I dont know if any of you here have raised any serious money (more than say 2 M). In my experience people don't part with money on flimsy grounds. Venture Capital or any form of investment capital has to keep a certain risk-return profile so that they can manage their returns. In doing so some firms take bigger leaps of faith make larger bets and some are conservative. We should be thankful to an investment community that fosters innovation and ideation even sans tangible business returns in the short run. It is the thriving venture capital community in the US and places like Israel that product innovations continue to show up.
I am not a VC but an entrepreneur trying to build an alternate reality albeit incrementally. None of us could have predicted the rise of google but it was VCs ( a bunch of them) who invested heavily in it where they backed their gut and imagination.
When it works out it looks great when it doesnt it looks dumb. I think there are only 2 kinds of people doers and talkers. Doers have a shot at succeeding but will fail as well. Talkers... well i have said nuf.
As soon as i read this snippet in one of these customer meetings that i was on, I had to read what the slashdotters say to this. I did that at the risk of losing a customer. But some things are just too juicy to let go............
I think we in the United States ( I am in immigrant from India) are so used to big cars as a way of life ( and I drive an SUV too) that we refuse to make changes that might inconvenience us just a wee bit but, may be better for our future. I am not debating climate change impact due to pollution caused by gas guzzlers. I am just commenting on our inability to make minor changes to our lives if there is potential benefit for our collective future.
I am a true and true capitalist and believe in personal freedom and liberty more than most. So I will not recommend government enforcing any such measure but we often make these choices willingly when we believe that it is "civic" and "common sense" to do it.
I still think US continues to set high standards of personal responsibility but there is nothing that stops us from improving. I drive my Honda much much more than my BMW even when I have to take my kid out. It makes personal economic sense and it makes civic sense.
let me repeat this again and again.... self-introspection is the only kind of introspection possible by definition just like repeat means saying it again...
Your understanding of marketing is, i must say, very limited and mostly wrong. Marketing is often used synonymously with advertising, which is wrong. A good marketer understands the consumer needs at an individual level and is able to aggregate it at multiple levels. A good marketer, based on this knowledge, is able to provide product definition. A good marketer is then able to provide critical inputs on what is the best way to communicate this to the customer and best way to make it available to the customer, while ensuring that the company makes money. Now each of these require a lifetime of experience and study and hence often are sub-functions called product management, brand management, pricing manager, distribution/channel manager etc. Without all this thought and its execution through operations, no R&D will have the legs to get the right products to paying customers. There is a lot of BS that happens in the name of marketing but that happens even with engineering.... I have seen terrible marketers and worse engineers.
brouhaha over outsourcing tech support
on
Verizon Can't Do Math
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
tech support no matter where you do it has its share of problems. i have a feeling if you had an Indian guy with an accent he would have undertood the problem. it his high time that we look at where is our education system going.
It will be interesting exercise in introspection if slashdot were to carry out this experiment -
Post some of the MSFT items as Google items and some of the Google items as MSFT items and see how the slashdotters react to it. I am not willing to conjecture anything as my hypothesis but one or more of the following might get answered (not definitively) -
1. Slashdotters mostly hate MSFT no matter what it does 2. Slashdotters mostly love GOOG no matter what it does 3. Slashdotters are unbiased and evalute every action purely and solely on the merits of that action. 4. Slashdotters are just another bunch of sleaze bag. They are vain, abusive and idle heads. 5. Slashdotters are the moral gatekeepers of the tech/corporate world and are above any pettiness.
Anyone at the slashdot willing to do this, do it silently and pleeeease think through the experiment design so that you get something informative out of it.
We ( a bunch of friends) are using Zoho Virtual Office for our own aspiring start up. It works really well from a functionality perspective. I must say it is buggy software but has enough in it for us to get started without a dime and if it improves I will surely pay for it when and if we grow. they have other products as well that are in the ASP model. Virtual office is web based tool that you have to download and run on your server.
