Information Convergence

The FED's independence at risk

2009-11-11T08:46:00.012-05:00

The past two years the global economy has been rocked by violent turbulence with its root causes in the uncontrolled sub-prime mortgage fall out. With the concept of spreading risk via new financial instruments such as CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligations) and CDS (Credit Default swaps), many financial institutions literally created a fiscal time bomb that could not be defused. As the mortgage crisis began to unfold, the global economy was literally on the brink of collapse. With massive bailouts and heavy tax-payer funded government intervention a second great depression has been avoided or at least delayed.

Some economists partly blame Alan Greenspan and his policies as head of the Federal Reserve (FED). In fact Greenspan himself publicly admitted that the US free-market ideology that he and others have championed for decades may be flawed. Greenspan, in his testimony before the US House Committee on Oversight and Government, said he was shocked at the banks' inability to self-regulate and blamed over-eager investors for the sub-prime housing meltdown that led to the financial crisis. Obviously the low interest rates that the FED pushed during his time as the head of the institution was partly to blame for the crisis. But the FED alone is not the sole perpetrator of the near fiscal collapse. There were a number of other parties who bet their banks on financial instruments that they had no idea about.

In response to all this, Senator Christopher Dodd plans to push for a new Financial Institutions Regulatory Administration (FIRA) that in effect would strip the current FED of its role as a bank supervisor. While this proposal seems like a good move at first, what is alarming is that it gives Congress a greater voice in naming the officials who set interest rates. This is the one last place where we need political interference. This newly proposed FIRA clearly opens the door to political interference with respect to interest rates. Imagine the political uproar every time the FIRA acts on the rates and a member of the Congress does not agree with it, especially if his/her constituents would be directly affected by such a decision. The FED's ability to act independently would be at risk as they would have to pander to political pressures.

As the nation's central bank, the FED has had the unique power in the U.S. financial system to create money, giving it the ability to conduct monetary policy for the U.S. economy. That same power also enables the FED to provide liquidity to the financial system when under stress. The FED has done so and the current FED chairman Ben Bernanke has done quite well given the circumstances. However, it seems that this crisis is pushing Sen. Dodd to do the unthinkable. That is, push politicians to have the ability to influence monetary policy for the country. This should be done so only indirectly and not with such direct powers as Sen. Dodd is suggesting. That would be akin to letting loose a bunch of monkeys in a china shop.

In his comments while announcing the new FIRA proposal, Sen. Dodd said that, "The FED’s regulation of banks has been an abysmal failure,”. He blamed the FED for not preventing the practices that contributed to the financial crisis and led to taxpayer bailouts of major banks. The key question is whether the FED ever had oversight responsibility. I believe it never did. Sen. Dodd's new proposal at most is a knee jerk reaction to the crisis and must be fully evaluated before it is passed. Global investor's perception that this could be the start of political interference in policy setting could harm the already fragile dollar and the US economy. Bank oversight is a must, but not at the risk of harming the FED's independence.

The Greatest Rip Off

2009-10-22T17:30:00.012-04:00

The white envelopes from the credit card companies usually sit on my desk for a while before they eventually go to the shredder after a quick review. So on a recent afternoon, I sat back to open up all those envelopes to quickly glance through the letters, hoping as usual not to find anything in there, so that I could send them to the shredder. The recent letter started with the usual ominous words "We are making changes to your account terms....". Normally these letters would talk about policy changes to rental-cars, insurance and other such things and I would scan through the letters and not find anything disturbing. But this time there was change and by golly it felt like I had been smacked with a sauce-pan.

The letter from a major credit card company went like this.

"To continue to provide our customers with access to credit, we have had to adjust our pricing. The terms of your account will be changing. These changes include an increase in the variable APR for purchases to 29.99% and will take effect November 30, 2009. As always, you have the right to opt out........ "

Now I have always paid my credit card on time, have no credit card debt, though I use it for many many purposes. I understand that I am not the kind of customer that the credit card companies are looking for, yet they need my business because I bring them hefty revenues via transaction fees which merchants pay them. On some cards I actually pay a yearly fee because it gives me some points/miles or some benefits that I think I need.

So after I got this letter, I called one of the credit card company and their response is that their costs have increased tremendously and that doing the business of "credit" is more expensive now than it was a year ago. But going from a 10% APR to a 30% APR is not fair. But wait a minute, the Fed is literally charging these banks next to 0% APR forcing them to lend. In fact some of them are so bloated with bailout dollars. I understand that the government is trying to change credit laws early nextyear, the pretext being protecting the consumer from abuse by credit card firms. However the card companies are rushing to make changes before the end of the year to avoid any such limits on them starting next year. It's daylight robbery and the senate banking committee is asleep at the wheel, just as they have been for the last 50 years. The legislators are asleep because they are deliberately ignoring the banks who are making whatever changes they want to right now, before any enforcement begins next year. It appears that the legislator are on track to protect the consumers starting next year. Who is the government protecting?

On the other hand, you can't cancel/refuse the card because cancelling a card for any reason has it's own drawbacks. Well, it affects your credit score negatively which will only increase the APR and other credit/borrowing costs as well. The consumer is caught in the middle with having to keep the cards and risk paying a hefty fine for late payments or high interest rates on balances.

