Dictators and Social Networks

Not even in their dreams the dictators in the middle eastern countries would have expected these kind of uprising from the youth of their countries. The countries are ablaze , the squares of country Capital's are abuzz with angry people and the state of anarchy which dictators have carefully preserved over the decades are crumbling in front of their own eyes.

The winds of change , which almost became a bit of gaffe thanks to obama's alleged overuse, are sweeping fast and so fast that mountains of resolute are uprooted.

So what caused these uprising and why Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain are all burning?

There are multiple reasons to this:

The first being the order of the world is changing. The Western democracies which traditionally fed these dictators in the name of arresting the arise of islamic fundementalism are mired with their own economic issues.

Secondly these countries have huge youth population who are not included in the weatlh enjoyed the top honchos of their country and needless to say they are very angry about that.

Lastly, the advancement of technology ,especially the social networking, has made the collaboration between the angry youth incredibly easy. All that it takes is to create a group in Facebook to share your frustration , organize your even and zooom there is a social uprising in notime. 

The dictators who have been very comfortable arresting the earlier uprisings with a combination of strict policing, tightly controlled media and brutal forces are caught unaware now. The key definition of what they are trying to control has changed significantly thanks to the non traditional media. The resistance and uprising of the angry youth, which has been crushed successfully so far, has non traditional letouts like facebook, twitter, youtube, flickr etc.

When there are easy letouts for your emotions, you start expressing more freely. When you start expressing more freely and more often, you tend to ignite the fire.

It would be an exaggeration to state that the soc networking site are the orign of these unrest, but we cannot disagree on their level of contribution in igniting, fueling and sustaining the momentum. The well preserved forests of arrogance, callosal absurdities and oppression have been set ablaze by the tech savvy angry youth.The interesting thing is that the forest is quite big and the areas of China, North Korea, Iran etc are still withstanding.....

We are very sorry Mr Dictator: all that it takes to initiate an uprising against you are a bunch of tech savvy youth with facebook, twitter etc accounts. Get your acts right or you would very soon have people rewriting your legacy [they would capture that in wikipedia as well].

Btw, lets all thank Mark Zuckerberg and others for contributing so much for a big cause , though their original intent was just do make some ad-money!!!!

Key Technology Trends for 2011

All of the technorati have published their take on what would be key technology trends for 2011 a month back. I did an analysis of all the key trends and found out most of them are same as the last year or minor derivatives of the same. Sometimes it feels like Time is circular than linear and progressive. Anyhow, here is my attempt to do it with a difference!

From a Macro trend perpsective; SOA, BPM, BI , Mobile, Cloud still remain the hot favorites with SOA increasingly becoming a norm or expected feature rather than a radically or magically revolutionary. For all practical purposed we could push SOA aside. I have always thought SOA is a good programming style/architectural maturity taking help of standardization and nothing else; So long, SOA pundits. We got it now and please work on something else. Lets analyse the key drivers which are relevant to the time that we are passing through now. 

The first and foremost driver is the Cost. Inspite of all those money pumped into the world economy and increased quantitative easing , the doubts about recovery are still looming large and we are yet to experience the next big boom. The CFOs are still vigilant and are cautious to spend in a casino style like we are witnessed few years back.

Secondly , the technology has been commoditised to a phenomenal extent that a Mom&Pop shop can download a OpenSource ERP, BI, BPM , DB etc if they are tech savvy. Laissez-faire is the order of the world now.

Thirdly, due to the ubiquitous nature of the internet and the increased adoption of the smartphones, the expectation for information to be available everywhere is beyond belief. We are going through an era where we are drowned with information both relevant and non relevant. 

Finally, we are getting back to have a social life [well, virtual one] through a plethora of social networking sites. We have started interacting with our near and dear more often than ever. The time that TV used to consume from us is getting slowly shifted to these sites. As we speak, there are atleast 200 million active users facebooking and twittering what they are doing now and what they would be doing in next 7 minutes. This is a very interesting driver as this represents a shift in the way we collaborate, express our emotions and share our needs/deeds. There is a whole new generation for whom this is a way of life. They are much more comfortable choosing that their friends 'Like'. Our social graph is getting increasingly cluttered.

In summary the key drivers of today are 

1. Cost

2. Commoditised technology

3. Increased information availability

4. Busy Social graph

With the above in minds, what could drive the technology world ?

Cost:

1. Cloud computing would become norm. I heard a CIO mentioning Amazon Cloud is more secure than a local vendor hosting his infrastructure with a local vendor

2. Open Source would find its way through the Enterprise mainly wrapped under Cloud based Services. If you are provided a complete CRM that meets your demand through Cloud and if asked to pay 10 quids, you wouldnt mind. Wouldnt you?