So there are a lot of alternatives out there. May the consumer win not matter who wins. www.zoho.com
try this link. It is a logical analysis of the state of IPv4 address space (it is all/8 based though). It also has a link to another report which has a different view on space exhaustion.
what intrigues me is this - has google provided a generic solution to providing context sensitive result set for any data entered into the search engine or it has mapped different results to a finite set of key words. It is the math behind that is interesting and of value. rest is all baloney again.
everything else is baloney !! In the end there is no difference between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc and i think we are better off for it. When we blame MSFT, we are just blaming our systems because MSFT is living by the laws laid out and if not paying for it and that is all you can or should expect from a corporation. If you need them to behave differently, you need to adopt a different value, political and economic system. Tell me how you measure me and i'll tell you how i will behave.
It is becoming one global economy. But it seems to me increasingly it is information that is being exchanged that unites us. While I think it is important for people and goods to move around to establish the infrastructure supporting this global economy soon ( how soon ??) there wont be any need or the desire for people to move around. I think it would make us move away from physically interacting with people from different regions. only need to travel be out of pure curiosity to see a place. Tourism is a very small fraction of total travel in this world.
So maybe this global information economy is going to create islands of social milieu that are tied only from a commerce perspective. How long can that stay. In other words of social mores diverge to an extent that humans species in different regions become different species then obviously the informational integrity may break.
What the heck ? I think we are all out of sorts on trying to predict this. I think no matter what we are most likely going to be snuffed into nothing by a cosmic event much earlier than we can evolve or devolve into anything dangerous. The only think we can do to protect ourselves i think in the meantime is to prevent a man-made nuclear or biological holocaust.
The other thing we must do is dring a lot of beer.
This is a silly statement isnt it ? VZ doesnt have to pay for data services but that also means that the combined entity will lose that revenue. Similarly MCI doesnt have to pay line charges but the combined entity will lose that revenue. When you take taxes into account things might change a little bit. But then this post doesnt talk about tax benefits gained from merger. Tax laws are too complex and orthogonal to most slashdotters including me.
Israel and Ireland are big software/IT exporters and have been that way for a long time. India is relatively new to the game. Manufacturing offshoring happened long back and there is very little of it that goes to India.
India has opened up its economy since 1991 in a very big way and is more of a free market than not. Foreign Direct Investnment has been on the rise in India since 1991 as a consequence of the economy opening up.
I can comment on telecom that the job growth in Indian market is commensurate with growing telecom demand in India. I monitor telecom very closely and the Asia Pacific region is hot in terms of demand. So the telecom jobs are being created in India and China to meet the demand there. (not all of them but a significant percentage).
I think India is competing and complementing the global markets in a fair way tapping on skills that it has. What this kind of behaviour deserves is respect and not derision and hatred. Compare that to whole host of nations that either have their hand out or are breeding ground for terrorism.
Indians arent only cheap labour by any stretch. The quality of Indian academic strength is established. Look at Intel talent search awards this year. Indian diaspora in US that comprises probably less than 1 % of US population had 8 kids amongst the 40 awardees; a whopping 20 %. Indians who come to the US (at least in last 7-8 years) are truly top quality professionals that can compete with the best. I think US is doing what it has done best always, provide an great magnet to attract the world's best talent.
I wish India were able to create this system that would attract world's best talent. Indian salaries are already going up in the IT sector to a level where the cost advantage is levelling out. So unless there are other drivers jobs wont move out. I do think US government should take care of its citizens by making changes that benefit its population but economic changes arent typically that simple in cause and affect and economic policies do not stay in the economic arena but affect every arena.
Let the chips fall where they may.
just another perspective.
what is relevant is not the stock price but the market cap. market cap, theoretically, should reflect net present value which is the summation of discounted cash flows over the average investor's investment horizon. One can take 10 years as the average investment horizon and I cannot imagine profits of google that will amount to that kind NPV.
What people are betting on is not the fundamentals of the company but are betting on the stupidity (optimism) of the next guy. Pricing is being driven by supply and demand for a stock which is disconnected from the real value of the stock. Well who loses in the process it is always the common investor who loses as most small investors are either not savvy enough or a also betting on general euphoria. The sophisticated investors cover typically are better positioned informationally (insiders) to enter or exit the markets.
Google or Yahoo or Amazon they (will) all come down tumbling when the bubble bursts. this doesnt make them bad businesses but bad investments.
