The Innovation Edge - Vishy Poosala

Blog Move, beyond Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 06:21:00 +0000

http://vishypoosala.blogspot.com

When I started the Innovation Edge blog, I had a simple mission in mind: discuss everything about innovation and nothing else.

Well that was the plan..

In practice, I've been writing about everything from Innovation to Alertpedia toNoSql to Job Advice to Meditation Gyan. To capture this better, I've now moved all my articles to a blog named in all modesty after myself ;) at http://vishypoosala.blogspot.com

With this, the list of blogs I contribute to are just two:

Vishy Poosala's Blog on Innovation and Impact (can't really get too far from innovation, can we? :) )
Alertpedia Blog on all the new stuff happening with Alertpedia, the Wikipedia of Alerts

See you there!

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact.

Alertpedia - the Wikipedia of Alerts

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:36:00 +0000

[Reposting this from our blog on Alertpedia]

We started Alertpedia in 2005 with a single category of alerts: Earthquakes. We were tracking 4 websites to get the earthquake data.

Today, the list has grown to include a few Dozens more - from Social to News to Shopping, and it's growing every day. And we track over 10000 sites every day to send out alerts. The nice thing is, you get all these alerts in a Single Email per day, and you pay NOTHING for it!

Here's the list of alert categories as of today.

NEWS	SHOPPING & DEALS
Cricket, follow players, teams and tournamentset Amber Alerts Weather Alerts for your Area Headline News Alerts Health and Medical News Horoscope Recalls Earthquakes	Flipkart Price Tracking Craigslist House listings and real estate Amazon Airfares Deals, Coupons, Daily Free Stuff
SOCIAL NETWORKS & BLOGS	FUN STUFF
Twitter Pinterest Facebook Tumblr Blogger / Blogspot Wordpress	Bollywood Movie News and Reviews Local Events Hollywood New Movies and Reviews Youtube Flickr photo alerts DVD releases
LEARN & EARN	WHAT INDIA LOVES
Jobs of your choice in your area Khan Academy, New courses	Cricket Flipkart Bollywood

And dozens more to come :)

Thanks, Team AP

50000 things people track on the web

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:58:00 +0000

Do you know what people like to get alerted about? If you guessed Earthquakes in Bay Area and Allergies on the East Coast, you're in for a surprise.
And, where do most people care to track the web? Silicon Valley? Nope. It's Auburn! OK, one should not derive drastic conclusions from a mere 50K random data points, but let's drop our statistician hats a bit and have some data fun, shall we?

I'm sharing some insights from a sample of 50000 alerts people have set up on Alertpedia.com. Alertpedia has been providing free email alerts since 2005 on stuff ranging from Craigslist & Amazon to Jobs & Houses to Earthquakes & Local Concerts. The idea is simple: you specify what you want to be alerted about (e.g., "email me when a Bike goes on sale in Madison, WI on Craigslist; or a when big quake happens in California") and forget about it. Alertpedia tracks 1000s of websites on your behalf and only emails you when that stuff happens.

So here are some quick graphics on the kind of stuff people like to track on the web.

What Categories do people set up alerts on?

The winner is - Local-Forsale, which is essentially stuff posted on Craigslist for sale. The world loves to track Craigslist! Some of the categories like Amazon alerts are very new, so I expect them to pick up steam over time.

What key words do people track the most across the categories?

Gimme Free! Website jobs anyone? Honda and Toyoto still rule the roads! And Obama beats Sharepoint!

And where?

Surprise, Auburn, Alabama rules! Looking at the time series of alerts from there, I realized a nice viral effect - one person sets up a few alerts, then a few join the next day, and so on. Are people more social in Auburn?

So what does a data scientist want?

There's no end to what a data miner can dig out of this data.. Drill down the data on time, location, category, filter, etc.. and correlate it with what's happening in the world at that time (Quake in Japan, and the number of Quake alerts go up). This is great stuff! Of course Google Search and Alerts have a billion times more data, but not this sort of categorized and semantically rich alerts!

Gotta love data! Thank you Alertpedia and all the users for using it.

Want to experience the future web? Set up some custom alerts on Alertpedia:, let it track the web for you, so you can have more time for the "real world"! :)

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Creating an Innovation Culture (3/3): The Ritual

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 06:13:00 +0000

This is the last part in the 3-part series on Creating an Innovation Culture in your company. The first part talked about goal-driven, pervasive innovation culture. To create it, you - as a leader in the company or team - need to first set the right Stage. In this last part, you will see the Ritual to keep the innovation beat going.

Keeping the Innovation Beat Going

A garden doesn't happen with just the soil and sunlight. You also need to plant seeds, water the plants, remove the weeds, harvest the fruits, and repeat the process. Innovation in your company needs a similar ritual to keep the ideas coming. You can go through the following exercise every 6 to 12 months. Tweak it to fit your environment.

Step 1: Opening Act

Choose a specific target or two, driven by business needs

Lower energy opex by 20%
Reduce call center costs

Define metrics that track progress towards that goal and share them everywhere

Power bill per month, for each data center
Number of calls to call center in a day, Average hold time

Announce the goal and incentives

$1000 for top-10 ideas having the most impact on power bill
CEO award for the most innovative idea to reduce customer calls

Step 2: Action

Regularly meet with small employee groups to brainstorm and listen

Townhalls, team meetings, Friday innovation sessions
You can use the brainstorming and lateral thinking techniques from my recipe for innovation and some thoughts on next generation innovation

Ask people to openly share ideas and seek collaborators

Create an internal social networking platform for discussing ideas
Think Jive, Facebook + Wiki, not Sharepoint

Provide resources to pilot promising ideas & scale them

Identify the data center where some of the ideas can be quickly tried out with least impact to business

Track the ideas and progress on the portfolio dashboard

Simple Excel sheet showing idea, team, potential, progress

51% into the program, conduct an event where the Top 10 ideas are presented to the company

Use this opportunity to also seek collaborators for implementation

Step 3: The Grand Finale

Conduct a public event to recognize the winning ideas

Share the current and projected progress towards the business goal

Inform how these ideas will be taken forward for full scale implementation

Tiger teams, business units, innovator role, what you created as the Stage

Launch the next cycle with new goals

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Creating an Innovation Culture (2/3): The Stage

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 09:34:00 +0000

Part 2/3 on Creating an Innovation Culture. Part 1 talked about goal-driven, pervasive innovation culture. To create it, you - as a leader in the company or team - need to first set up the right Stage. Part 3 covers the Ritual to keep the innovation beat going towards specific goals.

