The Simulacrum

Welcome to the Jungle

Published on 2010-08-23 19:19:00

And, if you need to learn the rules of the Jungle, you must live in the Jungle. Live, breathe and eat what the nature provides. You start with minimal resources anyway. The objective is to make good use of the resources provided by the eco-system. Learn the eco-system. The most important thing in the initial days is to get used to the eco-system. The new set of pathogens, different food, climate and creatures. It is these initial days that makes or breaks you. Once you weather the storm, you sta

The Distribution of Intention

Published on 2010-03-29 01:04:00

On one of the networks 'India Leadership' on linkedIn, I did come across a interesting question as follows: "Tens and thousands of millionaires and millions of hungry/poor people in India!! How can this contradiction exist?"My thoughts: The "distribution" of "Intention" needs to be fixed. If 'rice' is an intention, then we need to fix the distribution problems which amounts to 45% of wastage as per stats. If 'positive thought' is an intention, we need to enable effective distribution of this to

What does it take to create successful IT product companies in India?

Published on 2010-03-25 13:53:00

This thought keeps bothering me off late. Many have beaten this debate to death. I am still not at peace. What does it take to create more 'successful, innovative' indigenous IT product companies in India ? Approximate guess says that we have less than 1% 'successful, innovative' IT product companies in India. Enough hypothesis, conjunctures and theories have proven that product based solutions (due to replication of effort and automation) provides significantly higher bang per dollar invested t

What will you do ?

Published on 2010-03-12 23:20:00

"What would you do if your were the last person on earth?" - A simple question. Most of the people whom I interacted with on this question, responded with the following set of emotions: Despair, Attachment, Experience, Learning from the past... Deep brow, Thoughtful, Effort to reinstate the past.Now I asked a different question to different set of people"What will you do if you were the first person on earth?" - Simple againThis time around, the answers portrayed Desire, Hope, Passion, Trying th

Right Casting your Core

Published on 2010-03-10 00:34:00

If you are a startup and looking out to build a core team, think through on what type of people you need. Being part of several start-ups in the past and also currently being a founder of a new one, I understand the constant pressure you might go through to find the team. My personal opinion and observations on this (more of a philosophy) is not to hurry or compromise. Do not fall into the valuation trap to bring in high-fliers and experts in their respective fields. On one side, even if the che

What do you do ?

Published on 2010-02-25 17:29:00

Old Grandpa decided to take little Yajur to a field trip on Yajur's 5th birthday. Grandpa choose a factory which makes awesome mousetraps for the field trip. On the day, they walked into the factory, Grandpa instructed Yajur to ask as many questions as he wishes. The field guide decided to take them to the manufacturing department first. Yajur asked the chief engineer what they are doing ? The Chief engineer said they are building the most awesome mousetrap to catch a mouse. He explained that hi

Quantama Hiring Call - In Retrospect

Published on 2010-02-20 07:52:00

In retrospect, this call for action on Venture Woods brought in the highest calls and reactions for job application to Quantama on March 2009.The Job posting excerpt:------I am looking for people with entrepreneurial bent of mind to join the founding team of Quantama.com a mobile proximity company. I have the business case validated and have one of the largest retailers in India showing Intent to implement when the product is ready… Angel rounds are being vetted and talks in process… Have pr

Serendipity is the Key.

Published on 2010-02-20 00:10:00

Most of the established businesses get into a pattern of finding out what is working and doing 'more of it'. This is good for bottom line, margins, and retention of your existing customers. But, is it good for breaking new grounds ? Making the pie bigger ? Your Top-line?Business-as-Usual is to work hard consistently, trying to cash out on the idea that made the business successful. They work hard at establishing Cliches. Cliches are good. They are 'time immemorial'. They express ideas in simple

Shared Consumer Data, Reciprocal Marketing and Conversions for Retail

Published on 2009-07-27 06:21:00

Reciprocal Marketing is not a new concept in Retail marketing in India. Mostly in the B2B segment where promotions, cross-subsidy and cross-sale combinations exists. Insurance is offered for people who open bank accounts. Credit cards are offered in conjunction with book buying (landmark). Money back when you fill gas in a IBP station on debit cards etc... All this hints towards sharing the consumer (data).To carry this to the next level, it is important for Retailers to come out of their shell

The Worth of Value

Published on 2009-07-22 04:28:00

How does one sell in a down economy ? Given that consumers are becoming value conscious, many of the Retailers I am speaking to are seemingly trying to answer the question "How do I assess, reach out and offer what is 'valuable' to consumers contextually ?Why is Value contextual ? Because, it is based on the end user, end-usage and the environment. This is a coarse grained dimension of Value.Marketing gurus exemplify that other fine grained dimensions of value exists.- Value is Relative; relativ

The Experience Economy of Mobility and Convergence

Published on 2009-07-08 06:33:00

The Experience Economy specifically in the convergence and mobility (as in mobile based) sector shall gain new heights both from a continuous and dis-continuous innovation. Why ? Purely because of the disruptive nature of just having more bandwidth on majority of the handsets across social strata.Experience economy as defined is the orchestrated events made memorable to the consumers which collectively by in itself becomes a "product". Flashback to the Movie "Minority Report" in which Tom Cruise

