December 2006 Archives

I have had the opportunity to work in different sizes of software companies through my career. Big, Medium, SmalI, Very small. And currently, I have a startup right from scratch.

I learned quite a bit of each company's perception towards software, their indian-ness, their attitude, their project management, and numerous other stuff. And understandably, a company's perception is the underlying boses's or team's perception.... the team's perception is most often a consolidation of each members perception. We won't go into what a person's perception is based on, that would be a book to write.

Every often I think about the industry that made India standup from its stigma to show-off to the world, the software industry we are talking about... I only feel dissappointed.

For the potential every human brain has, that of the Indian also, for the number of people who are into software in India (every 1 in 2 educated youth you catchup in India will be into software).. the Indians could pull off something really really big almost every week in software. But its not happening.

Problem : Attitude
Current status : Slowly building up.. but long way to go.
Resolution : Needs regular attitude boosters.. and big guy speeches...

Always Developing
Like India is always a developing country in the mind of the Indians... I am afraid Indians have similar attitude with respect to growth in the software industry also. That its always someone else who has to do the big job, and I will always sulk with what I have. They call this attitude 'modesty' back here in India.

Every company I have worked for, every team I have worked for, I have experienced sparks and shocks from atleast one person in the team, which has had an effect in developing my own sparks (or shocks) over the years.. Every one of these guys (unfortunately including myself) feel very uncomfortable to shackle up and get out of box to do something bigger other than working on some outsourced project supporting / improving some old age technology.

And "old technology" here doesn't mean Fortran or cobol.. but any project that doesn't have any innovation involved.. something that is developed only to meet the current day demand of the customer without any foresight of future use scenarios.

Dreaming...
In my dreams I thought big companies all do great software, in all the latest technolgies.... until I got employed into one such big company in chennai, india to see that most projects were like maintaining or testing old products and improvements until the US or UK customer migrated to a better technology and platform.

I have always wondered and discussed with friends, that, 'Looks like Americans and London'ers are dumping all their old technology projects on us because nobody else in their cities would love to do it'.
Also, I ponder over questions like 'Are Indians trying to stick around something called proven ground most often, than making a ground themselves'.

Job Security
Job security is a word I read in all management books. I didn't know earlier that there was this term for the idea of keeping your job only because you have a good understanding with people in your office, and that they aren't probably thinking about firing you in the near future. The term clearly sucked any ideals and respect a person should show to his career which is the only thing that can justify his existence.

The first thing my mom tells me when I tell her I am shifting jobs is 'If this company you are already in keeps you happy, then stick around, why risk going to a new office new people new environments, you never know!'. After the first two times of hearing this, I only mentioned my shifts after I made them in my next companies.

I am not sure who is to blame for the stigma still sticking around with job security. The family seems all the time thinking about steady fund flows rather than words like aimbitions, achievements... the self has its indian attitude to make you always think like 'one step at a time' and still conservatively make only half steps.

Anyways, dreaming again about how things can be... if Indians and many many Indians for that matter destroy stigmas, and leap out of the box making differing with the traditional indian attitude or modesty thoughts.

While these things stand as introduction to the subject of this post... we will dive into what could be done in India to make many indians shackle out of the box... in software atleast.

I will keep it short:

For Big companies:
If companies like Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, Satyam, .. at the least allocated 10-15% of their employee base into product development, stay there and be focussed, India could be making big names in software business.. to equate with Adobe, Google, Microsoft and the likes. Currently, its only like all these product giants (google for web based products), have their bases in india and use the potential of indians here... while infosys, wipro and every indian company there are only most of the time only doing IT services or ITEs, and not even 10% of their revenue share links to any product sales.

One exception could be Infosys's Finacle software, but after that even Infosys seemed to have nothing more to do in products.

For Small companies:
If small companies spend time automating themselves and their processes or services, rather than all the time doing applications and services for clients...they could make a foundation for their growth.

I have learnt from experience that clients like to see their demos live as the product is developed (if its web), or like to see weekly or bi-monthly packages to see how things are coming up. and actually some of my clients liked to invest twice or thrice more than what was planned at first communication, because they liked what they saw with the work happening and the progress levels.

And when a small company doesn't have the delivery systems and communication systems to do this, their is a damp feeling in the project until its release which actually could get delayed or never happen because the damp feeling sweeps through quality levels in the project. When we say delivery/communication systems here.. we definitely don't mean email and chat software for these purposes. Email or chat software only should be used for brief notes and more often to make pointers / give links to the actual formal document communication or product packages.