I regret that my submission on Bhoomi was rejected in mid 2003. interested/. readers should go to the Bhoomi homepage and read about the project. It is truly fascinating and gigantic in scale. http://www.revdept-01.kar.nic.in/
Techies should make note of the enormous change management, infrastructure and end user adoption issues that are highlighted (dont get turned off by NT, SQL and VB which is what has been used here)
SOME PROBLEMS FACED
1 Data entry agencies were not aware of land records Computerisation data entry screens. It was not one to one data entry process. The data entry involved data transformation which many a times was not done on paper by Village Accountants thus increasing our dependence on data entry operators to use their own knowledge for data entry process. Data entry agency representatives were therefore trained in Bangalore by the Bhoomi team. The meaning of different fields in land records document and their implications was explained to them.
In all divisional and district level workshops also, these agencies were called so that they could interact with Bhoomi team and have independent knowledge of data inputting. 2 Data entry agencies did not have sufficient infrastructure with them. They had old computers, most of the time, 80486 based machines which could either not run Windows or if it could, its processing speed was very slow. They did not have enough printers and UPS either.
People go to Public Library now to access internet and not to read or loan books. So what is the point of all this. Unless there is a strong associated increase in books loaned and hence read there isnt much cause for delight here.
In India coffee shops started providing internet connections as a way to increase coffee sales which worked as most people liked the idea of sucking a cold coffee with a straw while net-speeding.
what's the brouhaha
ha ha
I have started running on a treadmill just 10 days back. I notice that my ankles and shins pain when i am running. Also, there is residual pain in my right heel even after finished with my running. Obviously I dont want to bust my joints or bones. Any recommendations from the the running geeks ? I am already considering a new pair of shoes. The ones i have now are pretty good Nike Air ones.
Is this a askslashdot post ?
maybe
I dont know if i am noticing it more now or it is because Indians are actually doing better on the global stage. Rusi Taleyarkhan, the key player in this discovery/invention, obtained a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1977. He came to the United States shortly afterward for graduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, located in Troy, N.Y. In addition, he obtained a master's degree in nuclear science and engineering in 1978 and a doctorate in the same field in 1982.
In all this talk about foreign workers coming to the USA, their contribution to American and Global knowledge is left unmentioned. This I think is tragic. In my view USA provides the best platform in the world for intelligent, creative and hardworking people and by doing that US benefits and stays ahead of the pack of nations. How I wish India could emulate US of A and make the smart people across the world work in India.
To me free trade is akin to Free-ways in some respect. Free ways are optimised for travelling to specific long distance destinations under standard/normal conditions. But the same free ways, that epitomise efficiency under standard circumstances, turn nightmarish during rush hours. Also, they are non-optimal if you want to, say, enjoy the scenic view offered by some of the backroads. It is also non-optimal if you have already reached the destination and any further movement for you is largely restricted to the local grocery store.
I think socialism, free trade or capitalism are all free way philosophies that aim to optimise specific goals at the cost of some others that are perceived to be less important. In India, we took up protectionist policies for 40 years and those led to gradual but sure erosion of our production capabilities. But during these years there was great stability (not affluence but predictability). Over a period of time we became a nation with "chalta hai" (make do) attitude than a "can do" attitude.
I think India would have been much better placed if it were open to competition right from the word go. But we offered sops to local industries that became difficult to lift as time passed and Indian goods lost out on quality. So I think free trade probably is a good long term policy that will lead to faster acceptance of realities and attuning yourself to it.
Within this though I think there can policy changes that will make this transition a little less painful. But making drastic changes that are irreversible quickly enough can change the direction of the broader philosophy.
Imagine if you were to miss your exit on a Freeway and you just decide to make random U turn. If you are the only one doing this, it may be fine. But if everybody starts doing that and this becomes a norm freeways would lose their value in no time. I know what this kind of behaviour leads to and that is complete systemic atrophy. There are a lot of models for economic success but they go hand in hand with the societal models. For the values that American's value like freedom, individualism etc. free trade is the most aligned economic model for continues success. Japanese have achieved it differently but then their social values are more community based than individual centric etc. The worst thing one can do is adopt an economic policy that is not in line with social goals and norms of the country.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont know if any of you here have raised any serious money (more than say 2 M). In my experience people don't part with money on flimsy grounds. Venture Capital or any form of investment capital has to keep a certain risk-return profile so that they can manage their returns. In doing so some firms take bigger leaps of faith make larger bets and some are conservative. We should be thankful to an investment community that fosters innovation and ideation even sans tangible business returns in the short run. It is the thriving venture capital community in the US and places like Israel that product innovations continue to show up. I am not a VC but an entrepreneur trying to build an alternate reality albeit incrementally. None of us could have predicted the rise of google but it was VCs ( a bunch of them) who invested heavily in it where they backed their gut and imagination. When it works out it looks great when it doesnt it looks dumb. I think there are only 2 kinds of people doers and talkers. Doers have a shot at succeeding but will fail as well. Talkers ... well i have said nuf.
