When the outsourcing biz began to make waves in India, it was more or less argued that all said and done, only low level manual jobs will be outsourced to India. Look what’s new : Most of the Indian firms are doing high tech product design and development and let some other US clients slap their brand and market wherever they want. This is I guess what we call moving up the value chain.

VisiCalc was the first commercially successful spreadsheet application in 1979. The developers behind this app were Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. How did all start: Like most of the successful products, the idea behind the product was the result of human frustation.The story is that Dan Bricklin was preparing a spread sheet analysis for a Harvard Business School “case study” report and had two alternatives: 1) do it by hand or 2) use a clumsy time-sharing mainframe program.

Here’s a new service which serves as an auction site…How are they even thinking of competing with ebay ? Jittery , upfront looks like (ebay-listing fees) + open communication between buyers and sellers + intelligent software facilitating market research(similar to amazon book recomm) + use of blogs to list items and quotes . It’s in beta..Watch out for this firm, for it will give a pulse on whether the market is ready to accept services which link blogs and auction.

Paul Graham in an interesting article shares his notion about people and ideas. The primary point of discussion is why do smart people have dumb ideas? The reasons for a dumb idea are : Still life effect:You come up with a random idea, plunge into it, and then at each point (a day, a week, a month) feel you’ve put so much time into it that this must be the idea.

via evan: Lots of cool web apps are now available that you can more or less run you company on. Basecamp - project/task management JotSpot - internal information management Blogger - Blogging ofcourse Gmail - E-Mail management FogBugz - Awesome bug and customer email management Textdrive,- Subversion, email management, DNS management, and more – all with web front-ends.