Phising Scams have risen , hence causing a major crisis in the online transaction volume. Everyday we do keep hearing new type of ad wares/spy wares/virus which seem to be stealing the identity information of the user and thus creating a havoc with his account.  In such cases , Digital Identity comes to the rescue if properly implemented. Digital identities, which provide two measures of authentication, could help improve Internet security, as well as having various other uses, such as digital passports, the experts said. Dual authentication often involves something a user knows or possesses, such as a smart card, and something that he or she is, which can be represented by biometric information

Boo.com is a mention in a  reminder  on the fifith anniversary NASDAQ crash. The lessons that can be learnt from the failure of boo.com are enormous. Burning 135 Million USD in 18 months by the website offers rich lessons to any person. Boo.com will serve as a warning for all the entrepreneurs who are profligate in their approach to their product / service.

The tag line for the firm reads as “Style never dies”.
“Lessons never forgotten” would be apt for an entrepreneur.

Peter Cohan, author and management Consultant says that there are three exciting tech developments that will be widely adopted and eventually save executives a lot of time. They are:

1.The Semantic Web. Cohan describes it as an extension of the current Web, where machines will be able to communicate without human intervention for example, scheduling a meeting for several participants at once by hooking into their scheduling software to see when everyone is available.

Here’s a look at facts which will justify the title of this post

1. VC Investment has risen to 33 Million USD from 8 Million USD from the previous year

2. Microsoft steps up the heat with MSN Spaces .IMHO that it is a late entrant in the market. However it is tough to hazard a guess as to how would MSFT leverage its existing communication infra with Spaces

3. Blogs have become another PR engine for the companies where the aspects of product release are discussed. In contrast to the earlier PR Channels, the firm has little control over the matter than can come up in the blogs. Hence the so called arm twising in the relationship management with communication channels has undergone a drastic change.

In an interview with Joshua Schachter,the founder of Del.icio.us,one of the responses regarding the revenue model for the company was as follows:
“I have a day job. I only work on del.icio.us one evenings and weekends. It’s not that expensive, just rack space and ALL MY SPARE TIME.”

Most people associate starting a company as something which requires tremendous amount of money, people etc. But I feel that the ability to prototype and test it out in the market is perhaps the most important ability to create a succesful enterprise. Another case is that of blogbride , a company which employs just one developer and the marketing is done by Pito, a veteran in the valley. Infact an interesting aspect of the development is that it is done in Ireland and the communication is mainly through emails and IM.

Domain name spam essentially means registering names that look like that of legitimate companies but lead users to fake sites designed to steal passwords and credit card details .Domain names are the ‘real language’ addresses of websites, rather than their internet protocol address, which is a series of numbers.

Domain names are used so people can more easily navigate the web.So-called ASCII codes are used to represent European languages but for other languages a hybrid of a system called Unicode is used.So, for example, website PayPal could now be coded using a mixture of the Latin alphabet and the Russian alphabet.The resulting domain as displayed to the users would look identical to the real site as a Russian ‘a’ look just like an English ‘a’.But the computer code would be different, and the site it would lead users to could be a fake."

My view of the pathetic powerpoints presentations we see day in and day out is also reflected in this article Feld Thoughts: Ban Bullets . A e-book written by Seth Godin has some interesting points on the way to avoid presentations.

Four Components to a Great Presentation:
First, make yourself cue cards. This feature should be built in to PowerPoint,but it’s not. You should be able to see your cue cards on your laptop’s screen while your audience sees your slides on the wall. Alas. In the meantime, you’ll just have to resort to writing them down the old-fashioned way.
Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

The story of Ron Popeil (great inventor and marketer) is a classic rags to riches story. One of the reasons he attributes to his success is innumberable interactions with the customers. Demonstrating his products in front of real live people who asked silly questions and broached objections, he was able to learn what the silly questions and objections were and build the answers and counter-arguments into his pitch. The same he carried over to television for selling Veg-O-matic which was a great commercial success. It seems so true but still a lot of companies wait for the perfect product to be released in the market rather than released a well made product which enables a quick feedback. Roberto Kiyosaki says the same in his book Art of Start : " Develop Quick proptotypes and test it out in the market. "

A fantastic article " Journey to the Center of Google takes one through the journey of Google’s success. " Ignoring Conventional wisdom is one aspect which google has done consistently . It has also executed all the unconventional steps with great diligence.
What the google founders have done differently:
1.Inventing a search engine when everyone knew search was dead
2.Building a business on Internet advertising when everyone knew it was impossible;
3.Antagonizing two revered VCs whose rings they should have been kissing
4.Going for a dutch auction in the IPO

Powerpoint is a tool whose power comes in to being depending on the presentor. If the presentor has cogent thoughts and presents in a concise manner , then ppt is a wonderful tool that complements his task .