The Checklist for Take-off

Check if you have the following items in your company. Start creating what's missing. Southwest Airlines has every one of these and they have not had a loss since 1971 (financial, accidental, or lay-offs) and have been the best performing US Airline company! Enuff reason I think to learn from them.

1.Define the WHATs and WHYs

Define business goals & metrics

Because we want innovation to be focused on results that matter
Metrics should be broken down from the business goals (e.g., profitability, affordable service) all the way down to EVERY Employee in a way that they can track and influence their own metrics
e.g., our airline company is profitable when the average luggage loading time is less than 10min. A luggage loader needs to see how his job affects the company in a quantifiable way.

Create an incentive scheme (financial, recognition, intrinsic)

But it's not all about incentives. Once money stops being an issue, the real drivers for people to innovate are Autonomy, ability to Master a skill, and a Sense of Purpose for their work (youtube video).
Also discussed this on "What motivates creative people?"

Form an innovation board

With top management and known innovators in the company
Why? To communicate, evaluate, motivate, maintain focus, help execute

Guarantee CEO commitment

This is the Killer. When things are tough, the first thing to kill are risky ventures like innovation. But those are precisely the times where innovation is needed the most and people innovate the best.
So, set aside some money - away from your P&L statement - just for innovation and DON'T TOUCH IT!

2.Implement The HOWs

Create a forum where users can share ideas and collaborate

Can be as fancy as the spigit tool with nice gaming elements
Or, as simple as a Jive-like platform for employees to engage with each other
Depends on how much "push" your employees need to start innovating: leave them in a big room (jive) or hand-hold them through an innovation staircase (spigit)
Check out an evaluation of gaming platforms for innovation

Make it easy for people to track progress towards specifc, drilled-down business targets

Display on laptops, at the gym, at the cafeteria. Make it feel like a NASA mission!

Set up physical and online forums where employees, partners, customers, leaders interact

Innovation happens on the interconnect - when people talk and new knowledge flows
These are also opportunities for different groups to collaborate (developers helping inventors)

Create sessions and material on business drivers, innovative thinking

Get Edward de Bono-type sessions, or
Or, If you can't afford him, check out my recipe for innovation

Make a plan for idea selection, piloting, and scaling

Much of this depends on the specific goals you set for a certain round of innovation ritual
This forms the crux of the Ritual we will look at in Part 3
Create an Incubator where the ideas can be protected from the rest of the company, at least for piloting and hopefully for 1-2 years

3. Communicate and create an exciting buzz

The power of buzz marketing, a passionate leader, and energetic role model innovators is immense.
Don't just send out newsletters and intranet articles. Have Soapbox sessions where your employees are hearing it straight from the leadership team

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Creating an Innovation Culture (1/3): The Southwest Way

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:27:00 +0000

Part 1 of 3 on creating an effective innovation culture inside companies and teams. This part gives the background for what kind of innovation culture we're going after. The other two parts talk about the innovation environment to set up and the idea exercise to follow to implement that culture. No MBA mumbo jumbo and preaching. We will look at some specific steps to take for thriving in times of change.

What's your company's inner animal like?

Does your company remind you of any of these lovely creatures?

Brontosaurus: Had a great past but struggling to grow in the changing world (whether because of own faults, Euro crisis, or cut-throat competition from Asia)
Sitting Duck: A start-up or a young company, has been doing well in its niche, but not prepared to survive and grow in a changing landscape
Sheep: Employees are too jaded or scared to suggest how to improve the company - typically found nestling inside a Brontosaurus herd
Chameleon: Southwest Airlines, -insert your favorite example-. The organization thrives on innovation. You don't need this article, but you can tell us how you do it!

If your company is one of the first three, then this blog is definitely for you. You need to start innovating, or you might be following that Bronto stuck in a pit munching on a Blackberry.
Btw, "you" = All of us working at companies. It IS meant to be taken personally.

What kind of innovation culture do you need?

One where every employee is motivated to innovate towards a shared mission.

If you don't ask the person connecting wires in your data center to think, you might miss an energy-saving opportunity there, right? The knowledge of problems and solutions is spread throughout the organization. Don't expect an offsite with a small group of "thinkers" to innovate your company out of crisis. This has to be a universal and continuous process. A corporate culture thing.

Given the shrinking resources and time-to-react, you also need to align much of the innovation towards specific business goals. This is more like Southwest Airlines innovating towards affordable travel, and less of the open-ended research at Bell Labs / Xerox PARC where 1000 disruptive ideas bloom. There's a place for both, but right now we're focusing on a more focused and more urgent goal-driven innovation.

How do you create such a culture?

Interestingly, creating an innovation culture in a company is not like making people build the bridge over Kwai. In fact, it's the most natural thing for humans to want to do - improve things around them in a creative way to evolve, survive, and have fun. The hard part is allowing people to be natural!

IMO you need to orchestrate two things:

Stage: Create an environment where people are allowed to behave like natural born thinkers, are rewarded, and have the basic tools for innovating.
Ritual: Keep the innovation beat going at the right pitch and in the right harmony through some periodic practices (yes, I finally used a music metaphor, all those guitar lessons paid off!). In particular, have specific goals identified for each session of the ritual which may last a few months

It's just like gardening. First, prepare the soil and sunlight conditions, then plant the seeds and water them regularly. The seeds naturally WANT to burst open and grow into fruit-producing trees, but they won't do it if you keep munching on them prematurely or spread them on the road.

In the next article, we will see how to create the Stage. If you want to discuss it in your team's unique context, you can email me at vpoosala AT gmail DOT com. I'm happy to help and learn!

