Brij Singh's Random Musings

Mixing business with fun Google style

Google India using creativity to convey the barrier to entry -

Pavan Pleasant, B-Tech student. Madhu Coolre got Organic Gummybear award for nicest student mentor , Anuradha Aravalli , a Phd candidate who did her bachelors from University of Rourkee (running Google spellcheck on this reveals where Google missed out - I have to pick on this one as this is my alma mater).

Bill Gates on hardware and web services

Bill Gates during Gartner symposium -

So 10 years out in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free. I mean, I'm not saying it will be absolutely free, but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the desktop machines, the network will not be a limiting factor, wireless technologies will have come in and created, whether it's in the consumer space or in the enterprise space, ways that you're connected all the time -- 802.11, Ultra Wideband.

Web services are super, super important.
....
the action item is that anybody who does any development or thinks about architecture application, you've got to look at what's happened with XML and say, OK, databases will be XML, Office will be XML, and what sort of schemas are important to your organization, are they being standardized horizontally or just in your industry group or does your organization have to do extended schemas around those things.

Then you think, wow, can we publish our capabilities as Web service, can we connect up to other Web services. It's a whole mindset change that lets you compose things in a much richer way.

First prediction sounds very similar to Paul Saffo's argument that in future cars would come free and we would be paying for services inside the car. With some of the newer models having more than 10 CPUs who can argue with that. Cars of year 2015 (or for that matter any mobile machinery) will resemble like Data centers of year 2000 !

Tenfold promise

Jeffrey Walker - CTO of Tenfold corporation and also ex-EVP Oracle has this for the Tsunami promise. Read about this in SDForum news magazine and immediately downloaded to checkout the promise. It will be interesting to investigate this further. Think about it, he is promising development of salesforce.com type application in just 3 hours !

You are about to embark on a fantastic, thrilling, awe-inspiring magical mystery tour into a realm of applications development heretofore unseen on planet Earth. And its name is Tsunami. Very quickly, as in a few hours, you will see for yourself that Tsunami is the next killer application, and truly DISRUPTIVE.

We are not talking about a few steps forward, faster coding, or code-generating
software (code-generating software is a few steps backwards in reality). We are
not talking about rapid-applications-development that lets you build prototypes
that you must rebuild once you sort out your ideas.

Tsunami is a QUANTUM LEAP into the future. Tsunami lets you build
applications you never before thought possible, and build them faster and with
more features than you imagined. Furthermore, the applications you build are
completely tested BEFORE you build them. In addition, these applications scale
to thousands of simultaneous end-users, running on networks of computers.

Google Watch

If this is true then its just not right . Shouldnt Google be telling their users what all information they persist about that user. ? Though I am not sure about the authenticity of this claim. As this comes from other end of the spectrum - Google Watch.

For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based on geolocation."

Out of search executives

This is quite funny - Yahoo's take on Google or some smart hacker's trick to trick yahoo search engine !

Simputer at $240

Simputer is launched under the name Amida. Priced at 9,950 Indian Rupees ($240).

Some interesting features include flip-flop sensor, khatta (budget), Panchanga (calendar to find out the auspicious day)

Ban on Typepad in China

Blogsite turned black as a protest. This shows not only that the law is slow to interpret new technologies but also how law enforcement officials through their genious moves help popularize technology to folks who have no idea of the technology in the first place. This is a great publicity for Typepad. Plays right into the rebellious undercurrent of blogging culture.

My expression, my voice as reflected in my blog !

Phhut @#$#$ you cant have unchecked expression ! - not in my China.

Welcome to the world of state-sponsored media governance where this draconian monitoring would be enforced at the micro-content publisher level. Since micro-content monitoring is hard to do so why not just ban the whole service altogether - Strange logic.

Center for Citizen's Media

Jeff Jarvis on the objectives of his idea for Center for Citizen's Media -

> Citizen journalists can benefit from education in some of the tricks of the trade (e.g., how to avoid libel, how to file freedom of information requests, how to write a killer lede). I'm not saying that bloggers need to be like big-media journalists but I am saying that media must to embrace this new wave of journalists.

> Journalism students can, for the first time in history, think and act like entrepreneurs (see Gawker, Gizmodo, Engadget). They can use weblogs to create a body of work that will get them hired. They must learn how to interact with their publics in new ways.

> Big media needs to learn how to interact with and serve and, most importantly, listen to the citizens formerly known as their audience.

> News sources -- in politics, government, business -- need to learn how to relate to citizens who can now, finally, speak to them.

Shouldn't we be expanding the notion of media here and preparing a platform-level thinking to take it out of the clutches of journalism completely. I would name this as a Center for Citizen's Expression and make it very generic in its purpose.

More on the Overhang issue

Jim Breyer on the "overhang" problem -

His group predicts that between 2004 and 2006 the industry will see a 20 percent annual decline both in the number of VCs and venture firms. That would mean that within three years the VC census would return to roughly where it was in 1997. "We're going to see a lot of firms unable to raise a next fund, track record really does matter in this business."

Article gives all the reasons why there is so much money out there (though lot of that is un-invested ) - along with their traditional LP base which is university endowments and large pension funds, third large base of wealthy individuals, also joined this party right around the boom time in good number. Along with the overall increase in percentage allotted to private equity investments by large pension fund managers.

As Bill Tai warned couple of days back that something doesn't add up here. There are lot of deadwood startups out there in their series-D/E stage. There is going to be a correction down the road. Its quite ironic to see how lot of companies with struggling business plans are extending their lifeline by outsourcing most of their operations to India and China.

Acumen Fund

Acumen Fund has a very compelling model -

Acumen Fund’s mission is to link high net worth individuals to some of the world's most innovative problem-solvers through a portfolio approach