• Quitting cozy high paying job and hitting the road again.
• Watching your friends going for vacation, while you are struggling to get a 7 hour sleep.
• Possibilities of not being able to sustain your family and getting separated.
• Watching your friends climbing corporate ladders. while you are stressed out about next month’s groceries.
• Not being able to read story books for your toddler and let them grow on their own.
• Driving a car with broken windshield, while your ex-colleagues are buying Porsche.
• Possibilities of not being with your wife when she is giving birth to your kid

And pretending to be cool headed, stress-less, super motivated guy who is always smiling, especially in front of customer or on phone with them.

What’s happening in your life?

With single click I could see 2D video into seemingly 3D video. I don’t have 3D glasses at the moment to test it out, but the effects i am seeing naked eyes makes me feel that there is subtle 3D effect YouTube was able to introduce, on the fly in an plain 2d video.

3D TVs are not selling at the moment, and one of the big reasons is availability of 3D enabled programming. But with YouTube’s capability to render 2D video into 3D might change it forever…

I am pretty sure that there are tools available online which can convert (or try to convert 2D video into 3D) but being able to integrate that into full blown commercial video platform is big. This is big!

Its true that early in the days, job functions would be too overlapping and everyone might potentially be helping team with every other thing they can possible do. But here why I think you need a CEO, even if you are a 5 person team. (Below is valid if you are working on your stuff full time, and not just teamed up to work on a hobby project)

1. You would need it for legal purposes: When you incorporate your entity , you need to define key players in the team as well as your CEO. This guy is responsible for the company and answerable to the board. Term ‘CEO’ could be something else, but you would need to choose someone who is going to officially ‘lead’ the team/company.
2. You need a face of your company: You can have anyone of your guy to be face of your company, but then you need someone(hopefully CEO) who can speak to wide variety of audience and can do at least decent job(if not exceptional) pertaining to how things are getting done at company and/or how things are planned and/or doze off a super tricky question asked by a  journalist.
3. Your potential investor wants a credible contact: Raising money is difficult (if you are not part of the inner circle) and not having someone in the team as its leader (CEO) would send out wrong/confusing signals. Giving them a sense of maturity and making your leader talk to investors/partners would make conversation go much easier.

What is your experience? Why do you think its important to have a CEO for early stage company as well or maybe you think its not needed.

Share your comments below.

This could trigger a question on many curious minds “Why do I need to go to real college then ?“.  A question, I have been pondering for a while in a different format “What is the value add of a college/school in the era where you have almost everything available on web, free or paid ?”

Answer is “World works on relationships and there are no better alternatives to learn, experience and make them work for you, than going to meet and interact with real people”. You can learn whatever you want over internet, but most important things you need to be able to successful in your professional and personal lives is your Human Skills. This is true even in the digital age, where we have luxury to send a tweet to president or Skype with someone across the ocean. At the end of the day, normal human being, use these tools to influence his social circle.

Even if MIT had announced that, their online certificate is of same value as that of their real classroom diploma ( they won’t, as it doesn’t make sense from business point of view), folks who would attend their original classroom would turn out to be much more successful than those who just took same classes just online.

Why is it that a person graduating from Harvard or MIT gets much more success than a person who is much more brilliant but just could not attend one of these well known college? Its all about network and things you learn when you deal with real human being. That is what you need when you enter into a real world. No doubt that you need to be smart, but I have seen much smarter people who could not make it because (a) they don’t know right people or people who would know right people or (b) they don’t have human skills to make it work for themselves.

Opening up courses online would democratize education, and many education institutes would need to redefine the way they currently impart education. There is and will be, much better course content, explanation available online and education provider would need to focus on other side of the success equation, i.e. impart more of Human Skills.

Focus on Human skills, real world exposure in a controlled environment and strong alumni network is what is going to make a college successful than others across the street.

Overall, I welcome this move from MIT and encourage students to think about the value a brick and mortar college can impart in their lives.