Innovation is not Invention

Much of this spiel comes from my experience at Bell Labs, helping with transforming a service provider company, and reading stuff like this:

Southwest Airlines, the poster child for a pervasive, goal-driven innovation culture. Next time you're flying, please read this book on going NUTS!
Summary of The Southwest Way, by Jody Gittell
St. Peter Drucker: Innovation and Entrepreneurship, The Essential Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century
HBR on innovation's enemies
Making Innovation Work by Davila et al.

I'm not creating anything original here, but I'm combining known stuff in a hopefully more useable way. Now that's innovation too, esp. if it's worth paying for :-)

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Next generation innovation - The power of stillness

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 12:33:00 +0000

Do you sometimes wonder what innovations in the future will look like? What will the world need beyond the iPad and all-electric cars? How we will come up with ideas?

I do too.. And I don't have the answers. But I have a take on it. Here it is. A verbatim rambling from a speech I gave at a recent TiE conference in Bangalore. (Thanks to Management Next for sharing it back with me!)

Exploiting Platforms: Most of the innovative product & services you see these days come by exploiting an existing platform. This is not going to change.You leverage the platform and you add that extra thing that can be worth a lot of money. So my belief about the future of innovation, not just in the online space but also in other spaces, will depend on how you make use of and exploit huge platforms and focus on the incremental value that you bring and leverage the entire strength of the platform.Conversely, if you have a cool product today, see how you can make it into a platform where others can innovate. Whether it is software or a car.

Stop Consuming, Start Producing: We have become very good consumers of information. But new innovations don’t come if you are always in the consumption mode. Just look at the time we spend staring into our phones and tablets, consuming tweets, status updates, breaking news, all the time. At some point you got to stop and say ‘enough of this information, you have got to internalize, let me think and come up with something new.’ I know that this sounds backwards, but if you have kids, please get them a laptop of PC, not just a cool iPad. Why? Because you need such an environment to become a Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Wozniak. Not just a pretty screen where I can consume Facebook and play Angry Birds.

Power of Stillness: A lot of people ask me how we come up with new ideas at Bell Labs. Ideas often come out of brainstorming or with gathering lots of information and churning it away or using lateral thinking techniques. The good old ways of the past. They all work. But, there's a new way. It is what India has been preaching for centuries - telling people how to slow down. Stop talking, stop reading, calm down, sit and think that's how big ideas are going to come.Most brilliant ideas in the world have come by contemplating not just by constantly consuming and communicating. I think people will discover there is power in stillness. Steve Jobs was a huge believer in meditation. Taking time off to sit quietly and tapping into our creativity is very important.

Sustainability is not just a good thing to have: What we innovated before were things that worked great and looked reasonably good. All that we cared about was functionality and price, until iPhone came and people were suddenly willing to pay a lot more for design. So what's going to be the driver in the future? It's not just about the utility, price, or beauty of it. It is also important to have sustainability - are you innovating for a world where people don't want to see cars and cell towers in their cities?

Democratization: If I'm an expert in designing electric cars (note: this talk followed another by the founder of Reva, Electric Cars), I don't need to be at a university teaching, I can be at home and running a class over Skype and if I have talent people will pay for it . So if you look at how companies are hiring people these days, IT folks it’s not anymore about whether you are from an IIT or BITS. So suddenly everything has become democratized, where its only talent that matters, it doesn’t matter what the pedigree is. And we are also going towards a highly personalized world where cars, phones, services everything is going to be designed for the individual.
*applause and onions* ;-)

Next Generation Innovation - Power of Stillness and More

View more presentations from Vishy Poosala.

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Getting the right things done on time

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 05:58:00 +0000

18 minutes - Get the Right Things Done

View more presentations from Vishy Poosala

Is this for you?

Do you feel that you are busy most of the time?
Yet, you don’t have time to get some of the important things done on time?
And, sometimes you just stop and wonder “where did all the time go”?

I won’t tell you how important time management is to get the right things done, to have “free” time, and to lower stress in life. You know that already. I’ll simply list down what seems to work for me.

All we need is some P & T: Plan & Track.

If you do nothing else, just Make a Daily Morning Plan (Step 3) and you’re on your way!
If you are short of time, go over my powerpoint (above)
But, best if you can go through this entire article

Annual Plan

Do this today and then on every 1^st of Jan
Think of 4-6 priorities for this year for you where you want to spend much of your time. E.g., play with kids, retain customers, learn photography, grow business in APAC, help son get into Ivy League

To-Do List

Pull up your favorite Task App. Even a spiral pocket notepad will do
Copy your to-dos (from mind, bills, emails, etc.) into the Task Pad
Assign a Start Date to them based on when you need to really attend to it (everything need not start Today)
Set up a filter to only show tasks starting today or before
Whenever a new task arrives (e.g., as a an email): Delete / Do / Delegate / Defer, i.e., add to the To-Do List

Daily Morning Plan

Do this first thing in the morning, before you reach for your emails
Look at your To-Dos and make sure that some of your annual focus areas (from 1) are covered
Mark as High Priority the items that Need to be Done Today
Copy the high priority items to your calendar and schedule them for specific times

Hourly Action

During the day, do One Thing at a Time. No Emails during Conf calls, No Blackberry at Dinner table.
Every hour, take a minute to pause, reflect on how the time is going, chill the mood, take a walk, and look at what’s coming ahead for the next hour.
When a task is done, mark it so in the To-do List. And see if you want to move some more items from the To-Do list on to your calendar

Time Tracker

(optional, but my personal favorite) At the end of the day, take your TimeTracker Excel Sheet (available upon request, free)
Auto-move your calendar entries into it
Add any other missing entries manually
Enjoy what the Plots say about how you are using your time and hitting those annual focus areas

(Thanks to the wonderful books like 18 Minutes by Peter Bregman)

Best of Luck! Vishy

Navigating the NoSQL Tower of Babel: Choosing the right database for your application

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:29:00 +0000

(picture taken from http://joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.in/2010/06/online-tools-for-internal-communication.html)

This is the 2nd in the series on unraveling NoSQL. The first article wondered at why everyone seems to be rolling their own NoSQL DBs these days. In this article, we will look at how to choose the right data store for your needs (I'm still struggling to call a less-than -100%-persistent data store a database thanks to CS564 at UW-Madison and internship at IBM-Almaden on DB2 :) but I'll use both terms interchangeably here)
The countless variations can easily baffle us, so we'll tackle this by looking at how data stores evolved from the beginning of Creation (Hello Darwin!)

