May 29th, 2009 by shashi

The web is agog with the news of engineers at Google announcing their newest and next generation communication tool – Wave. The service looks awesome and sure is a next generation material. And obviously scores of copy cats will try to mimic or even exceed the Wave in its appeal.

But where Google rules is that they’re open sourcing the entire platform (supposedly). Better still, the whole technology is purely built on top of standards and using technologies already available in the open source world.Wave is built on top of XMPP.

We at informedia technologies have been heavy users of XMPP and eJabberd from quite some time now. We’re also coming up with innovative solutions based on XMPP and integrating XMPP with various e-governance apps which takes the entire platform/environment to a whole new high level.

This development not only validates our technology choices, but also serves as the bell weather for things to come. I just hope, people in charge of the decision making processes understand these developments and encourage more open and standards based technologies.

January 9th, 2009 by shashi

Of late, we’ve been getting a huge number of mails from freshers/final year students looking for jobs. Though we are not in a recruiting mode now, we encourage people to send their résumés. But, most of them fail to make even a basic impression with the covering letters they send.

Take a look at one such:

Dear sir/madem,
Im ***********, persuing final year MCA in ********** (VTU affilated)
I will passout in 2009.
I here by request u that give an opportunity to work in ur company.
Plz Inform any openings.
I attached my resume here.
Thank you,

This person has studied throughout in urban schools and is from an urban background and even his academic credentials look good. But it is pretty obvious, he cannot communicate properly.

To be honest, my prior experience tells me that lack of communication/language skills, doesn’t really stop people from being innovative or hardworking. But the initial impression doesn’t allow these persons to get a chance in most cases.

I sincerely believe, switching the communication mode to the language in which they are most comfortable with – ಕನ್ನಡ, for example – might make a difference.

How do we test/do a study? Anybody interested?

October 24th, 2008 by shashi

The morning on the other day, was not very cloudy. I didn’t think it would rain either as it was quite cool and there was a soothing breeze even at around 10 in the morning. As usual I drove to our client’s site alone. After an uneventful morning session, when I came out of the building it was raining heavily. I didn’t even have my windcheater. Cursing my luck, I came out and waited for some time until the downpour turned into a drizzle. The dark clouds forebode rain for the entire day. Not wanting to get stuck in a heavier downpour, I started driving the two wheeler back home, hoping the rain gods would ceasefire for the next hour or so before I could reach home. The road is located through scenic and landscaped surroundings, with nothing to come by, except the occasional vehicle or some kids on their shepherding routine.

Somewhere in the middle of this road, I saw a middle aged man walking briskly in the drizzle. Hearing my vehicle, he suddenly turned and waved his hand. I stopped near him and he asked me if I could drop him. I said I could and asked him where he was headed to. He asked me to drop  him somewhere further in the road from where he could take a bus to the city. It started raining heavily by now and as a car passed us by, I was wondering if I did a right thing by offering him help. He could have hitched a ride in the car and saved himself all the drenching

As we neared a bus stand where a bus just overtook us and stopped, my passenger asked me if I too were going straight towards the city. When I replied in the affirmative, he asked me to drop him somewhere near my place from where he can go further. Though puzzled by his request – he could have chosen to board the bus and travel safe and warm – I consented and continued the journey inspite of getting drenched thoroughly.

After about 30 minutes of driving through the varying rain I almost reached my place. Just before I was to take a turn, he asked me to stop at the nearest bus stop. I stopped and he got down. But he kept his bag on the seat and asked me to wait. I was puzzled. He then started searching through his shirt pocket. I asked him as to what happened. He didn’t reply, but took out all contents from his pocket and started shuffling, sieving and vigorously searching through them. All the while, I was standing there trying not to look like a fool.

Finally with a winner’s look on his face, he took out his visiting card out of the mess and handed me the same. And said, “I’m an insurance advisor with this company. We’ve very good tax saving plans. Please do call me to know more. Please tell your friends also”.

I broke into a wicked smile, thinking I should tell him that I was also one of his breed some time back and that the only client I could manage to snare — was myself and sped.

But ruminating about the whole event, I am amazed by the tenacity these people demonstrate. I know  several people who have managed to achieve considerable businesses even under extreme adverse conditions.

I need to learn a lot from them.

August 19th, 2008 by shashi

In an interview with the Portfolio magazine, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says

Do you realize that we don’t understand globalization? Globalization increases Extremistan. That’s one problem with this Tom Friedman guy—he [the bestselling author of The World Is Flat, which argues the advantages of globalization in the internet age] didn’t seem to understand the very simple dynamics that globalization forces redundancy out of the system. And whenever you don’t have redundancy, you have Extremistan. Things are way too efficient, so the smallest mistake blows up. We depend so much on the internet. Tomorrow, if there’s a problem in Bangalore, we’re toast for a long time, you see?

I’m on a committee at the Pentagon, [the Highland Forum, a study group on risk] and one of the founders of the internet is on it and all these people understand that we need more redundancy in the system to avoid a second crisis that may come from the internet, because we don’t understand it.

And to think of it, the Internet was founded to provide redundancy in case of an emergency.

Life’s awesome

May 7th, 2008 by shashi

• Was Microsoft really interested in buying Yahoo! ?
• Did Jerry Yang do the right thing by rebuffing Ballmer ?
• Will the Yahoo! investors remain quiet even after losing out on the deal ?
• Does Microsoft realise they could/can never integrate Yahoo into their own ?

• Would the merger have been a good thing for Zimbra users ?
• Did Microsoft lose out on it’s only chance of becoming a contributor to Open Source ?
• Would projects like Hadoop, YUI, Zimbra died a premature death under the Microsoft’s management ?

• Seemingly unrelated events influence one’s personal and professional lives in ways that can not be even imagined.