For Small / Mid-size companies:
We can assume that this suggestion is already implemented in big companies.
I have also learnt from mistakes my own and that of my employers, that, if companies, mid-size or small-size, recruited employees regularly rather than recruiting based on new projects and short-term profits coming up... then such companies are more probably to be on a steady track of growth.

An analogy to understand this would be 'Financial investment planning'. If you invested regularly from an early age you get to reap its fruits much better and you grow better.. and re-invest better. If you invested based on the stock market charts or to make short-term profits, either you rise up on luck, or drop down to collect yourself up taking a while.

Drama, Play, Natakam are all synonymous in tamil.. and my use of these in the below post, mean all the same.

I have been to many Plays, a few times now, and whenever I hear debates and arguments on the dying state of Natakams in Chennai or India as a whole, I only could make some observations from what I like to view and what I wouldn't like or haven't enjoyed watching a play. Below laid out are my observation of core issues with Plays, and when people can be expected to consider watching a Play as equal to(or more than) their movie experience.

Core issues:

1. Too costly tickets.. even costlier than watching a blockbuster movie in an elite cinema hall.

2. Many actors don't have a feel of the audience, their body language shows it all as if they are doing it for the sake of it. The spirit of capturing the attention of the audience is not there.

3. Bad Sound management. Sound management is important for a Drama to be enjoyable. Most chennai drama actors and organizers have problems with understanding this. The actors shout out their throats or sneeze or cought at the mike, and most of the time the background score of the drama is so unclean/ bad on the speakers, or they just enact the play without background music at all for the worst.

4. Respect for the stage. Performing arts like drama, or dance needs to respect their stage space, its spot-clean looks, how they use it while pulling up background screen, structures and boards to make for the sets...at the least. More clearer respect for stage could be expressed by praying on stage. Some drama companies which focus on the weekend market, just ignore anything on stage use, and treat it like a rehersal ground with everything strewn around backstage.

5. Respect for the audience. Understanding audience age-groups and relatively presenting the play in an entertaining manner is core to any stage performance. It could not only save a Play but also make it profitable, even when most of the above points are not addressed. Avoiding this like smoking literally to act like smoking, or shouting slangs loud to act like insulting, are things to avoid.

6. Last but not the least. Infrastructure. Be it proper seats and air conditioning and environment for the audience, or proper optimal cost snacks at the counter, or the quality of sets put up behind an act in the Play.... if not high, I only wish organizers consider give some amount of priority to all this, rather than hosting the drama in a hall which best fits their low-cost budget with smelly seats and not-good snacks in the counter.

How not to Play - A bad example:

The other day I had been to a drama 'Ayya amma ammamma'.. by kathadi ramamurthy.
I paid the usual 150/- for a ticket.

The experience was totally unworth the money i paid, for the following reasons:

1. The drama advertisements mentioned popular comedy track writer and actor Crazy mohan's name as if he was in the crew, but
turned out that Crazy Mohan's was not part of the drama but his name was being used to market the drama and
it was the story once written by Crazy Mohan. Disappointed! that this was not mentioned clearly in the ADs.

2. The core character in the drama was played by one Mr.Kathadi Ramamurthy. This man
had no respect for the performing arts, and his body language with a lungi on the stage said it all, he was acting like it was a rehersal.

3. Also, for the reputation he enjoyed being a well-known comedian in chennai, it was dissappointing that Kathadi Ramamurthy
had no respect for the audience or their health and was smoking literally in scenes where he is to act like he is smoking. The smoke
got circulated through the air conditioning system, and the audience were literally second-hand smoking and the hall was smelling smoke.

4. Neither did the organizers(Abbas), of the drama have any respect for the audience. There was no break in the three hour long drama...also it wasn't enjoyable enough to make not having a break interesting. And the drama ended quite abruptly, there was not even a mention of 'The End' or a 'Thank you'... let alone the usual S.Ve.Sekar style commencing lineup of all actors to thank the audience.

I decided, I could even see a bad film, rather than going to a drama where Kathadi Ramamurthy is acting..or where one somebody Abbas is organizing.

Verizon, vodafone and many other US or UK based communications/internet service providers could have a bright business future if they came to sell their services in India.

Why?
India is fast consuming huge bandwidth for internet services, and telephone /mobile services. With small enterprises coming up in clusters, and every household considering computers and broadband as necessary as a Refrigerator, the Indian market is whopping big to miss for big multinational service providers.

