About 8 years ago, I blogged about how our generation has disappointed the science fiction writers by not making much progress in the area of Space Travel - something considered achievable by them by the 21st century. Space however is an area where we may not have matched fictional expectations in any form. We have an international space station in place but that I believe is a far cry from a space city and the days of Star Trek do not seem close enough. Time has come, when we will redeem our honour soon.  Space hasn't progressed much in the past few decades because it has remained, until now, a high expense, high government (funded and) controlled industry; much like Telecom sector in India until 2000s and Banking until 90s. Also, entry barriers in terms of cost and regulation made experimentation difficult, which in turn made risk taking difficult. Less risk taking meant less chance of disproportionate reward, lesser private sector involvement resulting ultimately into les

Image Credits by Flickr user  urbaneapts I recently went to the showroom of ' Sleek ' - a modular kitchen furnishing company. I and my wife were discussing the various options for fitments to be bought when we came to the point of discussing the Chimney. Both me and my wife were sold out on buying a Chimney, but the salesperson asked us if we were non-vegetarian and whether our apartment had a window in front of the stove - the answer to the former being no and the latter being yes. To my surprise, the salesperson suggested we do not buy the Chimney because we will have little use for it. The salesperson knew she was reducing the ticket size of her sale by almost 10% and this was not a discount to make the sale, the discount was to come after this. The experience reminded me of how we work in consulting - there are times when we tell our clients that they are not ready for a particular initiative or a new software implementation, even though these initiatives would fetch

Image Credits: Flickr user vernieman An eminent programmer was referring to one of the most typical challenge the Media today faces - how to find out the most influential people on Social Media? Who is more influential on twitter - Barkha Dutt or Amitabh Bacchan? Who is more influential on Instagram, on Facebook? Is the number of followers the only metric which matters? What about the quality of content? What about the quality of followers / fans? How do we measure this "quality"? And if we can measure these individual factors - what is the algorithm to combine these to create a common metric, the rating which will be used to rank people based on their influentialness on social networks. Some startups have attempted to solve this puzzle - just like this eminent programmer is also trying. Klout and some similar services look like they have cracked the nut, but Klout gives a pretty high level percentage score - so its quite possible that two people have exactly the same

Photo Credits: Flickr user Lord Jim Humans are cognitive beings, we instinctively get attracted to actions which involve thinking, perception and interaction with others. And the  crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals [Michael Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll (2005),  Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition ]. Hence, as I argued in the first part of this post  - given a chance, any human will prefer talking and interacting with others, even if it means talking or texting on the phone while driving! Making laws declaring mobile phone usage illegal is probably the easiest but the most difficult to implement solution to this problem. The solution lies in using technology to circumvent the problem. Humans today do not engage in several non-productive tasks such as those involving physical labou

Photo Credits: Flickr user  OregonDOT Short Answer: Yes . Long Answer - read below . Depending upon which source you trust [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ] - anything between 88 to 30 percent of people admit to using mobile phones (talking, texting and using apps) while driving. Several cars (even those not so pricey) available now integrate your mobile phone with the car stereo systems acknowledging that usage of mobile phone while driving is not just acceptable but also to be encouraged and aided with technology. Given these stats, is it really worth having laws which prohibit mobile phone usage while driving? These laws are similar to the sermons of the 16th century Church which decreed the Copernicus system of astronomy to be false. I remember one of my maternal grandfathers telling me that is mother never allowed him to ride a moped or a scooter in his youth because she was afraid of accidents. (Ironically, he got injured on the road was when someone else hit him while he was walki

Image Credits flickr user chippenziedeutch "A Director of Human Resources for a federal agency told me I was looking at the (Best Places to Work for) lists all wrong. 'I think they're great!' he said. Just not for employees. I was looking at the wrong consumers." Traditional companies (like the government), offer solid benefits like a great retirement plan - ReadWrite.com That quote above is so true. The last 2 decades of rapid economic growth across the globe, the coming and going of recessions and rallies has created a lopsided environment about the importance of 'work' (and its derivatives 'job satisfaction', 'learning', 'growth' etc.) in an employment relationship. Prior to the 90s, when the old economy jobs ruled, trade unions (and even officer unions) controlled what went into employment contracts - the important things were job security, retirement benefits, fixed work hours etc. Today, most workplace surveys and i

How did I spend my Sunday afternoon? Well .. (aside from being in front of my laptop) - listening to songs on Gaana.com/Mirchi Internet Radio Channel - but through my home theater. Now why would I listed to Radio on the internet through the home theater when the home theater itself has an option of listening to public radio directly. The reasons are many: Public radio does not always suit my mood on weekends - on internet radio I have a choice to listen to songs which I am in mood for: Meethi Mirchi if I am in for latest hits, Puraani Jeans if I am in mood for old classics, Mirchi Edge if I am in mood for offbeat and Club Mirchi for dance numbers (think Saturday Night) [Ref:  http://gaana.com/#!/radiostations ] Internet Radio offers far superior quality - as good as listening to MP3 on my iPod Listening to radio is far better / hassle free than playing songs from your own playlist. You don't have to choose each song you want to listen but just choose either an pre-existing pla

