Monkey Business is a lively and funny account of the investment banking world from 2 insiders John Rolfe and Peter Troop who have managed to survive a few years in the industry . The book is written in first person where each of the authors give a detailed account of their ibanking experience. The experiences revolve around author’s summer internship, full time work, pitch book preparation , compensation , work environment  etc.The best thing about the book is the honest and witty style employed through out the book. We usually get to read about the long working hours, high pay packets but not the nature of work, the work environment, fringe benefits reality against the hype that is generally associated with ibank jobs.

Money Doesn’t Make People Happy - Forbes.com

Tim Harford, the author of Undercover economist shows why happiness is still a murky concept which cannot fit a scientific framework,albeit gazillion Phds trying to do some sort of research on it :)

Toaster with a diff
Why didnt anyone think of this earlier ? WOW ! is the my only response.

After playing around with adobe for sometime, I managed to create a web 2.0 button for RSS feed with some online help.

Thoughts and behavior are determined (or are at least partially influenced) by language

To this day it has not been completely disputed or defended, but has continued to intrigue researchers around the world.

Swaminatham A. Iyer , a known economist writes in TOI Op-ed that he expects Sensex to reach 30k with in 6 years , logic being 18% profit rate per annum is perfectly sustainable…If not for anything , there is a case for stashing away some money in the index funds..

Searching for content in mysql was always an issue. The implementation that I was aware of ranged from the very basic “select * from xyz where name like % " to using indexing and culling out statistically significant result. The implementation itself took quite sometime.

Recently I stumbled upon Sphinx, an open source full text search engine. It is very very useful for any app which includes showing users some sort of search results based on text mining.

Shouldn’t there be a bot to cut down the 25 web pages mentioned below to possibly 2/1 links ( I mention the activity and the bot carries out on the net )

Experience teaches us not to trust new sites straightaway. There are so many web sites out there, when we’re searching for something, it’s likely that this unfamiliar site we’re on is the wrong one. If we’re on the right site, we’re probably on the wrong page.

Today was design day . I had made up my mind to spend the entire day on understanding the elements of Design. Picked up a book titled " The Non - Designer’s Design Book"  by Robin Williams. Had heard a lot about this book from various sources and hence plunged in to it, considering that it is the best book available or visual novice.

The book starts with a basic premise that once you name something, you are conscious of it, you can control it and you have power over it. Though the author tends to relate the above premise to the understanding of typography and design, the premise holds good for any aspect of our lives..Anyway that makes for another post someday.

This book is written by Andy Kessler. It’s a fascinating account of the way in which author runs a billion dollar fund and becomes one of the top performing hedge fund managers in US. But more than that, the book teaches a reader about trend spotting. The biggest factor that he attributes success is “trend spotting”

The first part of the book is about raising funds

Raising Funds is a very hard task as every investor worth his salt would ask for “EDGE”. What is your “EDGE” in the investing strategy? Very early in his meetings with various investors, he realizes that he needs to track change of change, the second derivative of change. Change was assumed to be taken by most of the investors and the only way the fund could add value was by focusing on change of change. In the words of Kessler," From the side of highway, you cant tell which cars are moving at a constant speed and which cars are accelerating. But from inside the car, you can feel the seat press against you when you gun it". In essence what he means is, it is easier to sit and give some “HOLD”/ “BUY” decisions on a stock / company.But once you put your money in it, that’s where all the action starts.

Among academics, there is little debate about the effect that extensive choices have on consumers’ decisions about retirement savings. In a study of nearly 800,000 employees at companies offering 401(k) plans, researchers at the Wharton School found that plans offering employees fewer choices about where to put their money had significantly higher participation than plans that offered a plethora of choices.

Yesterday I had been to citibank to deposit some stuff and submit my change of address form..Yes, change of address in this e-age,and highly connected internet world, sadly has to be submitted in a letter and put in a drop box.

The bank timings on saturday are from 10:am to 12:00pm…I do not understand the logic…Bank is just like any other service organization . The way they intrude us day in day out with the calls like overdraft facility, Loan on sms etc…makes me wonder, why the heck are we not allowed to bank on weekends and intrude a little in to their free time ? Bank obviously can afford an additional shift for branch personnel on weekends… i seriously don’t understand why shouldn’t the branches be open 24/7 ?  Its high time banks realize this…

Via New York Times :

“The idea that there are jobs that Americans won’t do is economic gibberish,”

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of “proving theorems”. Is a writer’s job mainly that of “writing sentences” ? – Gian-Carlo Rota (1932-1999).

Look at this job posting for a Blog writer!!! . Have people in India starting to care for Digital Identity ?
Blog writer

Blog writer
Posted by: Susmita Sen

Posted date: 04-11-2006

His / Her responsibilities will include updating new content on a daily basis for our Blog networks on Holidays and other Events, posting comments on relevant blogs, creating various profiles on different Social Networking websites, socializing with like minded friends in these networks, forming communities through such networks and marketing our e-cards, reaching out to wider user groups across the internet by targeting the social community websites.