Emerging Business Drivers and Orthogonal Validations

Published on 2009-07-07 06:16:00

Rapid Adoption of IT systems across sectors and Domain: Globally as more and more systems are being digitized, the need for testers have increased drastically. The availability of the resource pool who has the necessary domain knowledge is also shrinking which has lead to a resource pool crunch. That said, it would be paramount to ramp-up Business Analysts and Product Primes to acquire the pre-existing knowledge within the domain and innovate upon that knowledge. Bringing testers up to speed the

Mobile Call without getting Billed

Published on 2009-07-06 07:20:00

Convergence along with Innovation is a deadly concoction. It has been said that no power in the world can stop an idea whose time has come. So it seems for Cherry a Belgian Tech Startup in the Mobile MVNO space. The coolest thing about this innovation is the ability to make calls to the people in your contact list without using a SIM card. No I am not smoking, YES, ITS WITHOUT A SIM CARD. The technology uses a "handover" protocol as reported whenever in the vicinity of a Wifi range. There is a a

New Venture (Quantama)

Published on 2009-07-01 06:28:00

My last blog was quite a while back. I was caught up (lousy excuse) in establishing a tech-start up (www.bytedge.com). I am currently working on a mobile proximity start-up focusing on Consumer Lifecycle Management for organized Retail (www.quantama.com). Finding seed capital during recession, working on positioning for new market, getting a core team in place and getting the first customer on board have its own share of anomalies. Added to that, learning of things that you may have seen or done

SaaS'y Benefits

Published on 2007-02-17 18:00:00

SaaS or Software-as-a-Service as it is coined is the ability of a external service provider to provision a business service over the internet so that it can be consumed remotely by (mostly) enterprise organizations. The luring drivers for running software as a service stems from its propositions of the ability of a external service provider to apply economy-of-scales for either IT operations or applications to offer better 'benefits' to the consuming organization. benefits such as cheaper costs,

The Long Tail of IT Spend

Published on 2007-02-16 05:17:00

'The Long Tail' is a 'power law of distribution' used by statisticians to define a expanding market (in any given discipline that is) in terms of the economic and business model of the market. In fact the phrase 'The Long Tail' was coined by Chris Anderson (editor-in-chief) of wired magazine. In simple terms the long tail can be explained with a graph as follows:This graph compares the total average IT spending of organizations of differing organizational sizes. Notice that the graph has a 'Big

Architecture Process Framework

Published on 2007-02-12 03:13:00

For several years and across several product development engagements, I have come across varied organizational structures and 'disparate' architecture and development processes that I thought I must reflect upon my own understanding of these ideologies and present a 'process simulacrum' that I have been able to assimilate over time. In essence, the simulacrum is based on varied development methodologies such as RUP (Rational Unified Process), Agile UP, XP (eXtreme Programming), SCRUM, DSDM (Dyna

ESB Primer

Published on 2007-01-31 10:27:00

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) can be considered a virtual layer composed of a set of services that acts as a broker for “facilitating” SOA integration across all the IT systems and components that can or may possibly exists in an enterprise environment. ESB is a relatively new term emerging in the industry. Yet some of the rudimentary principles on which ESB is based on are relatively old (as in matured). The core objective of ESB is to enable agent based mediation between two service end

SOA Primer

Published on 2007-01-05 09:42:00

Service Oriented Architecture or SOA is an architectural style or design encompassing a set of guidelines, rules or principles that suggests how a software application should be manifested as a service. SOA has emerged as integration architecture to create resilient applications to coordinate with each other and extend the process and execution boundaries across application.The software service in the SOA is a network endpoint abiding by certain protocols and technology constraints required by S

The Fifth Utility

Published on 2006-12-15 04:41:00

Utility computing, also often called, as the fifth utility seems to be positioned as the cool new model for enterprise computing. Note that the term computing must not be read as just related to computer as a processing box, but must be generally understood as the ‘business model’ of offering a service. The fifth utility is more about business model based on utility computing rather than the technology alone.The idea of service provisioning for the clients based on similar grounds such as us

What is Simulacrum ?

Published on 2006-11-13 00:58:00

In simple terms, Simulacrum (plural: Simulacra) is a 'copy' without a 'original'. The definition of simulacra has evolved over ages and specific meanings and connotations has been provided that has varied context across different bodies of work (Doctrine of the 'Eternal Return', The book 'Simulacra and Simulation' ...)Some context:Universe being a simulacrum without a original which recurres eternally.Simulacra of the beings where the copy is true without a model (model being a theory). This has

My authorings on Amazon

Published on 2006-07-23 16:23:00

Java Web Services ProgrammingPacked with lucid explanations and lots of code examples, this valuable guide covers the Web services framework and the open standards that support it, including XML, WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI. Learn to implement these standards using the WSDP, from working with the Java Web services architecture and developing JavaServer Pages and servlets to making the most of JAXP, JAXB, JAX-RPC, JAXR, and the rest of the Java XML toolset.Internet Security and FirewallsImplementin