Way2Top

Before MBA
Techno Manager: A Technical person or a programmer who was managing projects.

After MBA
Business Technologist: A Business person who applies his business skills in Technology companies.

Evolution:
Programmer –> Techno Manager –> Business Technologist –> General Manager. This is the evolution through which Technical skills erode and Business skills grow stronger…This is the evolution from “Details” to “Big picture”…This is the evolution from “Devil” to “God”…This is the evolution from 6 figure to 8 figure….Well, forget it

Ganesh Immersion in Hyderabad is an event of great significance (though not as much as in Mumbai or Pune). Addressed as “Nimajjanam” in Telugu and “Visarjan” in Hindi, this event even forces many firms to shift the working hours or announce an holiday on the day of immersion. Unlike Mumbai, Chennai or Pune where the immersion is done at sea, the immersion in hyderabad is done in the lake. That’s quite unique. Given the number of statues that are being immersed, I would say Hussain sagar lake is overloaded. I like the passion and energy that people display during this event….The drum-beats blow you away…

Take a look at the pictures taken during this year’s immersion.

Ganesh Immersion 2006 - Set 1 [www.idlebrain.com]
Ganesh Immersion 2006 - Set 2 [www.idlebrain.com]
Ganesh Immersion 2006 - Set 3 [www.idlebrain.com]

Pictures of previous year immersion:
2005, 2004, 2003 Snaps

What surprises me the most is the creativity of the sculptors in shaping up Lord Ganesh into different avatars. The following statue totally blew me away…

I am not sure if we can display our creativity in re-shaping the image of gods so liberally….I can’t imagine Lord Ganesh in any other way than his traditional form.

I was reading an article in Hindu about leaving an employer without damaging the relationships. I felt a need for the following when I was reading it:

“One-stop website to capture the following input from the employers/employees: Testimonials, Recommendations (both positive and negative), awards offered and Experience validation. All employers can check out the details of prospective employee through this website. The website will act like a certifying/validating/verification authority. “

The benefit for employers:

1. A single point to know about the track records of prospective employees. This will help the employer in easily weeding out cheats from real stars at a very early stage of recruitment process.
2. A mechanism through which they can mark the employees who hop jobs relentlessly, who leave job half-completed and who were fired (kind of register the information in the database). This kind of feedback from employers will be crucial for the success of the concept.

The benefit for employees:
1. A star employee can proudly show all his “approved” accomplishments to the next employer.

Users of the system:
1. Corporates
2. Professionals searching for job.
3. Universities ( May be for recommendation letters needed by some Management institutes).

I have to think over this business need. Job portals like Naukri.com, monster.com can easily incorporate this feature as they already have some relationships with corporates and professionals. But how easy is to collect the data that I mentioned before accurately and timely?

Wordpress did the right thing. It Provided an easy-to-use, extensible and modular platform and stepped back. The developers all over the world are running the show through plug-ins, themes, widgets etc., This same phenomenon (strong community) happened with open source IDE called Eclipse. Enabling a strong sense of community and extending the community base fast is the key for a successful open-source project.

I have been experimenting with all the plug-ins that are available for wordpress. I have currently implemented a few (Blogstats; Theme chooser, User rating for the post and few more running in the background like “Live”). I have tried my best to place the elements at appropriate position.

I am quite impressed with User-rating and Theme-chooser. Both of them push the consumer-generated media one step further by combining the blogs with reader-customization. Now readers can decide what theme they want…not the blog author! Check out the Theme chooser on the left-hand side… Now readers can immediately rate the blog post (Check out by moving the mouse over the stars on the top…Once a vote for the post from a PC is registered no further voting is possible.)…The “Recent comments” enables visibility for reader contribution…

I have tried to position the “Search box” at a very prominent and visible position at the top right corner.

Tons of interesting themes and plugins to explore…I have all the nights in the world for this

Ever since I heard the news, it disturbed me a lot. Steve Irwin is a kind of character who will be missed immensly. His passion for animals and solid courage to get up-close with lethal beasts stands out…It is a shocking coincidence that he was killed while he was filming for a documentary called “Ocean’s deadliest” (A project with his daughter Bindi).

A death completely undeserved. A person who cherishes facing dangerous animals face-to-face to be killed by an unexpected creature in an unexpected way is totally undeserving…The death of this mortal has immortalized the same mortal in the books of history, the channels of geography and hearts of his admirers…

I feel bad to write this…but I actually searched for the video footage of the accident in the internet…found the following quotes…and am struck in awe for him…

“…The first e-mail question The National Ledger received after we published the fact that there was a video of the actual sting to the heart was “How long until this is plastered all over the web?”

I hope never - but the answer may not be what you think.

A report from Contact Music UK claims Irwin’s family are determined to respect his last wishes and allow the harrowing footage to be broadcast…”

…CMUK reports that Irwin once insisted, “My number one rule is to keep that camera rolling. Even if it’s shaky or slightly out of focus, I don’t give a rip. “Even if a big old alligator is chewing me up I want to go down and go, ‘Crikey!’ just before I die. That would be the ultimate for me.”

An insider tells British newspaper the Daily Star, “This is exactly what Steve would have wanted. He knew the dangers and was totally up for the cameras to get everything.”

If that was indeed his wish and if it is broadcast, I hope it is with the family’s blessing on a TV show. I certainly hope it does not leak to the web first.

- http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_27268187.shtml

I landed up on the following website while I was doing a Market Analysis for Enterprise Search Solution.

Jahia

Jahia offers a product suite with solutions for Enterprise Content Management, Corporate Portal, Document Management, Search Engine, Powerful Indexer, Caching, Colloboration Tools and Business Process Management Tools.