http://www.pajamachannels.com/
As soon as i read this snippet in one of these customer meetings that i was on, I had to read what the slashdotters say to this. I did that at the risk of losing a customer. But some things are just too juicy to let go............
I think we in the United States ( I am in immigrant from India) are so used to big cars as a way of life ( and I drive an SUV too) that we refuse to make changes that might inconvenience us just a wee bit but, may be better for our future. I am not debating climate change impact due to pollution caused by gas guzzlers. I am just commenting on our inability to make minor changes to our lives if there is potential benefit for our collective future.
I am a true and true capitalist and believe in personal freedom and liberty more than most. So I will not recommend government enforcing any such measure but we often make these choices willingly when we believe that it is "civic" and "common sense" to do it.
I still think US continues to set high standards of personal responsibility but there is nothing that stops us from improving. I drive my Honda much much more than my BMW even when I have to take my kid out. It makes personal economic sense and it makes civic sense.
let me repeat this again and again.... self-introspection is the only kind of introspection possible by definition just like repeat means saying it again...
Your understanding of marketing is, i must say, very limited and mostly wrong. Marketing is often used synonymously with advertising, which is wrong. A good marketer understands the consumer needs at an individual level and is able to aggregate it at multiple levels. A good marketer, based on this knowledge, is able to provide product definition. A good marketer is then able to provide critical inputs on what is the best way to communicate this to the customer and best way to make it available to the customer, while ensuring that the company makes money. Now each of these require a lifetime of experience and study and hence often are sub-functions called product management, brand management, pricing manager, distribution/channel manager etc. Without all this thought and its execution through operations, no R&D will have the legs to get the right products to paying customers. There is a lot of BS that happens in the name of marketing but that happens even with engineering.... I have seen terrible marketers and worse engineers.
tech support no matter where you do it has its share of problems. i have a feeling if you had an Indian guy with an accent he would have undertood the problem. it his high time that we look at where is our education system going.
anyway very hilarious
we can just encrypt the EM waves and then there can be no theft. I am half serious.
btw wireless power - what are batteries ?
It will be interesting exercise in introspection if slashdot were to carry out this experiment -
Post some of the MSFT items as Google items and some of the Google items as MSFT items and see how the slashdotters react to it. I am not willing to conjecture anything as my hypothesis but one or more of the following might get answered (not definitively) -
1. Slashdotters mostly hate MSFT no matter what it does
2. Slashdotters mostly love GOOG no matter what it does
3. Slashdotters are unbiased and evalute every action purely and solely on the merits of that action.
4. Slashdotters are just another bunch of sleaze bag. They are vain, abusive and idle heads.
5. Slashdotters are the moral gatekeepers of the tech/corporate world and are above any pettiness.
Anyone at the slashdot willing to do this, do it silently and pleeeease think through the experiment design so that you get something informative out of it.
cheers
We ( a bunch of friends) are using Zoho Virtual Office for our own aspiring start up. It works really well from a functionality perspective. I must say it is buggy software but has enough in it for us to get started without a dime and if it improves I will surely pay for it when and if we grow. they have other products as well that are in the ASP model. Virtual office is web based tool that you have to download and run on your server.