Overnight the credit card companies across the board are pulling this stunt and our Government officials just stand by and do nothing. Basically the banks are being allowed to rob the consumer and the US Senate and Congress are the co-conspirators. Many of these cards are offered by banks that have received bailout monies. The government borrowed money from the people to give to the failed banks to allow them to gouge the people. It almost seems like the very government the public put into office is now gouging the public indirectly via the banks. Why is it that the common man has to suffer and pay for the failed policies of the few greedy gecko's. All of this being facilitated by the Cons in Congress. As we speak, US banks are embarking on the greatest rip-off this nation has ever seen and we stand there and do nothing.

Google Wave - The Tsunami of Twaddle? Only time will tell

2009-10-02T09:30:00.008-04:00

The web has been abuzz with the controlled beta release of the new Google Wave. Google answer to "How would email be designed today". Well the first time I saw, Vic Gundotra present the live demo a few months ago at "Google IO 2009", he said that they were unveiling a "personal communication and collaboration" tool.

Well at that time, they defined the wave as equal parts of conversation and document. It's a system that allows people to communicate and work together with rich-text, photos, videos, maps, and more in one dashboard. Also anything on a "wave" is shared as long as you invite another person into the wave. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. The playback feature allows anyone joining into the wave at anytime to rewind the wave to see who said what and when. A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Then I saw this video and saw that it explained best, the way Google wave works and why it is different from email.

At the end of the day, my take is that Google wave is a cool tool but will be more disruptive than productive, because not everyone is tuned to work in that manner. The human mind cannot handle realtime communication all the time. The human mind requires people to spend some time together with others, to plan and collaborate, then go off and find some independent time to use their creative juices to put together or build new things. This wave seems like a communication overload to me, where the simplest of things/issues will rise to the top due to the fact that it appears the latest in the thread or wave. People personalities and idiosyncracies will be amplified and in your face at all times. I am sure you have experienced those personalities who love to hear their own voice at meetings and end up disrupting productive meetings. Well let me tell you that Google wave will give an opportunity for those personality types to constantly tout their horn and constantly bring up mediocre issues.

I do understand the Google Wave tries to solve one major problem with email and this is that, not everyone has a full view of the conversation. The single dashboard view for all, regardless of when the join in the conversation and the ability to playback is huge. This should alleviate some of the problems that email has. The reply-all is dreaded because it allows people to just jump in with irrelevant comments and change the trajectory of the original conversation. The second issue is the forwarding of an email thread to someone who jumps into a conversation a bit late and is not privy to what has happened earlier and again changes the trajectory of the conversation inadvertently. Google wave might alleviate some of these issues with the playback feature and the fact that everyone in the wave has the same dashboard view.

I personally don't have an invite as yet and will reserve to change my opinions for later, but however given what is being shown, I can only think of the negative effects of the wave. It seems that "Google wave" will become the "Tsunami of twaddle".

A modern day Edison - William Kamkwamba

2009-09-30T09:42:00.004-04:00

As I read the story of William Kamkwamba, I was floored. A self-taught Malawian boy, read books from a library and used scrap parts from a junkyard to build windmills and bring life-changing electricity to his remote village. In the video he narrates that he could not go to school and had to drop out because his family could not afford the $80 tuition. Instead, he found a library and read books about windmills. All the books only taught him how to use a windmill. No book that he had taught him the basic principles of generating electricity from the wind power. He pursued to learn all the techniques of how to convert that wind energy into electricity and eventually built a windmill that generated electricity for his home.

This is an inspiration to entrepreneurs and kids. It is not that a 14 year old kid can't put together a windmill. The issue here is that he built it from scratch and prevailed despite the conditions and availability of material in his remote Malawian village. If you see the video, you will understand what I mean.

To Blog or Not to Blog

2009-08-06T10:53:00.013-04:00

During the 46th Design Automation Conference (DAC) held in San Francisco, California, I had the opportunity to meet with and talk to John Cooley (ESNUG & Deepchip founder). John was one of the speakers at "Conversation Central" hosted by Synopsys. John's topic was "The Evolution of ESNUG and Deepchip", where he described his journey with ESNUG and now Deepchip. I have to say that over the years, I have met more people who view John with contempt and very few who have directly stated anything to the contrary. When I was at a small startup called Verplex systems, I ran into John at DAC 2000. During my brief conversation with him on topics that included the point of esnug, he abruptly stopped me and said, "Give me the top 10 bugs with Verplex software, known workarounds and fixes in the works and I will be happy to post that on esnug". His position was, "You will get some serious press from that". I was kind of taken aback by his words. I mean who in the EDA world in the right mind would openly put out known bugs and issues for the world to consume. It was imperative that you protect the company and not give the competition any ammunition and openly offer up marketing fodder for the competition. John had ended with "My audience is only interested in hearing about bugs in the software, workarounds and what's being done to fix the bug. This material they will consume, any others they are not interested". We walked away from each other and that was that. We never crossed paths again until now.

This time at DAC, John pretty much repeated the same words that I had heard him say in 2000. I thought, "This guy is relentless, he never gives up his mantra". But there was one change this time around. I had left the EDA world for over 2 years and My time outside of EDA was spent in new areas of Consumer and Enterprise Mobile Applications, and Social Media (SM). Armed with new found knowledge of SM and its acceptance in other areas of the industry, I wanted to come back to DAC to see if I could tie in these new areas and it's relevance and applicability to the high technology industry.