Commoditised technology:

3. The availability of best of the breed tools would increase the adoption of Analytics, BPM, ESB etc especially with the Tier 2 companies across domains

4. IT vendors would focus on solving business problems rather than touting their Technology expertise, at last.

RIP Technology driven world!  Now Go to solve the problem which your customer has been grappling with  than killing him [her also] by that 120 slider

Increased information availability

5. The focus would shift from access of information to the creation of knowledge from information. Semantic web could get more prevalent.

6. Devices like smartphones and tablets that helps in Knowledge creation would become the order of the day

Busy Social Graph

7. Buying patterns would be influenced by your social graph. You would be tempted to buy the Apple TV which your friend bragged in FB and got 'Like'd by 30 of your friends

8. Newer social sites for gaming, buying would emerge and stay

9. Focus on User Experience would increase as a differentiator among the competing sellers

10. World is a better place with 9 trends!

We have been going through a linear technology world for a very long time and now the shift is slowly towards a non-linear world where an application that respects users expectation, provides knowledge at a bare minimum cost would be the winner.

Please be advised that there would not be any trends for 2012 by any one as the Mayan's have predicted an end of the World , as we know, next year.

So long and thanks for all the fish. 42. [if you dont understand check out HHGG by Douglas Adams]

Wikileaks and Digital Renaissance

This is a followup of my earlier thoughts on Cablegate...

I had few fundamental questions in my mind about the implications of Cablegate on the Enterprises. Wikileaks , in my mind is very akin to what hotmail did to the world of emails and what iPod did to the mp3 players. The concept was not new, but it started a new era where the core concept found acceptance and evolved exponentially.

Julian Assange and his spirited team have taught us that we are living in an era of Openness. We leave trails of our thoughts all over the digital world. The world, its netizens and the organisations are more wired than ever. Whilst being closely wired has brought it great benefits of transparency , faster access to the information; unfortunately it has its byproducts as well which we are witnessing through the recent dawn of Wikileaks.

Like how the medieval European era progressed to the great Colonisation and Industrial revolution after the renaissance, we are just stepping into a digital renaissance era.
If we do a rewind of the time by few centuries and land up in Florence, Tuscany around 14th century and take a peek at what is going on , there are plenty of lessons to learn. The pages of 14th century Italy is one of the most glamorous pages of the human civilisation. It was a tipping point for many events that unfolded  and pushed the entire world to the newer dimensions.

A very practical example would that of our very own lives. If somebody had mentioned to me about what he/she could find about me by a simple googling, 5 years back, I would have simply laughed it off. The reality now is completely different , there are more information available about me (which i post in multiple sites) that my close friend may know not about me. This is a new reality, this is not going to change.

What does this mean for an Enterprise?

Primarily the employees are going to be talking more about themselves and their work in various social networking site. Your employees , collegues [and you] are very likely to lose a smartphone device which has lot of information about your company.Inspite of the huge spends on the security software, hackers are going to resort more to the social engineering than breaking their heads off to sneak in to your servers.

What would/could emerge?

Enterprise 4.0 is going to be more open. It is going to be aligned to our life styles in the digital world than resembling to the current state of traditional organisation which worked well in the pre-digital era.

The Enterprise 4.0 should cope up with the fast emerging technology and hence needs to be built on the closest way we react to the external information.

This is going to be a new digital renaissance and we better buckle up!

Cablegate : To speak or Not to Speak!

Looks like a complete new order of the day is unfolding right infront of us thanks to Assange.

He has sparked off a wild fire that is growing so wild that nobody in the international political limelight is left unscathed. A huge repository of 251,287 diplomatic cables that were secured by wikileaks from a US mole (?) is defining the new order of the day where meaning of Privacy , Secrecy , Confidentiality are getting redefined.

In an era where we have grown to become more reliant on the devices that technology has gifted us, we leave a digital trail everywhere. When this trail gets to the unintended hands , the guarded privacy is lost. This gives raise to two questions?

Should we just get used to it and be more cautious?

Should we try to develop more sophisticated mechanisms to keep the secret a secret?

I think the probability of the latter is very unlikely as the technology sophistication are getting out of hand and there is simply no way we could catch up the privacy stealers. What ever Assange's cause may be, the very notion of what you speak could be out in public as soon as possible makes our spines chill. Internet and various associated technologies are going to get only better and hackers are going to get only sophisticated!

At the same time, these leaks give a notice to the wrong doers and sinisters that they cannot be in the hiding forever. The powerful lights of technology would search them and bring them to the moonlight.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Welcome to the brave new world where you need to be Open , Honest and speak good things else you would be online for wrong reasons in no time.... and Assagne is only a beginning

So long and thanks for all the fish....

It has been quite a while since i blogged last. Well, the last one was to make an entry for the New Year's eve, i believe. In the era where we are overwhelmed with our intense social networking and using [useless] apps in our smartphones, it has become quite difficult to sit down and blog your thoughts, unless you are very driven by your passion of protecting rare species of Papua New Guinea or you want to make a point on your opinion about way Chinese run their government [shouldnt they be left alone?].

