" Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity." - Christopher Morley
Very recently I have been practicing “The Platinum 30” principle, which states that the first 30 minutes of your day are possibly the most valuable moments which will have a considerable influence of the other minutes of the day.
For a lot of reasons, I do not like any activity which constrains me to be only a gyan giver - There are a lot of professionals like that, teaching,hands off vc investing, consulting etc, where one is not involved in the operations per se but he bets on various aspects from the spectator stands. In this regard, I came across a quote from Theodore Roosevelt which aptly sums up my feeling :
In the book, 25 ways to win with people, author John says :
Forget about:Searching for ways to make yourself look good.Instead, search for ways to make others look good.
Ask:What positive, encouraging thing can I say to eachperson I will see today?
Do it:Give everyone you meet the Triple-A Treatment—attention, affirmation, and appreciation.
Remember:Within the first thirty seconds of a conversation,say something encouraging.
These are the times when Nano is the buzz word and its no surprise to see a tool for specifying designs in the Nano World. I guess this is just the beginning of tool deluge that will hit the market in the years to come.
Link: nanoTITAN NanoML .
Mike Treder , the director of CRN says that Nanotechnology is on a upward curve and it might not be obvious to a lot of people, at this point of time.
Why ?
The problem is human perspective, what Ray Kurzweil calls the “Intuitive Linear View.” When we see something that looks like a straight line, we naturally assume that it is. Although change occurs around us every day, unless we look closely we may not notice it. So, we logically think that last week, last month, and last year were like today, and that next year and a few years after that won’t be much different either.
Came across a nice way to classify bloggers :
If one has to broadly classify bloggers, then there are 2 categories . First category are Linkers who link to an article and either comment on it or help generate buzz on it. Second category are the thinkers, who write an essay / thoughts and as such do not refer to any external link perse. And obviously there are bloggers who adopt both patterns .
What are banks meant for : Intermediaries between Lenders and Borrowers. Why should internet, the supposed platform for killing all intermediaries spare banks…atleast that’s what a group of people from London think so.
Zopa , a new service promises exactly this :
Bank - Your idea of hell: a place where you’re told which rate you can invest or borrow at and how long you can invest or borrow for and then offered, in a sad mockery of the word ‘choice’, a meagre number of off-the-shelf solutions which either suit you or don’t. You can find places like these on any high street - they’re called banks - but you might have other names for them.
I had to do a brief revisit of UML Fundas to work on a new project. This also coincides with the current book, I am on “ Design of every day things” , which stresses the importance of design in the modern world.
To the non-IT readers, UML is the language of designers of software systems. It helps to put the designer’s mental model on to paper using a set of diagrams which then can be used , to check whether it is compatible with the user model , a mental model relating to that of the end user of the software.
“It’s business, you have to have a thick skin. If you let people get to you, on or off the court, it’s going to affect how you play.”
-Gar Heard
“It’s business, you have to have a thick skin. If you let people get to you, on or off the court, it’s going to affect how you play.”
-Gar Heard
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. “
- Samuel Johnson
This applies to blog postings too. It is one thing to keep a journal of interesting events and completely different thing to make users come to your site to read your views.emergic is an example of the former, while gapingvoid is an example of the latter category.
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. “
- Samuel Johnson
This applies to blog postings too. It is one thing to keep a journal of interesting events and completely different thing to make users come to your site to read your views.emergic is an example of the former, while gapingvoid is an example of the latter category.
Here’s freakonomics ( bagel guy’s solution ) possible application to p2p network mess.
Link: Paypal and RIIA
This is my third book of the week .
After a pretty long hiatus, I have gone on a book binge.
Freakonomics , another very popular book among the reader community turned out to be like a novel with a BIG difference. The difference being that of using data to show interesting results to interesting questions.
The book as such has no underlying theme, but only urges the readers to ask a lot of questions and then use data to challenge some of the conventional wisdom in the society .
I came across umpteen references to this book from various sources, my friends, my mentors, other popular books. Jim collins mentioned in his book, fast company and business 2 also mention this as a must have on any body’s book shelf, seth godin,avc, also give an abundant praise ..a whole host of people seem to be fascinated by the content of the book.