There is no doubt that John has achieved significant success with ESNUG and Deepchip. These forums moderated by John, offers a discussion platform where engineers email him their personal experiences with EDA tools. He forces people to give him real data and not fluff. He wants benchmark data and testcase stats (run time, design size, memory used, crashes, known issues, workarounds etc.). As you know, the tendency within the EDA and the semiconductor design industry is to frown upon this kind of postings by employees. There is the risk that either party may overstep the bounds of their mutual NDA's or that some secrets might be revealed by openly discussing issues at such forums. Also the EDA industry is a small world and one could risk alienating themselves or hurt future job prospects. This is an industry where everyone plays nice. In terms of identity, John gives people the necessary cover if they request anonymity, hoping that they will be elaborate with their posts. While this has mostly resulted in good information exchange for the engineers, much to the EDA world does not look forward to these posts, mainly because this is perceived by them as having their dirty laundry exposed and openly discussed on his forum. I for one, don't believe that John acts against the EDA industry or against any particular company. Neither do I think that he specifically sides with any one company. It is quite clear that he will post articles submitted by his user community as long as they meet the basic requirements he sets for them. John does allow controversial unverified statements or arguments to be posted on his forum. Its obvious he can't really verify the validity of every claim made by these posts. But, he does allow EDA companies to respond to these posts. The only thing John does not allow is people/companies to post any information that he considers as marketing or publicity material. One thing is certain, he seems to cherish controversy.

What surprised me was his comment and strong opinion that, "Engineers should not write personal blogs". He said that engineers should instead post in forums with an established audience, such as deepchip.com. He claims to have 25,000 active readers. John argues that the trouble with personal blogs is the following:

A blogger may not have enough material to maintain the continuity of the blog site. He quoted some random stats. (#1: 99.5% of blogs fail within 2 months #2: 99.5% consist of 2 or 3 posts on EDA, followed by irrelevant posts or nothing)

A blog owner doesn't have time to moderate comments or may be too biased to allow comments against the post.
Personal blogs are not focused and some postings are of a personal nature.
The audience is limited and that there's no money in it.
He says no one ever got a job writing a blog. He counters that by adding that many people on his forum have gotten job offers merely by John's recommendation.

His claim is that established sites like deepchip offer a platform for interactive discussion. Yes, John will give you all kinds of reasons not to write blogs. That's because if you do so and get good at it, maybe he will lose some traffic from his site. He obviously wants deepchip.com to be the center of the universe for EDA discussion. His 25,000 subscribers keep coming back for more and that means he has eyeballs on his site which translates to Ad revenues. Of course he is going to tell you not to write.

I want to tell each and every engineer out there that if you feel like writing, please do so. Don't ever let anyone (including John Cooley) discourage you from creating a blog. Just ensure that you counter the 5 points he raises above which are quite valid. Write because you like to do so and not because it's a one time thing. Be expressive, Be bold and take a stance. Plan your blog beyond just the first article.

Just remember:

It is very easy to get a blog site up and running.
Create a community, find other bloggers and cross link your sites so that you can share viewers.
Identify yourself. Don't ever write anonymously, for it is useless.
Have pre-screened guest authors share their views on your site, so your site can have regular and quality updates.
Don't do it for money. With falling CPM's and low traffic you will hardly get anything to write home about.
Allow un-moderated comments. Have people who comment identify themselves to weed out spammers and flamers.
Be prudent about what you say and always use common sense. Your first amendment right does not protect you from slander.
If you work for a large corporation, make sure that your personal blog does not meander away from the Social Media Policies of your corporation.
Provide value to your audience

Can the EDA industry truly leverage Social Media?

2009-08-03T07:57:00.016-04:00

I just got back from the 46th Design Automation Conference (DAC) held in San Francisco, California. Having been out of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry for a little over a year now, I was coming back in with an outsider's perspective. My time outside of EDA was spent in new areas of Consumer and Enterprise Mobile Applications, Social Media (SM) and it's relevance and applicability to the high technology industry. I was intrigued to find out that Synopsys, one of the leading EDA companies had created "Conversation Central" at DAC. This was an area where they had some invited speakers and sessions to educate SM newbies and discuss SM techniques.

I had met and networked with karen bartleson of synopsys via twitter and was very interested in finding out what EDA companies were doing with adopting SM methods. I attended a few of the sessions and did run into some very interesting people and differing opinions. I wanted to talk about the general areas that I see as barriers for EDA's adoption of SM techniques.

From my EDA experience, for too long the EDA industry has been clouded in secrecy and justifiably so. We shall not discuss the reasons for that in this blog. EDA customers have generally precluded EDA companies from talking about their relationship. The amount of Non Disclosure Agreements signed between EDA companies and their customers would only make attorneys happy. EDA companies on the other hand have rarely discussed issues about their applications openly on the Internet other than to use it as a platform for press releases (PR). This is in stark contrast to social media methods where open honest conversations are what it's all about. Many EDA vendors would like to help their consumers openly share and discuss issues with applications. However they are comfortable doing so only under a controlled atmosphere such as a users group (UG) community. While these UG forums have helped the user community, the information however remains within that small forum and the larger group of application users do not generally have access to that information.