Somehow my reading these days have been towards only two subjects: the first being Hindu philosophy and the second being Quantum physics. I am not sure what dragged me into these but i found a few interesting parallels between both. Hence i have been reading a bit of both to understand the parallels more closely and this week, my inquisitiveness rose further thanks to series of non-stop science fiction movies.

I have been an ardent fan of Douglas Adams and have read his HHGG multiple times and was curious to watch the movie to see how an amazing book has been distorted in the movie version. Sadly, the movie didnt give me much to crib about. The director has cleverly chosen the key aspects of the book and has packaged it very well.

The key concept of the movie is the existence of the extraterrestrial intelligence and the quest for Big Answers of who we are, what is the orign of universe etc etc, which have been pondering the mankind over millions of years. These big questions are not that world if you have that fact that the man set out his foot only two million years ago from Africa. However the impact that these questions have had over us have been phenomenal and is one of the key factors for the existence of most of the religions existing today.

Brahmasutra is an ancient Hindu relic which tries to answer these big question through the logical thoughts and reference to various Hindu Upanishads. Several thoughts of Brahmasutra like there was a singular orign (big bang) , we all belong to the oneness and reference of the supreme being as brahman which not but an immutable entity which cannot be defined in the words resonate well with modern scientific beliefs [discounting my bias towards Hindu beliefs].

Quantum Physics came out of ages in the last century and has already made significant contribution towards the way we think about the big questions. Whilst Classical physics is more matured and has been developed by the sharpest of the mind that humanity has seen till date, Quantum physics is still in its nascent days [forget about the quacks selling Quantum healing etc] and mainly the traversal of particles from their quantum state to classical state is yet to be established.

But if the classical objects are composed of the quantum particles as their founding blocks, may be the hidden answer lies in understanding the traversal between the particle/wave nature of the unstable particles and the more heavier objects.
May be ancient vedic rishies were able to understand this through logical deduction or self realisation!
May be advancements in scientific discoveries would lead us to very interesting things like parallel universe, teleportation etc!

May be the answer is 42!






If you had read this far, in anticipation of some interesting facts/arguments,  So long and thanks for all the fish........

























 

iPhone Killer at last? Google Nexus One

Smartphone industry is getting to be the most exciting industry to watch around. While Nokia and iPhone are battling their lousy patent wars, Google has unveiled the Nexus One which has got raving reviews so far (doubt every body who writes about it would have used it). People have already started talking it to be an iPhone killer?

Apple , Nokia, Samsung, Motorola , HTC control around 70% of the smartphone traffic among themselves (source admob report) out of which Apple has a lions (well not exactly) share of around 32 %. Whilst the smartphone market existed for quite sometime, Apple redifined the market by its innovative iTunes based business model and unique tie-ups with single carrier to make the product exclusive and more demanded. This month the AppStore downloads have exceeded more than 3 billion downloads and needless to say a significant revenue to Apple.

In bare naked truth , Apple has created a big revenue stream by letting the innovative deveopers across the world to go crazy on their imagination, providing them a good infrastructure (iTunes) to sell their products and presenting the customer a great device to tap this apps. In essense it is an ideal ecosystem of customer, developer and apple.

So far so good. But Google seems to have a different strategy which tells

1. No carrier lockin

2. Operating System is OpenSource (go and modify on your own)

3. Standards are pretty much open and you wouldnt need a specific make of a laptop/desktop to create apps (like Apple)

While Apple has to play a defensive game of protecting its turf, Google has nothing to lose but everything to gain. The Nexus one demonstration (if it were to be believed) portrays a fantastic 5 MP camera . Noice Cancellation and ultrafast processor for making it  a great device esp for Gaming which could take Nexus to a different plane.

Needless to say the smartphone industry got revolutioned only after Apple and Google is a follower but doesnt need to go through the learning curve and risks like Apple did. It just needs to do better than Apple (which is quite hard) and take the features to masses where it could strike it hot.

Inspite of the revenue that iPhone generates it accounts for only 1% of the cellphone market and there is a huge customer base who could turn to smartphone usage if the entry barriers are lowered. I think this is exactly what google wants to capture.

Google could heat up the play by the following strategies
> Promoting the carriers for stickiness (unlike the struck ATT with Apple)
> Connect the Apps to Google AppEngine
> Provide a cool interface to buy apps (like iTunes)
> Consolidate it various apps to a bundle

This would help Google in many ways
> Increase Android adoption and hence make avenues for getting it more matured
> Gain strong entry into the Smartphone (remember Apples rejection of Google Voice etc)
> Make competitors like MS and Apple work more harder and make them spend money over a new avenue

Whatever said and done , the space is heating up and getting interesting to watch.
Nokia , Are you listening?

Top Tech trends 2010 for BFSI domain

Gone are the gloomy days of  2009 and here comes 2010 with a ray of hope.

So what are the top technical trends(leaving the more interesting topics like Outsourcing, BPO, ADM to the experts) that would influence the financial technosphere in 2010.