Via The Browser :

Stop me before I start-up again!
Hey kids! Want to start a company? Why not two, or three, or eleventy hundred?

Forget focusing on one thing for years and working hard to make it successful. That’s so old media. Nowadays, if you’re not working on at least two startups, you’re just out of it. Take Digg cofounder Kevin Rose: He’s also got Revision3, an online-video startup. The San Jose Mercury News recently examined the conflicts Rose faces in running multiple startups.

The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

Very Insightful article…

Via Xobni

“Technology iceberg” is a term Adam and I often use to explain how on the surface a piece of software can seem very simple, but the details lie underneath the rippling waves of consumer facing functionality. Open source software is often underused by the broader community for this reason. No one has taken the extra steps necessary to make the software stupidly easy to use, robust, broadly compatible, and reliable. Lookout did all of these things. Lookout was bought after 14 months for $10 million.

Via NY Times

You’ll be able to pick any dot-com (or .net, or .org) Web address that hasn’t already been taken — no charge. You’ll get to design a Web site, complete with links, graphics, search boxes, tables, forms and navigation bars, and hang it on the Web for all to see — no charge. You’ll even get crystal-clear traffic reports whenever you want them, showing how many people are beating a path to your door — and still no charge.

Can you think of a site which is popular next to facebook  and VCs do not want to fund it? Yes it has to be related to porn…MercuryNews.com reports on Andrew conru, a Stanford grad who runs a profitable firm, adultfriendfinder. Article though does not mention about the revenues from the site.

Charles River Ventures introduces friendly “convertible” seed round  :
Finally Venture firms have looking for firms in the long tail and subsequently tailoring their investment strategy to suit the long tail.

 Paul Graham of Y Combinator :

The easiest way to make something people want is to make something you want. What do you wish existed that doesn’t? For example, back in the early 90s a friend of mine wrote some software for converting voice to data so he could talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan without paying for long-distance phone calls. That would have been a great project to turn into a startup.

Via USA Today :

Financial scams expected to boom as boomers age. With close to 7 Trillion changing hands from one generation to another , it is expected that a lot of financial scamsters would make headlines..

Metacognition is thinking about thinking. Often when solving math problems, a solution or a means to one pops into our head so quickly that we don’t know how we found it. It is not always easy to slow down our thinking, retrace the path of our thoughts and examine our hidden strategies. Doing so can help us to develop a set of strategies to try when we are utterly stumped.

An Interesting article on productivity that I stumbed upon today.,

“If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. I really believe that. "

--Adam Gilbert

A concept which took 6 years to work in US seems to be working straight away in India..carwale.com in India is a near replica of carmax.com

The making of You Tube -Straight from the horse’s mouth -Jawed, the co-founder

An interesting article by James Gatheral of Morgan Stanley explaining the importance of Math and Physics in the days to come.

I didn’t know what I’d do with my life; a good thing I guess, because the thing I’d do didn’t exist yet. 

Karel Baloun(Face Book Engineer) , on his thinking before facebook happened

Umbria - Someone had to do it ..Cull the blogs and help marketers get consumer insights..Have a look at the management team..They have all the skills necessary to make it a success..But will they be effective in marketing their company ? Will they have that share of luck which is always necessary for any successful company ? Need to track this company to know answers to these questions..

With the buy out of youtube, internet is buzz with news/analysis/crystal gazing/ etc about the future..One question still pesters me ? Youtube has a lotttttt of content whihc include funny videos, porn, musicals, event videos. Keyword and tag based search are on the site. But if one looks at the psychology of a guy uploading a video, the intentions vary..Some of them do it for fun, Some want to advertise their personal brand, etc…If a person wants to be known on the online community not for fun, but for some serious stuff , it is not possible in the current youtube phenomenon because he gets ignored by video overload. ..
This leads to an interesting situation. Here is a site which is extremely popular and gets visits close to 4 million a day. It is so popular that it is the best shot you have got to display your skills, be it your music talent, singing talent, etc..However, once you upload your video, its so difficult to push your video as it is a perfect democratic world…How do you push your video ? Digg it ? Delicious it ? Furl it ? or just leave it like that and let the world notice your talent ?

You tube has now an option to upload all the events of your college in to the site…A good nice shot back at facebook

“Obvious Adams” was a recommended reading in “The Art of Profitability”, a book which can be read a zillion times, each time you can get a new learning. One of the fascinating things about “The Art of Profitability” is that it takes the reader through various classic books that had been written in the past and gels it with the current and potential business realities.

The book “Obvious Adams” written b Robert R. Updegraff is a small 56 page book and it delivers a very powerful message. It says that successful people are the ones who do obvious things once they decide what they want to do in their lives. The book traces the life of Oliver B. Adams who began his life in a grocery store and became known to the world as “Obvious Adams” , the successful business man . At every step of his life, Adams, once decided to work on something, did pretty much the obvious thing, the thing which people might not even think about it and go about in a complex way.

