February 2010
1 post
2 tags
““The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept...”
– George Orwell, novelist (1903-1950)
January 2010
4 posts
2 tags
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
– George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
2 tags
““Prolonged study of the English language leaves me with a conviction that...”
– Robert W. Burchfield, lexicographer (1923-2004)
2 tags
““There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”
We...”
– Marshall McLuhan, educator and philosopher (1911-1980)
2 tags
““It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the...”
– Robert Southey (1774-1843)
December 2009
1 post
2 tags
““Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to...”
– Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
November 2009
15 posts
2 tags
““Reading a book is like rewriting it for yourself. You bring to a novel,...”
– Angela Carter, novelist and journalist (1940-1992)
2 tags
“Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever...”
– Abraham Flexner, educator (1866-1959)
2 tags
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at...”
– William Styron, novelist (1925-2006)
2 tags
“One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He...”
– Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
2 tags
“There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.”
– Honore de Balzac
2 tags
“Go to where the silence is and say something.”
– Amy Goodman, investigative journalist, columnist and author (b. 1957)
2 tags
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government...”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. Except a...”
– Mark Twain
“We always weaken whatever we exaggerate.”
– Jean Francois de La Harpe
1 tag
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 tags
Warning SMSes, Anyone?
I was pulling out of my office building when I saw smoke from slightly beyond I could see. I was worried, but had no way to know what had happened without taking a heavy detour and risking getting into trouble in the process. That is when it struck me. How great it would be if we had a service that pings me (SMS/email/automated call - I can choose the mode) when there are incidents, in or around...
13 tags
Tie-ISB 2009: Growth, Funding and Partnerships -...
This is the second part in the series on the Tie-ISB session and it covers growth, funding and partnerships. The panelists were Sundar Subramaniam (Cofounder, Dim Dim), Atul Phadnis (Founder, Whats on India) and Srinivas Pothapragada (Founder, Tidal Data).
Takeaways for entrepreneurs was:
1. Listen to your competitors’ customers very carefully :) - don’t design features that you...
12 tags
Tie-ISB Connect 2009: Incubators – Part 1
I attended the Tie-ISB Connect 2009 this year and to say the least, it was one of the most inspiring sessions I have attended in the recent past. Let me go over some of the highlights for those of you who missed and for the rest of us to keep pointers in mind, as we move on…(with the “rodent-sized memory” of ours – courtesy Siddharth of Rang De Basanti fame, during the panel discussion on Taking...
7 tags
Do entrepreneurs need previous experience?
I was asked this question by Suhani who is with YourStory.in. Here is the excerpt she published in her article at YourStory Blog. However, I could not stop my thought process from rumbling on and most of that does end up in this space…so here goes (my take, the unabridged version…). Hope it triggers a good discussion and thought process on this.
The truth is, if you are asking yourself this...
6 tags
What is right in India?
My good friend, Vinod Jain, and I were having a discussion on the kind of things that don’t work in India and the list goes on…you know, I know, we all know!
But, that is when I got thinking, there are certain things that do work and have been working reasonably well. Given the size of the population, the scaling and execution challenges they have and given the low margins they work on, they are...
October 2009
17 posts
1 tag
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m...”
– Albert Einstein
6 tags
Kite Runner – The Movie
I watched Kite Runner, the movie directed by Marc Foster and based on Khaled Hosseini’s book by the same title, recently. It had such a raw quality to it that it set me thinking about fate, honor and circumstances, as perceived by the characters as well as us, in general.
The interesting part of the movie is that it keeps the scenes, the characters and the emotions very real, no...
6 tags
Job Postings and Inadequacy
Most job postings I come across look too good to be true. The requirements make the ideal person seem like a the job requires you to be a “versatile demi-god” with excellent communication, good team player, leader, many years of domain expertise, no travel compunctions, no work hour issues (read as work 24×7) and the list doesn’t end here…
This is the easy way to go about the process, put all the...
1 tag
“The idealists and visionaries, foolish enough to throw caution to the winds and...”