So there are a lot of alternatives out there. May the consumer win not matter who wins. www.zoho.com
2 paisa
brevity is to be valued
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archive d_issues/ipj_8-3/ipv4.html
/8 based though). It also has a link to another report which has a different view on space exhaustion.
try this link. It is a logical analysis of the state of IPv4 address space (it is all
regards
what intrigues me is this - has google provided a generic solution to providing context sensitive result set for any data entered into the search engine or it has mapped different results to a finite set of key words. It is the math behind that is interesting and of value. rest is all baloney again.
everything else is baloney !! In the end there is no difference between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc and i think we are better off for it. When we blame MSFT, we are just blaming our systems because MSFT is living by the laws laid out and if not paying for it and that is all you can or should expect from a corporation. If you need them to behave differently, you need to adopt a different value, political and economic system. Tell me how you measure me and i'll tell you how i will behave.
It is becoming one global economy. But it seems to me increasingly it is information that is being exchanged that unites us. While I think it is important for people and goods to move around to establish the infrastructure supporting this global economy soon ( how soon ??) there wont be any need or the desire for people to move around. I think it would make us move away from physically interacting with people from different regions. only need to travel be out of pure curiosity to see a place. Tourism is a very small fraction of total travel in this world. So maybe this global information economy is going to create islands of social milieu that are tied only from a commerce perspective. How long can that stay. In other words of social mores diverge to an extent that humans species in different regions become different species then obviously the informational integrity may break. What the heck ? I think we are all out of sorts on trying to predict this. I think no matter what we are most likely going to be snuffed into nothing by a cosmic event much earlier than we can evolve or devolve into anything dangerous. The only think we can do to protect ourselves i think in the meantime is to prevent a man-made nuclear or biological holocaust. The other thing we must do is dring a lot of beer.
This is a silly statement isnt it ? VZ doesnt have to pay for data services but that also means that the combined entity will lose that revenue. Similarly MCI doesnt have to pay line charges but the combined entity will lose that revenue. When you take taxes into account things might change a little bit. But then this post doesnt talk about tax benefits gained from merger. Tax laws are too complex and orthogonal to most slashdotters including me.
Israel and Ireland are big software/IT exporters and have been that way for a long time. India is relatively new to the game. Manufacturing offshoring happened long back and there is very little of it that goes to India. India has opened up its economy since 1991 in a very big way and is more of a free market than not. Foreign Direct Investnment has been on the rise in India since 1991 as a consequence of the economy opening up. I can comment on telecom that the job growth in Indian market is commensurate with growing telecom demand in India. I monitor telecom very closely and the Asia Pacific region is hot in terms of demand. So the telecom jobs are being created in India and China to meet the demand there. (not all of them but a significant percentage). I think India is competing and complementing the global markets in a fair way tapping on skills that it has. What this kind of behaviour deserves is respect and not derision and hatred. Compare that to whole host of nations that either have their hand out or are breeding ground for terrorism. Indians arent only cheap labour by any stretch. The quality of Indian academic strength is established. Look at Intel talent search awards this year. Indian diaspora in US that comprises probably less than 1 % of US population had 8 kids amongst the 40 awardees; a whopping 20 %. Indians who come to the US (at least in last 7-8 years) are truly top quality professionals that can compete with the best. I think US is doing what it has done best always, provide an great magnet to attract the world's best talent. I wish India were able to create this system that would attract world's best talent. Indian salaries are already going up in the IT sector to a level where the cost advantage is levelling out. So unless there are other drivers jobs wont move out. I do think US government should take care of its citizens by making changes that benefit its population but economic changes arent typically that simple in cause and affect and economic policies do not stay in the economic arena but affect every arena. Let the chips fall where they may. just another perspective.
air traffic controller issuing tickets to pilots for using cell phones while flying. :-)
what is relevant is not the stock price but the market cap. market cap, theoretically, should reflect net present value which is the summation of discounted cash flows over the average investor's investment horizon. One can take 10 years as the average investment horizon and I cannot imagine profits of google that will amount to that kind NPV. What people are betting on is not the fundamentals of the company but are betting on the stupidity (optimism) of the next guy. Pricing is being driven by supply and demand for a stock which is disconnected from the real value of the stock. Well who loses in the process it is always the common investor who loses as most small investors are either not savvy enough or a also betting on general euphoria. The sophisticated investors cover typically are better positioned informationally (insiders) to enter or exit the markets. Google or Yahoo or Amazon they (will) all come down tumbling when the bubble bursts. this doesnt make them bad businesses but bad investments.