First, people were storing data in file systems and writing complex COBOL scripts. Then Codd said "Let there be Relational Data Model!". He even made 12 commandments! This model was exceptionally good at managing structured data with well-defined Column Schema and Rows, like Excel tables. And people spoke a single language called SQL to query the data. Coupled with ACID, relational database management systems (RDBMSs) ensured that we would never lose or muddle our bank account data even in the middle of multiple concurrent transactions.

The data was structured, the DBMS was reliable, the DBAs were paid well, and everyone was happy.
Then the Web happened. And data became far trickier and larger.

Key-Value Stores: Web companies like google, amazon, and pets.com found that forcing data into predefined column structure was overly constraining when all you needed was a key (e.g., Customer ID) to get the value (e.g., name, purchase history, image). But one small thing: there would be many millions of these records and performance was essential. This led to distributed Key-Value Stores.
They used variations of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) to create highly scalable data servers. Google's Bigtable is the grand daddy of them all. Hadoop HBase is roughly its open-source version. Amazon's Dynamo optimized on Writes and gave high availability at the cost of some consistency. Facebook's Cassandra was a mix of both. [Check out CAP Theorem to figure out why we can't have more than two in Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance in a distributed system.] You go for one of these systems when you are really dealing with BIG Key-Value DATA scaling to many many servers. As a bonus, you get great processing power by using MapReduce on these servers.

What if you had more specialized needs and needed something simpler to manage?

Document Stores: In many web applications, the schema varied from row to row, the column values took on set values (a strict no-no in RDBMS). XML was perfect for such data, now called documents. MongoDB and Apache CouchDB are very good at storing document data. They go one step further and store data as JSON documents which makes them really easy to process in Javascript. CouchDB takes the cake in storing document versions, which makes it good for Wiki-like apps and mobile apps that may have to work in a disconnected mode. MongoDB can handle huMONGOus data. Check out one of the many articles on MongoDB vs. CouchDB.

Main Memory Stores: Then Facebook and Twitter happened, and we started seeing millions of simultaneous users on a website. They were creating content, chatting with each others, and tweeting to the world. Going to the disk was not an option when you wanted almost real-time experience. Enter memcached - distributed main memory cache. A great solution to put in front of one of the persistent databases to improve performance.You want the data to be persisted on to the disk (without giving up much of the performance)? You can choose from redis, membase, etc. Redis gives pub/sub, a really neat way to push data to multiple browsers (e.g., stock updates, chat broadcasts,..), and supports data structures like lists. Couple redis with node.js with socket.io and you have got yourself a blazing fast chat server!

What about Querying in these key-value stores?

This is where I start to miss SQL. You are typically restricted to lookups based on keys and field values, with scant support for Joins. So, when you design your data model, you have to pretty much predict the kind of queries you are likely to ask. I suspect that Joins will make their way back into these NoSQL systems as well (e.g., Hive).

OK, which NoSQL DB should you use?

It depends on your application, really. But the above text gives hints on what these DBs were primarily designed for. It's possible that you may need more than one. For example, in a Chat application, you may use redis to handle rapid messaging and mysql for analytics on the old messages.

So, is mysql dead?

NOOOO! It's a tempting trend to say No to SQL and use one of these new babies. But that should not be a decision taken lightly. Mysql is still the most versatile, reliable, well-tested, and well-understood DBMS around. Worried about its scalability? You can use horizontal partitioning (sharding). Want low latency? Use memcached in front of mysql. Google apparently serves its ads from mysql.

So, is NoSQL dead?

NO again! E.g., If your application needs to handle unstructured data or is highly interactive, and it does not need complex queries, you should definitely evaluate one of the above. I've been playing with redis and am amazed at how well it fits my app's needs!

What next? There are many more variations on the NoSQL theme, e.g., to support graph data, Big Data Analytics (buzz word alert!), etc. You can find far more comprehensive comparisons in the following pages and on Quora.

NoSQL is a Horseless Carriage by Steven Yen. Check out the nice taxonomy
Cassandra vs MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis vs Riak vs HBase vs Membase vs Neo4j comparison

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

The story of my experiments with DuckDuckGo

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:57:00 +0000

In the middle of all the welcome din around FB IPO, two contrasting tunes are gaining amplitude with every retweet:

Google's "One privacy policy to bind them all"
Duckduckgo's "We don't track you"

Google's privacy policy is their prerogative and it may not even be as evil as it sounded at first. But I wish that they had given a simple opt-out choice. Anyway, that was enough of an impetus for me to try the unthinkable: switch from Google and try out DuckDuckGo - a privacy-guaranteeing search engine! By the way, I'm not the only one doing it nor the first. Om Malik (gigaom.com) tweeted that he's going to try DDG for 30 days. And he has 1.2M followers.

I've been using it for a week now and my impressions are:

The World Did Not End! The search results are quite sufficient, thank you. (more on this below)
The !yt !quora "search a popular site directly" syntax is addictive
Search Suggestions on the right side are growing on me
And, surprise surprise, I'm not missing the Adverts at all!
There are 10 more reasons: http://nerdbusiness.com/blog/10-reasons-why-duckduckgo-awesome
And, come on, we have to support a single developer dreaming of taking on such a big effort, right?!

I still use Google.com for Maps, News, Images, Docs. But Search? I don't plan on going back for now. I may go back if DDG gets too crowded and slows down, I sincerely hope that they're able to scale with their business model.

So, why is Duckduckgo's search mostly sufficient? And herein may be the bigger challenge for Search Engine biggies like Google, Bing.