Alas! thats not the case usually. Pretty bad speakers/ presentors hide under the garb of technical gimmicks in the tool that the entire audience is awestruck by the techy stuff in the presentation OR bored by the whole stuff. Both result in the audience not getting the point.The most disgusting aspect of a poor presentation is when the speaker reads out the points from the slide and doesnt bother to explain the relevance of the point.

The story of Ron Popeil (great inventor and marketer) is a classic rags to riches story. One of the reasons he attributes to his success is innumberable interactions with the customers. Demonstrating his products in front of real live people who asked silly questions and broached objections, he was able to learn what the silly questions and objections were and build the answers and counter-arguments into his pitch. The same he carried over to television for selling Veg-O-matic which was a great commercial success.

Chess:
If one looks at the game of Chess, each piece moves specified by different rules and the player knows the difference between each of the piece. The player leverages on the strengths of each piece, deploys a strategy using the pieces at various stages of the game.Playing Chess is much like managing a team. One needs to note the similarity between chess pieces and team members. Every piece is important for the ultimate aim, the victory. Every piece has its own uniqueness.

Nowadays, it is rare that any website does not have rss feed . Hence most of the times I tend to subscribe the feed so as to track it forever. This works well for dynamic content. However there are umpteen number of instances where we want to keep track of few static pages. The solution ,generally followed is to store it in browser favorites.
There are 2 drawbacks with this approach:
1. If I move to a different machine, I should take of copy of fav and include it in my new machine
2. I can never know who all have visited this page on the net, which means I cannot judge the popularity of the URL I am browsing.

I was listening to a discussion between Marc Andressen (Netscape founder) and Don Rosenzweig (COO Of yahoo)titled " Lessons Learnt - Futures Predicted" . One of the main prediction from the discussion was relating to RSS , where the evolution is going to happen very fast. Monetising the content in RSS feeds might bring about a new Overture type of player in the market. One such player is already out Kanoodle which matches ad to the content and pays the blogger depending on click throughs

Daniel Colbert in his article says that Nanotechnology is not an industry. He says
" Materials companies have traditionally been low margin, quick to commoditize and generally lacking pizzazz. These are not favored characteristics of venture-financed companies."

I beg to differ:

After reading the book “The next big thing is really small”, I did feel overawed by the range of applications that nano materials can be used. But that doesn’t mean commercial apps (scalable) are eons away.Even though the author says materials are low margin products , which might be shunned by VC’s, I think the following aspects can make a nanotech company fundable from a VC Point of view

In an insightful article on how startups make the crucial mistake of employing large salesforce at the early stages of the company, the author Mark Leslie argues on using Sales Learning Curve adapted from Manufacturing Learning Curve.

Budget proposals for IT Industry :

1.Reduction in custom duty on computer inputs from 10% to 0%.

2.Counter Vailing Duty of 4% levied on the above imported inputs with credit for the proposed CVD available against payment of excise duty.

3.IT software imports to be exempt from the proposed CVD.

4.Reduction in effective tax rate to 33.7% not to have any impact on software and hardware companies due to available tax benefits.

Ajax is a new way of making the websites respond faster. I have developed applications in the past and one of my constant worries was how to make the site respond faster. When I used to look at the response time of gmail , orkut and google suggest, I did wonder what makes them so fast. Now I know the answer :Ajax

Here are two links which explains the technology in simple terms:
adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php
serversideguy.blogspot.com/2004/12/google-suggest-dissected.html

An excellent and thought provoking speech made by Harvard President was highly distorted by the media
Here is the complete transcript:
www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html

Lawrence H. Summers presents the following 3 hypothesis and defends them :

“There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I’ll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.”

