Silicon Thoughts

The Kolaveri Di school of product design.

2011-12-15T19:45:00.000-08:00

Many of you are likely aware of a sensational video that went viral over the past month. Why this Kolaveri di? has racked up more than 23 million views on YouTube, spawned multiple copy videos and parodies, was covered in Time Magazine and inspired Amitabh Bachchan, iconic Bollywood godfather, to meet Dhanush, the singer.

If you are not aware of this, you should watch it now. It is a very simple Tamglish (Tamil-English) song that speaks of the pain of love on a one-way street.

A friend condescended on Facebook that there’s nothing to it musically. Famous Indian lyricist Javed Akhtar trashed the song (he may prefer this (Bengali) classical version). Even Hitler had a fit of apoplectic rage (must must see, language no bar). My friend did not get it, Javed did not get it and Hitler did not get it either :-)

"KOLAVARI-D". Every one is praising the robes but the emperor is naked. Tune ordinary, singing substandard. words an insult to sensibility" - Akhtar

I disagree with them all! Mein Gott! (I just got unfriended at Facebook :-))

It prompted me to think about why Kolaveri Di is good. It’s not just a viral video. I don’t write a blog post about every viral video I see. Kolaveri Di is not just a phenomenon! Kolaveri Di is a genuine consumer product. Let’s see what it teaches us musically about a great consumer product.

1. It appeals to the senses.

Myspace and Orkut lost out to Facebook because eventually, the products became noisy and garish and did not appeal to the senses at large. If the drums are too loud, or the guitar too distorted, it can hurt! There are many classical music pieces that are complex and involved, but they are not appealing. This brings to mind a must-see scene from Amadeus - Salieri on Mozart - everyone can remember Eine Kleine! I’m not saying Dhanush is Mozart (:-)), but everyone can remember Kolaveri.

2. It is simple.

Initially, I was highly sceptical about Twitter! How could a company provide long-term value with short 140-character messages! Back then, I was passionate about an idea that was = Twitter + search + Flipboard. While compelling (as it still is today), it was hard for folks to grok. While it turns out that the Twitter limit is beginning to hurt, and Facebook and Google Plus are marginalizing Twitter with rich features like Hangouts, Timeline, etc., Twitter demonstrated a key point of product design - people like simplicity. Google’s simple interface was critical to success. The iPhone’s single button was magic. Kolaveri Di is simple. Complexity is hard for consumers to consume, and can sometimes be downright ugly - sometimes, classical music can be contrived and over-done. Sometimes simplicity is more important than power.

Microsoft and Intel can go blue in the face that Wintel is more powerful and flexible than the iPad (which is true) ... but we’re in the “post-PC” era folks! That's why Windows is going Metro! Sometimes simplicity is more important than power. As in this case!

3. It fits!

In good products, things fit! Legos! Redesigns for major products are hard, since they need to fit well, or people who use them will scream and shout. The button size, colors and the font size are important. Even though you have full-featured browsers on smartphones, you can have crappy experiences on some websites on your smartphones - the buttons are too small, you touch things that you don’t want to, etc.

Kolaveri Di was conceived out of simplicity - dual-language, basic theme (one-way love affair!) - and was built with rhythm at the core. What the musical snobs don’t get is that it is not the accented words, not the head-nodding beat, not the unconventional use of the Nadaswaram, not the languid voice, not the casual tune, and not the story that make it great. The secret is - they all fit perfectly! The colors complement each other! It’s great design!

The thing is this - once you sing it, and shake your head to it, you get why it’s more cute than when you heard it!

4. It is localized/internationalized.

Many products are english-only, or not localized for global use. Kolaveri-di was designed from the ground up to be multi-lingual, and has therefore transcended barriers - it’s a global product! You don’t need to know Tamil to enjoy this. Even the Queen "liked" it! You don’t need an understanding of the vocabulary - the song speaks of the pain of unrequited love, and the Scotch does the talking!

How many people in Japan are singing/dancing to Javed Akhtar’s songs?

5. It lends itself to repeat use

Movies are hard to see multiple times - only a few have that capacity. Music lends itself to repeated use. But ...I don't know about you, but I hate hearing the same song more than once on the same day - I feel cheated. Very few songs can be repeatedly heard on the same day without causing nausea! Lift Karadey ... Brick in the Wall ... Hotel California ... Money for Nothing ... Kolaveri Di!

Yahoo! mail is so slow now, and keeps popping up the same IM request from some stranger, even after I say "don't". That's nauseating. I love Yahoo! but repeat use is getting harder. Facebook provides occasional delight - some old friend from decades ago to connect with. Repeat use is critical for product success!

6. It is marketed superbly.

A product needs to be known. All great products are marketed well - either by super ads - Apple - or by word of mouth / viral campaigns - Google, Facebook, Twitter. Viral happens! But you need to put something in the position to go viral. Launching the video was a masterstroke! Give credit, don’t begrudge the marketers. Remember, it’s not the marketing that caused the song to be great!

There are many products I’ve sampled once and will never taste again.

This product ~~speaks~~ sings for itself!

The Issue with Offers

2011-11-14T11:02:00.001-08:00

I have never before considered the possibility of providing screenshots of my personal email on my blog; I am now, unfortunately, able to do so. While this is just a sampler of my inbox, it is a reasonably fair representation of what I'd refer to as "Offer Overload". I am, of course, using the word "Offer" loosely, but you will see that both my personal accounts are, in disturbing manner, filled with offers - explicit - from "offer"/"deal" services, like LivingSocial and Google - and implicit - from services that I use or have used in the past. Sadly, also from sources I have no knowledge of ever having interacted with (spam). I don't remember signing up for LivingSocial, but there we are!

This is an issue with the offers model, or at least the model as it stands today, where a daily deal is sent (pushed) to someone's email. Coming at a time when Groupon just went public (issued at a premium, I might add), it is ironic that Amazon just figured that "Deal Fatigue" may be desensitizing users who get too many email offers, and may actually hurt customer relationships. Amazon recently started unsubscribing certain users from receiving offer emails.

Amazon has said that many of its customers had shown significant inactivity in using the daily deals e-mailers and thus, their un-subscription was justified. Amazon seemed concerned about its consumer relationships that span across more than a decade and thus, not bothering its users with unwanted emails was also hinted as a reason.

This does not mean that offers are not attractive, or not useful. Groupon is, in fact, amp'ing it up with Epic Deals this holiday season (what's more Epic than 90% off? (free?)). There's a human penchant for a good deal - something visceral that makes a deal too good to pass up, and therefore a deal to consummate. It is much like the addiction of going back to a social network and seeing "likes", "pluses" or comments on your post, despite knowing that the visit is likely unimportant, and will waste valuable time :-)

You'll notice an important change that happened with Facebook - we no longer receive emails when there's activity on our streams. Once there's an important and sticky engagement channel with the user, there's no need for a "reminder" channel, like email, which was really built for a different use. Facebook has earned daily engagement. I still get reminder activity emails from LinkedIn, which goes to show that LinkedIn has not been successful with sticky, daily engagement. LinkedIn is a successful networking tool when professional networking is required - it is an on-demand network, not a social network, as I see it.

The current offers model seems artificial - an "out-of-band" model - and will continue to be so, until it becomes integrated with a stickier model that filters out the irrelevant offers and shows me the right ones at the right time. Instead of impinging on my email-box, it needs to be integrated at the point of intent, i.e., search, or within, say, my daily social network interactions, or when I watch TV. The "daily dose" services - Facebook, Google - can do this. Maybe Amazon, if they can take over my regular online music/media needs, or even Yahoo! (did I just say that?) since it is still a destination site for millions! LivingSocial and Groupon on their own (without sticky channels)??

Offers will eventually have to be made at a destination site/daily "portal" application, e.g., iTunes/Pandora, Flipboard, etc.,. Note that there's also a big difference between the Y! Mail splash page and the actual email stream. An offer needs to be like a relevant targeted ad.

I have already started ignoring all "offers" in my e-mailbox, despite the fact that some of them are great offers. Offer overload is resulting in Offer offload!

The question is, will I ever succeed in cleaning up my email stream from invasive offers?

Or is it time to wean myself off email?

Live your own life!

2011-10-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

Two seemingly unrelated things happened yesterday ...

First, I receive a phone call from my 16-year old son in the afternoon to inform me of the news that Steve Jobs had passed away. It was initially not on NYTimes, not on CNN, but I did see it on Twitter, and I finally believed that it was not a hoax. I was not surprised, given Steve’s failing health, but it was still a very empty moment.

Second, I went to my son’s school for an orientation on college admissions - how my 16-year old will select his college. As I sat there, noting that one of the parents was making notes on an iPad, it struck me that in a very short time, my son would leave home for college. Time has flown - our time with our loved ones is very limited.

