardless, there is money to be made selling jeans and pickaxes....

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Student Loans - Why we should be worried

OK, why we should not be worried - Dennis Cauchon's article which, as Felix Salmon points out, is wrong.  If you don't feel like clicking, we do *not* have $1T in loans outstanding.  However, as the chart shows, the amount of debt (at around $550B) is rising steadily, and despite the drop in credit-card debt (and other debt as America de-leverages), has shown no dip.
Now that frightens me.

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SMBs and Job Growth

Check out the article in the WSJ about job creation.  It does get a point across, but elucidation is probably relevant.

1. Gross job gains are different from Net job gains. The St. Louis Fed found that while SMBs have hight rates of job creation, they have quite high rates of job destruction too.  So, if you focus on the SMB space, be prepared for high churn!
2. SMBs grow much more slowly than large companies.  It turns out that most "small businesses" in the US are businesses that start (and remain!) small (e.g., craftsmen, lawyers, small shopkeepers, etc.).  Research shows that most of these businesses exist for non-pecuniary reasons (being your own boss, flexibility of hours, etc.), and growth is really not a focus (read the abstract on the link!)
3. Startups that survive are the ones most likely to create new jobs.  This is the subset of both (1) and (2) above that still exist, i.e., companies that dont fail, and are actually ones that are in growth mode.  Note that people's perspective on startups tends to be skewed by the high-viz industries (we always think of SF/NY, or a couple of hipsters, when it comes to new businesses. *not* Bob the pizza guy who is happy making pizzas, and has no intention of expanding)

The bottom line?

• Focusing on SMBs means high customer acquisition rates, but potentially high churn
• SMBs probably wont expand all that much (no new users.  You can probably up-sell new services though!)
• A (small) subset of SMBs will grow, but unless you are lucky, it will only be a small set.  If you can predict them though, you should be in the VC biz!

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Calvin and Hobbes - #ows

Strip sez. it all....

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One contact strategy to find them all?

Just happened upon Everyme on venturebeat.  The concept seems fairly solid - basically populating *all* the information that they can find about everyone I know in one place.  Which seems kinda scary, but then again, it is already out there, and at least this way I can keep an eye on it (Mind you, this also means that they can keep an eye on it :-)  )
Anyhow, I signed up - will check it out if/when it goes live...

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From Phone-centric to Communication-centric

I just came across an advertisement article on VentureBeat  which makes a succinct case for multi-channel marketing.  Of far more importance, however is that the advertisement article says "The new rules of marketing now require brands to reach out to people through their “preferred” communication"

"Well" you say, "Well, whats the big deal?"

Which is pretty much my point here.  The world of telecommunications seems to have finally grown up, with everyone having internalized this message to the point where it barely merits a second thought, it

We are in the final throes of moving from a Phone centered universe to a Communications centered universe.  This is ridiculously (and trivially) apparent to most people who use 'smartphones' (yes, even you Blackberry users.  How many times a day do you email on yer fone, vs making calls?), but it is only now becoming apparent to the world of business telecom - and for those who don't get "it", well, theres a hard crash a-coming...

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Kids + TV =:= Bad

(From ArsTechnica)...

A decade ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics suggested that parents limit TV consumption by children under two years of age. The recommendations were based as much on common sense as science, because studies of media consumption and infant development were themselves in their infancy.

The research has finally grown up. And though it’s still ongoing, it’s mature enough for the AAP to release a new, science-heavy policy statement on babies watching television, videos or any other passive media form.

Their verdict: It’s not good, and probably bad.

Media, whether playing in the background or designed explicitly as an infant educational tool, has "potentially negative effects and no known positive effects for children younger than 2 years,” concluded the AAP’s report, (more...)

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Economics - and LOLCats

As it turns out Behavioral Economics explains everything.  Take it away James Oswald...

The Alchian-Allen Theorem has profound explanatory power when applied to the internet. The harder it is to gain access to cultural elements, the higher the quality of those elements will be consumed. On the flip side, if it is easy to access culture, people will prefer to consume shorter lower quality pieces of culture. In the middle ages, people had to travel long distances to view concerts, which were performed by live musicians. Thus, the fixed costs of consumption were very high. If you bothered to pay a huge amount of money and time, you might as well view a long complex opera or symphony. On the flip side, when fixed costs are as low as a Google search, people prefer short YouTube videos of cats doing cute things. Don’t think that this means that the quality of culture has gone down. (more...)

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Airlines - Bag-check edition

The theory is sound - by charging for bag-checks, the airlines have made more people carry-on, which causes delays at the gates (estimated at at least $6B in 2009, probably more now)
Ergo, by incentivizing people to check bags, they're reducing costs (one assumes that they're checking to see if it is greater than the revenue they get from bag fees).