Ask about the strength of the "Indian market" from Coca-cola and Pepsi, and they will tell you how much they sold and made since the 1990's.. (Only in the last couple of years do the cola companies have few hiccups, due to increased acceptance of the health concerns of drinking cola with its effervescence ingredients). Once you understand the deal Indians want, and you get acceptance, multinationals won't have time to look back.

Citibank had a dream run until other local Indian banks learned from its marketing...
Honda, Suzuki all have, and are still having India on their earnings charts in the top order.

For the question "why?", these are the core answers:

1. Currently not one multinational is servicing the communications market, be it the internet or the mobile phones.

2. Because the Indian companies providing these services have come to see no international competition, they make good money.

3. Rather than competing with each other, the Indian companies all go hand-in-hand in making money and just reword their deals and offers keeping their base cost almost or just the same.

4. For the cost of what verizon sells as 768kbps DSL in the United states, Indian companies are making the same money by providing around 64kbps technically, and marketing the package as 128 / 256 / 512 kbps. Yes, be it 128 / 256 / 512, its all the same speed in India, and the communications ministry in India, the regulatory authority all approve of this practice.

5. For the cost of what vodafone sells in UK or Ireland as a 'social connection' prepaid package, Indian companies are selling similar plans with approx. 40% hidden costs, raising this 40% extra cost without even informing the customer first hand through an advertisement or package brochure.

For all the above reasons, companies like verizon or vodafone, would be able to easily create the infrastructure and bandwidth for selling these services for very competitive prices, and still having very good profit margins on each unit of the services or products.

Good deals have good acceptance in india...even at a higher price.

A look at how the vehicle Honda Activa has struck gold in the market will provide the needed proof. Scooters seem to always have a good market in india.. especially the ungeared vehicles for men. Compared to other scooters available, their mileage, and related parameters, Honda Activa had a mileage comparable to that of a 4-stroke bike for indian roads, and was marketed as a friendly fresh new scooter (the last time there was a new scooter designed for men and attracting the family audience was a Bajaj scooter from the 1980's).

For all these reasons the Honda Activa is making brisk business, and is priced only a few bucks less than a 4-stroke bike for the same audience. Un-tethered by the pricing, there are still more takers for the Honda Activa since its considered equivalent to buying a 4-stroke bike without gears.

The local mobile phone service providers do attractive deals like lifetime prepaid cards. The hidden costs in the deal go like this. If you had 50Rupees worth of talktime on your phone, every outgoing call costs 4.99rupees per 60 sec pulse, if you had 400 rupees worth of talktime, each outgoing call costs 2.99 rupees per pulse. The intention is to make the user keep buy talkvalue in replacement for the lifetime free prepaid offer.

BSNL a communications company started All-India one-rupee per phone call concept and made huge promotion campaigns. What was hidden from the customer though was, the one rupee per call was actually one rupee per pulse, and this pulse was much lesser than the earlier pulse secs that were in use. Today even a local call through BSNL phones is actually costing the user higher than what he used to pay. Earlier it was 1 rupee per call for a 3 minute subsidized pulse. Now its a 60 sec pulse that costs 1 rupee per call.

All internet and mobile phone service costs from Indian companies have disguises and hidden costs. You cannot find even one Ad campaign without the wording "* conditions apply". Stands applied lots of conditions and rules which obviously have to be broken by users to use the services and the companies happily charge higher than advertised charges.

End Note:
Verizon and vodafone like companies, would enjoy competing in such market conditions where deals and offers are more important than quality of services. Because being multinational competitors, they would be easily selling a reliable, quality service among local competition.

But may be verizon and vodafone can't enter the Indian market at this time, since I believe, if i am right, the ministry of communications have an understanding with Indian communications service companies, to block multinational competition until more years to come. Though this entry point can be eased or broken if big organizations can woo politicians in the ministry.

For the market base and the increasing demand, multinationals would be missing a huge opportunity if they ignored or shy'ed away from tapping the Indian market. This is a market where a barber, grocery store keeper, rickshaw puller have prepaid mobile connections. And this is a market where students of all age groups are using the internet, online gaming is reached notably popular levels (secondLife gamers aren't far away from becoming), and importantly every software company does most of their development, testing / support for outsourced projects through secure internet connections 24/7 a week.

Read this interesting article by a scientist, actually a vision of future technology which will prove that santa is for real..