For the EDA industry to truly leverage social media techniques, whether it be blogging (regular long form blogs) or micro-blogging (twitter, utterz etc.,) it will need an audience. This audience will be mostly comprised of engineers who are always on a time constraint. Any reading material that they might consume must be far from marketing and more closely related to FAQ's and other helpful hints. They are always looking to save time and avoid techniques that could get them in trouble. For this to happen, EDA companies have to make themselves more vulnerable by openly talking about issues without fear of being targeted. by the competition. When I met John Cooley (ESNUG & Deepchip founder), way back in 1999 he said, "My audience is only interested in hearing about bugs in the software, workarounds and what's being done to fix the bug. This material they will consume, any others they are not interested". John has found significant success by offering a moderated discussion platform where people email him the results of their experiences with EDA tools and he gives people the identity cover (anonymity) so that they will be more open with their posts. This has resulted in good information exchange for engineers much to the angst of the EDA companies, because their dirty laundry is openly discussed out on his forum. On occasion, EDA companies find themselves having to defend themselves from baseless accusations when people post anonymously under the guise of protecting themselves from retaliation. However, in my book, I have always had the opinion that there is no value for anonymity on the Internet. If you are going to state an opinion on the Internet, then the only way that it can carry value is for you to identify yourself. For EDA companies to leverage SM, they will have to make themselves more vulnerable by talking about issues that their audience cares about. If they use SM for just PR, then they risk alienating the audience.

The other areas where I see some burden to leveraging SM techniques are the following.

# User behavior: Can you force people within the industry to change and adopt the above mentioned needed behaviors to dabble in SM?

# Protocols: How do companies moderate the discussion when their people start to leverage SM techniques. Do people know what to do? Many large companies have introduced so called "social media rule book" which can run into pages. These guidelines themselves can be daunting to a new user and can deter some real creative ones. Most times, all that it requires is common sense on what you can say and share. The simple rule is, don't say or write things that you will regret later. Remember, there is no "UNDO" button on the Internet. My two rules for corporate social media users especially twitterers. Don't tweet yourself out of a job and Don't tweet yourself into an SEC investigation.

# Generational Diversity: With respect to information, what the last generation regarded as private, the current generation regards as public. In the EDA world this translates to what is shareable and protected information. How do you overcome this hurdle when this dichotomy exists within organizations where both view points are valid? For large multi-nationals where the company is spread across many countries, there is an additional layer of cultural behavior to contend with. What may be acceptable for open discussion in one country may not be perceived so in other countries.

# Listening v/s dispensing: One thing is that SM is all about listening to the customer rather than dispensing marketing information or press releases. SM also enables companies to track consumer trends. While this may work readily for other industries, the EDA industry in it's current state may not be the most appropriate industry. One thing is clear, EDA companies need to understand that SM techniques should be used to gauge customer sentiment and avert any potential public-relations disasters. The key question is, are there enough customers leveraging SM techniques to talk openly about EDA products.

# Quantitative: Finally the key question that will need to be answered is, Can SM techniques provide any measurable return on time and dollar invested. This will be especially hard because of the initial difficulty in understanding what metrics need to be measured to enable one to objectively measure the ROI on adopting SM methods for EDA given all the hurdles.

One thing is for certain, media as we know it, is changing. With what I call the "now-media" generation that readily records and posts events, articles and blogs to the web for others to consume, the EDA industry may be forced to adopt SM techniques sooner rather than later. In ending I want to note the EDA people who I met at #46DAC are some of the people to watch in EDA for SM adoption. Karen Bartleson, Robert Dwyer, Daniel Payne, JL Gray, John F Macdonald etc.

The kid who should be CEO of GM

2009-07-09T21:21:00.005-04:00

"Who Killed the Electric Car?", the 2006 documentary that took us through the story of the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery operated electric vehicle in the US, (specifically the GM EV1). When I saw that documentary only recently, I was really saddened.

During the years 1999 and 2003 I worked for a company called Verplex Systems. During that time, I covered the eastern US region and Canada. It was during that time, I went to visit one customer at Lucent in Ottawa. There I met the first guy who had created his own electric car. His name was Bob Lawrence. When heading out to lunch one day, he suggested to me and my colleague that we take his car (A Volkswagon Jetta). When we drove around that car was nearly silent with just a soft humming noise. When we found out that Bob himself had put that together we were blown away. He had a big batteries in his trunk. An electrical charging cord that came out the front of the vehicle. Recently I found out that he gave up that electric car for a Prius hybrid. I am sure he's making it a plug in as we speak.

However I wanted to take a moment to talk about this kid, a teenager who claims he can't even change the oil in his car. He instead went on the internet found the instructions and converted an old Ford Escort car into an electric car. Why is that normal ordinary people can go and build an electric car, but the big-3 could never build one?

I am sure that one day another documentary will come out with the accusatory finger pointing to the oil companies being responsible for the death of the early electric car. But those conspiracy theories are for another day. Right now, I am so excited that there is a movement toward going completely electric. I wrote about Shai Agassi's plan the other day. I can't wait for the day when I can drive a car for which I don't have to add fuel.

Creative Advertisements

2009-07-08T07:36:00.003-04:00

There are some advertisements that totally make sense and then some that are just absurd. Either way the goal of an advertisement is to capture the attention of the audience and then lead them to believe that they need to use the product promoted in the ad.

Any video advertisement usually has about 30 seconds to 1 minute in which to convey its message. These seconds are vital to telling a compelling story. There's a story, a scene, a setup, the people, the dialogues and the product. All these components have to be arranged and choreographed in such a way so as to be able to convey the message quickly.