– Emma Goldman, social activist (1869-1940)
4 tags
Twitter n Me
I started using twitter a few days ago and one of the major things that has kept me on it (aside from the real-time effect) is the fact that there are certain thoughts you don’t want to expand into a complete blog article. They neatly fits into 140 characters and convey the point succinctly enough which, in turn then, lets me move on….instead of haunting me with expansion possibilities and an...
4 tags
Gtalk Feature Request
I know when you hear this, you will go, duh! But the fact is that, it not being there makes managing people on my gtalk list a little difficult.
Ok, first the request - need a “category” feature on gtalk, where (if I want to, that is), I can classify my friends into different categories and hence, manage the ones I interact with more vs. the others, a little better.
This feature...
1 tag
“We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we...”
– J.K. Rowling, author (b. 1965)
8 tags
Dancing With The Elephants
I went on a vacation recently to Thailand and wandering through a new city (Patong and Bangkok) famous for its night life, “massage parlors”, cheap shopping and fleecing tuk-tuk’s, we couldn’t help but wonder…how at home we felt thanks to the extremely friendly nature of the Thai people.
Not to mention the strange but true facts - that the people in Phuket spoke much...
1 tag
“There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way, and...”
– Christopher Morley
9 tags
Of Queues And Randomness
Imagine this, you booked an appointment at the doctors’ and landed up there on time, only to find out that they are accepting walk-ins and hence, you need to wait until the current set of customers have been attended to. After all, they have been waiting for a long time, right? Wrong!
It has happened to me twice now, once at Manipal Hospital in Bangalore and again, at a private clinic in...
4 tags
Losing It At The Top But Staying In Equilibrium
I was watching this sci-fi movie called Equilibrium a few days ago. For those who have not seen it, it is about a world without feelings, people are made to take daily dozes of a drug “Prozium” which suppresses their feelings. In this world there is no poetry, music or art, only utility. People who don’t take this medication are titled “sense offenders” and are subjected to execution.
So, it...
6 tags
Tata Indicom Launches Per Call Billing
Even as the GSM arm of Tata’s experiments with the per second billing model in India in partnership with Docomo, the CDMA arm, Tata Indicom, has launched a innovative plan of “Per Call” based billing in local networks. This is a revolutionary concept and could probably be a last ditch effort on the part of Tata Indicom to increase its shrinking customer base.
However, the problem of signal...
9 tags
Per Second Billing Model (Not) Mandatory?
Ever since Tata Docomo made a splash in the indian telecom market with per second billing, TRAI has begun to mull over whether to make it compulsory or not. After the initial speculation surrounding this decision and the concerns over falling ARPUs expressed by the telecom operators, TRAI has finally decided to commision a consultation paper to study the matter and make recommendations by end of...
8 tags
Shock Nahi Lagega - Havells' promise to Indians
Havells has launched a new ad campaign with the tag line “nahi lagega, nahi lagega shock”. The ad is well done this time round and really conveys the message very well. Their previous set of ads with a tagline - “shock laga kya?” - always involved people receiving an electric shock from the switch and mocked the customers. Compared to the previous message, the new one...
3 tags
“You can’t solve a problem on the same level as it was created. You have to...”
– Albert Einstein
3 tags
Trading? Have a good brokerage deal...think again
Here is a good post you can read about getting a good deal with your broker for the trading account- here. What I really like about this post is that it offers different strategies for traders in different stages of their trading lifecycles, check it out and hope it benefits you!
7 tags
Boundary Conditions and Rules
I was in my car at a junction near my house today and the signal turned from red to blinking orange just when it was time for me to leave. All the cars started moving at the same time and got interlocked at the center, it took more than 15 mins for people to back out of the jam and move on with their lives. This kind of got me thinking about how we create rules with the assumption of creating a...
September 2009
3 posts
9 tags
Why Consulting is such a sought after career...