This morning, on my ride in to work, I saw this Tweet from a former colleague of mine that gave me pause:

Steve Jobs passed at 56. Far too young. He fought pancreatic cancer, had a liver transplant. Individually, he had a very interesting life. Professionally, he had a hugely successful life. Every luminary thought so. He’s left legacy - in multiple fields - computers, movies, music, phones... - technologically, anyone would love to be in his shoes.

I lost my father earlier this year. He would have turned 84 this month. A good long life. He was diagnosed with liver cancer in early June and passed away a mere 6 weeks later. He left a different kind of legacy - a different kind of field. He was responsible for building a couple of parks in Bangalore that many people still enjoy everyday.

Many of us are people with no legacy - not big, not little, nothing of note … When I go, there’ll be a few pages that may live on for a while until someone blocks them due to inactivity. Yes, it’s easy to wax eloquent about our accomplishments, but only a few people ~~really matter~~ have enduring legacies. (Correction 10/08 - based on a comment that not only a few people matter)

The question I asked myself today is - “What’s important to people?” Would I trade off 30 years of life for the ultimate glory of being an icon, an innovator, an almost-Edison? Would I rather be rich, successful and famous or would I trade that in to be able to live long enough to be able to see my sons graduate from college, get their first jobs, marry, .... Given a choice, would I trade off anything for living long enough to see my sons’ sons?

I guess Steve himself said this best (watch this if you have not) - we don’t have a choice about death, and “death is the single-best invention of life - life’s change agent” - so we do the best we can to follow our dreams and live our own lives.

Your time is limited... so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

As technologists, as consumers, we will all miss Steve Jobs.

As a son, I really miss my dad! Especially today.

High tech gets the boot!

2011-09-30T13:03:00.000-07:00

My first “paid job” entailed writing software for one of the professors in the physical education department at Rice University. We did custom athletic modeling and animation using stick figures and motion vectors. There was not much available out-of-the-box then. I wrote programs on the Mac using Lightspeed Pascal, if I remember correctly. Interesting stuff. We actually presented this work at the AAHPERD conference in New Orleans! It may have even been my first publication!
I don’t remember how much I was paid, but I also bought that professor’s car later - my first car - a yellowTotota Corolla SR-5 hatchback that I called “Porsche 0.1” since it had one tenth the pickup of a Porsche - that's a motion vector for you!! Today, I see news about this really hi-tech Adidas soccer cleat that automatically records the motion stats of the athlete - speed, sprint times, distance, stride rates, ... - allowing coaches and athletes, and, of course, websites, fantasy leagues and commentators, to speak volumes of sports data!
These stats are important. Critical, in fact. Yesterday, I watched Barcelona win a Champions League fixture 5 - 0, and the stats (passes attempted - >700, passes completed ~87%) clearly represent Barca's total domination and the reasoning for the crushing win! More impressive, see the 10 stats with which Barcelona dominated Manchester United during the last Champions League final. 108 kms. run!! This entire story - the set of stats - could be automatically compiled for every game if they used the magic Adizero Mycoach (or equivalent) soccer cleats! That’s an activity stream for you! Remember, though, that there’s only one stat that really matters! How many times did the ball get in the net?

Single source, not open source!

2011-09-29T00:08:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of years, I’ve canceled unused credit cards and consolidated accounts, to try and simplify life. It’s good to have online banking, bill pay, mortgage and brokerage under one account. I’d like to eventually move various 401ks (multiple jobs) to this account if I can. Multiple bank accounts don't make sense especially when there’s not much to bank :-). I’m gravitating to a single source. Park this thought!

We all know that despite all the great things said about it, open source is not necessarily better, or a de-facto winner. Linux had little success vs. Windows, Facebook is thriving in the walled garden, Blackberry had a berry successful run, and Google and Bing are not looking to open source their search algorithms. Android has had some success wrt. iOS, but iOS is still a formidable force and it is as proprietary as you get. Jedi!!

It appears then, that it is the strength of the ecosystem that drives success. IBM provided the entire banking stack and still milks the banking sector. IBM also provides a one-stop shop for all enterprise needs - databases, servers, biz applications, services. Apple has the whole stack - OS, applications, app store, music, content, technology, ads. - the only big thing really missing is search. Google has brought together email, documents, spreadsheets with a powerful search platform as the core of your Internet existence and is now socializing these. Yahoo! had it all, until it dropped search on the floor and is now trying to pick itself up. Facebook, via its social platform, ownership of your profile, and communications stack is filling out the pieces of the ecosystem - Bing is temporarily serving its search needs.

The other player that just made a major play today - Amazon.

Today was an interesting day, as it seemed to indicate that the only players left standing at the end of the day will be the ones who can provide a significant bundle of value. Until there’s enough moss on the rolling stone, it will stay a hit single. Twitter is a hit single, being overwhelmed by FaceBook and (maybe) Google+, and may need to find a home soon. eBay will find it harder and harder to provide more value than Amazon. Flickr has been passed by Facebook. Netflix and HP just shot themselves in the foot last week. LinkedIn can be subsumed by Facebook Timeline, and become a one-trick pony - a recruiting tool. Hulu better get acquired quickly.

Today was an interesting day. Amazon may not be challenging the iPad with the Kindle Fire, but it is providing a rich system now - proxy-smart Silk browser, ecommerce, platform, cloud, your credit card, your buying patterns, your books, magazines, and last, but not least, movies. What’s missing? Search and the Phone!

Cable companies own a reasonable bundle, but they’re losing the content game, causing them to start responding to customer requests to provide the right content at the right price. Netflix figured out the distriution to devices, consoles, web-connected TVs and had a headstart on online premium content, but that’s tenuous now, as it loses content deals, and pisses off customers. No browser, no books, no commerce, no search - it could just be a one-trick pony, relegated lower than even Comcast - which now owns my phone, cable and Internet access. If Amazon can provide me a better movie library, I’d be happy to consider ousting Netflix.

I want to simplify - pay fewer bills, worry about less things, make life simpler. It comes from maturing (also called growing older). I no longer use vi and emacs, no longer write shell scripts (I don’t think I can anymore :-)). I’m a consumer now, and prefer to cut-n-paste, drag-n-drop, blog and Like. +1 that!

I am a consumer. I don’t care about open source. I want single source!

The Human Element

2011-09-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

Last week, for those of you who care, there’s been a big brouhaha about conflicts of interest at TechCrunch, a group of self-proclaimed awesome journalists with ethical standards that can weather all sorts of conflicts of interest. Let’s not forget one-sided coverage on the CrunchPad, publication of confidential Twitter docs, washing dirty linen in public (expletives and all...), etc. You decide. But, read on ...

Also last week, I had a massive hour+-long “debate” with my teenage son about whether humans are just animals.

We covered various dimensions, such as DNA makeup, intelligence, thought, art, conceptualization, and at what point an “animal” starts on a journey to enlightenment that differentiates it in a magical new dimension.

Needless to say, neither of us gave in, and, while the rest of the family thought we were going to kill each other, no one won the “debate”. (Of course, I was right!)

Well, I should go back and start a new debate - are computers just as good as humans (and thus, just another kind of organism, or maybe even superior “beings”! :-))

Ever since people replaced people with machines, and people improved their creations, and made machines more and more in their own likeness, the barriers between the carbon-based life form, and a silicon-based life form are being eroded!

Deep Blue - Kasparov was one nail in the coffin. Wikipedia being the de facto compendium of information, Google instantly answering all the questions you may have, Wolfram Alpha solving math problems, Facebook obsoleting the need to meet anyone, and Watson effectively reaching the 3-second trigger barrier to beat the best Jeopardy organisms in the Universe -- have all but sealed the coffin.

Today, Dr. Watson just replaced some M.D. person in order to improve the consistency of diagnosis of the ailing human condition!

Also today comes the news that computers can write better than (or as well as) journalists, setting them up well on their way to the next Pulitzer (after having already waltzed their way to moviemaking history). Computers seem to have discovered the human element!

This is very timely :-) Let’s just replace TechCrunch’s “journalists” with Narrative Science bots, and see if it makes a difference!!

It’ll create a conflict of great interest!

Hyperlinks, relationships and expectations

2011-08-23T21:12:00.000-07:00

It has been exactly a month since my father passed away. I did not lose my father ... in some ways, I found him. We received amazing support during the last couple of months, and I’ve been thinking about the relationships we nurture.

In recent news, HP decided to drop Palm, and Cisco got rid of Flip. These were reasonably short-term relationships - you’d think they’d at least need some time to evaluate the relationships. Nope! These are corporate relationships. These are relationships with expectations! If one doesn’t meet the expectations, the relationship is in jeopardy.

