Thursday, August 31, 2006

How to prepare for meetings:

1. Do your homework and prepare for the meeting
2. Figure out what you want out of the meeting
3. Have a plan B.
4. Map the meeting
5. Memorize your opening sentence
6. Memorize a closing sentence

Source: 1

Quote

A good leader listens to other members of a team. A good leader encourages ideas from every member of a team and encourages everyone to debate ideas. But a good leader decides which ideas to pursue herself or himself – and makes clear to the team that this is what’s going to happen at the end of the discussion.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Great Start-Up CEO

15 elements defining Great Start-up CEOs

Highly intelligent
Terrific negotiator
Charismatic leader
Great communicator
Technical expertise
Management guru
Marketing maven
Tough as nails
Soft as tissue
Flexibility
Zero Ego
Teacher
Creative
Disciplined and hardworking
And most importantly, CRAZY

Source: 1

Thursday, August 17, 2006

MindMap on Mobile Internet

Rajesh Jain at Emergic has a series running on the Mobile Internet, a topic of great interest for me, So i have taken excerpts from his posts and put together a mindmap on the same.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Quote

You must retain faith that you can prevail to greatness in the end, while retaining the discipline to confront the brutal facts of your current reality.

StockDale Paradox

Source

Monday, August 14, 2006

Quote

Desicion Makes Destinity - TED Talk

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Windows Live Writer

Microsoft launched Windows Live Writer today. This is a free, downloadable application that runs on your Windows PC and allows you to write blog posts.

Downloadable here

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Success Factors

What’s important to any person in any job/business is :

- UNDERSTAND what the important ingredients of your success are;
- Keep QUESTIONING whether the conditions that made these ingredients important still exits;
- DON’T assume past results predict future results;
- Make a new plan BEFORE the old plan fails.

Source: Fractals of Change

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Blogs at Infosys

In one of the PDF's i downloaded from the infosys site i saw a mention of a web address that goes - blogs.infosys.com.....What do they have there??..Is it just going to be only within the firewall?...Lots of questions...If there is anybody out there who knows? please pitch in and tell us what exactly is happening?

sunsilkgangofgirls.com

I have been seeing the ad of Sunsilks gang of girls.com for sometime now and have been wondering how successful they have been looks like we will get an opportunity to find out in blogcamp...Chaya Brian the brain behind might be there, looks like Kiruba is going to do a podcast as well.

Update: Website name corrected - thanks suman

How not to lead Geeks!

Here is a list from the Chief Happiness Officer:

1: Downplay training
2: Give no recognition
3: Plan too much overtime
4: Use management-speak
5: Try to be smarter than the geeks
6: Act inconsistently
7: Ignore the geeks
8: Make decisions without consulting them
9: Don’t give them tools
10: Forget that geeks are creative workers

I agree with all of them and have tried incorporating them in my schedule.

Detailed here

Friday, August 04, 2006

Loyalty programs in Multiplex's

Satyam the multiplex in Chennai needs to implement a Loyalty program and work on improving the whole movie experience, they have improved the infrastrucutre, the facilties but i think they are missing on a whole set of benefit that they can deliver giving them a huge advantage.

Today there is no competition for Satyam, but thats not going to be the case for too long, Infact the poster boy for multiplex in india - PVR...Could also do the same.

Call Center ....Business ...Is there a future in India?

Was reading the article at Business Week on Call Center Business in India...Lots of interesting data points:

"Call centers have become commoditized," says B. Ramalinga Raju, chairman of Satyam Computer Services Ltd.

That doesn't mean India won't be doing call center work anymore. But outsourcing powerhouse Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., for instance, has turned away potential clients offering call-center-only work. "We are thinking about whether this is work we really want to do," says TCS Executive Vice-President Phiroz Vandrevala. At Satyam, just 35% of business process outsourcing employees are in call centers, down from 60% 18 months ago, Raju says.

2000, they represented 85% of the total back-office business; now they're about 35%, according to Nasscom, India's outsourcing industry trade association. And while call centers are still growing in India, the business is expanding at about 30% annually, compared with 60% growth for nonvoice back-office work, Nasscom says.

The BPO industry doubled in size last year, to $6.3 billion, and is expected to clock 37% annual growth over the next five years, according to Nasscom.

Genpact, a former General Electric Co. (GE ) subsidiary spun off two years ago, prefers to take on jobs that let it tap its expertise in analyzing zillions of bits of data to help clients work more efficiently. If call centers happen to be part of the equation, that's fine, but Genpact is reluctant to take up contracts for call centers only. "We tell our clients, 'Don't start with call centers -- if you do, do it together with something else,"' says Genpact Chief Executive Pramod Bhasin. "This is harder than customers expect and needs to be handled carefully."


Source Business Week

Thursday, August 03, 2006

ServerLess Apps - Future of Consumer Apps?

I was just reading another post at emergic about Serverless Apps, On how a Client based wiki is using Amazon S3 as storage and there is no server in between, do we think its the best way to go....Thoughts????

Mobile internet to take off in India

Emergic gives 6 reasons why mobile internet is expected to take off in india

1. User want more, Not just SMS/Voice Calls
2. Excellent Mobile Infrastructure - I have been using Airtel GRPS for some time now to check mail and read blogs, the experience has been great...though i wish they didnt keep deactivating it for some strange reason...trying to work that out with support.
3. Improved phones...i use the nokia 9300 its pretty good, big screen etc, but i wish the o/s was not as sluggish (might need a reinstall of the firm ware, but in genral the capability of the phones has greatly improved, there is a lot more they can do.
4. Economics for mobile operators, today they are focussed on Customer Acquisitions...but tomorrow its going to be a fight to get the ARPU's up....so they will need to start focussing here.
5. WIFI / 3G, the two disruptions, though i agree with this i think the disruption will come else where i dont think the problem is the speed or connectivity i beleive that the disruption will be in the application space, Operators do something hardware infrastructure is good, but what can u do to help me build more usefull applications
6. "More people will access/expereience the internet via thier mobile phone than a pc" i beleive Jonathan schwartz said it some time back, this is particularly true in India, Every body seems to be having a mobile phone...the only thing that they are probably waiting for is an application which would force them to use the data services.

Would love to hear interesting ideas for mobile applications.....comments please.