From flickr by webtreats My first foray into Social Media was by starting this blog way back in 2004, a time when many of celebrated bloggers of India (such as Siddin Vadukut ) also started blogging. Having been the editor of my school magazine and a geek during my engineering, Blogging came naturally to me as a mix of writing and technology. My exposure to Social Media has only grown since then, Orkut – later Facebook, Twitter and even Foursquare are my regular haunts now. Having been an early adopter myself, I often wonder that today when most people in my generation use Facebook (and Twitter), what sets early adopters apart. Upon pondering I discovered that for most regular users of Social Media, it’s a way to stay in touch with people whom they know in real life but do not get a chance to meet - cousins, present and past colleagues, schoolmates, batchmates from grad school etc. However, those who are early adopters live in two separate worlds. They in addition to ‘real life

Flickr Image by  Sam Steiner Continued from  Facebook and Google are Apple and Microsoft of post-Web Tech rivalry In the last tussle between Windows and Mac - Windows won with a landslide majority - but there were to many variables. Apple got lost in its focus for a decade (after its visionary founder Steve Jobs was summarily expelled by the board from the company), which helped Microsoft evangelize developers to its platform. Piracy was rampant, making Windows one of the most pirated and hence most used software. Microsoft's dominance allowed it to "buy out" other markets like the initial browser market. Apple's hardware was overpriced due to its reluctance to adopt commodity hardware (ref: Intel processors). But the current tussle is nothing like the previous one. The initial success of Facebook has created pressure on Google to abandon the "open" philosophy so that now it is linking most other Google properties with its competitor social ne

The Tech Geek world is quite dry and mundane to the outsider but for insiders this is filled with philosophical nuances and comparisons. In the recent years, Apple has become the cool company thanks to the iPod and iPad while Microsoft has lulled thanks to the development hell most of its products are going through. However, reverse to the 80s and early 90s - Apple and Microsoft were two icons of the Tech world competing with each other and yet not directly competing with each other thanks to the divergent philosophies adopted by them. Apple believed (and still believes) in tight integration between Hardware & Software while Microsoft believes in decoupling Software from Hardware. Macintosh computers differ from competing Windows systems in that a single company is responsible for both the operating system and the hardware on which it runs. Windows computers are made by dozens of different manufacturers, and Microsoft cannot control either the minimum baseline of the hardw

Flickr photo by mohit_k For the past few days, I have been trying to analyze office situations - how people in authority (including myself at times) react, how subordinates react and how simple work situations often get complicated impacting personal lives of individuals. Of most interest is the matter of working on weekend. In the 24x7 corporate culture of today - weekends occupy a safe haven status. Infringement of time over weekends hence has most impact on the perception of work-life balance of people.* In my reading, work-life balance - especially that which requires people to work over weekends is more often a matter of personal egos than real importunity of work. Think of the many times you were forced to work on a weekend because you were tasked so much work on a Monday, with a targeted closure on a Friday, which you could not finish in 5 days time. And so, you had only two options (a) accept the blot of being 'incompetent' in front of your Boss (b) work over th

There is no doubt that Indian society has transformed in the past 2 decades and our cinema has transformed along with it - everything has changed. Indian movies are nowadays technically far superior, editing and conceptualization of sets etc are good, and finally story lines are far more mature (though many of them still continue to be copies of Hollywood counterparts). Nevertheless, Indian cinema continues to differentiate itself from Hollywood in that its essence is closely influenced by human relations, beliefs and metaphysical constructs (religion, love et.al.). The latest two movies I watched - Morya (in Marathi) and Kahani (Hindi)- reinforced my belief that Indian cinema is transforming itself while maintaining that differentiation with Hollywood. Morya portrays the rivalry between two chawls in Mumbai in organizing the local Ganesh pandal festival - illustrating how the festival which was conceptualized a public organization by Bal Gangadhar Tilak to unite people against

Edison's Menlo Park Lab; flickr photo by roger4336 In the whole din of work-life balance which surrounds the corporate world today, professionals - especially young professionals - often loose the sense of real achievement. We often get confused about what exactly does success and achievement mean - is rising faster in the corporate ladder success, or is it doing meaningful work, or even more fundamentally is it about doing work enough to earn you a good "life"? The MBAish answer would be - it depends - depends on the kind of person you are, the kind of goals that satisfy your internal compass, the kind of success that matters to you most, your value system etc. But this answer is as good as the fact that ' the total universe is still finite '! A professional's moral compass or measure of success depends on the very system in which they live - if your company's leaders spend their night thinking about business and treat anyone who does not as &#