The technology trends are characterised by the economy that is still recovering , the credit market that is still picking up and businesses who are still puzzled about whether to spend or not. On the whole the world economy is moving but not yet lubricated to the extent that it was during the 2007s (a bit of over lubrication it was) to catch up full spending mode.

While there are different ways to classify and prioritize trends, the technology trends are direct result of the business sentiments which inturn is the result of the economic climate. So what are the key drivers that would drive the financial technosphere 2010?

a. Surviving till the world is back to its normal ages (incurring low costs and reducing fixed costs)
b. Incremental investments that could bring immediate benefits (no 3yrs ROI types) and stay competitive
c. Addressing cant-wait regulatory initiatives

In very simple words anything that would not create a visible difference to topline or bottomline is quite hard to justify to the business who holds the kitty tight.

The following are the macro trends which would make a difference (if applied appropriately) and potentially improve the efficiency of the operations and acquire more customers.


Trend # 1 : Mobile Computing
With the strong adoption of the smartphones (around 180 million units out from iphone, blackberry, nokia etc) , the life stlye of the consumer is changing drastically.

From establishing identity about oneself , doing shopping till executing financial transactions the mobile phone industry is revolutionizing the way we lead our lives. The emergence of smartphone apps which can detect your location and push location specific information to you make it more interesting than the traditional push type applications.

2010 could be a starting point for those mighty finance apps.

Applicable Business Areas : Client / Sales Force Servicing

Trend # 2 : Cloud Computing and SaaS
While there are quite a lot of hype around Clouds , this is nothing but an evolved Application and infrastructure hosting IMO. What would be interesting is that organizations could push commoditized business process to the cloud and stop worrying about the associated headaches (scale-in, scale-outs, infrastructure). This is very akin to me having to host a email server, guard it from hackers vs buying a google professional email account with my preferred domain name.
Companies would prefer to have a SLA based delivery
Applicable Business Areas : Commoditized business process like Quoting, Mortgage/Pension Calculators , FNA's

Trend # 3 : Utilizing Social Media
The Gen Y (25-35 ageband) has adopted the social media like never before and content generation has been moved from the hands of few (traditional media and publishers) to anybody who could create a twitter/facebook etc accounts.
There are two things which organizations have to take a note on. The first being revenue generation from the Gen Y by playing their own social media game and the second is to guard the brand from the onslaught of public and competitors mudslinging.

A customer could be better profiled by bots which can trail his/her activities across the social web.
2010 could be an era where the Content Management industry would move away from traditional Workflow, Document Mgmt and Web Content Management to deliver results that makes more sense/benefits to the business
Applicable Business Areas : New Business, Understanding consumer behavior, Marketing

Trend # 4 : Advanced Analytics
With the consolidation across the Business Intelligence and thanks to Microsoft for having opened the BI holy-grail to the SME's, there has been increased adoption of Business Intelligence and industry would move away from low value-chain reporting to high-end analytics which could shed lights on understanding more about the consumer behavior, buying trends and their associated predictability
The advanced analytics could play a critical role in Risk Management as well for e.g the Reverse Stress testing would need huge sets of datapoints where a combination of Analytics and Functional Testing (from a business scenario perspective).
While the Tier 1 players would concentrate on the niche segments like Data mining, Predictive analytics etc, this gives a great opportunity for Tier2 and Tier3 player to level the game with their Tier1 contemporaries.
Applicable Business Areas : Corporate Performance Management, Risk Mgmt, Fraud Prevention

Trend # 5 Solution Choreography (sorry, i havent coined a simpler term yet )
With SOA having reached a house-hold status, the industry is moving towards buying components that could be assembled to deliver a business value rather than building things from the scratch or locking themselves with a costly package. More organisations would move towards buying points solutions and stitching them together using industry standards like BPM, ESB etc
Applicable Business Areas : Revamping legacy applications which are costly to maintain and rapidly deploying new applications

Trend # 6 Green Computing
If companies don’t spend on this the CEO and the Board may look cruel for not doing their part to save our little planet. Organisations would spend a sizeable amount of data-center consolidation, reducing energy consumption etc.

Lets take a stock by December 2010.

Apple vs. Nokia

Corporate battles are always interesting to watch. If they are happening between the best of the big companies with strong personalities , there is no void of fun.

One such battles which seems to be heating up is that between Nokia and Apple. To be precise this is round # 3. Apparently Nokia has some arrangements with 40 odd companies which use Nokia technologies in some form or other and Apple hasnt done so. Leaving the outcome to the on or off the court settlements, is it a right strategic move from Nokia at a time where they are losing money big time?

Though still a leader in the mobile market, Nokia has lost grounds to RIM (blackberry) and to Apple (iPhone) for the last couple of years. The smartphone market is a highend market with higher profitability (Apple made 1+billion in profits last year with iPhone) and Nokia is still struggling to captivate the minds of smartphone users.