It's a Flat Flat Web: After over a decade in Wild West Web, some sites have emerged as the natural destination for many Searches -- Wikpedia, CNN, ESPN, WSJ are the general examples, but even a specific topic like "PHP" has php.net. All search engines show them at the top of their results.
(Mostly) Similar Search Algorithms: If the the best result does not come up as the First, it’s in the top 10 results.
Universal Scalability: Thanks to Cloud, you can build a large scale system without actually buying it all up front.
There's always Google: If your search query is quite esoteric and duckduckgo does not give the satisfactory answer, you can always "!g " to send that query to good old Google ;-)

The 1st one should concern the large search companies. It challenges the current mantra that "we have to give up our privacy to improve search results".
And that begins to shake the whole Filter Bubble World we were told to move into - where personalization comes at the cost of privacy, and if a service is free, your profile is the product.
There may be a better alternative, after all!

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Have you rolled your own NoSQL DBMS, yet?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:17:00 +0000

Remember those days when you used to buy some silicon chips, make your own computer, and sell the roll-your-own-computer kit to other geeks? I don't remember them either, but that's apparently how Apple was born.

Move on commodotized-computers, the era of rolling your own DBMS (database management system) has arrived.

What got us here?

Let's say that you are building a web-scale T-shirt selling application but the relational data model is too constraining with its normalization (sorry Codd) and SQL is an overkill (by the way, isn't it ironical that olde SQL was an overkill but couldn't do transitive closure for listing your network on Facebook?)

You can choose from CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Dynamo, HBase, etc. Chances are that even they don't fit your unique needs for storing BSON objects (oh wait MongoDB does that), wiki-like docs (CouchDB), simple key-value pairs (DHTs, Hadoop, Cassandra), low latency (membase), Big Data Analytics (Pig, Hive, InfoBright).. OK I got it.. your app gathers tons of geo-spatial-music-video transient data with 66% Writes and needs exactly 99.4% availability? Well now you can build your own DBMS on the cloud using soft-state, eventual consistency models (who cares, it's just web data anyway ;-) ), make it scale on Hadoop, and there you are - a rebel is born! Of course, this will now lead to dozens of questions on Quora.com about how YourDB compares with other DBs, which only adds to the aura.

I love this freedom to create! I too once hacked together my own DBMS (myDB) just to store the list of books I had read. Why not use MySQL?

Books can have more than one author (!) and it felt convoluted to normalize.
This may sound paranoid but I was worried that if the DBMS messed up, I would have no way of retrieving my hand-typed data. I wanted know how the bytes were created.
I wanted simple queries. So I wrote a mini SQL query processor. (Aside: this personal DBMS became the basis for a cool data analytics project at Bell Labs called AQUA- The approximate query answering system, check out its Web 1.0 page.)

My point is that there's a liberating sense of control (oxymoron alert!) in having your own DBMS and consciously flouting a few RDBMS laws along the way. ACID is too much for you? let's try BASE. Locking is slowing your down? Let's drop locks and create new versions of data. Consistency is a drag? Let's relax it to some form of lazy eventual consistency. Starting with Eric Brewer's CAP Theorem, we have realized that you have to give up something to get two other things in distributed systems and life.

And once you have hand-crafted the optimal DBMS, why keep it hidden as a hack?! Gone are the days where the RDBMS purists would scoff at you for violating Boyce-Codd normal form and not honoring all constructs of SQL. Your baby now belongs to the rebellious NoSQL family!

Welcome to the brave new world of hand-crafted laissez-faire databases!

But here's the kicker: The more I read about the NoSQL databases, the more instances I'm coming across of big web companies reverting back to good old mysql for some uses (Google, Facebook, Twitter). Clearly RDBMS haven't gone the way of dinosaurs. So, how do I pick the right horse for my course? (ed note: pathetic mix of metaphors)

Next in this series: Navigating the NoSQL Tower of Babel: Choosing the right database for your application

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

A Christmas tree for bookworms and Lessons for kids

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:03:00 +0000

I recently came across a Christmas tree made of books. What could be more sensible than that for a bookworm? Imagine the perfect recycling involved: books make trees make books. Since we had many books at home (not to mention the 15k books in our Just Books Library that I'm really proud of), we decided that it would be a simple exercise to re-create at home.

Well, It's not as simple as others make it sound, especially if you haven't been collecting decades worth of of hardbound Readers Digest collections. This takes some patience and trials before the kids declare that it's a tree.

But it works. Here's the result before all the decorations.

Along the way, I learnt a few lessons about doing a structural project with kids.

Invest in good hardcover books :) There is a reason publishers sell over-priced hardbound books - to build such trees. Those lovely-looking and rarely-read books on gardening, philosophy, biography, anthologies are perfect for making a strong base and mid-tier support. For the Nth time in my life, I regret not investing in Encyclopedia Britannica; Wikipedia is just no match here!
Prototype, Trial, Launch: Don't tell your kids that you are going to build it in the first attempt. Comment from the kids on the first tree: "this is the only tree where we have to bend down to touch the tip!" This can seriously undermine your self-confidence and their expectations of your parental abilities ;) So, speak of the first few attempts as calculated efforts at building prototypes to figure out the best options. (bonus: you sound like an Engineer now). But, seriously, I think this is the biggest lesson to take away. When you start a complex project like a bridge over river Kwai or a Christmas tree, it's a good idea to make prototypes and test them.
Don't give up: It took us nearly an hour to get something to a respectable height, but giving up would have been a bad option, especially since we had pulled out all the books from their proper places in the shelves. Plus, this teaches the kids to not give up on projects that seem to fail at first.

Bottomline: Try something new and not-too-easy, work with the kids, good if you fail at first, but make it work in the end.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Do you want to introduce programming to your kids?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 05:16:00 +0000

Like they say, it's the dream of every Computer Scientist to learn the intricacies of programming.. and then pass on that wisdom to their kids!

How did I learn programming? From the software sages (and later my colleagues at Bell Labs, yayyy!), Kernighan and Ritchie, in their C Programming book. But exposing a 7yr old to K&R would be like giving them Hamlet and expecting them to fully appreciate the elegance of English. It's only likely to push them away from programming forever.