Some relationships are like hyperlinks - they only go one way! Other relationships can be two-way streets, but sometimes there are only homes on one side of the street. Yet others are two-way, but there are expectations on both sides, like a toll you have to pay to enter the street. Try mapping these relationships to those in Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook and Google+.

A few relationships mature over time so that they are not only two-way, but more importantly, have few expectations on both sides. You can (almost) take them for granted. My relationship with my father was like this - at least that’s how I perceived it. Maybe he had expectations that I was not living up to, but I did not know of them.

Over the last couple of months, some relationships stood out. The support I received from some of my friends was amazing; there were people I could count on, and although I did not have any expectations, they came through in surprising ways. I did not expect a friend to visit my father in the hospital the day I informed him of my upcoming trip to Bangalore due to my dad’s illness - he was there, representing me when I was still in San Jose. I did not expect a friend to travel from a different city for just a day to see me and my father - he did! I did not expect a friend to travel from a different city and stand by my side on the day my father passed - but he was there for me without my asking! I did not expect a friend to stay for 4 hours with my sister at the airport because she was unwell, but he did and I am not surprised. I did not expect a friend to offer me his driver when I needed him, but he did. These were all friends who I’d not spoken to for months. I did not expect that a friend visiting Bangalore from the Bay Area (traveling back the following day) would take the time to come be with us during the ceremony - she did, representing all our Bay Area friends.

These actions were unexpected, but they mattered!

The truth about relationships is that when you have expectations, it is extremely easy to fall short, disappoint, and devastate. Many marriages fall apart because of this, although, in many cases, these expectations can be tempered. The importance of the relationship needs to trump the expectations. Parental relationships are full of expectations, and many of them are justified.

Strong relationships evolve, and they shed expectations as and when, in some strange sense, those expectations are met. So, meet those early expectations, and scratch them off the list ... or choose not to nurture those relationships.

Remember, the world doesn’t just work like hyperlinks!

Why can’t we all just get along intellectually?

2011-08-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

I guess the natural instincts that go to work for an individual (envy, greed, self-preservation, ambition, etc.) also go to work for entities and institutions that are created by and composed of individuals - the hive mind is an extension of the mind?

I found it concurrently amusing and depressing when I saw the following contiguous pixels on a screen when visiting a site to read news about the Google Motorola deal.

In one pixel-swoop (a) Oracle is suing Google (b) Motorola is suing Apple (c) Porn star sues the TSA and (d) Apple sues a teenager!

A little more poking around the same site, and I uncover the following articles, all published on the same day:

Apple shuts down Galaxy Tab sales
Apple takes aim at Motorola Xoom in Europe too
Apple attacks HTC in courts again

It’s all about the patents! There’s often a specific patent or two that are immensely valuable (though sometimes, seemingly trivial to even be worthwhile), but these days, it is the arsenal of patents - called the patent portfolio - that really projects the power! IBM is the master of wielding this power.

Really interesting, how a few words on a piece of paper can be used to stop a specific activity, or seriously hobble it, and how, even when there seems to be fairness in placing these speedbumps to innovation or human endeavor, certain “settlements” can themselves look unjust when using a different lens/timeline. I’m sure the Winklevoss twins are kicking themselves for having “settled” with Facebook, and Yahoo! cannot, I imagine, forgive itself for having settled with Google for a rearview-paltry $400M (or thereabouts) for the Overture ads patent.

Aah … intellectual property!! I have an interesting personal patent-defense-related story, but I’ll leave that out for now...

I wonder how much my diversified patent portfolio is worth! $10? $200? Of course, I can’t make any money from it :-)

The sandwiched generation. The best generation!

2011-05-24T23:14:00.000-07:00

Cucumber-Mint - the tastiest sandwich in the world!

Last week, we were at the Bellarmine Speech and Debate team banquet, where we heard a great student speech, in which Mr. Rogers (of the TV show) asks each member of his audience to take a few silent moments to remember who made them the special (imperfect, but unique) person they are.

I remembered my parents, who are responsible for who I am and where I am today.

Being in Silicon Valley during the most vibrant technology era in humanity offers us absolutely unique perspectives and opportunities, while also throwing challenges our way as first generation immigrants from a distant place.

Being a first generation immigrant, we’re caught in a middle ground between who we are and who we (really) are. Or who we were and who we are. Or who we are and who we’re going to be. I’ve just crossed over in terms of spending more of my life in the US than in India. India still means a lot to me, but in day-to-day happenings, e.g., elections, business changes, etc., I’m not impacted - it’s not personal any more. My roots are there, my life is here, my parents there, my children here, my heart wanders there, my mind stays here. My citizenship has flipped, but my accent hasn’t. Proud of India’s accomplishments, derisive of the system, politics and corruption, yet hopeful of what India will become.

We’re bound by old traditions, but liberated by free thinking and the worlds we’ve been exposed to, starting with a liberal upbringing. Actually, it is not my son who is the American Born Confused Desi (ABCD) - I am the Indian Born Confused Indian-American!! The kids are actually reasonably clear in that their ties are just to us, not to a faraway country they were born in. I have half-baked ties to my relatives, even to those I was reasonably close with during my childhood. The kids have just a few clear relationships, and they seem pretty matter-of-fact about them.

My identity is like that blurred face in the airport scan. I feel like I’m on the Berlin wall, while someone’s pounding on both sides to bring it down - I don’t even know which side I’m going to land on. Maybe I don’t really care.

I’m the spicy mint chutney in a sandwich with wheat bread on one side and white on the other.

For my children, the extended family just got an order of magnitude smaller. They don’t enjoy the relationships that we’d have otherwise nurtured - their grandparents are not a strong force in their lives. Our family is so small out here! I have to PLAN to be with my parents!! That’s sad!

Now, for the good part!

There’s nothing like living in a sunny part of the world with the best technology minds in the world (yes - most of them are indeed working on making you click more on ads :-)). Technology is moving so fast that I’m almost obsolete before I write my next blog post! We’re not just consumers in this new connected world, we’re the ones creating it!! That makes us a special generation!

The best part - I can enjoy gooseberries and mangoes as much as I do crunchy persimmons, and salt-rimmed margaritas and caipirinhas just as much as a masala-chai(at different times :-)), crepes as much as masala-dosas, kababs as much as sushi. That makes me a special generation.(I still don’t get sauerkraut and tripe!!) I no longer need to stare at someone because he or she is from a different place - I stare at myself in the mirror and wonder where I’m from.

I've taken salsa lessons, been a soccer coach to kids from all parts of the world, watch football and basketball (and the Sharks choke every year on ice in crystal clear HD). I can watch Rahat Fateh Ali Khan in concert, followed by U2 in a few weeks. I can appreciate ghazals and the magic of Bollywood music, while also tuning in to classic rock and rap and Lady Gaga and ... Friday(that's talent!) I can choose to ski or go the beach this weekend (or watch TV!). You can do some of these things, but not all of them unless you are in the right place, like Silicon Valley.

I can appreciate a variety of things, because of where I am, and the generation I belong to. The next generation will never understand the magic of Kishore Kumar or Jagjit Singh. My kids have lost the ability to relate to good Bangla folk music, or even western music from the 80s and 90s (Michael Jackson?). I don't believe this is just a generational thing, it is a timing issue - we’re the right generation. The next generation will not appreciate the automatic respect we have for the earlier generation - the appreciation of hard work and experience and integrity and loyalty. Ask yourself how long you’ll work for a single company!

Yes, each of us brings a uniqueness to the world, to the neighbo(u)rhood, as stated by Mr. Rogers. But our generation, and our first-generation status in the sunniest part of the world brings a certain uniqueness to our lives.

Am I a citizen of India? A citizen of the US? A citizen of Silicon Valley?

I am a citizen of the world!

It’s all about the farmers!

2011-04-29T14:52:00.000-07:00

Flying out of Bangalore, Silicon Valley of India, last month, I saw patches of coconut trees and other patches of green around the airport. Farmers! Those of you who know India will realize that those fields are … history! The farmers who own that land probably have their uncles in the state government, and will make serious money selling their land to developers, or to the government over the next few years! For all we know, those acres were doled out to the right relatives by the politicians who knew where the airport was going to finally land!

Anyone who knows India knows how, over the years, it was the landowners (the zamindars!) exploited their way to riches and power. Although they did not pull the plough, they were in the position to sell the produce of the real-estate.

My parents' current flat in Bangalore is on land that was a paddy field when I used to go to high school. Paddy farmers moved up to real-estate farming, selling flats! It’s all about farming your real-estate!

If you know anything about parked domains, you know that it is big business, where the landlords of the domains make money off ads when people arrive at these sites from various referrers.

