Y-Combinator, one of the Internet’s most influential startup incubator gave a call to `Kill Hollywood’. And it also declared its intention to back startups who `compete with movies and TV’.

That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

This has prompted several responses, commentaries on the internet including this particular one advocating inclusion of Hollywood instead of working to kill it.

The `Kill Hollywood’ call if put in the right perspective, is more of a call to ‘Disrupt Hollywood Model of Business’ than killing the entire industry altogether. The post in support of including Hollywood rightly throws light upon all the stakeholders who make up the industry.

Disrupting the movie industry would mean introducing better and easier ways for movie production, hiring artistes, distribution using newer and wider channels like the internet, lowering capital and distribution costs, enabling cheaper access to new and library content, etc.

A key point that needs changed is the mindset of the Hollywood studios about control of content. History shows us that popular content become popular when people identify themselves with it, they play with it, create variations of it and in general make it their own.

The `Hollywood mindset’ should be modified from a `Source to Consumers Model’ to more of a `Creator to Community’ mindset. Just as the software industry discovered the benefits of having their user community contributing back (the Open Source model), the `Hollywood community’ could see the multi-fold benefits as their consumers number much more and has a better global reach.

Thus `Killing Hollywood’ would in turn give birth to a `new Hollywood Community’. And this I believe is the essence of the Y-Combinator’s call.

I wrote a small shell script to achieve the same. Modify suitably and add it to your crontab.





The file /opt/zimbra/conf/all_list_ignore contains a list of email addresses that should be ignored.

Some years back while still in school, we were made to recite Swami Sivananda’s Universal Prayer every Saturday morning. The lines

 

O’ Adorable Lord of Mercy and Love,
Salutations and Prostrations unto Thee.
Thou art Omnipresent, Omnipotent and Omniscient,
Thou art Sat-Chid-Ananda, Thou art the in-dweller of all beings!

Grant us an understanding heart,
Equal vision, balanced mind,
Faith, devotion and wisdom…

still rings in my mind every now and then. This prayer helped me through my student days to stay focused on the immediate goal – tests, exams.

But, how times change!?

Brass Horse

In my pursuit of a living, I usually forget that joy, prosperity, “happyness” is a function of my own inner-peace (yeah, Kung-Fu Panda!). Which, I had in plenty – way back then! Now, not a day passes without me getting frustrated about something. Be it a domestic attention or an assignment at work, be while at home or on the road, be it when awake or when asleep, some or the other event gets my goat.

I find I’m not alone in getting frustrated so often and about everything. In fact every second person I speak to nowadays, has an axe to grind. About their work, family, friends, cricket, politics, economy and even about failings in the latest movies!

Amongst my various efforts to find succour, dwelling upon the above prayer has been a frequent and sincere attempt to find my lost inner-peace. But events beyond my control or even participation continuously drive me crazy. So much, that I am frustrated about being always frustrated!
A few other attempts at curing my fetish of getting frustrated are trying to blank my mind, piping the latest film music at a very high volume directly into my ears – so that all the frustration in the air do not get into me, etc.

Now, if the spelling mistake in the title of this monologue didn’t get you frustrated, hope the rant has woken your frustrations to a small extent!

PS: This is an experimental piece. If it has frustrated you or woken up your hidden frustrations, please accept my apologies.

Though rhetorical, it hits the point right on its head. It is a matter of common knowledge that the current owners of Skype were very edgy and wanted to sell it off to anybody who could pay up its latest market valuation (around USD 3 Billion). Various analysis of the buyout have explained that Microsoft is looking at the value that Skype shall add when integrated with Outlook, Sharepoint, Office and their other enterprise collaboration tools.

Skype was one of the very few internet services for which I had paid (both for personal as well as official uses). Skype has also generated an innovative economy in which many well known musicians (esp. from Mysore) conduct classes over the internet for students from all over the world and get paid by the hour. SkypeIn was another service which provided an economical way for small cos to get a US number.

Skype is a service that makes real money and contributes to real economy when compared to other much hyped services like Facebook, Twitter – which have been valued at more than 20 times their revenues. So, in my opinion Microsoft have really snapped up a really valuable service that could multiply its revenues several fold.