There must be a more fun alternative, right? I did some G-search and found other parents who had discovered The Path, and experimented it on my kids.

It seemed to mostly work well and not harm them much (I hope) :), so I shared it with more unsuspecting parents at a recent talk at KidsINK (like TED for kids). No one complained, in fact quite a few parents wanted a follow-up workshop, so this didn't seem to be that bad.
Here are the basic ideas.

The key to teaching programming to kids is to NOT teach it as a separate subject
Understand what they are already passionate about - e.g., writing stories - and first introduce computers as a tool they can use in pursuing that hobby (MS Word, MS Paint, Blogspot for writers)
Then give them the right mental model of computers. I strongly recommend Light Bot because it feels like a game (because it's a game) but it also teaches how one can specify instructions ("program") to the robot ("computer") and the robot simply follow instructions, just like a computer follows what the software says.
Then start them on visual programming using Scratch (aka God's gift to parents who want to teach programming to children). Please don't be in a hurry and teach them everything in one go. Show some cool tricks using a program YOU wrote. Tell them how to write a simple Hello World program. And then get out of the way. Watch the magic unfold! They WILL figure out how to make games and animation using Scratch. Meanwhile, unsuspecting little kids that they are, they will also pick up tons of programming constructs.
Next Stop: Alice
After that: Visual BASIC? Excel? C? PHP? I don't know yet.

Underlying all of this is Patience from the parents. And willingness to look at familiar stuff through fresh eyes.
Remember:
Computers are not Magic. They are Magical! They can do wonders for a kids' creativity.

Here're the slides I used at KidsINK.

View more presentations from Vishy Poosala

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Innovations in Software Architecture, Howard Roark, and Gaudi

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:16:00 +0000

Some of the really smart people are building web-scale architectures at Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc. I was asked to address Yahoo's architects in India at an event recently. Since I was sure that they knew more about architecting software systems than I do, I decided to talk about something different: architectural inspirations from buildings and nature. That's where Roark and Gaudi came in. My talk was preceded by Yahoo's Chief Architect David Chaiken. Impressive stuff, the Yahoo's have to do, to serve my email!

We also went over the typical problems with architecting in large companies, working with developers, debugging architecture, etc. The slides say it all.
By the way, check out the dynamic towers and Roark speech on youtube. priceless!

Innovation in software architecture

View more presentations from Vishy Poosala.

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Do you want to market virally?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 05:25:00 +0000

We've all have heard about viral marketing since the day hotmail and yahoo added a simple signature to our emails "sign-up here to get a free email". That helped hotmail get to 10M users in less than 2 years. Then Social Networking happened and it took Google less than 20 days to get to the same!

What's going on here? It's viral marketing: the simple act of using a product also spreads the idea to others. This is often easier with communication-related products (you can't use Chat without talking to others, right?). But if your product is not like that, don't despair. Pretty much every idea can be virally marketed - your ecommerce site, blog, new t-shirt design, grassroot campaign, physical store,.. It can be as simple as adding a FB Like button to your product page on Facebook, or something more organically (yes!! I used that word in a topic about viral :) ) added to your product or service right from the beginning.

The best thing about word-of-mouth / viral / meme (another buzzword simply meaning an idea that seems to spread like it's alive) marketing? It's cheaper and often more effective than traditional broadcast / in-your-face advertising. In today's world of jaded customers, it's often the only way.

So how do you make your idea spread virally? It has to do with ideavirus, sneezers, hive, smoothness, vector, and velocity. That's how I read it in Seth Godin's book "Unleashing the Ideavirus". Then I cut through all that jargon and created a simple recipe for virally marketing our ideas, fully based on that book. You can check it out in the slideware below.

Recipe for Viral Marketing

View more presentations from Vishy Poosala

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

10M users in 10 days?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 15:24:00 +0000

It took Radio 38 years.
It took Facebook 2+ years.
It took Google+ 16 DAYS to do the same.
You know what I am talking about.. Time to acquire 10 Million users.
When will the 10 day barrier be broken?
And the geek in us wants to know - is there a theoretical limit to this?

Only rule: should be a new service requiring sign-ups. Launching angrymonkeys on Facebook doesn't count. Some might even argue the same about Google+, but let's not get into that debate.
thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

The Chronicle of a Fast Foretold

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:53:00 +0000

I was reading about Ramadan (Ramzan) yesterday. 100s of Millions of Muslims go on a fast during this holy month, from teenagers to the elderly.
Millions of elderly Hindu moms observe Fast at least once a week. (dads rarely do it, did you notice? :) )
There're hundreds of blogs on the web touting the health benefits of fasting. Even if I don't understand the biochemistry of digestion, I can believe that a regular cleansing of the gunk from the body can be a good thing.
Gandhiji used fasting both as a non-violent weapon of civil obedience and as a self-purification technique.

I have never fasted in my life. Not even for a single day. Rarely ever skipped a meal. On the contrary, I love food. I'm not convinced that we only eat to live, and not live to eat.
However, I'm basically curious and I like to experiment. And I have faith that this can only be good if tried in moderation.

So I decided to try fasting this month, borrowing some-not-all rules of the Ramadan-way.

Eat before sunrise (cereals, milk, egg may be)
Eat after sunset (definitely some carbs and proteins, no binge eating!)
No eating or drinking anything in between

Exceptions (there are always some :) )

Drink water if absolutely necessary
Possibly eat during the day if it's a big family function and I don't want to disappoint others
If it comes to health vs. fast, choose food.

Let's see how it goes. Will post here how successful I am in observing it.
I already told the folks around me, so there's no backing away at this point ;-)

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Using Reliance Netconnect Broadband on Mac Book

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:09:00 +0000

This shouldn't have been so hard, but I'm new to Mac so it took me some missteps before I got it working.