Sending Madmimi promotion

You can create HTML promotions using WYSIWYG editor provided by madmimi. These promotions can be sent programmatically to your users using madmimi mailer apis. Below is C# sample

var request = WebRequest.Create("https://api.madmimi.com/mailer");
request.Method = "POST";
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

//compose and POST message via Madmimi

var data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(String.Format("username=YourMadMimiEmailAddress&api_key=YourMadMimiApiKey&promotion_name={4}&recipient={1}&from={0}&reply_to=no-reply@YourCompany.com>&body={5}", fromEmail, toEmail, bccEmail, ccEmail, MailSubject, MailBody));

request.ContentLength = data.Length;

using(var requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())

{

requestStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);

}

var webResponse = request.GetResponse();

Above would send an email to your user and would also user’s email ID in the mad mini system, if not already there.

Now, if  you are sending your first ever email to the user, many a times you would like to add that user and his first/last name in the madmimi system. Below is how you can do it using Madmimi list management APIs.

request = WebRequest.Create("https://api.madmimi.com/audience_lists/BetaSignUp/add");

request.Method = "POST";

request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(String.Format("username=YourMadMimiEmailAddress&api_key=YourMadMimiApiKey&email={0}&first_name={1}&last_name={2}", to, firstName, lastName));

request.ContentLength = data.Length;

using (var requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())

{

requestStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);

}

webResponse = request.GetResponse();

Very easy, isn’t it?

Feel free to use above code and add your comments and suggestions as comments below.

Many years ago a senior corporate executive spotted me passionately pitching ideas for my my startup in India and few years later convinced me to join Microsoft India(R&D) as one of the first team member of MSN Games team in India. Since then, over 5 years at Microsoft, I have had chance to meet some amazingly talented folks around and made bunch of good friends while working on various projects like MSN Games, GFWL, Win7 inbox games, Windows phone7 Game Services, Business Intelligence gaming on phone, Omniture for Xbox.com, XBOX Live Services…). Hindsight, I got opportunities to work on some of the best software products in the world!!

On personal front, within these last five plus years, I got married, relocated to USA, became father of a beautiful daughter and made some wonderful lifelong friends. Incredible journey!!

As with any other journey, this one needs to give way to another and thus I have decide to leave Microsoft. Will be chartering some unchartered but exciting territories (aka Startup). Today is my last day at Microsoft.

I will be in Seattle area and my contact information is below and I hope to say in touch with many of you.

Wish me luck!

viagra

If you purchased $1,000 of shares in Delta Airlines one year ago, you would have $49.00 today! If you purchased $1,000 of shares in AIG, you would have $33.00. If you purchased $1,000 of shares in Lehman Brothers, you would have $0.00 today. But, if you purchased $1,000 worth of beer, drank it all, turned in the cans for recycling, you would have $214.00. So, the best current investment plan is to drink heavily & recycle.

Its called 401 Keg plan.

But first What is CDN?

From WikiPedia

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network. When properly designed and implemented, a CDN can improve access to the data it caches by increasing access bandwidth and redundancy and reducing access latency. Data content types often cached in CDNs include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, live streaming media, and database queries.

When is best time to start using CDN?

It depends on what kind of content you are trying to serve in which part of world. If you have a website which serve rich multi-media contents for global audience, you should consider starting on CDN from day one. On the other hand, if you have website which serves a local community with some static pages, serving files via CDN might not be that beneficial(from ROI perspective)

Most of us would find us in the middle of the two extreme scenarios I have mentioned above, and there is no better way for you to find if you need a CDN or not than running some tests. Below are steps:

1. Run your website on http://www.webpagetest.org
2. Keep note of results.
3. Move files to CDN (you only pay for use, so couple of tests wont cost much)
4. Re-run tests and see if it made difference for you.
5. If you see good difference in the page load time, and believe that would benefit your customers (and you at the end), go for it!

BTW, there are other great recommendations you will get on http://www.webpagetest.org when you run test on it, like zipping content n stuff, which would help you reduce latency.

Know any better way to improve latency? Share with readers as comment below

From Bill Buxton’s collection

Found my way back home…