There are some ads where the character (actor/actress) holds the ad together with a display of their acting skills (delivery of dialogue, display of emotion, physical and or facial expressions). Then there are others that are just supposed to convey the message either with a funny skit or scene, mostly through the unspoken word and all action.

With the advent and ease of use of photo/video editing software, the quality of these ads are getting to a whole other plateau. Some of these ads are really quite amazing and visually stunning. You can basically create an ad nowadays with a simple computer and free software. However the best ads require a creative team that can put together all the ad components and make it compelling for the viewer attention to be captured. That is the first key step toward pushing the product.

I recently saw this ad and was quite amazed by it. I thought I would share it with you all. The agency that designed and produced this video needs some applause.

There are many other ads that amaze me with what they are able to convey in 60 seconds or less. However, for the sake of brevity of this article, I only used one example of an ad that I liked.

Indian Politician's Loan Rage

2009-07-01T13:19:00.004-04:00

A Member of Parliament (MP - elected official) in India, has taken it upon himself to judge and punish a bank employee. On a lighter note, I wonder how long before we see elected members of congress and the senate to go after those who created the banking crisis in the same way. Maybe the fear of appearing on a youtube slap video would be a deterrent to many of the greedy gecko's and would make them think twice before starting any scheme which results in systemic risk.

This is no way for any politician to behave, but it happens routinely in India. Politicians think that they are a higher force and take it upon themselves to verbally and physically abuse normal ordinary people. A bunch of thugs, ("goondas" as they are locally called) usually accompany the politicians on their daily beat. This happens because they usually face no consequences from the party higher ups as evidenced here. The MP should be fired by the ruling party, but instead he is just asked to explain himself. He on the other hand, denies having assaulted the bank employee, though the video evidence speaks to the contrary.

I am sure the bank employee on the other hand was guilty of at most following the rules that were in place. Sadly, the employee's case against the politician will go nowhere, but the MP will be back at this again.

Recycling by Building

2009-06-12T12:26:00.014-04:00

A Recycled Home built with unused shipping Containers

It's estimated that 18 million shipping containers are used to ship materials around the world. A significant chunk of that ends up in American ports due to the fact that we import more than we export. Now what do we do with the surplus. Well here is one good use for those containers, much better than rusting at the ports and taking up valuable space. Watch this video on CNN and realize the potential of putting together strong homes quickly with shipping containers that might otherwise go to waste.

Amsterdam supposedly has one of the biggest container structures, that houses over a 1,000 students. SG Blocks has found that recycling homes cut construction time in half. Based on the costs of acquisition of these containers, this might be an additional option for organizations such as Habitat for Humanity. Building homes with containers saves on high cost of raw material and since the homes are metal, they are naturally water and termite resistant. The finished home can me made to fit in with and look like other existing homes in the community. According to SG-Blocks the company that is leading this effort to build homes from unused containers, it takes 90% less energy to re-purpose containers than to melt them for reuse.

Can Shai Agassi's Battery Centric plan make the world a "Better Place"

2009-06-08T17:07:00.015-04:00

Added 6/16. Shai Answered questions posed by Business week which were asked by BW readers. Here are his answers. Watch his answer to my Question (starting at 4:00 min mark) about how we will generate large amounts of clean energy.

"How would you run a whole country without oil" was the question Shai Agassi posed when opening his TED talk about "Better Place", his company, his concept and his dream. I must say I was a bit skeptical when I first heard that. After all as Americans we consume more than 25% of the world's oil and for long we Americans have battled with our addition to Oil. It is a dependency for which we have no near term solution. Shai's argument is that we have to deliver an electric vehicle, something that 99% of the people can drive. Most importantly he says it must be doable with the science we know today and bound by the laws of physics and the laws of economics. I wont go into the explanation of these two limits he talks about here, but it essentially covers the issues of affordability and practicality of the solution. All these thoughts floated in my mind as I listened to the rest of his talk.

He was recently interviewed by Sarah Lacy on tech ticker and part 1 and part 2 of that conversation is available below.

Part-1

Part-2

Some Background: If you ask the question, "How much Oil does the world use"? The answer can best be explained by the Cubic Mile of Oil representation since that explains it best with comparisons to all other current energy sources. The world uses one cubic mile of oil per year. Now how much is that? you ask.

According to an IEEE Spectrum article (Jan 2007 issue), a cubic mile of oil has the energy equivalent to:

* 4 Three Gorges dams (China), cranking out hydro-electric power for 50 years.
* 32850 1.65 megawatt wind turbines, cranking for 50 years (at 100% capacity factor).
* 91,250,000 2.1 kW solar PV installations, converting solar energy for 50 years.
* 104 500 megawatt coal-fired electric plants, burning coal for 50 years. OR
* 52 1.1 gigawatt nuclear electric plants, running continuously for 50 years.