My only concern is that Elite travelers are the ones most likely to game the system, e.g. by checking empty boxes...

Earn American Airlines AAdvantage Bonus Miles For Checking Baggage

Through November 22, 2011, American Airlines will offer AAdvantage® elite status members the opportunity to earn a minimum of 500 AAdvantage bonus miles for checking bags on flights departing Boston Logan International Airport (BOS).

Earning the bonus miles is easy - simply visit a BOS Self-Service Check-In machine on the day of your departure and follow the normal steps to check-in with bags. Check at least one bag under your own name to earn the bonus miles, which will automatically post to your AAdvantage account five business days after you have completed the travel associated with your itinerary. As a reminder, all AAdvantage elite status members are entitled to check two bags free of charge (within current size and weight limits) in addition to earning the bonus miles with this special offer. (more...)

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Hipsters!!!

Hat tip to Dork Tower...

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Timezones

Sigh. Do we need to call it the ICANN database now? Olson sounds much better...

Time zone database has new home after lawsuit

Organization in charge of Internet address system is taking over a database used to keep track of time zones around the world. The transition to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, comes a week after the database was abruptly removed from a U.S. government server because of a federal lawsuit claiming copyright infringement. (more...)

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Oktoberfest...

Spotted in The Bangalore Times

The Oktoberfest celebrations are on at all T.G.I. Fridays all over India

The mind reels...

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Comparing a bunch-a NoSQL DBs

MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis in an article by Riyad
and then a whole bunch of others thrown in here by Kristof

Riyad's article may not quite be relevant 'cos of the slight shift going on in CouchLand, w/ BigCouch doing the "CouchDB + Dynamo" thing, and CouchBase doing the "CouchDB + Memcache" thing...

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BigData - BioTech

DNA sequencing and analysis are pretty obvious candidates for BigData implementations, and clearly people are Getting It. I'm particularly glad that the good guys at Cloudant (BigCouch! W00t!) are getting some significant traction...

Major investments show promise of big data in biotech

Cloud-based DNA-sequencing specialist DNAnexus has closed a $15 million second round led by Google Ventures and TPG Biotech. Elsewhere, we learned Wednesday that agribusiness giant Monsanto has deploy (more...)

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And now for something completely obvious

that is all...

5 ways to keep your rockstar employees happy

Salary and benefits aren’t enough to guarantee that your best and brightest creatives will remain engaged. Rypple’s Daniel Debow presents some best practices about what does motivate your top employee (more...)

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If you are discarding data, you are doing something wrong.

BigData is pretty much the rage - everybody is talking about it, and some people are even doing something about it.  But before we go there, lets just look at the data you already have.

Of course you already know the value of all this data. You are, after all, using it to do whatever your product is - be it an iPhone App, a telecom service, or a wire-transfer system.  That said, data is just the first step in the Data --> Information --> Knowledge --> Wisdom food chain.  By focusing only on the first - or maybe the first two - steps of the food chain, you risk losing out on the big picture, and possibly Not Making It In The Long Run.  

• Some of your iPhone Apps may have made money, but performing demographic and geographic analysis on the purchasers could help you figure out why.  Adding historical context could help you figure out what changed - for better or worse!
• Your telecom service provides nice usage reports but you could be providing valuable insight to your clients by allowing them to look for patterns in this data, or to integrate it with their own internal data, 
• Your wire-transfer system may be functioning, but analyzing the trends could help you prevent those pesky law-enforcement types from showing up because of all that money suddenly flowing into the Caymans (I know, its a simple example, but when we did it back then, it was pretty revolutionary!)

Yes, of course you can do that with <insert Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, etc. here>.  Why haven't you done so already?  I bet its some combination of Time/Energy/Money/Ability, combined with all sorts of database constraints (We need a new reporting server!  The View needs to be optimized!).  In contrast, services like Bime, Birst, and GoodData are ridiculously easy to use, and if you don't want to outsource this its really remarkably trivial to stand one of these up yourself with CouchDB/CouchApps.  In all of this, Flexibility is key, with the factors that you care about changing frequently, and the data you are manipulating dependent entirely on your (ever evolving) business requirements. And historical context is almost invariably critical.  Yes, there is absolutely a set of problems that are completely dependent on Velocity (twitter feeds monitored for mood, to predict stock market changes), but Volume is as, if not more, important.  And you can't get Volume if you throw away your data.

If you are discarding data, you are doing something wrong.  