Last weekend I managed to lay my hands on to this book.I was little skeptical to begin with as any over hyped book always dampens the expectations. However Viktor Frankl book’s exceeded my expectations by all standards.
One of the finest books I have ever read.This book is an inspiring story of Lance armstrong whose story moves around triumph, tragedy and transformation.
At the age of 24, he becomes a sporting legend and very soon he finds himself affected by testicular cancer. Docs say that his survival rate is 40% . The book’s primary portion covers the way in which he battles the cancer and comes back to participate the Mother of all races. Tour de France and win it in style.
A few days back , the same person had won the event for the 7th time. If one looks back at what he has gone through and what he has achieved after the torturous period, the story will serve as a inspiration for any one who thinks he cant make it in life.
Came across a site Backpack.com, which will allows me to store all sorts of lists .It is also rss enabled. Now I can get rid of Excel sheet where I used to store my To-Do list and carry it to whichever machine I went to..
Slowly I get a feeling that day is not near where everything will be on web. delicious, flickr, backpack are just the early indicators I guess
Learn to Bootstrap a biz rather than playing a biz - Link
Duncan Cheatle, founder of the advisory body Prelude2Business has a checklist for aspiring entrepreneurs:
Do it for passion not money. Things don’t happen overnight, so do something you feel passionate about. Do not start something with an exit and a fortune in mind. You’ll probably fail.
This was commonplace during the dot-com era where people came up with ludicrous business ideas to be delivered by inexperienced teams.
Do something you know about. Philip Green, the retail entrepreneur, gave this advice. He and his family only invest in retail businesses, because that’s what they understand. If you go into something you know little or nothing about, you have made things much harder from the start.
Take away :
Take a look at your natural talents and do what you do best
· Be honest about why you want to have your own business
· Research every aspect to find out if it’s right for you before jumping in
Ask the following questions and mull over them for sometime.
What are you really and honestly good at?
Will you find joy in the activity of doing the task involved in the business ?
Definitely found some nuggets of marketing wisdom at : Marketing eYe Blog
A lesson from the Chinese Bambook Tree
You take a little seed, plant it, water it, and fertilise it for a whole year, and nothing happens.
The second year you water it and fertilise it and nothing happens.
The third year you water it and fertilise it and nothing happens. How discouraging this becomes.
The fourth year you water it and fertilise it and nothing happens. This is very frustrating.
PR guru Philip Gomes :
‘The day will come when the online location of a company’s RSS feed will be just as much of a PR pro’s email signature file as his or her email address, home page and phone number’.
What we will see in the future is a portal where all rss feeds of companies can sit and will be subscribed by various users.Nooked.com has already come up with a service which does the same.
“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.” - Ray Bradbury
Ruby on Rails : A simple to use framework that is supposed to churn out web apps at a super fast rate
Some info on it :
Ruby is a pure object-oriented programming language with a super clean syntax that makes programming elegant and fun. Ruby successfully combines Smalltalk’s conceptual elegance, Python’s ease of use and learning, and Perl’s pragmatism. Ruby originated in Japan in the early 1990s, and has started to become popular worldwide in the past few years as more English language books and documentation have become available.
StartupJournal | Startup Q&A :
Instead of thinking about which industries might provide an easier road to success, think about your own talents and interests and education.
I was to meet my cousin at a hotel when he had come over for a brief visit to Hyderabad. He was in to some VC investing in a life sciences company at Bangalore. I was eager to meet him for I like the way he has gone about achieving a few aspects in his life.
I took an appointment with him :) yeah and was waiting for him at the hotel lobby. Considering my maximizing nature, I went in to a book store which was available near the lobby and picked up a book titled “Success Vs Joy " By Geet Sethi and Sunil Agarwal.
Based on Wisdom of crowds fundas, here is Robert May trying to experiment in the real world whether there is a possibility of building a business , decisions relating to all aspects taken by crowds .Will be interesting to watch the outcome of the experiment
Link: The Business Experiment
The oldest fully authenticated age to which any human has lived is 122 Years
Sometimes it sounds very irrational to me, infact nonsensical when people feel that any shift in their activities, shift in their path,careers cannot happen after let’s say the first 30 years of a person’s age. We tend to hear " Settling down" from most of the 25 year olds today. I dread the mere thought of the word. In a world where there has been a documented fact of 122 years which is nearly four 30 year slots technically speaking , I see limitless possibilities before an individual to attain joy and do wonders in this world.