Have a good domain to sell? iCloud anyone? That’ll be $4.5 Million. Cash! The opportunists who buy up domain names are called cyber-squatters for a reason! The benefits of land-grabbing in the real virtual world.

Shelter in the past was where you lived - home - with a roof over your head. Today, it’s where you live on the web. This is why I pay more to my Internet provider than my utilities company! The expensive real estate is those pixels between the search box and the search results on Google, or the strip of ads on your Facebook page. There are always vendors hawking their wares where you live. They know you live there, and you’ll be back.

The smart farmer will figure out how to fertilize the land so the yield is higher. Plant strawberries with other trees and you’ll have more to sell at the famers market on Sunday. Plant richer ads on the web page that you’ll be at, and that’s fertilizer for the online world. Make your home an estate, where your friends can live, and there’s more fruit to be purchased! If you don’t have enough land for your friends’ (updates), you can always plant other fruit - some other lucrative offers.

It’s all about the fertile land. That’s where the trees grow (or buildings! if real-estate brings more than flowers or tomatoes - what the heck!). It’s where the famers go, where the market makers go, and the customers too. It’s no wonder that all the fishermen go to the fish market! You’d think they don’t want to sit next to each other and compete ... they do, since that's where the customers are!

It’s all about the right space. Let’s Face it! It isn’t My Space - it’s the landowners’ space!

Big company … small company?

2011-03-31T14:29:00.000-07:00

My life in bags!!

Ok! So I’ve worked for several companies so far, and they range from big to tiny - conglomerates to mid-sized companies to startups. My roles have seen the gamut - from research to development to product management, driving vision to building prototypes, mulling architecture to evangelizing technology, coding JSPs to creating sites for internal communications, meeting customers to writing blog posts. Jack of all trades, master of some!

There’s been a common thread - the need to have impact - help move the needle of technology in some tangible way, or impact the search experience for users on the web or within the enterprise or try to create a new paradigm that changes how we work/play.

A question I'm asked is - which is better - large or small company? What are the pros and cons?

First, let me say that with every organization, there’s something to learn - what to do, and very often, what not to do. I try to take that with me wherever I go, so as I get older and wiser (dumber and less skilled?), these lessons can help me become more effective (tolerable?). Some things, I don’t seem to learn - like managing up! Maybe it’s not in my DNA. BTW - that’s a mandatory skill for success anywhere :-)

The biggest advantage to working for a big company is that you have access to contribute towards changing the world in a significant way, sometimes making tech. history.

When you’re contributing (even in a miniscule way) for the world to watch IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov, or serve the Olympics results on the web for the first time (Atlanta 1996), there’s no feeling like it! I still cherish those projects. Before the Olympics site went live, I remember personally bringing down IBM.com to upgrade it with our research software (Network Dispatcher) (to prepare for the expected surge in referral traffic from the Olympics site) - 2 hours became 4 and I was sweating, since the web server logs were stalled instead of running like a torrent. The folks on the Watson team are feeling that exhilaration of the Jeopardy achievement now, and it will last them throughout their careers! The folks at Twitter and Facebook will forever cherish their role in the transformation of the middle east!

When you launch a feature on Yahoo! or Google.com, you know that you’re impacting millions of people in a very real way. People think you have something to offer when you speak at conferences. You meet large customers - brands you hear about everyday. Your product is powering their websites and intranets, and you’re reaching into their everyday lives and touching their users. For me, it is deeply gratifying to work on products that power FIFA.com or the NY Times or Starwars.com.

Now - what about smaller companies? There’s a huge thing going for them - you own the destiny of the company. You’re not a cog in the wheel - you are the wheel! You are driving from idea to product, design and architecture, and you’re probably also the person selling the idea to your CEO/CTO and to your customers. You own the budget, you are responsible for delivery of product, and the primary owner of the health and happiness of your team.

In a startup, you are the company! You’re working on a mission, and sometimes, it is all-consuming. During the first phase of the company, once the core team is in place, all that matters is the product you are building - it is only after the first few months that mundane things like market conditions, market opportunities, burn rate (oops!), go to market strategy and the business model become top of mind. That adrenaline-pumping exhilaration is only possible in a startup. You’re doing the design, you’re doing the coding, you’re doing the data backup, you're writing the design docs and product documentation and your product is … finally … working!

With a startup, you’re not meeting daily with the big name customers. In fact, you have to repeat your company name more than once when someone asks what you do at a party. You’re not being given the tour of the newsroom at the New York Times, or getting an inside view at a museum in Washington, and you’re not meeting a customer who (really) cannot tell you what their top secret (really!!) project is.

In the lobby of the New York Times

With a startup, you’re not getting bags and shirts that have the Olympics/FIFA logo on them.

One of the nicer shirts in my collection

But … given a choice ... give me the exhilaration of the startup!

The regimes of Silicon Valley

2011-02-25T20:35:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: Please don’t take any of this too literally, especially if you are an Apple Fanboy, a Google bot, an Android, a Netflixter, or a Motoroller - but do try to take it seriously...

This last week has seen a lot of activity in Middle Earth as Sauron has waged war with enslaved men, and elves; we’ve even seen some Orcs show up in Tahrir Square, on horses and camels, nonetheless, to try to quell the protests against tyranny.

While the attention of the world has been on the pyramids, and on the robed leadership in Libya pouring fireballs on protesting folk outside the ramparts of the city, more freedom protests are likely seething in the heart of Silicon Valley.

What protests, you ask? I tell...

Silicon Valley autocracies are being challenged, and they are responding in anger and vitriol, setting the stage for the common man to protest.

Challengers to the establishment are Xooming to the forefront, promising a Flashpoint of courage, but even as they mount the challenge, they are setting the stage for their own autocratic behavior! We’re informed that this freedom to Flash freely in society is likely not a right until the next spring! When will the proletariat be allowed to freely choose if and when they’d like to Flash? I should be allowed to Flash when I want to, should I not? This is the twenty-first, I say!! The Cult of Apple had one possible chink to their dominance, but who is the challenger? - is it the real democracy, or the army or the Muslim Brotherhood - who makes their own rules about how and when? Is that a lost opportunity to true freedom, a moment lost in history?

They say that Twitter and Facebook are leading the revolution in Middle Earth, but all of a sudden, I see some messages from my Faceful brotherhood are lost in the ether. A convenient way for me to be subdued... heh? Why did my Twitter updates to Facebook suddenly stop arriving? Why do I not see the updates from some friends that I was seeing last week? Did I ask for this filtering? “M’lord! I did not!” The Facebook autocracy has deemed this a good decision for the masses. My privacy - their call. My friends - they decide. My messages - they filter. My very own tweets - they hide! (I know not what I think any more, since I see none of my Tweets). My likes - they own! Which countries to free next? ...okay...I am getting carried away in my passion! But come, my bretheren...it’s time to awaken and take back our profiles - I’d like to break down my own wall!

Like Bahrain, Netflix is only giving us the cushion that progress is being made. Cut the cord, they say, and charge more for the DVD option. Yet, that umbilical is like a chain, for if you go to the library, there’s nothing there! Can I instantly watch? NO! If I need to watch something with the children, I have to get a DVD! Can I watch the latest and greatest freedom movie? No! I will have to wait for months. It is unbelievable that this regime claims streaming of information is in vogue. And Comcast!! Sometimes has the latest - but that’s a mercenary force, for I’m already paying them to get my television channels and they want me to pay more and more for my freedom! Shoot me down like a dog on the highway - for this is highway robbery. I may just fly to the Amazon for my breath of fresh air!

And if you like "On-Demand Media", the fruit of a free press, be prepared to separate the wheat from the chaff. Garbage in, garbage out, and propaganda is plentiful. And, of course, just like regimes can play what they really want on television or radio (revolution? what revolution?), the regimes can snuff out the Demand Media or Democratic Spam - choose your moniker. The interesting thing is that people can vote on what constitutes Democratic Spam (or crap) in order to make it less available to the masses. That’s the power of suggestive thought! For the people, by the people...And if you don’t like the regime ...Bing! and decide what you are going to do about it! The regimes are quite pleased to tell you who has more money in their accounts - some measure in Royal Pounds, the other in Tweets, and yet another in Likes! Those are our assets, gentle folk... remember that!

Regime change may just be easier than you may have thought before. All it takes is a Blog … a Tweet! You just need a few million to re-tweet! Get in line ...

But be warned, brothers of my protest army … Obama dines with the regimes!

It’s a small small world

2011-01-29T14:57:00.000-08:00

The world is flat - and small too! In fact, sometimes, I feel, as time goes by, it’s getting tiny!

25 years ago, when I was in high school in Bangalore, I could not have imagined that I’d be living and working in California in the U.S. In fact, I probably didn’t know about San Jose, and Silicon Valley.