Science of Santa Claus

All these years old people always told curiously awake children that santa claus is not for real and its not possible for him to deliver all gifts around the world in one night...

The scientist's vision in the above link, mimicks a claim that such a santa exists, telling its all very much possible. Better watch out if you have yet to tell your child that santa is not real...may be you wait for another 5 years. :)

Its NOT about the film, its about the weird climate this holiday season.

Its holiday season, and more than it is at bethelhem, it is in the United States. Swap around any of their radio or TV channels (through internet radio, or through slingbox) you will hear and hear nothing but christmas songs and holiday Advertisements.

'no work all play' season.. usually more remembered for the festive fairy tale setting with all snow.. snowing around all the time. (For people like me who haven't been there, you can remember all those english movies from funny children stuff, to Die Hard 2 where christmas time climate is "snow".. only snow).

But this time around, the sad thing is, seemingly there's 'NO' Snow or much less snow in many parts of the Americas, Britain... except for probably the north pole where too possibly its 'reduced' snow.

Here's a report on the abnormal weather conditions in 2006

'Climate change' is what everybody is thinking and everyone is worried and serious about doing anything to get back their earth from its growing anger... leave alone those thousands of people who are more worried.. we don't want to discuss doomsday this season..not now.

Questions to ponder over the holidays?

Will we be (or already) missing... the ice man, the snow balls, the snow covered cars, and all that white everywhere...with those big machines throwing snow out of the roads.?

Is climate change actually making everything go wrong slowly?

What all will stop the change as it is today, then we think about reversing the change.

What the weather channel can forecast is the climate.. not why it is happening.. thats something we should be bothered about. are we?

Organizations, scientists, educationist's can always study climate change and suggest theories, but by the time they come back, we shouldn't have worsened the situation. Should we start with better or lesser fuel consumption, ban on freon like chemical components, and what else. ?

Should we stop NASA research on moving to colonies outside earth .. and contribute that on existing problems.

We know more damage was made by katrina than the attack on WTC. in economic loss and change in priorities of american people. Shouldn't the government and UN be allocating equal funds and energy to analyze climate change, as much as on 'war on terror' ?

For the brave thinkers..

Are we looking at something as serious as 'the day after tomorrow'?

How long do we have?

Look forward to this guy making some news in January & February 2007.

Above is a satellite, Space Capsule Recovery Experiment(SRE) that the indian space research organization (ISRO) has planned to launch coming january 10th 2007...alongwith with 3 other satellites, from the same launch vehicle PSLV -C7 (Polar satellite launch vehicle -level C7)

The SRE experiment:
Indians are trying to catch up a wee bit of space technologies like 'space-to-earth rentry' which the Americans have known for two decades now. ISRO is making this SRE experiment to understand and test its technologies of satellite or object rentry into earth's atmosphere.

The SRE is planned to be put in an orbit for a week or may be a month, and then commanded and manoevered to re-enter earth, navigate itself and fall 120km away from its initial launchpad, into the waters of the bay of bengal.

The technologies involved and that are expected to be tested are,
> Decceleration, to try reduce speed on re-entry since objects from space drop at blistering speeds into the earth.
> Temperature insulation methods, objects rentering earth, at blistering speeds have blistering temperatures. (remember those sci-fi movies where something drops from space into the ocean and lot of evaporated gases around making up for the sudden cooling of the hot object falling in the water)
> Navigation, guidance and control of the object during the re-entry phase,
> Testing of drop methods, like 3 sequentially openend parachutes at different altitudes once entering the earth,

ISRO says: It would be a forerunner to ISRO mastering the re-entry and recovery technologies, which are required to help ISRO build its long aimbition in launch vehicles, the "re-usable satellite launch vehicle".

The last mission of ISRO trying to launch a few other satellites failed, because the launch vehicle burned up on course, due to faults in the rocket system. Hence this mission is quite important to ISRO and indian space technology buffs to boost up confidence in their work.

Everytime christmas comes, innovative toys and robots companies make to hit the christmas gift market keeps you amazed and gaping.

This video in the link below discusses two such interesting robots.. these are not the high-cost dog robots or anything that you can only see, but these are interesting, funny robots, and quite attractive gifts that you will love to buy for someone. check the link below. and hey, the link plays a customary ad video for a minute and then loads the actual video. but its worth the waiting. happy holiday season.

2 interesting Holiday robot gifts reviewed

There is this old hack (which i knew only today) about configuring browsers to load pages faster in faster connections. By default, most browsers seem to have configuration that fits a dialup connection better.