This brings up the question - in this day and age, why would anybody ever want to throw away data?  Storage is - effectively - free, and the cumulative value of data is, well, incalculable.  I know, there are database constraints that your production system suffers from, and you don't have the Time/Energy/Money/Ability to remove these constraints.  Thats OK!.  Leave your system the way it is!  You can, however, stream data out of your system and dump int into one of any number of existing databases - Cassandra, Riak, BigCouch, MonboDB to name just a few - with little to no effect on your production system, after which you can absolutely (and with my blessing!) clobber the data.   

If you are discarding data, you are doing something wrong.  

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Its about Accessibility, stupid

I suspect you've seen Steve Yegg's rant about Google, its been all over the web, and the usual take has been Google Doesn't Get It Nyah Nyah Nyah.  Which is partly true, but only partly.  Me, I basically got the following

1. Accessibility is King.  Accessibility is Key.  Accessibility is Job One.  All Hail Accessibility.
2. Accessibility & Security can occasionally be in opposition. If thats the case, figure out what you really want to do, and then give Security appropriate amounts of The Boot. Not accessibility.
3. If you want to be a platform, you better be Services based.  Really.  Extensively.  If you're not, someone else who is will eat your lunch for you

Frankly, I quite agree with the above, and the Accessibility bit in particular.  Its no surprise that Accessibility, Design, and Human Interface Engineering are the bedrock behind most everything that one of the most successful tech companies of the past few years (yes, Apple).  

In fact, the current trend in companies is to take this further, and make Design an integral and strategic component of tech companies.  

     While it’s really always been strategic, it’s only recently that the perception has caught up with the reality (consider Apple, IDEO, Target, Design Within Reach & Coca Cola). This new breed is whole-minded, leveraging the right brain to create experiences and the left to analyze the experiential data in order to iterate and improve.     This breed of founder is focused on weaving their new sensibilities into the strategic fabric of the startup, forging the path to the customer through user metrics, customer metrics, product flows, and conversion funnels. Last, but not least, they are sociable. They seek to understand user behavior and empathize with users, rather than constantly defending their creative output.

I couldn't state it better.  Ask yourself about your current (and next!) project - "Is this (design, service, project, app) intuitive and easy to use?  Can it be explained to others? Can it be improved upon?".  Trust me, it will not be time wasted...

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Quasi-Fail by the NY Times

Interesting that they start with she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and at the very very end with Tuition at Dartmouth is $41,736 a year, not including room and board a point that most people probably didn't actually get to.
Its not particularly surprising that the Ivies (and heck, every other college in the US) are looking for Indians. Heck, they're looking for anyone that can pay the borderline insane skyhigh costs of education. I suspect they'd accept the famous Dead Voting Dogs of Chicago if they had money.
I do think the NYTimes could have formatted this better...

Squeezed Out in India, Students Turn to United States

The number of Indian students studying in the United States is surging as competition for admission to top Indian institutions has made that goal nearly unattainable. (more...)

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Benford's law & Accounting FIrms

Studies in Everyday Life: Benford's Law and the Decreasing Reliability of Accounting Data for US Firms

Benford's Law and the Decreasing Reliability of Accounting Data for US Firms. A few months ago I came upon an old episode of Radiolab, one of my favorite podcasts whose host Jad Abumrad just won a... (more...)

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What Defines Software Quality?

 I could get into the whole definition of Quality, and end up in a digression about the false dichotomy of separating Truth And Quality, about the need to fuse Rationality and Romanticism, and then end up telling you to Just Go Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

Mind you, that would be my attempt at ignoring the original question (See?  Thats why I could never be a politician!), and we can't have that, can we?

Back to Software Quality - the underlying issue in defining it is that it really depends on where you are standing.  Lets just assume that you know what you care about vis-a-vis methodology, i.e., you want modular code, written in erlang, using Strong OTP Principles, etc, etc. etc.  At this point, you should probably look for Software Quality based on the people involved.  i.e., if you have quality people, you'll probably have quality software.  Joel Spolsky has a great writeup on this, which I am absolutely not going to encapsulate here. Just Go Read It.(*)

Anyhow, the point behind the People approach to software quality is that at the end of the day, its about the compromises

- Business conditions determine the constraints associated with your project

- These constraints (most likely) are things that your people really have very little control over

- These constraints have existed, and will exist forevermore (ok, not the same constraints.  But some constraint will replace the current one)

- If you have a quality software team, then they will build to current (and anticipatable future) constraints.

This, of course, brings up a Very Important Point about code quality, which is that it is inextricably linked to the constraints under which the code was developed.  Or, to put it differently, virtually all code is going to be the best code that it can be given the constraints under which it was developed.(**).   