At the Nano Tech 2005 show in Tokyo, Fujitsu displays the BioServer, a powerful new computer that will be able to handle the large number of calculations currently necessary in fields including medical research. There were some 350 companies that displayed their products in the show.

All ye Early adopters – Look out for nanotech products for they are supposed to be serve as disruptive technologies to a whole lot of industries.The show where one can closely watch the upcoming products is Nanotech trade show that is scheduled at California (May 8-12 2005).

For all the gyan on rise of net as an advertising medium , irrelevance of mass media marketing , need to take permission from the customers before one markets their goods…Well, atleast in India , such things have not yet taken place. One obvious reason is becoz of less internet penetration. One look at the mass media advertising slot rates gives an idea abt the powerful existence of second wave advertising strategies

My computer was affected by a spyware - Phisher which steals all the banking and personal information and sends it to some vague site. I did browse for anti-spyware software to remove it. I tried Microsoft Anti-spyware, Webroot and a host of tools. These tools did help in scanning the spyware and removing it temporarily. The spyware used to reload in to the machine’s RAM whenever I rebooted it

Finally I go hold of software which permanently removed the spyware from a tool developed by lavasoft. A sigh of relief to me at last.

In the past 5 years I have been involved in the field of technology and business
But strangely I somehow lost touch with developments in science. I did not track ANY developments in Science which forms the bedrock of technology. Being a engineering graduate, I am surprised at myself not doing so.

The book I picked up this week “Probable tomorrows” was an eye opener to the great advances that are due in the coming decade. For a moment I forgot the distinction between Science and Technology. They are fundamentally different

A new Dynamic Address Book service has hit the market.
www.bebo.com -from Birthday alarm guys.

It seems that it is spreading like wild fire www.businessweek.com/the _thread/techbeat/archives/00000056.htm

My take:
Nothing great features wise, plain simple service. Other services like plaxo,good contacts, a host of firms have a much richer interface. Since they have just started, it will be interesting to watch what they bundle in the core service. But I guess their past performance and brand is helping their viral marketing efforts.Can their late entry in to the market be offset by their marketing efforts? Time will decide.

An excellent article describing the parallels between “Rise of Net” and “RSS” .It addresses questions like “Where is RSS headed ? what are the potential apps that need to be developed ?”

One thing that the articles emphasizes is that the pace of development of RSS tools and apps would be breathtakingly fast
www.ventureblog.com/articles/indiv/2005/001187.html

imeem: It integrates IM, Blogging, uploading of photos,community formation in to one. Sounds as a wonderful service.
http://imeem.com/index.aspx

Another interesting startup is Jambo Networks which is combining Face to face networking with Wifi Technologies
http://www.jambo.net/

Both of them present in an interesting point of debate–Does community building take place using online services OR Communities or contacts are made primarily offline and the services which will flourish are the ones which will only aid the offline meetings

Memorial Space Flights , a company is offering space burial . It launches the cremated means of the departed on board a funeral satellite. After orbiting for sometime, the remains would fall back in to atmosphere and be deposed permanently in a fiery display Who said space manufacturing and space services are eons away from now? Link : http://www.memorialspaceflights.com

Microsoft is bringing 3 main services, Blogging, IM, E-Mail along with Address Change Notification (MSN Spaces, Hotmail and Messenger) together. This seamless manner of integration is likely to attract more users

www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/dec04/12-01MSNWave10PR.asp

Here’s a good market analysis of blog tools using a metric “Google-share”.Though the metric may not be a fool proof one, it does give an indication of the market direction

Links:
www.elise.com/web/a/an _overview_of_the_weblog_tools_market.php
www.elise.com/web/a/weblog _tools_market_update_february_2005.php

I remember an interview with a top scientist at Intel who was nearing his retirement at the time of the Interview. When asked what he would choose as a field to work in, if he were 25 now. He said categorically that any technology relating to environment protection

From then on I have been particularly looking at news relating to businesses in that sphere. VC funding has started to flow in to such businesses , recent one being Pionetics Inc., a San Carlos, Calif.-based provider of water purification solutions, has raised $6.4 million in Series C funding.