I would take the company bus to school in the city, and take the bus back home to ITI township (my dad worked for ITI (telephones)). One of my best friends would take his bus back home to the HMT colony (his dad worked for HMT (they made great watches). We would walk together after school to our respective bus stops! We never took the same bus to school or back home.

Fast forward...I’m sitting in the Google shuttle, and I look up from my Nexus One. I see a familiar face. My high school buddy is sitting in a seat in front of me. That’s a Nexus! We share a workplace (we took completely different paths to get there) and we’re shuttling the same bus, more than 2 decades and thousands of miles away from where we were born. It’s a small world!

How far we’d both come to finally take the same bus! Interesting? Ok...now...

I’m sitting at my cube at work, and I see a couple of people walking towards the door to our office. One of them’s leading ...there’s a big smile on his face, and he's saying my name as he reaches his arm out to shake my hand! His face is familiar, but I cannot place him in that instant.

Turns out that he’s a high school buddy, who I’ve not seen since graduation (except on Facebook, which is why his face was familiar). He was visiting Google to meet an ex-colleague for lunch, and was just walking past my cube to check out the view from the window, when he saw me and recognized me. It’s a tiny world!

Communications, technology, education, careers …. how can one imagine that the world has gotten so flat and so small, and there are no boundaries or barriers.

Time has flown (HMT still makes watches!) and ubiquitous communications are here (ITI is on the verge of bankruptcy, and traditional wired telephones and exchanges are all but history...)
Our parents were coincidentally in the right place - Bangalore - the Silicon Valley of India … their progeny are sitting in the same building on different floors, trying to push the frontiers of change just a little bit farther!

How tiny will the world be 25/50/100 years from now? Will we have nationalities and passports or will we just be citizens of a single heterogenous union? Will we need to take a bus to work? Will we only recognize each other online?

Time && space && communications = [itsy bitsy world]

The "Real" Madrid experience!

2010-12-22T15:52:00.000-08:00

Snow in London, no salt ⇒ no flight to Switzerland! Go to Munich directly, eat good Bavarian food, and squeak out of Munich before the snow catches up...arrive in Madrid. Finally ... no snow to ground planes!

Ready to leave on Saturday...so went to the Bernabeu to buy shirts for RonRik! Walking back to the hotel, I see a big crowd gathered around the entrance, cheering and singing ... the players are driving in, so they can take the team bus to the hotel - game with Valencia tomorrow evening. I hang around, hoping to see a glimpse of some of the best soccer players in the world, since I'm leaving in the AM. Sure enough, I recognize Di Maria as he drives in to a cheering crowd. TV crews are shooting the scene, and yours truly makes it to the real Real Madrid web site, as photographic evidence shows!

Rajat's on the real Real Madrid website

Thrilling enough? NOT!

I walk into the hotel and am told that the airport is SHUT DOWN! Why? There's no snow?! No freeze!

Aha - the human element (Cisco! pay attention!) - Spain's air traffic controllers have gone on a flash strike and Spanish airspace is frozen! Government declares a state of alert and threatens the striking controllers with prison ... well ...my flight is moved out a couple of days! Stuck in Madrid!

Colleague rises to the occasion (Thanks Cesar!!), and I get to see the Real Madrid game vs. Valencia on Saturday, with Cristiano Ronaldo scoring 2 great goals right before my eyes!

"...is this real?"

Destiny, I say! I have the REAL Madrid experience!!

It's all about the video - idiot!

2010-10-25T21:16:00.000-07:00

The most amazing invention in the world, after sliced bread, cars and cellphones is ... high definition television! There's been lots of well-deserved buzz over the last few weeks about self-driven cars; an interesting future ahead, but let's talk about what's currently on the pop charts!

It's all about video!!

I just realized that I pay more in (average) monthly bills to Comcast than I do to PG&E!! After food and shelter, I effectively pay more to my video provider - more than I pay per month in gas. The irony is that there's not much TV I watch - maybe a couple of DVRed shows per week. But when I watch something cool on HDTV, it's worthwhile - world cup soccer, NFL football (even when the damn Cowboys lose), CSI Miami (it does not matter how stupid the storyline is, or how hackneyed the acting, the faked-out colors of Miami are gorgeous, pixel by turquoise pixel)

Therefore, independent of wondrous phones and colorful book readers, the big screen is here to stay - I call it the form-factor discontinuity. That's also why Netflix, Apple and Google are all playing for the TV market, since you'll always have users in front of the gorgeous screen. If you consider games as interactive video, the case becomes even stronger. My boys were just pointing out one of the recent PS3 games, and the comment was, "it's just like being in a movie".

It is all about the video. Why? Since it's the best way to tell a story. You may not want to watch the story twice, but there's no better way to tell a story than with brilliant HD video and Dolby Surround!!

I'm not sure who will win the TV wars - but Apple TV seemed to go a step away from where we need to be, i.e., device consolidation. They should have made the iPad the AppleTV!! Why can't I just beam video wirelessly from my cell phone/tablet to the television - why do I need yet another device? At least Google TV seems to have tried to worm it's way into the actual television, and is based on the phone OS!! With built-in search, access to all the web via a full-blown browser, there's a chance it can become a convenient portal to photos and all video content, be it high-quality ESPN or Netflix, or crowdsourced or family videos on YouTube. Maybe Flash videos too :-) Of course, it would help if Hulu, NBC, ABC, CBS stop blocking Google TV :-)

Another argument is that it is also going to be the right place to allow you to interact with the web - this is where WebTV failed, but I'm not convinced that's going to be the predominant use of web access (with user interaction and input).

Why? I'm not sure I'm going to start browsing when I am watching a movie or a world cup game, or my weekly show. If I do, it will likely be infrequent. There's a reason that the TV is called the idiot box - I like being an idiot when I watch TV. I love the movie experience and I love the entertainment value of television.

Another "killer app" is supposed to be using the TV for calling. Given that Android is the Phone OS, that makes a lot of sense technically. I like that the TV can become a mega-phone, but I suspect it will not be the primary calling station. When Comcast beams the caller on my TV screen when a VOIP call comes in, I'm not jumping to pick up the phone. Why? Because the call is likely a disturbance when I'm watching a movie or a game. Will I place a call while watching a show? Unlikely. Will I use the TV to place the call, when I could Facetime on my mobile phone? Sometimes! Work-related telepresence?

I could be wrong about all this, since I'm the idiot with the idiot box. I like TV for entertainment - pure and simple. This is also why, given time, I have the capacity to watch *anything* on television ... I'll bet that there are many idiots in the world who prefer "recline" to "upright", at least on the living-room couch!

I can see Tweeting and Facebooking during a game or a show, but the real use of Google TV will be to stream audio/video/photos, and possibly, game content. The other stuff will be sidebar activities, also possible with your mobile device (iPad or phone). It's ironic that Facetime belongs to Apple and not Facebook!

So let's look a few years hence...my car will drive me to work, and I'll be sitting in the back seat, watching video!!

Tradeoffs!

2010-09-21T23:53:00.000-07:00

Most articles about Google talk about the great food there. True! Some articles have written about the Google15. There's truth to this - I'm currently facing (despite my skinny frame) the Google5 - extra pounds that incrementally hit - I have a gut feeling about how this will turn out! Tradeoff -> goodg food vs. unneeded weight.

Trying to walk/run it off this evening (first activity in a while), I ran down a little creek near our home in Almaden. I saw a few mallard ducks and a family of quail scurrying into the bushes (yes quail can fly too!). Idyllic and peaceful, with the sun setting over the Santa Cruz mountains, and the water dribbling down the creek. The moon clear in the evening sky!

My eyes filled with tears, since this was hardly a peaceful, lovely day for our community - in the wee hours this morning, (around 3 am), a young boy from our community was killed in a car crash - a couple of teens were returning late when the driver, inebriated, crashed into the traffic light post. The car caught fire and the passenger, a recent graduate of the local Leland High School was trapped in the burning car - gone! Imagine this pretty day for his family and friends, and the family and friends of the driver, who is in jail. DUI! Tradeoff? Probably one glass too many, one choice too bad, and a young man snuffed out at the prime of his life, another with this weight for the rest of his life.

We are constantly making these tradeoffs - trading off family time and relaxation for incremental importance at work ... a "career" or recognition or a fistful of dollars. I'm not able to see my parents in Bangalore for months on end, as we're here in California for a "better life" for ourselves and our kids. Our son is working very hard in high school - several hours of homework per day plus other commitments, and it's a daily tradeoff between his future and his social well-being. More likely a tradeoff between a good UC school and another good school. Not much of a tradeoff! If he's not stressed, we're doing it on his behalf.