The point behind all of this?  Get to know the people who built the code, and then find out what their constraints were - what were the crisis, when did they have to panic to meet deadlines, etc. You'll probably find have a much better understanding about the Quality of your code, than any number of code reviews (***)

And thats about all I have to say about Software Quality.  If you want to get into more detail, get this journal, and then spend the next six months not actually being productive (yes, I'm being snarky.  Sorry…)

(*) Of course, for the people out there who refuse to follow links, the The Joel Test for Quality Software Teams is

1. Do you use source control?
2. Can you make a build in one step?
3. Do you make daily builds?
4. Do you have a bug database?
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
7. Do you have a spec?
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
10. Do you have testers?
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

(I know some of the above is obvious, but seriously, you'd be surprised)

(**) Yes, there is the mythical environment in which the Perfect Development Team had infinite time and infinite choice in developing the Perfect Application.  I also have recently come into possession of a bridge in Brooklyn, which I have for sale…

(***)  Code reviews are A Pure Good.  I am *not* knocking Code reviews.  Really!  In fact, for extra credit, what you want to do is at least some reviewing.  Mind you, this is not to make sure that they have Getters and Setters everywhere (ack!).  You should have figured that out when you spent days talking to the developers (you did spend days, right?  Not hours?  Because if you think you got to know them over a few hours in a conference room, well, remember that bridge I have for sale?).  The point behind the code review is to see if you find Beauty and Elegance.  And no, I'm not going to define either.  And yes, I may be substituting one loose term for another (Quality?  Beauty? Elegance?  What next?  Wisdom?), but frankly, Elegant code is pretty easy to identify (if you've ever seen it, you know it.  If you don't know it, you haven't seen it)

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Whither HTML5 in the mobile space?

First Microsoft seemingly rolled Silverlight under the bus in favor of HTML5,  and now Adobe may have done the same with Flash.  This makes a lot of sense given the increasing fragmentation of the web (Apple/Android's Apps are increasingly creating mini walled gardens that have a difficult time interacting with each other).

In this vein, Microsoft seems to have a bit of an edge (at least theoretically).  Their mobile paradigm (focused on HTML5 based apps) allows for apps to communicate with each other - the famous example of course being the one where if you search on Bing (ok, Google, whatever) for a movie title, then the search also gets executed against all of your apps, and their results are also displayed.  

On the Apple front, there has been a lot of Have my cake and eat it too going on, with support for HTML5 in the browsers, but a distinct desire to maintain the App Store model - a bit of a contradiction since an HTML5 'web-app' should work just as well as an HTML5 'mobile-app' (except for the part that Apple gets no money from it).

Schmidt/Google, on the other hand, have already indicated that HTML5 is the future as far as they are concerned, for both mobile and regular usage, and various platform vendors have been jumping on the bandwagon too, such as Sencha and PhoneGap (even though they clearly have quite a ways to go!)

Even more relevantly, platform issues (IOS vs Android) currently ensure that native apps will really be more capable and/or user-friendly for the fore-seeable future, and 'cross platform' apps will only be useful/relevant as long as they don't really exercise any of the underlying platform specific capabilities.  The hardware universe is not just evolving at a rapid clip, but its also pretty massively fragmented - resulting in the 'native capabilities' that are exposed/exposable being quite radically different across not just iOS/Android, but also within Android versions. That said, there are some 'standard' native capabilities that can be accessed (GPS, Accelerometer, etc.) that seem to have become standardized, a trend that will surely continue. 

The bottom line here - HTML5 is starting (barely!) to get some momentum.  A lot is going to depend on how well Microsoft's new philosophy is received, and if they end up backtracking vis-a-vis support for their existing platforms and environments...

Postnotes:  

1) Nokia is a wildcard.  They have commited to Microsoft,  have a massive distribution network, and could significantly impact the adoption of Windows Mobile. 

2) Silverlight may not entirely be abandoned.  There is clearly going to be desktop support for it, but all the rumblings from BUILD and massive inconsistencies in statements from Microsoft seem to imply that its days are numbered...

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Naperville Eats - Naf Naf Bakery

Where to go if you happen to be out in Naperville, IL..
Its in a strip mall, and reminds one of Moby Dick Kebabs in the DC area. More to the point, it reminds one of Moby Dick when it actually used to be good (back in the 90s). The hummus is fresh, slightly tangy, and outstanding, Crunchy salad, and frighteningly good Pitas. And oh, the Falafel, to die for it is.
Its also spotlessly clean, the staff is amazingly friendly, and the whole place leaves you with a pleasant Wow, can't believe I found this heresensation.
It is a wee bit expensive, and they have no lamb. If you can overcome that,

Run, don't walk,there.

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