The video in the link below will show how to improve page load speeds in Internet explorer or FireFox browsers .. provided you have a broadband connection.

Please remember to reset the configuration back when you have to use dialup connection, for it tries to use more bandwidth through dialup and might crash the browser.

Video: Lightning Fast Browsing Trick For Internet Explorer And Firefox

If you are technically inclined.. to know why the suggestion on the video works.. then you can read the technical details here

This time inside the hall, I was not burt munroe the story's character, but i really enjoyed watching antony hopkins in those shoes. He should be doctor of expressions.. or probably the movie's character was big enough to easily influence hopkins to assume that character.

Though the film has exxagerrated the real story a bit (a wee-bit) here and there to give some anxious moments and emotional moments to viewers, "The world's fastest Indian" was a life well pictured. Antony hopkins should be getting an oscar for once again marvelously depicting a character to the roots.

After coming out of the hall, and controlling myself in not driving fast home in the effect of the movie, I tried to imagine the movie without antony hopkin's level of expressions and acting. The movie would have been nothing without him.

There are these once in a while, where the perfect cast, match the perfect story, matching the perfect crew members in the making of a movie, and the cast act exactly as much required( nothing much and nothing more)..... "world's fastest indian" was one such in all ways.

Don't miss this one if you hadn't seen it yet... and you should see it on a big screen hall (rather than a dvd), to see antony hopkin's service to playing the burt monroe, and taking us an era back to burt's period of achievement.

More news, wallpapers, .. and even links to history of real burt monroe here.

Thanks to Amit, a friend who forwarded me these pictures.

You would have experienced hearing marketing messages on your phone.. I am talking about the automated ones. Communications providers like TATA or AIRTEL, are technology front-runners in the sector in India.. and they prove it in that they do machine driven phone calls to their subscribers to advice of bill payment dates... very often they do marketing calls in the disguise of "value-added services"

I have been receiving one such call from AIRTEL quite often on my mobile phone.. that just does not leave me if I ignore the call.

Looks like some intelligent programmer made sure his program ensures that the recipient hears the message and if the call is ignored or not connected the call retries after a few minutes. I do not have any idea whether the programmer has any threshold wherein if i ignore a specific number of times they will bear my number... but they surely don't seem to respect the 'DO NOT CALL' registry on their website on which i have registered many times.

Currently the solution i have is ... I recorded the number of the call, stored it as 'Airtel Virus', and whenever the call comes i take the call and disconnect after 2 secs.

After a few times like this, I started smiling whenever my phone says 'Airtel Virus calling...' So, its become a way to have a sweet surprise once in a month.

If you are in chennai, and having this problem too, the number for Airtel Virus is +9199400 12600 Other cities probably have different numbers. If you know of any, please comment to this entry.

And don't bother to register on Airtel's DO NOT CALL registry, they just don't care about that list for sure.

Happy disconnection with the virus.

Indian government has finally realized the threat of the web, or actually the threat of few disturbing websites on the web.

Government sources announced interests in practising URL blocking on all international internet gateways linking to India. Currently there are 8 such gateways of which 5 are owned by VSNL (a part-government, a part-TATA enterprise), 2 owned by Reliance Infocomm, and 1 owned by Bharti network running Airtel broadband.

By way of this implementation, those website/blog URLs (or addresses) which have disturbing content for Indians, those that could pose a security threat, will be blocked at the international gateway level itself, which would prevent access to such websites in India.

It seems all this time, the government had implemented ban on such websites through service providers (ISPs) like AIRTEL, TATA or RELIANCE, and the ISPs which didn't have such infrastructure to block websites easily, blocked them at the domain level.

As this list of websites grew unmanageably large, ISPs due to mistakes or other problems, started blocking many normal websites occasionally. No wonder, the ISPs have now appreciated the government decision on implementing this themselves.

Is this good or bad?
Depends!

For the optimist reading this article, especially from outside India, its good news that such implementations are happening and this could probably eliminate a lot of current problems with blocked websites, and also allow for better monitoring on the Nation's security front.

For the pessimist (like me), especially people living in India (pessimistic can also be termed the 'realistic' approach when it comes to Indian government implementation of reforms), its going to become easier for politicians to bribe or frighten somebody and block websites like tehelka.com which has a reputation for exposing corruptive politicians time and again through online videos taken during secret sting operations. Once such a thing happens, it could probably take years in the courts for the website to get out of the blacklisted sites and continue operations.