Whilst RIM has captured the Exec User segment, Apple has captured the popular user segments. With new entrant of the Android Operating system from Google, this war is going to get even more intense and nasty. The smart phone market is on its way to heat up even more and it could soon reach a point where the price-war starts between the major players, once the features across the phone are more or less similar (iPhone, BB Storm and HTC/Android, Motorola ) .

Nokia with its inability to comeup with something which could capture the market share, has resorted to the game of distracting Apple and making it lose its resources over the legal landmine battle and eventual off-the-court settlement.

In my opinion this is going to take a significant management attention from Nokia (esp if Apple decides to play hardball) and could lead to deadly spiral, unless Nokia uses this as a distraction attempt before it launches its stunner iPhone killer.

Lets keep watching

Domestication of Animalistic behaviours

The title may sound pompous and a bit academic, but the thoughts behind are very simple. Over several thousand years mankind has been getting domesticated after having travelled a long way from the forests of Africa (?) to the grasslands of savannah and further to so many other countries and getting diverged to so many other races.
But the fact is that human beings derive their genetic makeup from the animalistic behaviours which has been dominating their psyche for long. Over the past 6 or 8 thousand years, man has been domesticated and has been left with agriculture , then to trade and then to further manipulations. The strange fact if you look at those famous have always had that animalistic , go for the kill kind of tendencies.
So should we all give up our social niceties and get brutal? Looks like yes

Strategy Game : Apple , Microsoft and Google

For anybody who is interested in corporate strategy these are real feast time. The strategic wars waged by the technology heavy weights is seeming to get intense day by day. MS is really flexing its muscles agaisnt the Google to break its monopoly in the search with the Bing. Though Bing is not a path breaking revolution it neatly aligns to the MS style of adopting to the best working model and perfecting it. Down the line Bing could prove nuisance to Google if not as an outright killer.

Google, while preparing to adapt to Bing's onslaught wanted to drag the war to a different war and announced Chrome OS. While Chrome OS itself is not an ingenious invention (would be based on linux kernal) google is just trying to open up another battle to distract Microsoft. This may force microsoft to release a lite version of either XP or 7 to counter the Chrome Offense (if it really an offence) as MS thrives on it OS dominance.

While the analysts and industry pundits were discussing the Chrome, Bing etc Microsoft has entered into a deal with Yahoo to further intense the onslaught on Google. It is going to be interesting to see how google react and retain its dominance on the search engine (and ultimately ad revenue battle) field with the fight intensifying from different corners of the world , especially from baidu which could eat away a major portion of chinese, japanese and far-eastern market.

When MS, Yahoo and Google are fighting the known battles, Apple is on the verge of releasing its iTablet(?) which is hoped to be another revolutionary breakthrough in the content publishing world (people could buy few chapters of the book, instead of the whole book). If the tablet lives up to its hype , world is pretty sure that it will, then amazon would be dragged to a bigger fight for dominance in distrubution of the content which more or less it dominates now through amazon book store.

Of all the games played by MS and Google , the most interesting game would be that of Apple. Apple creates a market, retains its dominance for a longer time with its own supply chain (iTunes) for distribution and makes another innovation before the current product loses its charm or the space is crowded by copy cats(iPod, iPhone etc) . If Apple adopts a right pricing (very likely) for the iTablet, it could crack open a new avenue for its much awaited growth into the OS domination.

Anyways, we are going to have plenty of actions these days and it is going to be throughly entertaining.

#iranelection , twitterati and emergence of new media

Sunday 14th of June 2009 has been an interesting day for iran, media and twitter and in no particular order.
During sorting out things for the next week, i happened to catch the trend #cnnfail from my twitterfon and found people are very upset that CNN hasnt done much coverage on the emerging Iran trends, this was taken up seriously by CNN and looks like the Iran story is given prominence there. Traditionally the Newspaper and TV media are used to give people what they thought is relevant and which would captivate the attention of mass and advertisers. Looks like this law is being rewritten now. The public could express contempt of the way media behaves and the media has to listen to the public
And the term journalist which used to be static earlier has become more dynamic as the common public could easily express in real-time open media like twitter and post their photos and videos to popular social media sites like youtube and flickr. The common man who happens to be there on the spot who may not have journalistic acumen is ready to pass on the information the analysis which was typically done by the journalist has now been given to the common public.
Though this brings in chaos (most of the tweets are emotional and rumour based) , the relevance in time (i tweeted to couple of blokes in iran to get some opinion) and the flexibility that it offers is next to none.
Probably the traditional media moguls should take a note and be prepared to face the reality.
In the meantime, things are extremely chaotic in iran as per the input streams from twitter (good that twitocalypse was yesterday) and twitter once again is in mainstream headlines by serving as a gateway for various links to opinions, videos and pictures across the web.
I think for most of us it feels like suddenly stepping into the sunlight after having spent years in a dark dungeon cell, facing a flood of informations. But i think we would get used to this and refine our life styles.
Hope iran gets some peace tomorrow, will check my twitter first before checking the static media.

