Cannot ask for a bigger joke while MBA students around India are enjoying world class salaries. Good but I envy them!!!!!!!!!
|W|P|114542689531068922|W|P|Good Joke 'MBA'ates|W|P|rajesh.segu@gmail.comAnytime had a chance of peeping into a girls hostel. I did, at the Saravathi Girls Hostel's Night, IIT Chennai on 13th of this month. Started from office at around 6pm, dreaming like the normal boys, went quick to take part in the mega event around [atleast for us ]. Reached there in 20min on cycles, hope you have assumed how fast we must have cycled. Nearing the hostel we could see all the colors of life floating here and there. My eyes where fighting to get the glimpse of each and every beauty around. We had nice time while our friends took some more time to finish their last adjustments. At last they made it but they directed us first to the dinner explaining how difficult its to cope witht he queue's if we are late. Had nice dinner with all our gang out there enjoying sattire's and sarcastic jokes but never forgetting our intentions[sight seeing].
Later we reached the dreamt heavan, hey nothing serious, its just the ladies hostel. Unusually, this time we entered through the main entrance. Everywhere everything was beautiful and I could see all open spaces while everything seemed big big big [has only one meaning guys]. We had to walk to the top floor to reach our friend's rooms. Each room was similar to each another, this was enough for us to take chances with other rooms, but anyway we were good enough. Had long chats bullying everyone around, dont worry everyone had their chances , and we watched the next generation movies of our great hero 'Ballayya' which is worth a new blog post.
Soon, we heard music all around us, and learned that its Disco at the ground floor. We stayed there for some time but could not anymore resist those remix's and screams echo-ing every corner of the hostel. Went ahead running for the Disco and couldn't believe the effects and number people at the disco. We got started with small shakes and steps but as the fever went on we went real crazy. Slowly, dance became a reflex for every beat of music. Some had good time with all that touchings, dashs, mis hits,..........................with other cuties , dont take this serious, it just happened. We retired at one point on reaching saturation with our energy levels. We had to have some cool drinks to gear back our energy levels to reach home. The whole week, recalling every moment, our mood was lingering and shouting 'Its the time to Disco......................'.
BarCamp, Chennai - A Technology Un-Conference
[ April 8 & 9th ]
Day 1:
I started with charles to Day One of BarCamp, Chennai at Anna University a bit early to make ourselves comfortable. We had no idea of the 'Ramanujam Center' but somehow figured it out after some short queries here and there. As soon as we reached there we had our BarCamp ID cards self signatured while we had short introduction with the little organizers [they were students]. Unusually all the front rows were full and we had to go to the top last row to learn that there was internet connection missing. We anyway took out our laptops to start live offline blogging. Soon, Kriba Shankar of Sulekha.com kick started the un-conference. Then the presentations went on like breeze.
VoiceSnap - Ganesh
Did you ever feel that you have been detached. Here is Voice Snap for you. Its an voice messaging system which helps you record voices online and store to retrive it anytime you it. Its an offline podcast which helps people recall memories just by listening to their loved ones. They could also play a major role in multilingual customer feedback as well as cell phones. Sounds intereting right!!! Go check out www.voicesnap.com for more use-cases, featues and complete story. But, sorry guys, its applet for now. But good news is they have different versions for mobile's, hand held, computers as well as for the web. Thanks for that wonderful presentation Ganesh.
MyToday - Vinu
Vinu presented MyToday.com, which was a lovely idea. It all dealt with citizen journlism and importance of personalized daily's for people to share what they think is important. Yes, you can start you own daily and distribute them to your interested friends and foes. I thought that was a great idea , as it sounded great. He insisted on a service like Craiglist + Wiki + Blog for indian community. But MyToday has just got started and it has a long long way to catch up the big guns. All the best Vinu, I could take back some inspiration from this very good idea.