I’ve thought about this endlessly, perhaps will continue to do so…but applying one of the principles I read in Nissim’s, Black Swan seems to help me address this question very elegantly.
In a section where he touches upon career advice he says how the best career advice he ever received was one about picking a career that was scalable (he later on talks about how that advice was...
5 tags
Late Comers...Fly Good
Two of my past experiences seem to be indicating that if you manage to arrive really late, but at the nick of time at an airline check-in counter, there are lots of sops in store. The nail-biting, nerve-wrecking experience of just about making it to the flight can lead to rewards ranging from upgrades to business class, meal vouchers at stopovers and seats with leg-stretch space that are generally...
12 tags
Tinkering, Innovation and Product Companies in...
I was reading Nissim Taleb’s, Black Swan and something that he mentioned really jumped at me. He talks about how in the history no major discovery, breakthrough or innovation ever happened based on statistics and empirical data. It happened because people tinkered with experiments, data, projects, applications. In my mind, this is a very important observation, for any industry to proliferate...
August 2009
11 posts
11 tags
Has the mainstread media tweeted too early?
In the recent past I have seen 3 different “editorial-like” posts in the mainstream media (read - newspapers) about twitter and to think that less than 120K Indian’s are tweeting, yet. Is the mainstream media disconnected with the Indian reality and just aping the hype in the western media? To begin with all the articles assumed knowledge of this phenomena and were not...
6 tags
Cadbury's India Tryst
I can’t help but notice that the chocolates I love in India are from the same company - Cadbury and that the company holds about 72% market share in the organized chocolate market (source: here ). Just in case you were wondering, Cadbury is a British company and has a bouquet of products ranging from Diary Milk, Perk, Five Star, Eclairs and Halls to the higher end Temptations.
They have a...
7 tags
Aircel Launches Youth Plan
Aircel (the 4th player in the telecom game, after Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, with majority presence in South India) recently launched a Youth Plan…before, I go into the package details, think about it for a moment. Which is the segment that’s extremely price sensitive, could be a first time customer and does not really care about the quality of calls or signal availability? - The...
5 tags
Social Media Surveys - Not Too Social
Recently I got a survey request. It was for understanding how people use internet and specifically, social media. What struck me the most, was that the surveys we use to understand “social media” is still playing catch up with the concept of social media. You see polls being conducted on social networks, but they are like any other poll that would be conducted through any other medium....
8 tags
Bluetooth Mobile Headsets - Quite An Earful!
Ever wondered why Bluetooth handsets never took off the way they should despite the growing need for such a gadget amongst the “teleconferencing community”? I bought a Jabra headset a couple of years ago and it has fallen out of favor with me . Thinking back at my reasons, I decided to put them up here for those considering buying one and for those wondering why they wasted money on...
8 tags
Samsung Mobile Ads - Next Is What?
Samsung appointed Aamir Khan as the brand ambassador for their mobile phones in India in March 2008. Since then the ad series has gone through a couple of revamps. The initial set of ads were for the Samsung Karoke Phone, pictured Aamir Khan singing old Hindi film songs aloud and prancing around in an apartment. It was masterminded by the creative agency, Cheil Worldwide, and ended wit the...
11 tags
Why Japanese Phones Are Not Global?
Japanese are ahead of their times in the kind of phones and mobile services they launch and have been using 4G for sometime. They have the sleekest features ranging from internet browsing and e-wallets to pedometers! However, the Japanese phone makers Panasonic, NEC and are not globally popular, unlike LG and Samsung from Korea. One might only wonder, why so?
The Japanese phone industry is a good...
8 tags
Neo-Cultural Custodians
Media for its own reasons has a fascination with festivals, especially cultural ones. Diwali, Onam, X’mas, Id - the fanfare begins a few weeks/months before the due date and offerings range from ”50% off sale” to “attractive gifts/lucky dips”. If there is not one cultural festival in a month, they create one or borrow from the international ones - fathers day, mothers...
1 tag
“The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can...”
– Thomas Carlyle, essayist and historian (1795-1881)