Plug in the reliance broadband dongle to the Mac USB port
It should automatically trigger a Reliance Netconnect window. Don't bother with going into Network Connections and playing with the 3 (yes, 3, not 1!) Huawei entries there.
Open the Tools option on the top menu at the very top of the screen!
Set the options for connect

Dial: #777
User id and password (usually the phone number of the modem)

Done

If it doesn't work, try googling. Be careful about OS version (32 vs. 64-bit). According to all the reviews I read, calling Reliance customer service will not help - you might as well call McDonalds for a big Mac. The Apple Macs are not worth training the call center executives in, apparently.

PS: The speeds are quite terrible. But it works.

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Plus or Miss? Who will win the FB-Google+ war? Answer in a few hrs.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:04:00 +0000

Will Google+ Kill Facebook, or go the Buzz way?

Should I be packing my bags and scooting over to Plus or Stay put in FB?

What about my friends? Will they follow me? Will I be all alone?

Tell me, someone, pleaaaase!

Everyone seems to be sitting on the wall on this one and biting their social nails off. Some of us decided to hangout in a hack-session and circle the right answer (all puns original, poor, and intended :) ).

In a few hrs, you will get a chance to Play God to answer this 70 Billion-dollar question.

Watch this space! Hope you will like what you hear!

thanks, vishy & team of curious do-ers

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

The Google+ Equation in C++

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 06:15:00 +0000

Everyone and their blogger is talking about Google Plus. (If you haven't got an invite yet, don't worry, Google will make sure that all 750M users of Facebook will get one.)

After playing around with it and reading blogs on it, this is what I've concluded. Google+ started as a single statement in a C++ program titled "Hello Grand Unified World!" :-)

Google+ = Facebook + Twitter + FourSquare + Skype + RockMelt + Slick UI - USP - Users - Simplicity;
/* TODO for R2: Pull in FB graphs and the G-factor of innovation & science, link with Search; R3: Social commerce and Ads. */
Here's the logic behind the code. Let's look at all the terms from left to right.

Google+=: Obvious to any programmer what a + is doing on the left hand side :) Google+ integrates most of Google services like YouTube
Facebook: Friends, Circles (= much better implementation than FB Lists), Notifications, Status updates (Stream)
Twitter: Watch the "Following" Circle in Google+. Many people already see FB as a Friends Circle and Twitter as their Professional interests circle. In Google+, they get rounded up as two circles. simple.
Foursquare (and many others like Loopt, Sonar): Check-in to a location, see nearby messages and users.
Skype: Hangout is Video chat done cool
RockMelt: Ok this is not so obvious. The main USP of RockMelt is the ability to be plugged in into your social networks without visiting them. The Black Bar that Google put on all their pages lets you do that. It won't work on other web sites, but it won't be long before users download a browser plug-in, or websites add a Google+ widget (so that visitors can stay on their page while killing time on social networks).
Slick UI: Admit it, the circle drag & drop looks so cool and finished, almost like it's from Apple and not Google. May be because the same Designer God worked on both? Why Google+ Looks Good: Original Macintosh Team Member Andy Hertzfeld
- USP: More than anything, I was expecting Google to add a "WoW this is a new twist and it's scientific too". I don't see it yet. May be unification of many ideas is the big idea?
- Users: I'm sure this will improve over the next month, can't say what will happen after that. The current ways of importing from Gmail and Ymail contacts is just not enough. Those contact lists are too big and full of random one-time contacts that you would not invite to your HangOut. Google+ needs a way to import FB and Twitter lists. Period.
- Simplicity: The natural trade-off in any grand unification is Simplicity. People know what to do on Foursquare ("check-in"), Twitter ("tweet"). When you can do all of these things in one place, there's more cognitive load on users. Being the pioneers of One Search Box minimalist UI, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

What do you think? Is the code correct?

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Ideal Job: Discovering and Doing What You Love to Do

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 03:38:00 +0000

As promised in an earlier article, I'm now posting a recipe for discovering what you love to do and how to go about doing it.
After trying it out with a few people, I realized that it works best for two kinds of people in two different ways:

Working but Wondering: You have been working for a few years now. You are also aware of things that you love to do which may extend beyond your current job. This presentation will help you crystallize exactly what you love to do, and then help you get over the resistance for doing them - often without having to do something drastic like quitting your job or shocking your friends and family!
Student, deciding what to choose: You are at cross-roads: should you take up Aerospace engineering or Computer Science? Should you continue in Med school or take up a job? This presentation will help you partially - by giving exercises you can use to identify what you really love to do.

Of course, it's also helpful to parents to see how they can help their kids discover their own dreams and pursue them.

So, here goes. The recipe is given in a presentation format with many hands-on exercises to do. Your comments are always most welcome! Please feel free to share it with others.

Ideal job: Doing what you love to do

View more presentations from vishyp

Credits: The first draft benefited a lot from comments from internet reviewers who were interested in this topic (you know who you are!).
Much of the content for this came from the excellent book I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It , by Barbara Sher.

The book has lot more, please read it.

Good luck!

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

An online marketing checklist for local businesses

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 04:15:00 +0000

*ACTION*	*STATUS (e.g.)*	*COMMENTS*
Text write-up – Para	Done	Crisp, with essential details: what / why / when / where / who / ph, email, website
Graphics flyer with Google map showing store location	done	- Do -
Write a blog and tell people about it	blog	Informal, emphasize the good reason you are doing it for, not just to make money. In leading and future blogs to it, write about the related world. Encourage people to comment back
Create a FB page (optional: website)	FB Page	Make it public
Publish the write-up and flyer on blog & FB page	done
Create Twitter a/c for the store, or use your own.	vishyp	Optional, only if you plan >3 updates every week
Announce FB page on your FB status update. Optionally: ask friends to LIKE it
Create customer mailing list		Regular newsletters, announcements, ask them to LIKE
Create location on wikimapia, google maps. Also create Google Local Business	Google Maps wikimapia
Add to local Yellow Pages listings online		Justdial, etc.
Google Ads, FB Ads
Post on locally relevant FB pages and websites
Submit FB page to google, bing	done

This is just a simple list of things we gathered when we started our library in Bangalore. Much of it should be relevant to any brick & mortar store.. or even an online business. I'm sure there're many more and better ways of doing it. If you know some, please add them in the comments.