Project Infranet - Vijay
Think big was the name of the game with Vijay. A successful young software professional from canada has stepped out to think the impossible. Project Infranet was all about providing Unique ID to every citizen residing in India , ya, you guessed it right, its like the SSN number available for the Americans. His presention meant that this project would do good to the people of India and could solve many existing socio-economic problems. The idea remains wonderful but he had plans to team with the government of India to setup infrastructure for this. If it was a compulsion I would believe in the private sector ot the public sector holding my private data. I doubt if there was a threat to privacy. Some how, leaving my gut feeling, I wish him all the best.
Taazza - Arjun Ram
Taazza by itself means 'freshness'. Taazza has bought in freshness in organizing news from all around India. I would call them News Organizers than a News Site. Spell Bound! Yes, they are aggregators of news feeds from more than a hundred credible sources and organizing them into proper channels. [ Promise me you keep this a secret ! The crux and strength of the application soley has been the algorithm that categorizes the aggregating news into proper channels]. Their integration with Google Maps and Flickr Images would be the most innovative idea that could make them the best news aggregator around.
File Tracker - Vasu
File Tracker, as the word goes, is a device that helps organizations track files across the office space. The concept included an specially made file with a strip of chip inserted with an unique id and all the files needs to be placed on a specially made file container that helps in tracking the position of the file. According to Vasu, he is ready to opensource the technology and help people who would like to setup industries around this idea. Nice idea, but RFID could have solved the problem better.
Art of Web 2.0 - Narian , TracBac
Narian, the founder of TracBac, gave a presentation on Web2.0 and its importance in the future of software. Some important points include:
Web2.0 --> Interactive Web or Live Web or Semantic Web or Energy Web
Versioning is dead .........Software as Service................. Web2.0
Browser - the door to all service , even to your world.
Web as a Platform and Harnessing Collective Intelligence: Wikipedia and Technorati [Blog - personal popularity pattern] [Technorati vs Google]
People as a center - Web2.0 - Democratic Internet is real
Life is Beta today on Internet
User Interface: HCI - Flex, Ajax, flash+ajax
NPL Programing Language - Suman
Suman a Programming Language enthusiast has found his way into Data Visualization. He has come up with a new language named "NPL" which has syntax of Lisp and semantics of Python. The presentation was interesting at first but took it an extreme of implementation that made people boring. He started with an example of the difference in the feel of 'Reading a Novel' and 'Seeing a Film made out of that Novel'. NPL dealt with visualizing your program for better understanding and debugging. Sad part was it needed a learning curve of a new programming language and good part is that it can be interfaced into Eclipse intelligently to get the best of it. Great Idea but wrong audiance. Anyway, all the best Suman.
Blog$$$$$$$$ - Amith
Importance of Blogs and How to make money using Blogs was the main agenda of the presentation. It had more sound of Adsense! Interested go check out Blogger and Adsense for the complete picture.
Zoho - Charles
Zoho had quite interesting products. Charles presented about Zoho Creator an online database as well as online application builder. Audiance had good response and were very much interested in the whole suite of products. For more information go check out www.zoho.com
xDesign - Muthu
Muthu, a well known user interface designer , from SUN gave a breif about the principles of Design aspects.
User Interface. Principles and Process involved in UI design.
Mental Model................ and not the details are important.
Reduce the gap between developers Implementation Model and Mental model of user.
Recognization vs Recall
Preference vs performance
Usability vs Flexibility
80/20 Rule
Visibility fo System status
Golden Ration: 1.618
Day 2
MicroSoft ------ Your Potential , Our Passion - MS Office 12 -- MS Students Partner
MS Student Partners from various colleges got togather to give us the taste of MS Office 12. The presentation was neat and the demo went on well. Believe me, the audiance had real fun commenting the great MS products like Vista and Office 2007. But the students very composed during all their presentation. The Office 12 UI had very major revamp with lots of usablity enhancements with the computer novice's in mind. Lots of business process introduced to make collaboration lot more easier. But anyway have ot wait for one more year for the official release.
MSync: ------ Aswin , Jappier Eng. College
MSync, just in case you did not understand, means Mobile Sync which enables sync between mobile's and email services. This asp.net hosted service collects all the mails from your mail services like Yahoo, GMail,etc and store them in their servers to give the user the full fledged one console for all your mails. Young kids with big dreams. I wish all of them a good time ahead.