I came across Amplify, a tool that helps one to store various interesting pieces of info, images, pdf etc from different websites in a single page called Amp. One it is stored as Amp it can shared with any person using mail, instant messaging etc.

This service reminds me of http://www.tenbyten.org . However this is more for an individual customer who can create his own view and share it with others. Probably this can be added as a feature in the future Firefox or IE versions.

Alvin Toffler’s view of the future is wonderfully captured in the book “The Third Wave”

If one were to look around the institutions relating to politics, business, technology, communications, technology, etc that were regarded as strengths of human civilization, one can see that they are facing a lot of pressures and forces in the current age. The author describes these institutional structures as Second Wave structures i.e industrial revolution structures and sees their end in the coming years.

A sample list of books which are considered essential for understanding Technology and Business Aspects

Love is the Killer App – Tim Sanders
Net Gain – John Hagel
Intellectual Capital : New Wealth of Organizations – Thomas Stewart
Linked – Albert Lazlo
Influence : The psychology of Persuasion – Robert B Giald
Smart Mobs : Howard Rheingold
Designing Web Usability : Practice of Simplicity – Jacob Nielsen

CRMSugar, an open source CRM Application vendor has secured 2 rounds of funding and also seems to have got a good number of customers.After just nine months, Roberts (founder)is talking boldly of competing with mammoth proprietary incumbents Siebel Systems and Salesforce.com.

Roberts is charging $239 per user per year, and is offering customers a perpetual license. If they don’t renew an annual subscription, they don’t get new updates or support.

Here’s a dog which can figure out the optimal path when a person throws a ball and asks it to get it. It has a business card too which says ““Elvis Bogart Wales, Doctoris Caninarum.”

www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/index.php?ntid=28478&ntpid=1

Almost the entire last week, I spent on reading up on Goldratt books which I read them a few years ago. I was sure that my understanding of the concepts would be much better this time. The books that I read were “ Critical Chain”, “ Its not Luck”, “Race”.

Each of them presents the fallacies in the current management techniques, be it production scheduling, decision making, Project management. When I read that the much cherished and holy concept of Net present value is fundamentally wrong because it does not take in to consideration that the availability of money is always a constraint, I was rather curious to read Throughput accounting , a book which talks about how we can account for in a much better way

I was eagerly waiting for the next book from Malcolm Gladwell, the author of best seller “The tipping point”. After his first book which contained ideas about Viral Marketing that were lucidly portrayed, there was a great buzz in the industry and marketing circles about his next book – Blink. I got a chance to read the book when one of my friends presented to me as a gift. Actually I never expected it to read so early after it’s publishing, as it would ideally long time for some of the books to get to the Indian Book stores.

An innovative project has been kicked off to stop spam. The solution attacks the spammer before even he/she tries to start to send junk mails !

The way it works is:

The website owner installs a Honey pot page with under his sub domain which cannot be surfed by a regular user but is crawled by spiders and robots. When a crawler visits one of those pages, the page will generate a unique e-mail address that contains information about the time it was harvested and the IP address, or identity, of the computer that harvested it. When the spammer starts his operation, the email gets redirected to Honey pot server

From many months, I have been yearning to read the story behind Oracle’s success and more so about its megalomaniac founder Lawrence Ellison, who is very often seen in the media, sailing boats rather doing anything else.

I was very curious to know about the individual who is portrayed in the media as one who makes bombastic statements about his company and deplores his rivals. He is also known to remove any key people whom he thinks as rising starts at Oracle. With so much said about him in the media, I was more than keen to understand the way he runs his company. From what the media has painted, it definitely looks like he runs his company in an autocratic fashion. If that is the case, how come a company can withstand 25 years in the fierce competitive Technology Industry? All these above made me immediately pick up a book written by Mathew Symonds who has written a book titled “ Softwar – An Intimate Account of Oracle and Ellison”

With the launch of X1, google desktop is left far too behind
Looking at the rave reviews of X1, Desktop search is certainly one area which will see a lot of competition in the days to come

http://www.x1.com/

The title of the book itself evokes a feeling of interest to any person, who stumbles on it. In these times where people have seven-day weeks, the phrase “seven day weekends” comes across as a surprise.