I regret that my submission on Bhoomi was rejected in mid 2003. interested /. readers should go to the Bhoomi homepage and read about the project. It is truly fascinating and gigantic in scale.
http://www.revdept-01.kar.nic.in/
Techies should make note of the enormous change management, infrastructure and end user adoption issues that are highlighted (dont get turned off by NT, SQL and VB which is what has been used here)
SOME PROBLEMS FACED
1 Data entry agencies were not aware of land records Computerisation data entry screens. It was not one to one data entry process. The data entry involved data transformation which many a times was not done on paper by Village Accountants thus increasing our dependence on data entry operators to use their own knowledge for data entry process. Data entry agency representatives were therefore trained in Bangalore by the Bhoomi team. The meaning of different fields in land records document and their implications was explained to them.
In all divisional and district level workshops also, these agencies were called so that they could interact with Bhoomi team and have independent knowledge of data inputting.
2 Data entry agencies did not have sufficient infrastructure with them. They had old computers, most of the time, 80486 based machines which could either not run Windows or if it could, its processing speed was very slow. They did not have enough printers and UPS either.
People go to Public Library now to access internet and not to read or loan books. So what is the point of all this. Unless there is a strong associated increase in books loaned and hence read there isnt much cause for delight here. In India coffee shops started providing internet connections as a way to increase coffee sales which worked as most people liked the idea of sucking a cold coffee with a straw while net-speeding. what's the brouhaha ha ha
I have started running on a treadmill just 10 days back. I notice that my ankles and shins pain when i am running. Also, there is residual pain in my right heel even after finished with my running. Obviously I dont want to bust my joints or bones. Any recommendations from the the running geeks ? I am already considering a new pair of shoes. The ones i have now are pretty good Nike Air ones. Is this a askslashdot post ? maybe
if MS went the OSS way ? to be or not to be that is the question? intelligenter than thou.
I dont know if i am noticing it more now or it is because Indians are actually doing better on the global stage. Rusi Taleyarkhan, the key player in this discovery/invention, obtained a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1977. He came to the United States shortly afterward for graduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, located in Troy, N.Y. In addition, he obtained a master's degree in nuclear science and engineering in 1978 and a doctorate in the same field in 1982. In all this talk about foreign workers coming to the USA, their contribution to American and Global knowledge is left unmentioned. This I think is tragic. In my view USA provides the best platform in the world for intelligent, creative and hardworking people and by doing that US benefits and stays ahead of the pack of nations. How I wish India could emulate US of A and make the smart people across the world work in India.
To me free trade is akin to Free-ways in some respect. Free ways are optimised for travelling to specific long distance destinations under standard/normal conditions. But the same free ways, that epitomise efficiency under standard circumstances, turn nightmarish during rush hours. Also, they are non-optimal if you want to, say, enjoy the scenic view offered by some of the backroads. It is also non-optimal if you have already reached the destination and any further movement for you is largely restricted to the local grocery store.
I think socialism, free trade or capitalism are all free way philosophies that aim to optimise specific goals at the cost of some others that are perceived to be less important. In India, we took up protectionist policies for 40 years and those led to gradual but sure erosion of our production capabilities. But during these years there was great stability (not affluence but predictability). Over a period of time we became a nation with "chalta hai" (make do) attitude than a "can do" attitude.
I think India would have been much better placed if it were open to competition right from the word go. But we offered sops to local industries that became difficult to lift as time passed and Indian goods lost out on quality. So I think free trade probably is a good long term policy that will lead to faster acceptance of realities and attuning yourself to it.
Within this though I think there can policy changes that will make this transition a little less painful. But making drastic changes that are irreversible quickly enough can change the direction of the broader philosophy.
Imagine if you were to miss your exit on a Freeway and you just decide to make random U turn. If you are the only one doing this, it may be fine. But if everybody starts doing that and this becomes a norm freeways would lose their value in no time. I know what this kind of behaviour leads to and that is complete systemic atrophy.
There are a lot of models for economic success but they go hand in hand with the societal models. For the values that American's value like freedom, individualism etc. free trade is the most aligned economic model for continues success. Japanese have achieved it differently but then their social values are more community based than individual centric etc. The worst thing one can do is adopt an economic policy that is not in line with social goals and norms of the country.
two cents and some more