Brij Singh's Random Musings

Entrepreunarial thoughts

List of good checkpoints

Releasing Googlebashing alpha version

Now that GoogleMania is about to hit EOL, lets prepare for alpha version of Googlebashing.

Technology cooperative

There used to be a time when one of the big 5 consulting firm will cook up a fancy methodology to push big ERP upgrade. In order to make a killing in the process. Every customer will have to buy the same or similar expensive methodology. Lot has happened since those days - big promises, over run budgets, CIO losing their job and some say relevance. This was bound to initiate some grassroot level activism from the customer side.

Calls for an idea whose time has come - customer driven activism. Bunch of IT execs and CIO have launched one such body in the form of a technology cooperative.

Add this point to the ever growing concern for enterprise software sales execs.

Apache founders split

Joined at the hip and separated by the source code. Tale of two companies - Covalent and Hyperic. And this is how they used to be

Revenue pressure was never been so high. check the details here.

Prescription for business innovation

Dave Pollard on the 'Prescription for Business Innovation'.

1. Listen broadly for ideas.
2. Listen to "pathfinder" customers, competitors, and colleagues.
3. Listen to the front lines.
4. Understand who your actual and potential customers are.
5. Understand and respect what end-consumers want and need.
6. Understand what immediate customer will need.
7. Understand why these wants and needs aren't already met.
8. Organize those with a stake in solving the problem.
9. Organize the program for solving the problem.
10. Organize the resources needed to solve the problem.
11. Create an environment and capability for innovation.
12. Create lots of alternative solutions.
13. Experiment: Try many things, learn fast from failures, tinker, iterate, combine, transfer.
14. Listen to potential customers and help them imagine.
15. Listen to acceptance criteria -- the "if"s.
16. Listen to "what could go wrong."
17. Design: Consider customer-valued attributes, cost, intuitive ease of use, ease of change, ease of enhancement.
18. Make the final go/no-go decision, then implement.

I need a story and for that I am willing to loose my rationality !

Thats how this Rachel Konrad thinks and wrote this piece for AP, which Yahoo gladly listed as the top news of the day.

Those who keep track of actual trends know whats really happening on the ground.

More on social enterprise

SEI intiatives at HBS -

One factor working against educational institutions interested in producing more socially aware leaders is business school rankings produced by various publications. The lower starting salaries earned by graduates going into nonprofits can drop a school's ranking, Tierney said. These rankings should begin to take the nonprofit sector into account, perhaps weighting salaries of nonprofit sector graduates differently. Publications should also rate schools on their contributions to society.

Somebody recently commented asking me whether I am involved in social entrepreunership. I wish he left some note to get back to him. Anyways the answer is at this point I am only passively supporting such projects. In next few months will be making active contributions, will be making formal announcements to that effect very soon.

Search is on for superconductive materials

Superconductivity is the age old qwest for material scientists and power engineers, NYT covered the latest developments in that area -

Superconductivity, as the phenomenon is known, has fascinated and baffled scientists since its discovery in 1911. Even now, they have yet to develop a comprehensive theory to explain its appearance in materials as diverse as metal and ceramics.

Such scientific conundrums are of only passing interest at Superpower, a four-year-old subsidiary of Intermagnetics General, and at other companies like it. After years of false starts and setbacks, these companies say they are closing in on the goal of producing relatively inexpensive superconducting wire for power generators, transformers and transmission lines

Though nowadays all hear is nanotechnology and carbon nano tubes.

IT business 1/5th of the entire health care

Putting in perspective -

According to the research firm International Data Corp, U.S. corporations spent about $260 billion on Web hardware and software last year.

To put this into perspective, spending on health care totaled $1.3 trillion last year. So business software and hardware alone is about one-fifth the size of the entire health care industry. That's a huge amount of money to spend each year solving business needs. All this money can be directed to custom-built, non-proprietary solutions created by OSS software specialists

Linux Desktop on the roll

Technology is usually ripe when financial community starts taking interest -

Prudential analyst Brent Thill recently bought a Lindows PC from Wal-Mart's Website. In a note to clients, Mr. Thill said that the system was easy to set up and to use. It cost $231 with shipping, which is about the list price for Microsoft PowerPoint. Mr. Thill predicts that within 3 to 5 years, the consumer applications, like games, will appear and Linux will start making a dent in Microsoft's pricing.