And you are here why?

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 Or about the introductions are puzzling? What is your good name please? Turns out there is actually a rationale. Herewith a paper that explains this in detail.  Mind you, if you want to look up specifics, go check out Samosapaedia , for the ultimate glossary on Indian English... 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...

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 Cost Leadership :  Being more efficient than anyone else.  Differentiation :  Superior products or service compared to others. Focus of the above in a market niche:  Meeting the specific needs of customers/buyer...

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

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

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 #3 here ). 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 regi...

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...

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 ...

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:  The ridiculous growth in information collected by organizations The increasing inability of "traditional" systems to deal with this data ("traditional" =:= Client/Server, Monolithic applications, and Application silos) 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.) The accessibility of cloud content across multiple devices, and multiple behavior streams, in a manner not restricted by traditional boundaries. The ability to leverage this access by using tailored applications (light and heavy, single-purpose and  multi-purpose) across the entire organization The d...

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 ab...

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 A Juniper study that sez. 80% of the VoIP users in 2016 will be doing it through apps on their smartphones 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 - particular...

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, t here 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....

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.

Check out the article in the WSJ about job creation.  It does get a point across, but elucidation is probably relevant. Gross job gains are different from Net  job gains. The  St. Louis Fed f ound 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! 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 !) 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., companie...

Strip sez. it 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...

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 ...

(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...)

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...)

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 you...

Hat tip to Dork Tower...

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...)

Spotted in The Bangalore Times The Oktoberfest celebrations are on at all T.G.I. Fridays all over India The mind reels...

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...

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... )

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...)

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 cou...

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 Accessibility is King.  Accessibility is Key.  Accessibility is Job One.  All Hail Accessibility. 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. 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 compa...

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...)

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...)

I could get into the whole definition of Quality, and go off on 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 ...

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 i f 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 ...