Amsterdam : A Social Experiment

I happened to go on a short tour de europe covering Amsterdam, Zurich and France. With diverse cultures , richness, building, cobbled streets, greeness etc, arguably europe (at least the part that i went to ) is a typical poets dream.

Amsterdam throws many a surprises for those who are typical moral beliefs. Drug (soft drug) is legal, prositution is legal. A coffee shop said "Smoking Permitted, No Tobacco". It is no brainer to understand what they intend to say and i dont understand why cant they be explicit about it. Amsterdam surely is a social experiment in liberalising the key dark wants of the human mind. Apart from drawing the tourists in tons of thousands, the argument says by not restricting these "Anyway happens" thing in the country it experiences a low crime rate etc.

To me it looks like a weak argument, if that being the case this would have been adopted by other countries more successfully and easily. There is some element which is beyond the obviousness of the reasons. Perhaps the dutch being the one of the smartest of the traders in the globe, would have realised that it is an easy way to lure people's attention towards the country if the moral ethics could be relaxed a little. Anyways there is no universally accepted moral ethics in the world, and these are enforced only for the poorer segments which cannot enjoy these benefits. While the poor man is advised to stay put with his wife loyally , the king is rightfully given permission to have a harlem.

Amsterdam is a worthy philosophical debate.

Brighton Street Performers

Brighton is very synonynous with joy and i happened to be there for couple of days during the last longweekend. Being used to be travelers than a tourists , sounds a bit zennish, we just packed up some food and stacked up some loose change. As usual with the weekends (both long and short versions of it) , trains didnt disappoint us and we have to take a circum route towards london victoria. After having bought the tickets by staring too long at the dumb terminals , we missed a fast train by a minute and took a slower one which was very adamant to stop at all the stations in the route.

The thing that attracted me most was the street musicians throughout Brighton (May is the Brighton festival time). We were watching a show by a small band in the fringe street (near Royal Pavilion) and i started thinking about the numerous street performers and buskers that i stumble upon. Performing in the street is the hardest job for any artist as the people are always on the move and not having paid to listen/see they could walk away in any moment (sometimes only the ticket money makes us stay ) . To captivate a fluid audience, the artist needs to really engage them and should have lot of perseverance and a good sunny day.

Street performing must have had its origins from very olden days as it is a form of an art which allows you to reach the common mass which cannot afford to go to the theatres (same applies for artists as well). If we take evolutionary angles, the performing can be closely linked to an attempt to attract the females and that could have gradually evolved to amuse others who are in power and have huge money. In the due course the performing has got sophisticated and has reached into the shelters of specialised buildings viz theatres and has taken many a forms through radio, tv, dvd, internet etc.

Performing in great theatres and cinemas are not reachable for everybody and those who didnt hit the jackpot, resort to various other platforms where the entry barriers are not very high. Street is full of untalented (who have an illusion of having lot of talent) and unlucky talented ones. I think it is the moral obligation of the society to acknowledge those underappretiated and hard working artists who work with passion and with a hope that somebody important would notice them and lift them to the stardom forward.

Next time when you come across a street artist, please acknowledge them as the air sorrounding you is full of their songs and music which expects to be appretiated , otherwise it could just mix up with the horrific traffic noise unnoticed.

iPhone and twitter ecosystem

The social media phenomenon is further evolving with the advent of twitter and iPhone Apps ecosystems. The twitter and iPhone platform have something in common ie they provide the basic platform and expose functionalities that you could mash up to your imaginations and be wildly creative.

Creating an ecosystem where the innovators would defy mediocrity and stretch the products is not something which comes easily to everybody. While iPhone thrives out of the Apple/Steve Jobs brand clout, twitter came from nowhere and has been rocking the world. I felt there is a similarity in the popularity of both and wanted to put my points (has been quite while since i blogged last)

Opensource was probably the pioneers in getting the value based on ideas of few individuals and developing it with the efforts of an mass intellectual army. While OS offers you the full flexibility of shaping in whatever way you can, twitter and iPhone doesnt offer you the same flexibility but offer an access to the stabler platform (debatable in twitters case) which you could extend to offer varied functionalities.

Twitter has become the defacto microblogging platform and has taken varied faces in the forms of apps across browser, blackberry (twitterberry) and iPhone (twitterfon). In acceptance to its popularity spammers have started venturing into this ( wait for those ads selling viagras and mail from nigerians offering 50% of 1 billion that they have to collect).

iPhone has offered the flexibilities that we never used to enjoy (my wife searched for indian restaurants nearby using google maps which asked to share our location and ordered chicken tikka in a nearest shop for snacks in the evening) and has created a near gold-rush with every body grabbing a mac and trying to write a killer app that could make them rich.

Nobody can be sure whether iPhone or twitter ecoSystems are here to stay but may be they are just an instance of an emerging phenomenon of product vendors providing a platform that could be extended and left to the creative imagination of end users than a closed environment. This is worth noting especially with the popularity of the social media (Facebook apps).