Illustration Source: SRI International (Illustration: bryan christie design)

Assuming that we will try to make America independent of Oil. I want to play out the following scenario. Taking into account that we consume 25% of the world's oil, the above 50 year number for each category can be reduced to 12.5 Years (25% of the 50 years in each of the above equivalent scenarios). At this time, I have no idea on what percentage of the US Crude Oil consumption actually goes to produce gasoline that powers cars specifically. I can say that producing the equivalent of that amount in electricity to be able to power all "Better Place" cars in the US will require some staggering amounts of electricity generation. Additionally Shai claims that it is possible to power these cars via clean energy. (He gives examples of Windmills in Denmark and Solar Panels in Israel)

In the US, we have not addressed how we are going to generate massive amounts of clean energy. Power generation by coal is still the predominant method followed by nuclear energy and natural gas (EIA stats). In all his talks, Shai does not talk about where we will find the additional capacity needed especially from clean sources. In fact none of the electric car makers actually address the problem of electricity generation. I would like Shai to address how we will actually generate that much power to convert more cars into his electric vehicle. I for one, believe that Shai's plan is much more viable than any of the other plans out there because it considers the hurdles of affordability and practicality. But my skepticism remains because America has not upgraded it's energy infrastructure and we do not have the resources to produce that kind of electricity to convert all cars to "better place" electric cars.

One way that Shai can increase adoption is by working with customers such as Hertz or Avis to try this out locally in the Bay (SF) area. That may be the catalyst that finally convinces America that this is a viable plan. But yes, the issue of the additional power generation to run cars will still need to be addressed.

"Twitter" A Social Radar! - Pros and Cons

2009-06-04T10:12:00.008-04:00

Jeff Pulver's 140 character conference will be taking place in New York City on 16/17 of this month. Various characters from the worldwide twitter community will be descending into NYC to talk about what twitter means to them. They will share their thoughts on subject of twittering and making sense out of 140 characters.

Twitter has been talked about much in the past few months starting from the interesting episodes of "Student who twittered out of an Arrest in Egypt" to the "Hudson crash-landing incident" and many other daily trending topics. I personally use twitter to rant about various things from technology to finance and pretty much everything else in between. I have made a few friends through twitter and though I have never met them in real life I have conversations with them on meaningful topics from time to time.

As an entrepreneur working on technologies that merge presence and leverages micro-expression, I believe that this conference will bring together a meeting of wonderful minds and provide an unique opportunity to interact with people who are thought leaders in the area of applications built around twitter.

I want to list out the pros and cons of twitter here and see what other people have to say about it at the conference.

PROS:

1) Ambient Awareness: Twitter like updates, though seen as mundane by many is interestingly termed "ambient awareness" by technology writer Clive Thompson. Read his Sixth Sense article here. The process by which you follow quick, abbreviated status updates from the constituents of your extended social network.

2) The Power of Brevity: I believe @biz once called twitter, "the messaging service we didn't know we needed until we had it". I think in some ways the brevity of input to any status updated and the creative ways in which people fine tune their limit of 140 characters to get their point across has shown that communication can occur effectively in micro-expression. Can a twitter like system be expanded to get rid of the clutter of email? Maybe!!

3) A customized newsfeed: Twitter has become a "Social-Radar" for me as it gives me an instantaneous view of what is going on with the people that I follow. I am also aware of breaking news from various parts of the world as I follow tweets from people and organizations of locations I am interested in. Twitter has become my listening device. It provides a source stream of information that when appropriately filtered gives me more specific information than random rants at the water-fountain. The trending topics section gives me an idea of what is the topic of discussion at the moment in the outer reaches of twitter and whether I should listen in and contribute if necessary.

4) A Marketing/PR tool kit: Twitter is an automatic system/tool-kit for marketing and public relations. You can reach out to your customers and ask them about products or features and get their feedback instantaneously. Product roll out information, recall notices, links to announcements and other information that needs to be quickly disseminated publicly can be done via twitter with a link to the main article leading people back to the company website. Having a presence on twitter is powerful for companies in many ways.

CONS:

1) Quality of Information: A Harvard business publishing article by by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski states that the top 10% of prolific twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. Many of these top tweeters could just be using twitter as a quicksand to lead people away to their websites or businesses. You will have to filter and prune your following list from time to time for the sake of sanity.

2) Vulnerability: Earlier this year at Soccomm, Jeff Pulver stated that it was important to share the human side of yourself in the social network that you belong to. This vulnerability as he defined it further as, "You have to put your guard down when you want to connect to people so that they do not doubt your true intentions and see you for the person that you are". One should be careful in what they reveal about themself on twitter or elsewhere on the web. Recently an AZ twitterer alleges that his home was robbed because he tweeted about where he was on vacation. Be vulnerable to earn people's trust, but not vulnerable to cause you harm.

3) Chatter effect: Twitter tends to create a lot more noise than signal at certain times. For example, I find there is a lot of duplication of info when you are following a trending topic especially as people start re-tweeting (RT) other people's information. This can sometimes cause mis-information as unverfied information can get propogated and pushed. I experienced some of this misinformation when I was following the mumbai terror attack on twitter.

4) Twitter Safety: Don't tweet your way into an SEC investigation and don't tweet your way out of a job. Companies whose employees tweet must be aware of the limits of what their employees can or can't talk about in these public forums. Then there is the good example of that potential Cisco employee who tweeted himself out of a job by making a lame comment on twitter. Also another famous example of notorious tweets is that of @keyinfluencer whose tweet about Memphis was picked up by a Fedex (based in Memphis) employee and sent up the chain. Read Peter Shankman's post on the same.

In the end, I conclude by saying twitter and the very concept of micro-expression is a valuable tool. A plethora of twitter based applications are available and listed at the conference site as well. Use it wisely. Some of my favorites are "stocktwits", "tweetdeck" and "twitpic".