MindCanvas ---------- Amith Rajan
Research Tool for Designers
Mashup of - Online surveys, online games, data driven statistical analysis
Making filling forms more interesting . This is something which is really giving thought to new innovation
Flash is predominenetly used.
Survivors Checklist of Building World Class web Products:
1. Design is the Differentiator
Process of Collecting Data is the pleasure of Data
Reports are real amazing . Visualizations: Tag Cloud, Big to Small
2. The UI is the Software
3. Users are Distracted
Information Overloading
4. Users are empowered
User generated content supports web2.0
Consumers are the king , marketing pitch's doesnt work out .
5. The requirement Doc is dead
6. Design Changes
7. Bring Your own Money
8. K.I.S.S. Keep in Sharp and Sample
9. Early Stage Health Check ups
Prevention is better than cure
10. Designers + Engineers must co-exsist
11. Welcome the Devil's Advocate
12. Expect the Unexpected - Murphy's Law
13. Execution is all that matters
PodBazzar ------------------ Ram Kumar
Ram Kumar , founder of PodBazzar, joined us in a skype conference. He gave us a good insight about PodBazzar a market place for PodCast's on the internet. He took us through his story of setting up this nice company as well us gave us a good insight on the technological aspects. Extending this further with CastMatrix which adds dynamic ads into the podcasts which would be an unique dynamic voice advertising around. They sound world class and I assume they have a long way to walk.
Design and the Web - Adel
Importance of Design:
a. Emotional Factor
b. Stickiness
c. Behavioural
d. Reflective
Interfaces, Colorpallettes, Typography
Less is more!
The Tipping Point -------------------------------- Book, try to find and read it yar.
Bloggers evangilize the products
So, these were some of the presentations I followed and looked very interesting. Guys, sorry, if I had missed your valuable presentation. Time is always limited and everyone has to accept it anyway. Thank you guys.
|W|P|114537623674846041|W|P|BarCamp, Chennai|W|P|rajesh.segu@gmail.comIf you are reading this you must surely be crazy about enterprenuership. So here is the list of questions, I suppose, you need to answear to get started for VC Funding.
1. Do you really need money?
2. Have you got a business plan laid out on paper?
3. Are you ready with the Executive Summary and the Pitch?
4. Are you clear with the strategy, revenue, profit projects for the next few years?
5. Are you bringing a solution to a pain or bridging the gap or making it good?
If you are ready with all these questions, you might start sharing them with me ;-)
All the Best guys!
|W|P|114458073532467852|W|P|Want a VC Funding?|W|P|rajesh.segu@gmail.comNews at its best means well organized. Today I could really name a hand full of news services that churn out news every second organized well by time, region and field of news. Believe me, each news site has its own way of organizing things just next to junk. News, the most wanted information for people has never lived up to its standards when it comes to organizing its data to target various sects of people. Are you still worried about finding organized news? Here is Taazza.com for you.
Taazza by itself means 'freshness'. Taazza has bought in freshness in organizing news from all around India. I would call them News Organizers than a News Site. Spell Bound! Yes, they are aggregators of news feeds from more than a hundred credible sources and organizing them into proper channels. [ Promise me you keep this a secret ! The crux and strength of the application soley has been the algorithm that categorizes the aggregating news into proper channels].
So guys, go read the news, at Taazza.com , the way you like or news the way you want or news of a particular region or news for a context and many other ways. I have seen their aplha demo and believe me their navigation and user interface are superior to any other Indian news site to my knowledge. Their integration with Google Maps and Flickr Images would be the most innovative idea that could make them the best news aggregator around.
Bad news as of today is that they are still in private alpha and the Good news is that they would be anytime out next 4 weeks.
My personal caption for Taazza.com would be 'Fresh' NEWS your way!
|W|P|114456344117695813|W|P|Taazza.com - 'fresh' news your way|W|P|rajesh.segu@gmail.com
|W|P|The following website already does the news aggregation, that Taazza is trying to do.http://www.desicrossroads.com/
|W|P|Thanks for that wonderful site!But they categorize news according to region [google maps, flickr integration] and people. I like their UI as well as their navigation.