I am very curious to see how this would affect the development of the enterprise applications, with a core platform alone and prebuilt apps at a lower cost and remaining extendable features........

In the gloomy times where everybody (you and me too ) is preoccupied in whats going to happen next, these ecosystems give us some hope that we could also make some money if we are creative and willing to burn some midnight oil. Lets all get a mac (no sight of PC version of iPhone SDK sadly(

Twitter Monetization

Twitter has come a long way in the last three years it has been in existence which is a relatively short span of time. The leading internet traffic analysis site compete has estimated that twitter’s popularity has grown by 964% compared to the same month last year (Myspace is going down). The number of unique visitors are close to 8 million. This is huge given the basic functionality twitter offers (140 characters on ‘what are you doing now?’).  What is very interesting is the fact how it is going to survive further as the VC’s would be mounting pressure on twitter team before web obsessed crowd turns their attention to something else..

Web is full of social networking sites that serve as an alternate to the decreasing interpersonal relations in a fast paced world. For millions of years ,if you are looking at a coverage for billions of years, read ‘Ancestors Tale’ by Richard Dawkins, we have been operating as groups and this desire to operate as a group has taken the shape of social networking in the web world. If we were to consider orkut,myspace, facebook etc as 3 course meals, twitter is ‘the’ fast food. Grab something real quick , have it and move on. But mind the fact that like triple whopper with loads of cheese, it is really addictive as well ( i have an urge to sign on to twitter early morning after checking mails in my blackberry, as soon as i wake up)

The factors that make twitter click are

> It is quick and easy, the 140 character limit makes is mass SMS media of the web

> It interests high profile techies and celebrities, so high chance of developing valuable networks

> Great platform to market your product and yourself (sparing those I-AM-IN-BATHTUB-NOW type updates)

> The facts are more authentic as the false information gets corrected by the ungoverned watchful eyes (same phenomenon like Wikipedia)

But How will twitter make money?

Twitter as a concept has web, mobile and 3rd party apps as its channels and hence any monetization strategy has to be different according to the nature of the channel. While web is a great medium to put adverts, mobile is not. And since twitter allows api level access, governing 3rd party apps would be too difficult. So it is going to be interesting to see how twitter folks monetize their fame , real quick.

Following are my predictions about the ‘cashing in’ of twitter

> Online contests/prizes that could earn you twitter points (nice business opportunity those chinese entrepreneurs who could employs 1000+ chinese youths to earn and sell these points)

> Opinion polls by product vendors with guaranteed freebies

> A small fee for premium twitters with more options which are not normally available to the common folks ( Linkedin irritates you with this strategy already)

> Sponsored Ads in between the twitter streams (this would annoy really)

My thoughts are based on the fact that twitter would remain textual and wouldn’t want to become another jazzy confused social networking site. In this web 2.0 era where people have multiple options to voice their opinions , companies are getting increasingly conscious of guarding their brand (bad mouthing by a lead twitter could do a considerable damage) and market their brands to the masses who crowd these sites. Anyways as long as i am not restricted in what i could do now and if i had to do a courtesy-click of some weird ads to support twitter engine going, I am perfectly fine. Go Twitter Go……

You can follow me in twitter at http://twitter.com/rsenthilk 

Technorati Tags: chinese entrepreneurs

Technorati Tags: web 2.0,twitter monetization,linkedin

Chinese Aggression

China as a country has always been good Greenfield for strategic thinkers and has produced great thinkers like Confucius, Sun Tzu etc. Chinese society has survived several odds in its long history and has contributed immensely to the world (paper, gunpowder, silk , sil road etc). The leaders of china never react in haste and when they react it carries lot of hidden meanings. There are three incidents which happened in the last few weeks which are worth a close look.

The first being harassment of the USNS impeccable ship near Hainan Island ,which is supposed to be a Survey ship collective marine data(?). The ship was surrounded by Chinese fish-vessels and a PLA navy vessel(People Liberation Army) there were some bold/aggressive manoeuvres like throwing wooden logs in front of the US ship, bringing the Chinese vessels too closely etc. USNS impeccable is not the only ship which suffered this fate but there were other survey ships like USNS victorious which was a victim of Chinese aggression.

The second incident is the warning from Chinese Premier Wen Jiobao expressing concerns over the credit worthiness of US government as Chinese have invested heftily on the US Treasury bonds. Traditionally Governments all over the world have a habit of buying Tbonds as a safety net to preserve their foreign exchange reserves. China has accumulated over a Trillion dollars of US Bonds which accounts for more than 70% of its foreign reserve and more than 50% of US Debt in bonds.

The third incident is the blocking of an 2.5 Billion acquisition of leading juice maker Huiyuan by coca cola. Though this would have recurpussions in Chinese acquisition in US and all over the world , the closely guarded Govt of China (Republic or whatever) seems not to be bothered, in spite of china’s reliance on US for its exports.