“In my career I’ve found that “thinking outside box” works better if I know whats “inside the box”. In Music( as in life) we need to understand our pertinent history …and moving on is so much easier once we know where we ’ve been”  - Dave Grusin ( Award winning Musician and Jazz composer )

One of my friends who visited NY recently had gone to Empire state building and he bought a pamphlet. It contained an advertisement urging Empire state building visitors to carry a cell phone type device which would contain a 30 minute overview of all the aspects that one gets to see from the top of the building. It costs about 6 Dollars. Its cleverly positioned at various places that atleast , i guess, 25% of the visitors would take up the audio tour instead of merely viewing from the top of the building.
There are close to 4 million visitors to the NY Landmark, which means close to 1 Million people in a year take up the audio tour which fetches the authorities , a cool, 6 Million dollars for 30 minute audio presentation…This I would call “Leverage”…I was talking one of my friends the other day and amidst our conversations, he came up with a brilliant point. People typically work in startups because they want to get their work measured as soon as possible and also leverage their products or service before companies can even think of doing the same…Tony the cabbie falls in one such category where a 30 minute beautiful story telling of NY fetches 6 Million dollars year on year to Empire state building authorities.

TRADER JOE’s ADVENTURE

• Small stores which are generally one-sixth of the size of regular supermarket

• In-store layouts that are difficult to navigate

• Insufficient Parking

• Inconvenient Locations

• No National Brands, eliminating the use of manufacturer coupons

• Limited variety of 2000 to 2500 products - 10% of consumers find their typical local supermarket

• No emphasis on sales or promotions

• Emphasis on private labels, which represents 80 to 85% of all items stocked

Via Fortune :

“We grew so fast and could never keep up,” admits Friendster president Kent Lindstrom. “Our page-load times were 20 to 30 seconds when MySpace’s were two or three seconds.” Secondly, Friendster management sanitized its site - much to Anderson’s delight. “They had no room for fakesters,” Anderson says. “If a dog or a city or an idea had a page, they would delete it. Could anything better have happened to us? People said, ‘I’m going to go to MySpace because I can do what I want there.’ "

Was reading an article written about incentives by Steven Levitt( Freakonomics fame) . He says a lot of people enter very risky and sometimes even dangerous professions because they believe in making the same / equivalent money which the previous generation has made. Cockaine drug dealing profession is such a dangerous profession that foot soldiers have an annual death rate of 7% ( 0.5% is the annual death rate of people who fight Iraq war ). However the lure of making 400k per year ( who are at the top of the biz) lures them…Consider this, only 2000 people could make 500k+ in Goldman sachs in 2005. (source confidential) .

Today I was riding down the elevator when an advertisement flashed across the mini screen . It said " the bloggers in china have surpassed 20 million mark" . There is a cambrian explosion of businesses waiting to happen in China…

Games bring the best amongst us. It shows our IQ, EQ , if used properly is the right mode for recruiting.
Google time and again uses this techinique for recruiting.This time for content writers in India

Via WSJ.com :

One popular use of social-networking site Facebook.com is to flirt with other members. As it happens, Facebook Inc., the start-up company behind the Web site, has been doing some serious flirting of its own.

People familiar with the matter say the company has held separate acquisition talks with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Viacom Inc. over the past year. Now, say some of these people, the start-up is in serious discussions – again – to sell itself to Yahoo for an amount that could approach $1 billion.

Bubble Motion , an innovative use of a technology..I just love the way something is put to use which is probably,in the hindsight looks as a bloody obvious need in the market.

The service is launched in Pune. ’ll be interesting to see if the result is same as Malaysian market.

FICO , a concept which helped banks to remove the human element out of credit decisioning process, thus making lives simpler. One metric could encapsulate a whole lot of information relating to the payment history , outstanding balance, length of credit, depth of credit and recency of credit. Improvement of FICO score was always considered a healthy option for a person as it would give way to a lot of incentives like low buy down points, lower mortgage interest rates,etc. I was always of the opinion that FICO was a great win-win for everybody. Banks get to appraise credit worthiness of an individual and disciplined individuals get better rates..

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing. - Dale Carnegie

Little things make a lot of impact in a company. There is a a simple practice of having free bagels with cheese on every Friday morning in a company and I had a chance to overhear quite a few conversations of the employees. This was placed in such a way that employees from various functions could come and talk over while they were having bagel in the morning. It could be their weekend plans, their department stories, etc..People infact looked forward for Friday bagels..From a company’s standpoint, they hardly cost anything..But from an employee’s feel good standpoint, it is great investment.

“I don’t believe at all the creative is some inborn talent. Creative People believe they are creative and less creative people believe they are less creative. " Michael Michalko( Thinkertoys)

Another brilliant essay by Paul Graham .. The power of Marginal

We learn so so much from failure and in fact it is one of the best learnings anybody can have(even though they are costly). A popular adage is that the smart learn from other’s failure.Yes, it is probably right, but more often than not, the kind of learning which is associated from actually failing oneself is something valuable. Be it failing to ride a cycle or  be it failing to stay afloat in water, or failing in a business, they give immense learning to any person. Every failure helps us in understanding ourselves better in our decision making skills, relationship skills, people management skills, etc…