True to its unconventional title, the book took me through the making of Semco and the way it is run. Every page is filled with so many anecdotes to spell out the practices at Semco, that at the end of it, I felt like traveling all the way down to Brazil and work at Semco, to have a look at the organization in a much closer way

Today I happened to pick a book which is slightly out of my usual reads. It’s a book by name “Tuesdays with Morrie.” I completed it in one sitting which shows that book was really an engrossing read

The narrator , Mitch tells his experiences with his professor Morrie after 20 years of his graduation , when he suddenly comes across his professor. Morrie, a lively character is struck by a deadly disease and doctors say that he would not llive more than 6 months. It is during this time that Mitch gets to meet his old professor. He expects to see the professor in a ocean of self pity . BUT to his surprise the meetings and discussions on every Tuesday , with his professor in few months changes his perspective towards life.

I had always thought brands do not serve any purpose and it is the intrinsic value of the produce bolsters a brand value and never is the case, vice-versa. In this regard, I wanted to read No Logo – Naomi Klein from a long time, but somehow have never got a chance to pick it up and read. I should do it sooner. I came across a no nonsense article describing the fleeting value a brand provides to a company, which made me ping on these thoughts. The author has quoted umpteen numbers of examples, in this “What have you done for me Lately, Economy” and says it is always the performance of the product that wins and not the brand This article definitely vindicates my stance that I hold from a couple of years http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/brands.html

I had always thought brands do not serve any purpose and it is the intrinsic value of the produce bolsters a brand value and never is the case, vice-versa. In this regard, I wanted to read No Logo – Naomi Klein from a long time, but somehow have never got a chance to pick it up and read. I should do it sooner. I came across a no nonsense article describing the fleeting value a brand provides to a company, which made me ping on these thoughts. The author has quoted umpteen numbers of examples, in this

Hugh MacLeod has written a brilliant piece of work on how one can be creative, in a really creative way.

Here are the points to summarize his views

1.Ignore everybody

2.The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to change the world

3.Put the hours in

4.If your biz plan depends on you being suddenly discovered by some big shot, in all probability , it will fail

5.You are responsible for your own experience

Blinkx, a company started by Suranga Chandratillake and Kathy Rittweger is pitched a worthy competitor for Google Desktop. This combines the power of local words that are being used by the user and then highlight any new items on the net.Something on the lines of pubsub.com.

With a lot of companies entering the desktop search area, what is expected out of longhorn which is to bridge the file system and the net in a seamless way?
One thing is definitely sure that whatever Longhorn promises, unless it comes out soon, it probably will have the best operating system but not a single customer who would be willing to shift from Blinkx,pubsubs and google desktop’s

Have you ever wondered whether you can capture all the world events in one singlepicture ?

Well, you can go here to find one http://www.tenbyten.org have done. One image made up a 100 small images which capture the latest info from the world

How do they do it :

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

Firefox , the browser which is increasingly finding its acceptance , has a Pubsub icon
in it ..
Whats Pubsub ?

PubSub is a matching service that instantly notifies you when new content is created that matches your subscription. Using a proprietary Matching Engine, PubSub is able to read millions of data sources on your behalf and notify you instantly whenever a match is made
http://pubsub.com

online experience is becoming more pleasant

Your task—TODAY—is a short story.
Your current project is … a story.
Your career is … a story.

HE/SHE WHO HAS THE BEST STORY WINS!
SO … WORK ON YOUR STORY!
MASTER THE ART OF STORYTELLING/STORYDOING/STORY PRESENTING!

Words of Tom Peters – whom I regard for his thoughts in the book – The secret of WOW

If one looks at the current age where a lot of automation has come in to being, a lot of mind numbing and number crunching activities are taken over by the computer, the skilled right brained people would be in demand. And people who are going to be successful in the future are creators and empathizers.

Who says a person is old enough to start a company ? 84 year old James Lawrence Toast starts a company to connect to the younger generations. The apparel are so wacky that toast shd have no problem in connecting with the current wacky generation where companies like http://littlemismatch.com/ can exist , a company started by 4 yound girls which is in to selling mismatched socks!!! Yes in this world of sanity, insanity pays I guess. http://www.sharpastoast.com/toast.php