But is the price right? At USD 8.5 Billion, every analyst worth his salt even in India is saying, that it is too steep a price to pay. Some “analysts” like this one say Microsoft wanted to keep Skype out of Google’s reach. While this one says Google aborted an attempt to acquire Skype many years ago. And some say Skype might get wired into Microsoft products’ DNA and hence provide a fully integrated communication and collaboration tool.

I have a drastically different take on why Microsoft paid a steep price to acquire a supposedly dull technology company like Skype. Also, before that I believe that integrating Skype into Microsoft is going to be anything but easy. Skype is built entirely using open source technologies. Though some of Skype’s communication protocols might be proprietory, most of the network elements use only open source technologies. Over a period of time Skype too has lost its original charm on developers. According to several places on the internet, post-acquistion many of Skype’s technology people might make a quick exit to the nearest startup.

The trickiest part will be migrating the users onto either Microsoft’s Live infrastructure or Facebook’s social infrastructure (Rumours has it that Microsoft may throw Skype at Facebook to thwart Google). Given that most users do not like changing their usernames, access methods and other functions that easily, managing the user database is going to be one thankless job to begin with. Add to that the payments made to Skype by paying customers like myself who want value for our money to be provided in full. Microsoft is going to have its hands full with this acquisition.

Ballmer has reportedly taken a hands-off approach on Skype allowing it to be managed by its current executive team itself. This in my opinion is the correct approach to take by Microsoft and hope they’ll act only as an investor and strategic partner.

Finally, whatever the buyers and sellers involved in this transaction may say and how much ever the analysts may point out to the synergies and potentials of the acquisition, my strong suspicion of the buyout is that it is some kind of a quid pro quo by Microsoft to Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen-Horowitz, Canadian Pension Board and eBay. And along with several other people I also believe that Ballmer doesn’t have the kind of vision to think about Skype as a strategic fit.

Well. Good Luck Skype!!

We too were in a similar situation some years back. We wanted to raise some capital to upgrade our infrastructure, power backup, furniture. We had recently incorporated our former partnership firm into a private limited company. We approached State Bank of India with our requirement. SBI also had recently started a dedicated unit staffed with sufficiently experienced and friendly managers.

We were informed about a scheme called Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE) run by the Central Government to support small companies like ours. The idea is that the Fund guarantees (insures) your loan. If you default, the loan is repaid to the Bank by the Fund. To do this, the Fund charges a annual fee (around 0.5-1% of your loan amount) as a premium for insuring your loan.

Here are some notes learnt from our experience with taking and repaying the loan.

1. Loans are available from Rs. 1 – 50 Lakhs.
2. The basic requirement is that the unit must be registered as a Small Scale Industry. To register as a SSI you have to go the District Industries Centre and submit an application. (They are working on taking the registration online as well. http://122.181.176.179/dic1/). YMMV!
3. The loan application must be backed by a sound and realistic business plan. (We were quizzed sufficiently on the business plan by very competent managers)
4. Though the credit worthiness of the promoters/partners is not a criteria their background, qualification, experience, net worth are factors that are considered.
5. The business plan must also be accompanied by finalised quotations, proforma invoices, purchase orders from established vendors or service providers. The proceeds of the loan are paid directly to them as per the plan.
6. In most cases, 100% of the required amount will not be sanctioned but a certain percentage is expected to be contributed by the company as margin money. (As with any other home loan)
7. There might be a holiday period of 3-6 months (based on your negotiations) when only the interest on the loan needs to be paid.
8. Typical tenors for these loans are around 5 years or 60 months.
9. The interest rates on these loans are typically 1% more than the PLR.
10. Upfront fees and charges include processing fee, CGTMSE’s fee, Stamp duty charges, Charge creation fee with the Registrar of Companies (If applicable),
11. Annual charges include the bank’s regular fees and charges, insurance, CGTMSE fee.
12. In addition to the Term Loan, you can also avail a working capital or Over Draft based on the same guarantee.

The bottom line is that, raising a credit line without putting your precious assets in the line is possible and easy. Some people scoff at the very idea of raising credit and recommend taking angel investments instead. But IMHO that is a hugely debatable point on its own and shall save it for another day.

You can find it here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/03/the-road-to-the-cloud-how-do-y.php#comment-161898196

Contrary to popular perceptions, implementing cloud for the enterprise has to be a planned and carefully executed exercise. In fact even migrating from your locally hosted email and collaboration suite to Google Apps could turn out to be a flop if you dont have the necessary variables sorted out.