They are offering almost all the features that we are trying to develop but in a slightly different approach. Anyway, I liked Jahia not just for what they offer…but more for their effort to promote a Sustainable Business Model blending the benefits of Open source software and proprietary software. They have instituted a Sustainable Software Initiative (SSI), a non-profit organisation dedicated to promote this business model.

The basic idea behind this initiative is to provide the source code for free and to allow anyone to freely modify the code. But the model charges a licence fee based on the intent and the extent-of-the-intent of use! (commercial or professional reasons). The developers who contribute to the development of the project will be fairly rewarded through stock-options or shares or discounting the licence fee! Jahia is essentially trying to curb out free-riders in the software community: The passive people who use the free software for commercial purpose without contributing anything back! Jahia calls them as “Technology free-riders”.

Bottomline:

“So, you want to enjoy the benefits of high-quality open-source? then give back something useful to the community. Don’t be just passive consumers…You can earn your right to be passive for a specified Fee..”

The movement seems to focus mainly on eliminating the Technology-Free riders. I was just reflecting this principle on what we currently do. I have been wanting my team to contribute back to the community…Time to take some concrete steps towards that…

http://Sramanamitra.com

This is another Business-Technology-Entrepreneurship blog that I found today. The blog is maintained by Sramana Mitra, an Entrepreneur and Strategy consultant since 1994. She blends her rich experience with happening tech trends and offers solid content for readers.

She has been writing for 20 years! The lady seems to have great photographic skills too….And yeah, she is a good friend of Om Malik, the person behind the blog Gigaom…

Yet another entry to my Technology Blogroll…

Now-a-days, my life in general can be summarized in 4 words:

Write, Read, Speak and Plan in the same order!

Write: Official Documentations. Blog @ way2top.org; Intranet Blog @ Office to record the progress, capture the learnings and fossilize the hard-earned-wisdom! Though it looks promising, it remains to be seen if the effort is sustainable.)

Read: Product and Technology related readings (work), Interesting websites and blogs (Personal), Books and Magazines.

Speak: Talk about our product.

Plan: Plan @ work.

Want to develop a Product out of Open Source Technologies, Frameworks and tools? You should be glad, because you don’t have to worry about the availability of options…But, you should be concerned, because the options available are aplenty and sometimes drive you to madness! Instead of choosing a Open source project based on word-of-mouth or based on the recommendation from Technical leads/expert developers…you can choose the path of “A formal evaluation”. There are two prominent frameworks available to systematically evaluate open source projects.

Business Readiness Rating (BRR)
Business Readiness Ratingâ„¢ (BRR) is being proposed as a new standard model for rating open source software. It is intended to enable the entire community (enterprise adopters and developers) to rate software in an open and standardized way.

Open Source Maturity Model (OSMM)
The Open Source Maturity Modelâ„¢ (OSMM) is a formal process to assess the maturity level of open source software. Developed by Navica, the OSMM is itself open source, freely available for any organization to use in their open source work.

BRR came into existence quite recently (and still evolving) while OSMM has been in existence for quite some time. Basically, these two frameworks evaluate each open source project based on 10-14 parameters. The final rating helps one to decide whether the open-source project is ready for mission-critical enterprise use.

The parameters that are evaluated are Functionality, Usability, Quality, Security, Performance, Scalability, Architecture, Support, Documentation, Adoption and Community. The last 2 parameters are quite important for open-source initiatives. The quality of the open source is directly proportional to the adoption and community.

So, next time you need to evaluate any open-source project, why not evaluate it using these frameworks and establish your professionalism?

I downloaded and installed Microsoft Office Project 2003 - Standard Trial version few days back. When I opened the Trial version today it advised me that the software has expired and that I have to purchase the official version. Before searching for an Open-source alternative, I decided to play around with Trial version to open it. (If it is a year or couple back, I would have searched for crack in the internet. But today the availability of high-quality open-source alternatives has ruled out the need to search for Cracks!).

Anyway coming back to my last-ditch attempt, I double-clicked the Project Plan file. Project 2003 opened with it’s usual warning message with only the “OK” button. Instead of clicking the “OK” button, I clicked the close icon for the dialogue (at the top-corner). Surprisingly, it asked me “Do you want to save the file?” with three options “Yes”, “No” and “Cancel”. I tried clicking “Cancel” and voila…the Project 2003 application became fully functional and allowed normal operations! The surprising thing is that I did all this intuitively…may be it is a freaky! I was glad that alteast I could complete my work…

Now, do you call this piracy??? I don’t know…It is an inherent loophole in the software bundled, which I accidentally discovered. Whoever did this “Expiration of Trial version” part has not done his job completely (atleast adhering to the basic requirements). Now, I am publishing this as a post…Is this an indirect cause to piracy? I think I am just trying to criticize the loophole in the software…

PS: I read an HBS article about “Microsoft Vs Open Source: who will win?”. A high-quality academic publishing. I would like to quote the piracy related content here…

“…There are two types of Pirates: Those who would not have bought windows in the first place because it is too expensive and Those who would have bought Windows but now decide to pirate it…

The first category increases Windows’ installed base without affecting sales. As a consequence, this group increases the value of Windows. And thanks to these pirates, Microsoft is able to set higher prices in the future (because the value of the system goes up).

The second type of pirates (those who in the absence of piracy would have bought Windows) reduces Windows’ sales and profit. Thus, if the proportion of first-type pirates is sufficiently large, Microsoft’s profits will increase with piracy….”

I am not saying that I am a pirate here…But I think I indirectly fall into the first category here!