We're in Silicon Valley in the sun when the rains are pelting the streets in India. We've traded off the grass and the mountains for the concrete jungle and the traffic, the creek for noisy Old Madras Road, but we're losing ourselves in a meaningless quest for ... what?

We blog and tweet and only a few "followers" care about our false sense of self-importance or self-meaning. We think we're doing something important, but are we? We're only making a tradeoff - one decision at a time - that we'll be happy with or regret in the future.

This morning, I made my middle schooler get off the car and run to school so he wouldn't be tardy since all the cars had backed up on the side streets due to the accident (which we were unaware of). Tradeoff - he ran more than 3 blocks with his heavy backpack on his back, so he wouldn't be tardy!

Tradeoff -> no one was tardy today! The principal's phone message just asked us to hug our kids and tell them how much we love them, and that we should reinforce that they should use good judgment in their lives. Make the right choices! Some tradeoffs are expensive. Some tradeoffs are painful. Some tradeoffs don't leave room for others.

There's a poster and flowers at the traffic light near our house. Flowers for an immature decision, a bad choice.

Let's hope that our sons and daughters make the right tradeoffs. I'm questioning mine!

Another shift begins...

2010-08-17T19:53:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I had written a poem called "Shift". Now, if blogging had existed then, I'd have published it on my blog (like ronrik), and therefore, you'd be able to evaluate my poetic instincts in their entirety. However, I had no blog at age 14, and so I have been unable to find the poem, so you'll just have to go with the few snippets that I remember.

Shift
Sirens blow, faces glow
People stream out in a pretty row
In the buses, people mop
with handkerchiefs, a sweaty drop.
...
...
A shift begins... another shift begins...
To the factory we go!

What's the basis for the poem? Let me explain...

My dad worked for ITI (Indian Telephone Industries), a very large, successful, public-sector telecommunications company in Bangalore. Here were some interesting things about that company/job:

Given that ITI was primarily government owned, food was heavily subsidized for the employees.
Employees took shift buses (a full fleet of dozens of dark blue buses) to and from work. (We students took the buses into Bangalore city to our schools, and the buses brought the "workers" in for their shift.
Most "workers" just had a desk (or not) on the factory floor.
The siren blew loud and clear to announce the end of a shift/beginning of the next shift. It was often a reminder for us. Too late for the school bus in the morning, or dad would be back home soon, or we'd better get back home right away for "tiffin" if we didn't want mom mad!

Thinking about it - when going to work, now in Silicon Valley decades later, I've come full circle!

We have subsidized (free) food at the cafeteria at work. Instead of dosas vs. vadas vs. puris vs. rice, we have chinese vs. indian vs. grill vs. mexican vs. tapas. But food is food!
I take a shuttle bus to work, and I need to be there on time, or I miss the bus. It has Internet, but that just means that "they've" made it easier to work even on the bus! Oh yeah! It's air-conditioned, so no handkerchiefs required.
I've gone from a wonderful corner office (IBM Almaden) to a cube (Verity) to an open cube (Yahoo!) to ... hey hey hey ... a DESK (Google). I don't even have a wall to put up my award plaques from previous jobs. Ha! Even if I did, I'd probably have to move anyway, so easier to leave them in a box or in the garage at home!

The only real difference?

There's no siren!

What's in a Foxhurst?

2010-08-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about living in Silicon Valley is the wonderful sunshine.

Two of the things that are not great about living in Silicon Valley - the exorbidant real-estate prices and
earthquakes!!

However, if you have a little room in the backyard, and if it is an older house, then you may also have the fortune to have a few fully grown fruit trees. We have a few. We had a good yield this year from our fruit trees - tangelos, nectarines, plums #1 and #2, and last, but definitely not least, the grapefruit!

Now, for a couple of years, we consumed none of the grapefruit (slightly bitter), but over the last couple of years, we discovered that grapefruit is an awesome component of Silicon Valley innovation - the drink called the Foxhurst!!

Three - the ingredients in a Foxhurst (besides ice):
- Vodka (a few oz, depending on how innovative you want to feel)
- Fresh-squeezed grapefruit from our Foxhurst backyard
- 2 crushed fresh mint leaves from our Foxhurst backyard

If you want a little more zing, add an ounce of Patron Citronge (Orange Liqueur). The magic with grapefruit - you can't even taste the alchohol! The negative ... you can't have it if you are on statins :-(

I'd post a photo of the Foxhurst here instead of the grapefruit ... but it's been consumed!

I'm not yet on statins.

3 strikes, but not out!

2010-07-27T23:03:00.000-07:00

Under normal cicumstances, 3 strikes, and you're out!

If my car breaks down on me 3 times, I'd switch cars! 3 DSL issues later, I'm with Comcast.

Exceptions involve matters of the heart, strong relationships, a lack of choice or irrational attraction! For example, I'm sure we've had more than 3 major disagreements, but my wife and I are still together (uh-oh!). I'm sure our teenager has broken major rules more than 3 times, but I still see him at home. If you consistently have major issues with your boss ... you may just have to suck it up and deal with it. And then, there's irrational (or rational) attraction...

The point? Well ... I've had 3 issues with Apple's magical device this week alone, but rather than walk away, which I'd have done under normal circumstances, I'm still open to giving the iPad a shot. This only happens when one has something to offer beyond what's normal... Yes! the iPad is special!

I was using (not testing) my brother-in-law's iPad (I'm still waiting for multitasking (iOS4?) and video camera - i.e., for my very own xmas gift, or maybe someone will buy me a birthday gift next month).

News Flash! Apple's no-flash decision bit me in the butt 3 times in 1 day! (I think the iPad is great otherwise - and FlipBoard is pretty awesome on it.)

First, I tried following lyrics for a song I'm trying to learn while listening/streaming it live from a Bollywood website - doesn't matter which! There's a flash music widget on the site, so I normally go to the page and the song starts playing, while I can scroll down the Hinglish lyrics! Convenient! Flash may be slow, but who cares - I want to do it! It works on my Android phone.

Tough - it did not work on the iPad. No flash!

Second, I tried going to Flickr on the iPad - is it just me, or does Flickr not work on the iPad? Tough. No flash! Anyone who thinks that's a good thing for users? Apple fanboys?

Next, I went to my own website. I've updated my own site with CoolIris Photo-wall - pretty cool, if you ask me, i.e., desirable functionality on my website. Screech! I could only see 3 large gaping spaces on the iPad! My site is broken on the iPad (no flash) because ...

Book of Jobs #1 - Thou shalt spend the time to "sanitize" thy pages of vermin Flash.

I need to HTML5 it? Should that really be my priority, or should I spend time playing carrom with my kids before they go off to college?

Strike 3!

While most other products would have been out of consideration after this kind of experience, I'm still open to the iPad, because I believe it is a game-changing product. But you know, if there was a copycat in the market by xmas, with similar functionality (a fast follower?) and user-choice, allowing me to do what I want/need to do, maybe I'd be okay if the brand said Orange!

I think the Flash decision will eventually amount to a bite out of Apple - maybe a small one.

BTW - I don't think the issue has anything to do with the system being "closed". Open systems are good, but not a recipe for success. Apple, Facebook are flourishing examples of closed systems! It's about being able to do what you want/need to do. I wasn't sure about this flashpoint earlier, but now it just seems like a bad business decision.

Today flash, tomorrow AdMob ads, what's strike three for developers?

iPhone FaceTime - a Silicon Valley relationship!

2010-07-22T23:14:00.000-07:00

This is a true story, and has nothing to do with Antennagate! Read on! If you liked my "search play" you'll probably like this...

A sweet relationship begins...

It was an early morning in January 2007, and he saw her shapely figure emerging from the an Apple orchard in Cupertino. It was, cliched as it may sound, love at first touch (yes, she did let him slide his fingers across her whenever he so desired!)

She brought him the newspaper in the morning, sang his favorite songs for him, was with him night and day, and even accompanied him to work. His company agreed to pay for her to be with him. They had free lunch together at the cafeteria everyday. I guess they thought that if she would constantly remind him of the tasks he was to do for them, that would pay off...and it did!

They went on a Safari together, and she took care of all the navigation, finding interesting places, maps, directions and all sorts of great information. The remainder of his family felt pretty left out, as he was with her in heart and soul even when he was physically with family members. He didn't care. He was in love with her smooth and shapely figure and delightful touch.

Fall! He'd fallen head over heels in love and they were married. He had her in his pocket, and they spent all the time together.

A year or two passed - she introduced him to her sisters, who were actually prettier and flirtatious (Man! was he surprised at how fast they were!), but he stuck with his first love. She suited his needs, and he needed no other...

The contract had been signed. Til' death do us part, so it seemed...