Some basic and necessary steps towards a successful move towards cloud

1. User interest, education and participation
2. Policies and Priorities sorted out with the management and legal teams
3. A good understanding of the SLAs and guarantees from the service provider.
4. Access to data backups and ease of transferring them off-cloud. (You never know when you may need them)
5. Sufficient thought and planning into Plan-B and Cs.

Once the plans are through, provisioning and migrating to the cloud is the easiest part. (That’s what makes the cloud The Cloud). Say migrating to Dropbox!

The most difficult part is the user education and satisfaction. With most enterprise deployments you have a service rep handy to resolve any user queries or to fix/customize software issues. But with most of the cloud services, “What you see is what you got!”. Your users satisfaction is your most precious partner. But as veteran IT professionals can vouch, users can be a pain too.

IMHO, ensure that the users know what they are getting into before signing the dots.

Then comes the maintenance and the management. In my experience, the management wants reports on every single variable in the system. (Eg. How many people were actively using the CRM from home between 1400 to 1800 hours last sunday? Eeks! For an Unix admin, it could be a one liner in sed/awk, but you’re dependent on the cloud app now

Make sure your management knows the capabilities and the limitations of the cloud based service in advance.

Now, when the system has been adopted in full swing, what happens when there is a downtime? Of course systems have been down right through the ages and nobody expects anything better from cloud based services (but for an improvement in performance and minimum downtime). But with the app in the cloud, you do not know the variables that have gone wrong, you do not know what is the ETA for the system to get up, you do not know if somebody with a malicious intent has gotten into the system, you do however know that you are the fall guy for the users!

So, it’s absolutely essential that you keep the app provider on her toes and keep you updated on the goings on in the data center or the underground garage.

If by chance the provider has totally lost it and is unable to bring your access to the app back, time to switch to the Plan B and Cs. You surely remembered to negotiate the backup plan with the provider right? And you have the latest tarred backup (from yesterday midnight) safely tucked away in another cloud based storage provider some half way across the planet, right?

Now you can put on your superhero costume and get the data to their respective users and start looking for yet another app provider!

Remember the only difference between the CLOUD and a complete CLOD is U!

My blog has its own share of search engine driven traffic and a few popular articles include the ones on configuring Gnokii for Nokia phones, Zimbra tweaks, etc. In addition, I also maintain some links to websites covering the mankuthimmana kagga. Hence it would have been a tough task to create everything from scratch.

The only surprising element in the whole process was that the Internet Wayback machine has no record of my seemingly popular website :-p

So if you happen to erase or destroy your website or blog due to any reason, you know whom to contact!

But of late, things are turning around. More and more people are searching for relevant results in their googled information. Try searching for “Google results not satisfying” and you’ll understand.

The problem in my opinion is with both Google itself, as well as the way the internet is evolving off late. The amount of cruft is increasing enormously. As pointed out in this post, content creation is a huge money spinning business today.

In this situation, how to solve the problem of finding needles in haystacks? Initially, we can try using alternative search engines such as Bing, Blekko. In addition to that the stakeholders need to work out solutions to the problem of data cruft piling up. My thoughts on this in the next post.

Till then, wish you all a very happy, prosperous and fruitful new year. May you get all that you search for in this year

But however, is it only me who is seeing Google and China as unlikely opponents? Here are some similarities I found between them:

• Google operates as a monopoly, so does the Chinese government.
• The Communist party has a two tier membership – one for the influential and one for the masses. So does Google – Class A & B shares divide the influential and the peasants.
• Chinese practice an open “people’s government” in which it chooses what should be open and what not. Google too practices an “open internet” policy, in which it chooses what is open and what not.
• A world economy without the Chinese manufacturing backend cannot be imagined in any way. Similarly, a world economy without Google’s information peddling backend cannot be imagined.
• China aims to achieve global superiority by being totally self-reliant and also by buying up other countries. Google also is trying to be self-reliant in its own sphere of economy by entering into diverse areas such as Electricity, Broadband, Wireless, TV/Radio and even Real Estate.

These similarities do not end here. But does continue in other areas. Nevertheless, we will never know the actual reasons behind the current face-off between Google and China.

But, IMHO Google must strike a deal with China and stay back just in order to live to fight another day.

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.