U know what to call single-mindedness ? I think there is no better example than this :
Prakash Padukone , the Indian Badminton Champ , for six years in a row did not watch a single movie while he was undergoing a rigorous training regime. He would wake up at 5:30 , go for a 10 km run, return home for breakfast, exercise, then play two-and-a-half hours of badminton, come back at noon and sleep for two hours. He would then wake up at 2:30 in the afternoon, exercise till 3:00 , play badminton between 4:00 and 7:00 , have his dinner and go to bed by 8:30. He maintained this incredibly disciplined lifestyle for six years with out a break, seven days a week!
A brilliant article by Paul Graham : Hiring is Obsolete
.
It basically says, gone are the days that you have to go and work for a company.
These are the days where its much better to start a company and have a potential employer of yours acquire it.
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Average can be considered as mediocre by a large number of people. However in the areas of decision making, remarkably there have been a large number of instances where collective wisdom of the crowds have helped in churning out a better solution.
The premise of the book is that “ A group with enough diversity, Independence of opinion , Decentralization of the decision making and an aggregation of all the opinions will enable the group to take a much better decision than relying on the so called experts of the field.
I have been away from the blog world for a fortnight or so . It gives me a feeling that I have been away for a decade.
My work involved relocation to a new place and hence the pause in my blogging activity. I am back to working in a company and I have realized that unless one actively puts some discipline in to one’s schedule and checks out the latest happenings on the net, it is very easy to become “Institutionalized”- My favorite word for people who resist change and get adapted to an environment of safety haven. Infact I caught on to this word some years ago, when I watched Morgan Freeman in “The Shawshank’s redemption " , where 30 years in to prison makes him a different person where in he actually likes his life at prison and dreads to live a civilized life.
While I was cleaning up some of the old stuff in my shelf, I came across a poem which I had preserved long ago.
It goes this way:
-————————————————
Dreams need people
Like people need dreams
Visions need somebody
To make them real it seems
The world is a canvas
And you have the power
To paint your kind of picture
When it comes to be your hour
Hold on to your Dream
Just believe that you can
Nothing’s going to stop you
That’s the story of man
“Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart - the dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides; in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.”
-- Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer
Ice.com, the online jewelry merchant, now has three blogs that are driving an amazing amount of traffic and sales to its main site. “We get thousands of leads a week from our blogs,” CEO Shmuel Gniwisch told me today. Clearly marketing vehicles, these blogs stretch the definition. But given that its customers on average spend about $200 an order, that’s a pretty good business model.
When will Indian markets become mature enough to realize the power of blogs as a medium for marketing. Firstly, there needs to be use of blogs in India. Last week in ET, there was an article that said that India Inc. has started to realize the power of blogs.However I am yet to see a example of a Indian company which has made a difference by tapping in to blogosphere.
I was reading an article when I came across a term called Osborne Effect. Eager to check its source, got this piece of info from a wiki :
Osborne Effect was a common slang term in Silicon Valley in the 1980s . It referred to a marketing blunder at Osborne Computer Corporation which might have contributed to that company’s bankruptcy in 1983 . In 1983, the inventor Adam Osborne preannounced his next-generation PC before it was even built, saying that it would outperform the current model. Customers immediately stopped buying the current model, in expectation of the next one. With the sudden drop in cash flow, the company lost profits and within months was forced into bankruptcy .
Occam’s Razor :This principle thought up a long time ago by William Occam while shaving(!) states that the shortest hypothesis, or solution to a problem, should be the one we should prefer (over longer more complicated ones). This is one of the fundamental tenet’s of the way western science works and has received much debate and controversy.
Which means always the smallest, simplistic equations explains the phenomenon in the best possible way. Is it true in the case of successful companies ? Are they few priciples based on which we can more or less predict the success of a company. I am half way thr the book - Good to Great…The main predictions from the book after a decade long number crunching and analysis of successful companies does propose a few priniciples for companies to become great.