While reading this article on RWW , I went to Mark Zuckerburg's Facebook profile and lo! I see all of my own contacts on that page as people who subscribed to Mark. What I was probably expecting to see on Mark's page was a list of his close friends, a few close facebook employees or industry veterans etc; not people whose status updates I anyway see on my Facebook stream every few hours.  It's true that seeing that some of my own Facebook friends follow Mark's stream means that I too would be tempted to follow Mark - in fact this is even more true if the page I was visiting for not a public figure like Mark but a mutual friend of a friend, whom I wouldn't follow / subscribe to otherwise. However, Facebook takes the concept of familiarity to a complete extreme. In fact, wherever I go on Facebook, my own network follows me closely. For example, I go to a new Facebook page through someone's recommendation appearing on my FB Stream, it is usually the s

Couple of weekend's ago I visited Lavasa  - build about 50 kms away from Pune in the Sahyadri range of hills; its a good attempt to create a Dalhousie or Mussourie equivalent for Western India. While the weather conditions in Western India do not give you the luxury of creating a 'cool' hill station - it sure isn't a bad place to spend a weekend lounging and relaxing. However, as I read through some pamphlets which we got during our trip and researched a little more on its concept - I was intrigued by the tall statement made by Lavasa Corporation which claims that "Lavasa is envisioned to be a more liveable city of the future where residents can live, work, learn and play in harmony with nature ". While I could fathom the live, learn and play - the 'work' aspect didn't quite convince me. My wife suggested that the 'work' aspect probably relates to the workers in hotels, resorsts, hospitals and schools located in Lavasa; but when I dug

Flickr Image courtesy Mr. Conguito How many of you know that the close buttons don’t close the elevator doors in most elevators built in the United States or that buttons below the signal at crosswalks "meant" for people to trigger the signal change are mostly all disabled! [ Source ] Well - I just realized that there are several actions we do which are also such "placebo" actions. One example is pressing a "Ctrl + Home" or "Ctrl+End" on a browser. Pressing the Control key makes sense only in either a Word Processing software like MS word or when you are typing inside a textarea (like composing a mail etc.) wherein pressing a "Home" key will take you to the beginning of the line you are typing in while pressing a "Ctrl+ Home" will take you to the beginning of the document / text. However, when we are browsing a webpage on a browser - there is absolutely no reason to press the Control key because either ways pressing &qu

Photo by Flickr user lrargerich  I am sure all of us are taught the virtues of practice in Childhood - most often "Practice Makes a man perfect" or familiar Kabir's doha: करत करत अभ्यास के, जड़मति होत सुजान   रसरी आवत जात ते, सिल पर पड़त निसान We are taught to rote the mathematical multiplication tables or to mug up nursery rhymes ... the list is endless. And we all HATE IT! Even as we grow up we start disdaining and condemning the method of rote which is perpetuated across the educational system. However, secretly we all know that we benefit somewhere from some of the rote we did. When you secretly calculate the percentage of your increment or the approximate EMI required to fund the next investment we remember our math tables. Yesterday, as I was watching Mtv Unplugged , I realized one more advantage of practicing any activity or art. As I watched the guitarist or the tabla player play their instrument so effortlessly and then experiment with it during the eve

Image Credit:  Kevin Dooley via flickr The Cloud is often considered an amalgamated progression of web2.0 (SaaS) and virtualization technologies(IaaS) - which it indeed is! However, the emergence of Cloud Computing also draws from a organizational shift in IT departments - from in-sourced to outsourced. What started in IT depts as routine maintenance outsourcing is now taking shape in form of the Cloud which promises to not just outsource routine operations but everything including financial management (move from  Capex to Opex ) of IT infrastructure owned by the company. As the organizational structure shifts from in-sourced IT to the Cloud - it impacts the role of the CIO, which has been a much talked about topic. However, what has not been talk about much is how the Cloud will impact the rest of the IT department and the roles of techies in it. To understand the impending metamorphosis - we need to understand the existing position of the IT department. Across organization

[Warning: Suited for techies and tech enthusiasts; others may find it boring] I was talking to one of the new joiners at our firm today - we were talking about a client using Sun's hardware for a project when he asked why Sun ran only Solaris and no other OS - I started to explain him that Solaris was actually a Unix variant when the conversation turned to free software, Linux etc. and generally into  the lineage of operating systems, the history of modern computing etc. During our brief chat I realized that for most of us post-90's generation, the seeming "excitement" times in computing were either the mid-90's when Linux and GNU/ FSF grew or it was even later when Web2.0, Software as a Service etc grew. But I think the most exciting times for the computing industry when the real "pirates" swarmed the industry was the period of 60s / 70s when the foundation of the personal computing world was being laid. The foundation of personal computing - unlik

I read through this awesome interview with Steve Jobs taken way back in 1995 before he created the second revolution of his life (iPod et al). While each section of the interview is breathtakingly awesome, I wanted to reiterate some gems specifically, hence quoting them here. For the whole interview transcript go to this URL  http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/sj1.html 1. ...a lot of people come to me and say "I want to be an entrepreneur". And I go "Oh that's great, what's your idea?". And they say "I don't have one yet". And I say " I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you're really passionate about because it's a lot of work ". I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I