Month is a long time

Month is a real long time on blogosphere. Much has happened since I last posted. Lets do a quick wrap up of all the events which are worth filing it in this "other" memory.

Met lot of interesting people in recent time, including Lawrence Rosen (whose new book I am currently reading - highly recommended), Lawrence Lessig (His work demands more attention in the mainstream media) and Dan Gillmor (most well-mannered blogger in the whole blogosphere, delighted to get his signed copy of the book with a catching line - "From one blogger to another blogger").

And there were random SDForum meetings, always revitalizing. Its a great forum to get the normalized view and sync-up with some really smart people.

On the business front, most of the current focus is now on Apptility. There is a tremendous scope to pass on the cost savings to customers by leveraging open source technologies. Its slowly evolving into a mission to drive the open source adoption in safe and efficient way. Goal is to build tools and processes to establish Open Source as a vendor of choice.

Open source and it's spread in India is another dimension we are carefully planning. There are lot of interesting possibilities when you put open source against the broader outsourcing trend. Economics and legal regime frictions alone can generate many new business propositions. There are some real problems to solve in this area. Anybody who has seen companies running away with the open source technologies and not thinking through the legal issues are in for a surprise down the road. Open source is free to use but not entirely free to "sell". There is lot of wrapper selling going on in the name of open source. Its a welcome trend as it expands the market but it has to be clean as well. We are going to focus on making sure that the planned adoption takes place.

There are other themes like Trust, Reputation and Influence which are playing critical role in how businesses conduct their operations on the Internet. We will continue to invest our efforts in prototyping new concepts in those areas. Trust is a big deal. It's not getting enough attention out there.

On other developments, Pankaj rolled out a spiffy looking hindi group blog - Akshargram. If you like reading and writing in hindi then this site is a must read one.
I wish I could devote more time to my writing interests. Also old friend Krishna is helping get the RoorkeeInc website out of the gates. Stripped down and minimalist interface based interview format is on the way. I hope people will like it.

Will try to be more regular with my posts. Yes I have a long rant on Salesforce.com support. Don't they eat their own dog-food ?