Boredom in the relationship...

As often as it occurs in real life, this Silicon Valley relationship lost steam just as Silicon Valley employees lose interest in their companies. (like software engineers lose interest with a product after a while just when they've learned enough and become important for the product). She was just not as flawless as during the early days. She seemed to be a little sluggish in the mornings, and every photo did not show her in the best light. There was no optimal resolution to all situations. Her favorite rubber jacket was slightly ripped - she still wore it sometimes and she looked kinda shabby.

He still tried talking to her, but she did not always listen! It was like she did not recognize his voice.

Then, there was news of this new lady in town. She was introduced first as kinda stoic and robotic, like an Android, but once you came to know her (really), she was actually quite slick and fashionable. His company offered him her company - and to be polite, he asked her out!

Pandora's box had just been opened! and the music just flowed...

With his new amour, things were just brighter and faster. Her face was like liquid, and rippled with enthusiasm every time he touched her.

With his wife, things just got sluggish and irritating.

He'd just started listening to a great new radio station online, and his wife always seemed to turn it off every time he asked her a question! It got so damn irritating, he wanted nothing to do with her. With her, Pandora's music softened everything they did together - it was a cruel joke.

Going out in the car was just different. His wife would constantly remind him to ask for directions, while she would speak them out as he held her in his hand. Never did he get lost again, never reminded again that "men never ask for directions! (but should)"

He would pick her up in his hands, and speak with her, and she would respond to his every suggestion. It's like she knew his voice, accent and all!

He made a clean break! The separation was a little painful, and he had to learn a whole new set of buttons to push, but he got there quickly. He missed the old records that he would listen to with his wife.

No Annulment

Their ATTorney, Bloody ATTgood said he was fine with the separation, although his wife had first introduced them. Further, since ATTgood had a deal with his company, he'd get a special discount for upcoming legal services. Sounded good! He trusted his lawyer at his word. He moved in with his first extramarital Nexus. He called her Nexy!

It was a few months when he started receiving his lawyer's repeated (irritating) SMSes. Apparently, he needed to pay more, the same pre-nuptial agreement could no longer be used with Nexy. His legal fees shot up, since apparently the lawyers were dealing with more complicated information - 3 G's more expensive! It sounded rather absurd - he did not feel like a million bucks! He'd spent enough on his wife to begin with!

He went through with it, and had to pay his lawyer more just to be with Next to Nexy. He was too much in love with her to give her up and go back to his wife. Pay to play! The funny thing? With ATTgood, he did not get the 3 G's worth of service, as promised!

Then, he noticed that he was not getting the promised special discount with his legal fees - they were higher and were piling up, with no discount. What was he paying for? It took him months to find out. Call after call, ATTgood said they'd adjust his legal bills, but no discount was forthcoming!

He was mad, and called one more time, "I'm switching the legal service unless you tell me exactly why I'm not getting my promised discount. I have emotional trauma, and my relationship is in bad shape, and I'm paying more for your terrible services and dropped calls and you're ripping off my company discount. It's like a double-whammy, a single-EDGEd sword through my guts! It does not feel good, and now I'm beginning to think I should have stayed with my wife to begin with, so I wouldn't have had all this pain! I'm spending more money on this!

"Aah!" ATT-no-good croons. "It seems that I know what the problem is. The legal documents we have show that you are still married - to your WIFE! It's right here on the computer. Plain and simple."

"I thought I got that ANNULLED! I even paid more to make that happen, and to stop your stupid SMSes. "Are you an idiot? Or just a ****ing shark?" I'm not even getting anything more for paying more."

HE felt like the idiot for agreeing to all this!

All of a sudden, seemed like Nexy looked better in videos than in photos - she actually looked pretty dull in incandescent light, and her makeup was literally blueish in flourescent light. The damn flash didn't seem to do the trick either.

"Get the damn annulment, ATTnogood!" he bellowed. "Or I'm taking my legal services to T Mobile lawyer down T street!"

The party

The next weekend, he met his ex-wife at a party. She was wearing a brand new silver dress, with mesmerizing silver halter straps, and it looked like she had a glass sheen on her dress - front and back!

A couple of margaritas, and he wanted to go up to her, talk to her and see his face in her eyes! He wanted some FaceTime with her - she seemed to touch an emotional chord in him. She was looking prettier and brighter, and had lost some weight. Someone took a photo of her while he walked towards her, and there was a blinding flash. He saw that the photographer was delighted with the photograph.

There was a twinkle in her eyes!

The annulment was in flight, but he wanted to be with ... his wife ... again!

Football, execution, social networks and innovation!

2010-07-07T19:35:00.000-07:00

The last month has been all about ... football ... and execution! Brazil, my favo(u)rite team, played the ultimate collaborative team game, weaving the ball around the field, and creating the most unexpected patterns in attack, but they had a single point of failure in defense, and their team network failed - instead of executing when in a position of strength (leading 1-0 against Holland), they focussed on denial-of-service attacks, and behaved as defensively as Yahoo! did vs. Google. The result -> they, like England, are out. Beckham, in a fancy suit, was the marketing icon for both England and Yahoo! during the world cup. Marketing and execution are 2 different things!

I spent the last month at Bangalore, and one thing I learned, is that everything works there based on social networks. You call into the ether, you get Biryani delivered. You lower your car window and ask the autorickshaw-driver next to you, and you get to your destination (no need for Google maps :-)). "Aagey se right" and the social network executes for you. (Hyderabad is a different matter, as all answers seem to be "Seedha-eech". It's called "auto-forwarding to the next friend" :-)

Football is a social network - you pass the ball, you get it back, you score! It's like WebEx :-) The key learning is that the real power is in team-nets vs. anonymous social-nets. You want Messi on your team, not Joe the Plumber! This is true on the Internet as well - I trust my friends, colleagues more than anonymous followers. This basically means that social features may have unexplored power in the enterprise (where the trusted team lives). (I'm not sure about the equivalent of a match-saving handball in social networks - blocking someone on Facebook?)

Maradona, with an opportunity to win, underestimated what the competition could do - the Argentine defense looked amateurish, especially on the 4th German goal (which should not have happened at a World Cup!!) You need offense and defense to win, and that's true of technology as well. Yahoo! only had a "defense" strategy. Google and Facebook play like South American teams! Opt-out instead of opt-in is an aggressive strategy, followed by both.

Companies that underestimate the competion have chinks in their armor - which is why I place three elements into product strategy - mandatory features (trapping, passing, penalty kicks), defensive features (set plays, goalkeeping), and differentiating/offensive features (messi, forlan, klose and ronaldo9 (who may have done more than fabiano!)). Ghana lost because it missed a mandatory feature - slotting in a penalty kick when it mattered. African teams lose composure at key moments - unnecessary fouls late in games, etc. - they often beat themselves with a lack of discipline (Nigeria-Italy 1994)! (similar to India/Cricket). Not so with teams like Germany, who have the ultimate discipline - they never beat themselves - you have to *beat* them, as Spain did today. See this article on Africa's date with failure. Quoted:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” - Aristotle

This brings me to innovation. Innovation wins! Germany gave up on the old cross-and-head strategy. They innovated! England did not innovate, and their kick-and-rush was boring and predictable (even Beckenbauer said so). The result is that Germany's results were stunning. England came in with a Nokia and Germany spoke on an Apple iPhone 4 (4 goals/game?). I would not be surprised if Ballack being out actually helped Germany innovate. At the semi-final, Germany played a scared, defensive, boring game, and got out-innovated! Simple! You need to play to win.

And when you have killer features in your product (Milito), play them to win!

Oh Spam - why do you exist?

2010-06-03T01:22:00.000-07:00

When you open your window, you get the fresh breeze, but the room also gets dusty!

We're so used to SPAM, chain letters, etc., that I did not wait a moment to scream at my 11-year old when I saw his "Chain" email ... he laughed, as did everyone at home, since it was a big joke that I'd fallen for - he had made this up himself (read it and you'll see why it is funny and original). Even an 11-year old understands this insanity!!

Today, despite promises that comment spam will soon be a thing of the past on Blogger, I can deal with it no longer. I have finally gone to full moderation of comments on my blog. No more this crap - you @^%=*%^! who leave this kind of slime behind ...

You win some, you lose some. I'd gladly lose the SPAM!

It's creation science!

2010-05-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

This is the first invited post on my blog. I wanted to write about this topic, but Ronny, our very own highschooler, did a great job publishing this on Nanothoughts, a blog he shares with classmates from his Bellarmine freshman class. Enjoy Ronny's post!

What yesterday was fiction today manifests truly.

