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

Matrix . a movie which talks about a future where mankind is trapped by machines to produce batteries to power themselves. A pretty psyching phenomenon.

As of now, humans seem to mime the matrix concept …MIT Researchers have come up with a breakthrough – creating power from spinach..Day is not far I guess when one goes and buys vegetables to power their mobiles and current appliances .
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/24/tech/main645436.shtml

Power of blogging seems to awaken the Redmond giant too
http://redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=10625&hed=Bill+Gates%e2%80%99+blog+strategy

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.

Tom Peters, the biz guru who spells out the secrets of excellence among companies says that there are Ten “Traits of Excellence” for an individual . He quotes them with reference to Gandhi, Churchill and Mandela.
I have tried to put in a few words against each of these traits . An entrepreneur who wants to build a successful company should possess these qualities :

1.Dreamer-Visionary.: He needs to visualize the situation much before lot of people can and have the guts to execute it.A healthy mix of dreaming and execution is important. Mere dreamer wont do. Like Ram charan and Larry Bossidy who point out thatExecution is the killer in this world of dreamers. This reminds me of a statement hung on the wall of my previous company , “ Lot of people dream , but only few stay awake in the night to make it succeed” –

Google takes 2.5 word query and displays 10 results in a second, - I mean how faster can a search engine be - A whole lot of information is accessible. what next ? Come to think of it , what is needed is user interface which not only lets users remember what they have visited, it makes the search experience very personal.

This is not some thing which is not already being worked on http://www.statalabs.com/products/bloomba/features.html This company works on making email search products and is developing state of the art search engine products which blurs the distinction between the PC and the net, thus providing a customizable search experience.

One always tend to talk about business model , revenue model , just after looking at a site.
Yes , may be we are reminded of the dreadful years that have gone by, the dot com bust years

I happened to visit www.changethis.com and was surprised to see their objective and their mission. First thing that struck me, as usual was how the hell are they making money and when I read their manifesto - http://changethis.com/files/CT-manifesto.pdf

Viral Marketing is one kind of marketing which is being increasing heard in e- commerce circles. Though the word was christened after hotmail’s success, there have quite a number of advocates for this type of marketing. A few good books have also been written on this – The anatomy of buzz, Tipping Point to mention a few. Advocates of viral marketing have always said that buzz for any product or service is a drama where there are 3 characters in the play.

Passion, Fun and Vision, they say are the vital ingredients of a successful company, irrespective of its stage in a business life cycle. One of the most important things that these 3 depend on is Communication levels in a company. Tomes have been written on how to effectively communicate, how to see to it that all the employees in a company use tools to communicate among each other, collaborate, voice out their opinions. However, if one looks at most the companies, the communication techniques are rather dull and boring, and inevitable they do not give the grass root feedback that is needed for everybody Lets look at communication from 3 aspects . Firstly, generic communication levels among all departments of a company. Secondly, communication inside a team and thirdly inter personal relation ships A company’s values are shaped by communication mechanisms. In fact a large part of culture of a company is shaped by how effectively people exchange information. Sadly most of the companies merely do a lip service to it. Lets take an example from a company, which I adore for some specific reasons - The Body Shop run by Anita Roddick . Its a firm which is in to cosmetics business and which has grown from a small outfit to a gigantic organization. Anita Roddick uses a simple but very very effective means to get grass root feedback. Imagine, one place where almost every employee visits atleast once a day Toilet - If one looks at the history of toilets, generally, people freak out on the walls…Why not turn this problem in to an opportunity. She put a electronic graffiti board which took feedback from all its employees. The type of feedback she received helped her take a lot of effective decisions. Such creative ideas should be used by one and all to know the pulse of the company and sort out issues if there are any. Apart from these techniques which are used across organization, there are also some simple but very effective to keep the communication free in a team. Do you know that human touch is a great tool for effective communication? In my little work experience I had, I really did not give a great importance to this aspect. But increasingly this simple aspect of touching some person while talking to him is certainly helping me put across my point better, when working in a small team.When was the last time you touched some person while talking to him/her? Go ahead and try it out for yourself Thirdly , the interpersonal communications. Ricardo Semler believes that there is no need to have any restraint on the language that can be used in a company.He feels that one cannot police on the employees vocab and the eco system will itself become one where diverse vacabs merge in to a culture unique to the company. Vineet Bajpai , one of the successful entrepreneurs thinks that language among employees need to be restrained, as in all probability they might use the same language with one of the supplier, vendor, customer or some external entity and that might reflect badly on the company. As you would have seen , this interpersonal communication is not a straight forward thing to deal with. Probably I will figure out this issue myself in the days to come whether restraint on the vocabulary of the employees plays any role . All in all, the role of communications in a company is a crucial element for its sustainability. what about the element of external communications..! Thoughts on it

° Traffic (hits) is the best way to measure a website. The truth is that without metrics to convert the hits to sales, or hits to market share, you’re wasting time.
° You can sell stuff on the Web if you invest enough in a secure server. Focusing on infrastructure, instead of marketing, gives you a store with no sales.
° The search engines are the key to traffic to your site. Successful sites need a process that creates a scalable flow of traffic, which doesn’t depend on random visits via a search engine.
• Your site should be a complete online experience. Most companies can’t afford to create an all-encompassing portal with everything a user needs in one site. Attempting to do this badly is worse than not doing it at all.
° Anonymity is good for the Net. Permission marketing rewards viewers for taking off their ski masks. Traditional Web techniques embrace anonymity and fail.
° Activity is good. Just because you tweak your site daily, add new features and have an active committee of well-paid executives involved, doesn’t mean you are doing marketing.
In conclusion , the future on e-commerce
- Wireless. More bandwidth. More clutter. Permission gets more expensive to get—and more important than ever

Today I happened to listen to a good business case, the story of 2 barber shops(Lets call the owners of the respective stores as Mr. A and Mr. B ) which opened simulataneoulsy at the same time, in the same locality, Now this was the perfect setting to witness the market dynamics. The owner of one of the shops whom I visit frequently , Mr. A , happened to narrate his store’s evolution from a no-branded place to a decently popular store.