There is local marketing (flyers, ..), online marketing (this list), and then "local online" marketing where you apply online techniques locally. The last one is mostly unexplored. I have some thoughts on it which I will post soon.

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact

Needed: Social Marketing 2.0 for local stores

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 07:52:00 +0000

Everyone and their marketer is talking about Social Commerce, Local Social Marketing, LBS, Buzz, Klout, Facebook marketing, Twitter influencers, Foursquare Mayors etc. these days. And they should. There is still a lot left to be said about all of these things.

But we're here to talk about Social Marketing in the real world where social first started. Yes - in the physical world where until recently you had to meet people to know them socially..

Are you a business owner running one or more physical stores - anything from Walmart to a single library to a corner store to a new restaurant in the block?

You have used up your marketing dollars on flyers, hoardings.. you have even tried out some Google Ads.. but you know that you are missing the Social Buzz that everyone is talking about in the new world? Somehow your repeat customers are not bringing in more customers, when you know that they must be able to influence many more people.

Do you want to be ahead of your competitors and get that viral marketing going in your world? You know that the old social viral techniques in the real world (passing flyers to share with friends and family) are just so old and limited!

Then, welcome to Local Socal Marketing 2.0, where all this online virtual buzz meets brick & mortar. This is social commerce in the real world, but using techniques that were first used in the Facebook and Twitter worlds, and a few new ones. A new approach where LIKE and CHECK-INs suddenly become real, once again!
Why are the current solutions not enough?

Physical ads give limited exposure and do not exploit the physical social network
Online Google ads do not exploit social influencers: Let's hope Google solves this one, including for their own sake
Facebook , Foursquare, and Twitter do not reach Billions of users for the foreseeable future, especially in emerging markets. We're talking about the real world where people are not walking around plugged into Facebook all the time.. many don't even have FB accounts!
Giving out fridge magnets and flyers to share - well let's just say that they never spread like FB Like spreads your buzz. It's not as simple as pressing a LIKe button.
Even the amazing social commerce techniques that Amazon pioneered ("readers who read A also bought B") are difficult in a world where you don't always keep a digital record of your customer identity and their purchase preferences

Do you agree?
Stay tuned as I will discuss in a series of posts the current solutions and the upcoming disruptions in this space. Much of this material comes from my own experience in starting a library. Please contact me (vpoosala AT gmail) if you want a preview or write a guest column on this topic.
thanks, vishy
Vishy Poosala
innovate & impact

Upcoming: How to Discover your ideal job (or Calling in life) and Start doing it. Looking for (p)reviewers!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 08:39:00 +0000

Are you in a job that you love? One that you can't get up in the morning to go to? Then, Congrats! You may still want to read the upcoming blog on how to do more of what you love.
Are you unclear about your calling in life - what you LOVE to do? Then this is for you. You can follow some simple guidelines to discover your passion, your mission, your ideal job in life.
Do you know what you love to do, but feel stuck in the current job for some reason? - this is definitely for you! You can go through a questionnaire to find out what IS blocking you and then some hints on how to get over that resistance.. all without taking unnecessary risks.
Remeber: An ideal job for you is one that you LOVE, not one that you CAN do. If you love it, the skills will come.
I will be posting a blog and presentation on this all-important issue. It consists of wisdom captured from books I've read and people I've spoken to (i.e., none of it is my original thinking, I just organized the ideas :) but I love helping others by sharing and talking ) Please drop me a note if you want to be alerted when the blog is posted [vpoosala AT gmail]
I'm also looking for folks to read an early draft and help me improve it. Let me know if you are interested!
Thank you,
vishy
Vishy Poosala
innovate & create

A recipe for meditation - slideshow

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:33:00 +0000

You might've read my earlier post with a recipe for meditation. If you did not, no worries :) I'm posting an easier-to-follow slideshow version of the same recipe. By the way, I did my first informal guided meditation session to 9 colleagues. It was an impromptu session in Atlanta. Loved it! Hope to do more of them and do them better each time.

thanks, vishy
Vishy Poosala
innovate & impact

The Innovation Edge - Vishy Poosala

Blog Move, beyond Innovation

Alertpedia - the Wikipedia of Alerts

NEWS

SHOPPING & DEALS

SOCIAL NETWORKS & BLOGS

FUN STUFF

LEARN & EARN

WHAT INDIA LOVES

50000 things people track on the web

What Categories do people set up alerts on?

What key words do people track the most across the categories?

And where?

So what does a data scientist want?

Creating an Innovation Culture (3/3): The Ritual

Keeping the Innovation Beat Going

Step 1: Opening Act

Step 2: Action

Step 3: The Grand Finale

Creating an Innovation Culture (2/3): The Stage

The Checklist for Take-off

1.Define the WHATs and WHYs

2.Implement The HOWs

3. Communicate and create an exciting buzz

Creating an Innovation Culture (1/3): The Southwest Way

What's your company's inner animal like?

What kind of innovation culture do you need?

How do you create such a culture?

Innovation is not Invention

Next generation innovation - The power of stillness

Getting the right things done on time

All we need is some P & T: Plan & Track.

Navigating the NoSQL Tower of Babel: Choosing the right database for your application

The story of my experiments with DuckDuckGo

Have you rolled your own NoSQL DBMS, yet?

A Christmas tree for bookworms and Lessons for kids

Do you want to introduce programming to your kids?

Innovations in Software Architecture, Howard Roark, and Gaudi

Do you want to market virally?

10M users in 10 days?

The Chronicle of a Fast Foretold

Using Reliance Netconnect Broadband on Mac Book

Plus or Miss? Who will win the FB-Google+ war? Answer in a few hrs.

The Google+ Equation in C++

Ideal Job: Discovering and Doing What You Love to Do

An online marketing checklist for local businesses

Needed: Social Marketing 2.0 for local stores

Upcoming: How to Discover your ideal job (or Calling in life) and Start doing it. Looking for (p)reviewers!

A recipe for meditation - slideshow