Hope to see some of you fellow tweeters at the 140 conf.

Locating Flight 447

2009-06-04T07:02:00.007-04:00

The disappearance of Air France Flight 447 and its 228 passengers over the Atlantic Ocean this week is a great tragedy. What is even more tragic is that a simple $300 device could have located the final (or last known location), aiding rescuers and emergency to get to the area of the crash site sooner. The Brazilian and French planes had to fly hundreds to square miles of open ocean looking for clues on the open waters.

Could this device* have helped us reach the crash site sooner?
(*Magellan Maestro 4350 pictured above - Any GPS device would suffice)

Today due to limitations of radar coverage, you are flying un-tracked over vast stretches of oceans, in the middle of the Atlantic on U.S.-European routes or over the pacific. Currently pilots resort to calling controllers with estimated positions every hour or so. The call-ins is again dependent on radio and radar coverage. Even though the aircraft is rigged with systems to send automatic messages to the home base, this does not include a simple lat-long coordinate information which can easily be gathered by installing a GPS chip along with other components on the plane with some simple software code written around it to send this information to the automatic data transmitter.

Even if an electrical failure disabled the GPS device, the last known location can be clearly established by establishing a flight path from the incremental GPS updates. This need to determine approximate location is imperative for crashes like the AF 447 or other air crashes over the ocean with limited radar coverage. I am positive that each aircraft on the planet can be fitted with this device for a total cost of less than a $1000 per install. A small price to pay for a lot to gain. I hope airlines and the FAA realize the urgency of this and implement this low cost system before the proposed costly overhaul of radar or satellite systems.

The Amazon Kindle for textbooks - Its About time

2009-05-05T13:41:00.004-04:00

One Kindle to replace them all (text books)

The announcement that Amazon plans to unveil a new large-screen version of its Kindle e-book, bundled with other features designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers, brings me great Joy. For years and years textbooks, magazines and newspapers have used the one resource "paper" which leads to immense destruction of forests. With Kindle for Textbooks and its adoption by a few universities is just what we needed as an alternative to paper.

I can only imagine the benefits for students with this device. Imagine if each school or university pre-loads all their textbooks and assignment papers due dates and other pertinent information into this one device that students can carry around. The students can first of all carry lighter loads, always have the most up to date materials and receive any updates or new versions of the text books over the air.

I would most certainly buy a device, though I would prefer to wait for the second generation. I would like the kinks in the first generation product to be identified by the students and for amazon to fix them. This is not the only device, Sony has its own e-Reader. Here is a comparison of the e-reader and the regular kindle. Some of the pros and cons of the two are mentioned here.

The lesser our need for paper, the better it is for our forests and our planet.

Earth Week

2009-04-21T18:58:00.008-04:00

A quick update post on doing my part to combat global warming and deforestation. Last year I had planted 80 saplings of various trees and had written about it here. I had planted about half the saplings in the yard and the other half in a special holding area I had created for them.

I can't believe that one year has passed by so quickly already. As we celebrate earth week 2009, I wanted to update the status of the saplings. So far most of them have survived. It seems that I may have lost about 10 of the saplings due to the cold winter. However, I am optimistic that they may all come back. A big project for this week will be to replant the 40 or so saplings from the holding area in different parts of the yard.

We also had a visitor come by quite a few times last year and inspect the saplings holding area. You can see the saplings in the background, this little fox would spend his time in the general vicinity. He is now gone, I am assuming he got big and left for greener (er... meatier) pastures.

Well I will update pics when I have them after I have replanted the 40 saplings from the holding area. Do you part to leave a better earth to our children. We owe it to them. Plant a tree. Do what you can. Every little action counts.

Great Scot: From Obscurity to Celebrity

2009-04-17T08:30:00.011-04:00

"Vulnerability"

In February of this year, I was at Soccomm, a conference organized by Jeff Pulver that examines the role of social media and communications. At the conference Jeff opened his talk on the subject of the "importance and power of vulnerability". "Vulnerability", as he defined it, was that it was important to share the human side of yourself in the social network that you belong to. He further defined it as "You have to put your guard down when you want to connect to people so that they do not doubt your true intentions and see you for the person that you are". The subtlety of this definition was hard to explain until this past week. I cannot find a better example of Jeff Pulver's definition of "vulnerability". That example or person is Susan Boyle.

If you have not heard of Susan Boyle by now, you have probably been hiding under a rock for the last one week. Over the last few days, Susan Boyle has emerged as a household name. She has gone from being a nobody to being an instant celebrity. What amazes me is that this 47 year old single woman came determined to audition for the "Britain's Got Talent" show and was undeterred by the negative atmosphere surrounding the few minutes before she sang her rendition of "I dreamed a dream" from Les Misérables.

Some stats for you here: Note that these numbers may be irrelevant or outdated by the time you read them. The total views of all her audition videos are now over 20 Million. Yes, in a matter of one week: She has garnered 20 million views on youtube, her name is the top-ranking trend on twitter, She has quite a few Facebook fan pages , a Wikipedia page and a fan page at Susan-Boyle.com. On top of that, she is on every major news network and constantly being hounded for interviews. I am sure she can handle the onslaught of the media pressure as cooly as she handled her audition.