A rather poetic way of putting it, but I believe that the momentous occasion this article pertains to deserves it. This is a moment that future historians and students will look back on. Whether their rearward glances will contain regret or admiration, only time will tell. But for now, we've got this to chew on:

Man has become God.

Or at least a certain group of men have. On May 20, Craig Venter and a team of top scientists made an announcement: the world's first synthetic life form - a bacterium with a genome that is completely man made - has been created. The cell, dubbed Mycoplasma laboratorium, has been worked on by Venter's crew for almost fifteen years, and it's finally here. The cell, which takes physical components from a preexisting cell, but has a genome that is completely man made, has already replicated itself over a billion times.

Before this achievement, the longest synthesized sequence numbered about 30,000 pairs. The first chromosome attempted by his crew, that of the Mycoplasma genitalium genus, the smallest naturally occurring genome: 580,000 pairs. The final product: over 1,000,000 base pairs.

And that's still a comparatively tiny genome. Damn, nature, you scary.

So how did they do it?

Venter's group started with a very basic genome, that of the Mycoplasma genome. They began to eliminate genes, figuring out which ones were absolutely necessary to life. And after determining the Minimal Genome, they began to create the world's first man-made functional DNA sequence. The team used machines that produced DNA sequences up to 80 nucleotides long, but seeing as they eventually produced a genome 1,000,000 nucleotides long, you can see why this process took upwards of a decade. Venter explains the attitude his team took towards the process: "When we look at life forms, we see them as fixed entities. But they change from second to second. And life is basically a software process; our genetic code is our software, and our cells are dynamically, constantly, reading that code." In a way, what Venter's group did was change the operating system of the cell when they replaced its natural DNA with their own hand-crafted stuff.

And speaking of hand-crafted, this man-made genome is built to order. When working with such small bacteria, contamination is a big issue; someone sneezes in the lab, and you've got ten thousand new lifeforms, ready to be misidentified as your man-made masterpiece. So the crew over at Venter's included a couple of "easter eggs", including a functional html website in code, names, and even philosophical quotes in the code. These "watermarks," as Venter calls them, make misidentification almost impossible.

But what's really astounding is what this project means to us. The institute plans to use this achievement in producing biofuels, food on a larger scale, and even vaccines and medicines, much like E. Coli is altered to produce insulin and human growth hormone. These achievements have prevented disease and death in thousands suffering from diabetes or growth instability patterns. Since the genome for this kind of organism is completely artificial, it would be much simpler to simply include DNA that produces these kinds of necessities instead of having to inject it into plasmids and hoping that bacteria incorporate it when they undergo cell division. Geneticist Vyacheslav Tarantul said that this kind of cell would probably be more efficient than current bacteria used to do these kind of jobs, as it would have a genome geared to do only one thing. In this way, the man-made genome may prove to be a saving grace for mankind.

Unfortunately, Mycoplasma lboratorium may have negative effects as well. Among these are claims that because it is now possible to create completely synthetic genomes, governments and terrorists may create biological weapons, like cells that produce hydrogen cyanide or even sarin. The National Farmers Union also say that the cell may have a negative impact on the food industry, and that "the synthetic life form poses a risk to humankind and the environment."

For now, though, the cell only subsists on extremely rich substances where it is grown, and since it hasn't been subject to millions of years of evolution and can only infect goats, it poses no real threat to mankind as of yet. Critics say, however, that future man-made genomes can easily be tweaked to replicate behavior of parasites and infectious bacteria.

Deadly disease or answer to pleas, the changes brought about by Venter's team will be monumental. According to Venter, creating single celled eukaryotes is very viable, as chromosomes can be transferred "across kingdoms", but creating life on the scale of animals, even insects, will not happen within his lifetime. Sorry to all of you Jurassic Park fans out there, but dinosaurs are out of the question. As for the rest, we'll just have to see.

- Rohit (Ronny) Mukherjee

Oh East is east and West is west ....

2010-05-13T15:48:00.000-07:00

Will the twain ever meet? Maybe, maybe not, but ... (if you haven't read the ballad, you must...)

Judging by the Internet connectivity at the hotel that I stayed at over the last couple of days in New York city, it is reasonable to say that the internet works better on my shuttle bus (back west) than it did at the hotel.

Score W=1, E=0.

While the weather this year on the west coast has been far from exemplary, thanks to El Nino (?), I did arrive to some sunlight, which quickly faded to rain, resulting in a couple of hours delay from JFK to DC.

Score W=2, E=0.

Judging by the results of the Cavs-Celtics game, it looks like LeBron will not really get a chance to redeem himself in the Nike puppet ad (3 championship rings :-)), and the Lakers will end up beating the Celtics again :-)

Score W=3, E=0.

Presumptuous? Maybe - but let's throw caution to the wind and predict the Sharks winning the Stanley Cup (they did make sure to not flame out in the first couple of rounds of the playoffs like they usually do!)

Score W=4, E=0

Now - Internet connectivity at Washington D.C., is also problematic (at least with VPN) - this does make cloud computing a little harder, does it not? East = 1, Cloud = 0.

If Cloud = W (the West is Cloud Mecca) that makes W= 4, E=1.

Walk into Times Square and it all balances out - NY City is still the capital of the world! I felt real nostalgic being back in NY (especially as it was not freezing cold, like I remembered it...)

East is east and West is west - and hey! - we have 2 boys, one born in NY and the other...sunny California!

(Go Sharks! Go Lakers! Go Earthquakes!)

Final score (E=W)!

Postscript (5/23) - The bold prediction about the Sharks turned out to be foolish! Score W=3, E=1.

La La land? The valley is going nuts!!

2010-05-01T00:27:00.000-07:00

This week has been crazy!

I finally got to read the sacred memo from the special one (not Mourinho, who's also special, but the really special one :-)) Today! days after it was real-time news :-)

That's cause I was busy at work - yeah ... sometimes work comes before fun things like blogging! Ironically, one of the things that I spent some time on has similar keywords to what became major news this week - Adobe's Creative Suite (one of my products - Site Search - offers an awesome search experience across applications in Adobe's Creative Suite 5 - check it out!)

This week has been crazy! I just said that ...

First, Apple admitted that Macs crash! This must be devastating to all Apple fanboys!

We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash.

News Flash! They blamed it on Adobe.

Then they said a bunch about being "open" - that, by the way, I'll ignore, not because Apple is open (closing out a reasonably popular technology on the web isn't my idea of "open") - but because, personally, I think "open" is overused and overrated. Open does not relate to success, as we've seen over and over in the technology industry. IBM still rakes in billions with proprietary systems (sure, the banks are paying these billions with taxpayer money), Microsoft continues to rule with proprietary systems (offices with windows), and Google's search algorithms are not open-source (pagerank, not openrank). I still don't see Linux beating Windows or OSX. iPhone and RIM are still pretty strong, tho' Android (the open one) is coming on strong.

Technology succeeds because it is good. Good is better than bad! Open can be irrelevant. Good closed is better than bad open! Let's close that window.

Lots of good points in the commandments. I buy some of them. Not this one, though...

We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Apple decided it did not want to be at the mercy of developer choice. It really isn't at the mercy of a third party, is it? If a "native" iPad app is better than a slow Flash app, users will get the "native" app, no? Let the user decide if he wants to play a crummy game! Why not let the developer decide if something's good or bad? It may be the best way for her to optimize her resources and hit multiple platforms in one shot, instead of being forced to develop more than once. If a developer can write in Java to run on all platforms, maybe they can write in Flash for all platforms (write once, run anywhere). Performance, good or bad ... should we let the developer decide? No! Apple decides.

Amazing that there's so much power here driving an entire industry to shift. I shouldn't be surprised - a president can take a country to war!

iPhone succeeded because the consumer loved it and the developer decided it was worthwhile developing for. Apple will continue to succeed as long as it is building compelling products! They just need to be more compelling than the other ones out there. iPad is a case in point ... compelling!

In the news:
Adobe, trying to Flex it's smaller muscle (remember, an apple a day keeps the doctor away) is offering Android phones to its employees.

Also in this week's news:
Our friends from Redmond also took the opportunity to say that HTML5 was the way to go (too much time and effort spent competing with Adobe with Silverlight? What becomes of Silverlight?)

In other news this week:
Apple's not just shutting down Flash videos globally, it's also stopping the music from playing on Lala :-) What becomes of streaming music? It becomes (for now) iTunes credits, and it stops playing on Google as well?

More news this week from La La land: Yahoo! thinks Google has a problem:

Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search,' said Ms. Bartz. 'It is only half our business; it's 99.9 percent of their business. They've got to find other things to do. Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting.

99% vs 50% - is it the size of the pizza, or is it the toppings?

Apple posted. Adobe posted. Microsoft posted. Google posted. And of all people, Yahoo! boasted! This is La La land!