A Splendid Quote by Marc Pincus about the current valley status:
‘‘I’d say we’re happy the boom busted, that the majority of M.B.A. carpetbaggers went B2B and B2C’’ – back, that is, to banking and consulting. ‘‘We’re now left with real entrepreneurs who will continue to make bold bets, sometimes right and more often wrong, having a ton of fun in the process – especially when they’re right.’’
My friend referred me to this article which talked about 2 IIT Alums along with a porn baron and her husband who are slated to become dollar billionaires.The four are the business brains that took the age-old game, once the preserve of card sharks in smoke-filled backroom bars, on to the internet and in to the homes of millions of people around the world.Companies like PartyGaming have brought the glamorous image of poker - a macho game of nerve, wit, tactics and luck - to millions of ordinary punters.
A Splendid Quote by Marc Pincus about the current valley status:
‘‘I’d say we’re happy the boom busted, that the majority of M.B.A. carpetbaggers went B2B and B2C’’ – back, that is, to banking and consulting. ‘‘We’re now left with real entrepreneurs who will continue to make bold bets, sometimes right and more often wrong, having a ton of fun in the process – especially when they’re right.’’
Have you ever wondered why X and O are used in the popular game Tic-Tac-Toe ?
Why not use a , b for the game ?
If one looks at the english alpabets , one can fit an alphabet in 5 by 5 squares with each dark square as 1 and white square as 0, then what we have done essentially is to represent each alphabet in a 25 dimensional space.
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I was reviewing on some of the thoughts on the book by Oded Shenker titled " The Chinese Century : The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job "
Here are some facts about the Indian IT Industry :
Revenue from the export of software and from services : $17.2 billion (2004-2005 )
Growth: 34.5 percent over the previous year’s revenue of $12.8 billion.
Revenue split :
Of the $17.2 billion,
$5.2 billion = call centers and business process outsourcing services
$12 billion = software and other services.
$ 3 billion = Revenue from product development and R&D services
Workers employed = > 1 million.
From MIT :
Nanotechnology research and development funding almost doubled to more than $10 billion in 2004 from the previous year. Most of the increase was driven by a big jump in corporate and private funding, which grew by 160 percent, while government and academic research outlays on nanotech R&D increased by a vigorous, but less outstanding, 37 percent. Japan led the way, with expenditures approaching $4 billion; the United States, however, was not far behind, with spending of about $3.4 billion.
The report from Lux research gives a classification of the three thousand odd patents that were submitted in Nanotech.
* Dendrimers pose the biggest question mark, scoring low on white space and freedom from entanglement for all commercially significant applications. A large number of relevant claims have been assigned from pioneer Dow to one start-up company, Dendritic Nanotechnologies.
* Quantum dots have particularly knotty entanglement for general claims that cover the materials themselves and not any specific application. This fact casts doubt on the commercial value of quantum dot IP.
Neurological implantation by Robert Fischell envisions a future where chips can monitor and cure a lot of mental disorders ! . Looking at his history of inventions, he might really pull off this stuff in to a market which he estimates to be a multi-billion dollar business.
Will Price writes on his lessons from steve ballmer :
technical innovation with impact
protected IP (patent portfolio)
market understanding
engineering excellence
alignment with sales capacity (can you sell it?, do you know how to sell it?)
timing and tenaciousness
understanding of value chain and how to partner to win
Woot.com is a modern Internet success story, with tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of dollars in annual sales. And yet woot doesn’t advertise and has just a few dedicated employees. How did it do it? Woot sells only one item a day.
It is not trying to out-Amazon Amazon. Instead, it tells a very compelling story, and that story is easy to believe and easy to spread. Every day, starting at midnight, it offers exactly one product at a great discount. When it’s gone, that’s it. Come back tomorrow and see what’s new. On a recent Thursday, for example, the company offered a set of Dell computer speakers for $14.99. The item was sold out by mid-morning. Woot is a business with a story that’s easy to tell. And because the story is its and its alone, it has plenty of room to grow
I stumbled on to a nice blog( Will Price ) which gives an insight in to the way in which sales and revenue model needs to be designed to use and pitch to the investors.
Sales Forecasting:
In this model, future bookings are NOT a function of market share, size, and penetration rates ($500m market x .005 penetration, or $2.5m) but rather of how many mature sales reps are in the company and the expected sales rep quota and productivity.