If we connect the dots, Chinese are clearly questioning the authority of American Might on the lines of Military , Economy and Fundamentals upon which american society is built.

>When the enemy is too strong to be attacked directly, then attack something he holds dear

>Encourage your enemy to expend his energy in futile quests while you conserve your strength. When he is exhausted and confused, you attack with energy and purpose.

>Loot a burning house

>Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west

>Startle the snake by hitting the grass around it

The above are the selected few from the 36 stratagems, an age old wisdom practised in China and probably Obama should have a look at these instead of his usual rhetoric about how great mankind is , why should we all love each other etc. Anyhow apart from the usual news of failing banks, falling interest rates, vanished property markets etc, china is determined to add some spice to the ongoing drama. Time has to tell how much more spice china would be willing to add and how much obama would be willing to take. May be he should pickup some lessons from Dalai lama…..

Technorati Tags: Chinese aggression,USNS Impeccable,Wen Jiabao,36 stratagems,Obama,EEZ

Hyundai Assurance Plus - Recession time innovation

This is clearly a time for the "Survival of the fittest" (contrary to popular belief , the quote was made by Herbert Spencer and not by darwin). If fittest stands for strongest or most intellect only elephants and foxes would be surviving among the rest(discounting homo sapiens sapiens). The fittest in my opinion means the most adaptable animal or species which could adjust itself to the hardships of changing environments and acquire newer skills. This applies to businesses as well.

It has been very boring to be saying that we are going through historically transformations times and this is the most difficult era of the current generation/living memory etc. HenceI was trying to see how businesses are shaping their strategies to survive in this environment and one that really caught my eyes is the "Hyundai Assurance Plus" program.

The main reason why majority of the population are not willing to spend (i spent quite a lot over this weekend promotional sales due to domestic compulsions :-( ) is because of the fear of job loss. This is a vicious cycle as the lesser spending break even more business and hence more job loss (Prisoners dilemma). Interestingly Hyundai has taken advantage of this tricky situation and guarantees that one need not pay for the first three months after losing the job and if the job loss continues beyond three months , they can simply return the car. This is a very clever more where in Hyundai has just wrapped an additonal job loss insurance cover and has marketed it very effectively. The clever strategy has paid well and while Toyota car sales has slumped by 36% , hyundai's sale has gone up by 4-5% in US.

Hyundai is definetely not the strongest car company of the world, they are not the company with the best R&D team in the world(Is it Merc/BMW?), but they are adaptable evidently. Please check out Hyndai commercials/website alternatively you could wait for 1 more month to read the "Successful Recession Business Strategies" by some of the management gurus for 30$.

Live Writer – A great blog writer

Just testing the Windows Live Writer which is promising to be cool……..

Yeah it definitely is , looks like Microsoft is into mainstream league at last. One real cool feature that i love about Live writer is that it can detect the annoying spelling mistakes, which I don't tend to correct while typing into the rich text box  of the blogger (because it doesn't show ;-)

Self Help Industry - Master Con against the human mind

Generally i am not a great fan of Self Improvement books but based on recommendation from a collegue i bought a book called "PersonalImpact", though i wouldnt say it was a bad book, it was not very impressive either. But this gave rise to very interesting questions about the selfhelp books.

There are multitudes of selfhelp books. There are the kind of books that take (auto)biography format and tell you how successful a particular individual was and how you can emulate the same and other popular kind is those which directly tell you what to do, Like 'How to do negotiations effectively', 'how to successfully run your business', 'how to influence everybody' etc.

While there is a certain amount of authenticity in the former category the latter is a complete joke especially those written by obsure 'thought leaders' and other intellects.

The common theme among all of these books is to have a catchy title which exploits our want and current state of affairs, for e.g how to influence your boss?, how to close every deal; If you closely observe the titles are generic enough to catch your attention span very very fast. Once you fall prey to this then you develop an urge to buy (especially when you are buying books from railway stations W.H Smiths like me) in a hurry.

The main problem with the Self Help books/authors is the fact that they all think that the rest of the world is completely dumb and need their help to have basic sanity. This is very close to the moral high ground that religious leaders take by proclaiming that the world is full of sinners and they have the message of the God to relive us from the clutches of sin. Like the preachers exploiting those poor mortals by promising a berth in the heaven, these neo conmen(some times women too) promise higher salary, likeable personality, faster career growth, becoming thin, quitting smoking etc.

The Self Help industry thrives in the chaotic times and now is their best time to make most out of the current confusions in the world(rumours say, 10 downing street has placed huge orders for 'economy for dummies). Though i dont argue that all selfhelp is rotten, i feel the basket is more full of rotten eggs than good ones. If in doubt, please check out 'I moved your cheese' by Darrel Baristow Bovey. Awesome read and hilarious.

Grand Depression

I just noticed that the current depression/recession has not been named yet. The pundits who name each and every thing , especially the natural calamities (katrina, elf etc) must have been busy saving their jobs. Probably would "Grand Depression" suit ?