Prakash|W|P|http://indiagram.com/First social bookmarking site for Indian community.
Leader can never remain leader forever. Here is a business case-study of Britannica (Encyclopedia).
The market leader was Britannica - with sales of approximately $650 Million, they were considered the gold standard of the encyclopedia market containing “over 44 million words” written by scholars and “more than 80 Nobel laureates”. World Book Encyclopedia was firmly ensconced in second place. Both Britannica and World Book sold hundreds of thousands of encyclopedia sets a year for over $1,000.
However, in 1993, the industry was permanently changed. That year Microsoft launched Encarta for $99. Encarta was initially nothing more than the poorly regarded Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia repackaged on a CD – but Microsoft recognized that changes in technology and production costs allowed them shift the competitive landscape. By 1996 Britannica’s sales had dropped to $325 million - about half their 1991 levels – and Britannica had laid off its famed door-to-door sales staff. And by 1996 the encyclopedia market had shrunk to less than $600M. In that year, Encarta’s US sales were estimated at $100M.
So in just three years, leveraging a disruptive technology (CD-ROM), cost infrastructure (licensed content versus in-house editorial teams), distribution model (retail in computer stores versus a field sales force) and pricing model ($99 versus $1000), the encyclopedia market was cut in half. More than half a billion dollars disappeared from the market. Microsoft turned something that Britannica considered an asset (a door-to-door salesforce) into a liability. While Microsoft made $100M it shrunk the market by over $600M. For every dollar of revenue Microsoft made, it took away six dollars of revenue from their competitors. Every dollar of Microsoft’s gain caused an asymmetrical amount of pain in the marketplace. They made money by shrinking the market.
[It is also interesting to note how distruptive business models have continued to impact the encyclopedia market - anyone care to guess what Google and Wikipedia have done to Encarta sales in the last few years?]
Courtesy: Shrink a Market
So, start thinking big, start executing and you will surely end up big.
Leader is not forever, you can be one!!!!!!!!
|W|P|114432658064668123|W|P|Leader - does not mean forever|W|P|rajesh.segu@gmail.comBarCamp is around the corner in Chennai. Its happening on April 8/9th with a big bang at Anna Univerisity Chennai. I am really excited to be a part of that un-conference where innovation and socialize is the name of the game. Hope this weekend will really be interesting..............
|W|P|114429783092968012|W|P|BarCamp WeekEnd.......|W|P|rajesh.segu@gmail.com
Web 2.0 wave has finally reached India in the form of Bar Camp. Its gaining momentum by spreading its wings in all the possible major cities in India. This time Chennai is ready to host this mega event at Anna University on April 8th and 9th this year.
BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.It focuses on Web 2.0, Social Media and Next Generation Internet.
In general, latest technologies lags time to find its trace in India. Technologies enter this country after long cycles of proven history. Slowly things get adopted and we are always behind. This was true some years ago and today the story is entirely different.
Web 2.0 has found its traces very early in India in the form of Zoho, Taaza, 360in , ........ . If somebody wondering about Web 2.0 , it simply means "For the People, By the People and To the People", thus making web more powerful than ever. With this advent, entrepreneurs have grown largely in number bringing about a new ecosystem into the Indian IT industry. Who could guess which can become the next Google/ MS / Yahoo...
Hope BarCamp would become to medium for this ecosystem in India brining about transparency in innovation , ideas, technologies and community. I wish them "ALL THE BEST".
I did my part in spreading this word for a bright IT tomorrow, now you have your part left.
|W|P|114424725236764657|W|P|Bar Camp - Chennai is around the corner|W|P|rajesh.segu@gmail.com
Everyone talking about Web 2.0 around the world , so here's Browser 2.0 for you. More extensions than the browser area has become the new wave. But how many would use so many of them, surely he must be User 2.0 expecting and managing more.
So, If you find any xxxx 2.0 just let me know.
|W|P|114424404439486978|W|P|Browser 2.0|W|P|rajesh.segu@gmail.com