What I want to bring out here is the example Susan sets for entrepreneurs in all walks of life. She set out with a purpose because she made a promise to her mother to do something with her life. Susan boyle let her guard down, became "vulnerable" and stepped up to the plate. She did not let her age or the long odds be a deterrent to her own dreams. At every step of the audition process, it seemed like she was being setup for failure. She was mocked by the crowds and the judges, her pre-audition interviews, the choice of the video snippet the program producers decided to roll (that of her eating) and the fact the crowds groaned in discomfort and laughter at who she wanted to be "Elaine Paige", envisioning the fool that she was going to make of herself.

All that lasted a mere 10 seconds into her rendition of the song and she blew away each and every doubter in that audience. In quick stattaco like bursts, she won over waves and waves of audiences and melted their hearts. At the end of it, she had obliterated the maniacal "pitt-bull" doubters and beat them into loving puppy-dogs. Key take away from this for entrepreneurs is that If you have a dream, do not be scared of saying who you are (be vulnerable) and what you want to do. Doubters will remain doubters and you must pursue your goals and dreams and not be deterred by challenges. Susan Boyle, I don't care if you win the contest or not, in my book you are already a winner for you are living proof that talent can defy perceptions, age and expectations.

In ending I want to say, that sometimes "vulnerability" is viewed as a weakness, but in fact the openness and candor of a person is actually more powerful than any perceived weakness. I borrow this quote from Jim Rohm, "If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary"

Why I oppose the AIG bonus tax bill

2009-03-20T18:21:00.014-04:00

We are all aware of the tremendous amount of tax payer dollars being used to prop up AIG. Its in the news everyday. Everyone I know, me included is outraged at the bonuses being paid to some of the executives. Having been in many positions before where my total compensation has been a mix of base salary and a target bonus, I know that every bonus dollar I ever earned was tied to achieving some performance metric or sale of products. So in that sense I do not understand these bonuses that are going to pad the wallets of the executives in the particular division that caused this financial collapse of AIG.

Having cleared that up, I want to now bring your attention to the issue of Congress trying to pass an AIG bonus tax bill with the expressed intent to reclaim those tax-payer dollars. I am against this hasty tax bill because it draws parallels for me on another hasty tax bill that was passed many years ago and now haunts more people than it was ever intended to target.

The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) was introduced by the Tax Reform Act of 1969. It was intended to target just 155 high-income U.S. households that used the many existing tax loopholes to literally avoid paying income tax. President Lyndon Johnson's Treasury secretary Joseph Barr and the Asst Sec of the Treasury, Stanley S. Surrey created the initial proposals to tighten the tax loopholes that eventually led to the creation of the AMT. In April 1969 President Nixon's Administration presented its proposal for tax reform to Congress and It eventually became law. The bill, I believe was created in such haste that the AMT proposal did not include the language to adjust for inflation. Congress for years has just sat on this and done nothing about it. 40 years later, it affects more Americans than it ever was intended to apply to. There are even horror stories of this tax affecting people who bought stocks which later dropped in value during the dot-com boom, but they still owed tremendous amounts of AMT dollars to the IRS.

It is thought that by 2010, over 30 million taxpayers will be affected by AMT. Over 94 percent of married filers who have children and make $75,000 to $100,000 will pay higher taxes due to the AMT. This tax that was designed as a parallel tax system in 1969 to ensure that that a few people in higher tax bracket didn't evade paying any taxes through loopholes has now become a comman man's tax burden. Even with all this staggering data, Congress does not do anything about the AMT year after year, because its now become a significant source of tax revenues.

This is single reason why I oppose the AIG-bonus tax bill. I am of the opinion that unless the AIG-Bonus tax bill is very narrowly defined and very very temporary, it will eventually affect a much larger set of people who were never the original target of such hastily passed tax laws. I don't want my government to be reactionary and put in laws that will hurt more people in the future. I want my government to be smart about this and find other ways to recover this outrageous bonus money, not through a hastily drafted document. Let us not repeat the mistake that was AMT (IRS 6251) with another called AIG-tax.

The friction against alternative energy and grid infrastructure

2009-03-08T17:01:00.012-04:00

An estimated 50 million people across the US and Canada were affected by the great big blackout of 2003. I remember this because I was scheduled to travel to Canada that day and the blackout caused so many disruptions that eventually I just canceled the trip. I am reminded of this as I read about two events this past week.

The first one I read about was the strong opposition to the planned new high-voltage power line by PSE&G. Eight towns in Morris and Sussex counties of NJ, have formed a coalition to fight this proposal by PSE&G to build the 45-mile, $750 million power line project that cuts through North Jersey.

Construction of this has not even begun and it is estimated to take about 2-1/2 years. PSE&G estimates that the new line needs to be in service by the summer of 2012 to avoid overloaded lines and possible blackouts and brownouts in New Jersey. The power-line project would include installation of towers with heights ranging from 180 to 190 feet, almost twice the height of what exists along the route now. PSE&G says that the new line is imperative and would provide a better and more reliable power system. However the towns are opposing it because of an array of issues regarding health, safety and economic concerns. It seems to me most home owners near the property view the towers as an ugly eyesore.

The second article I read with great interest was that NJ Gov. Jon Corzine's policy push to use alternative, clean energy sources has run into headwinds. Critics of the offshore wind generation project say that it will harm the ocean ecology. Gov. Corzine wants wind farms to supply 1,000 megawatts of electricity. This energy would be enough to power about 375,000 homes. There is a proposal to increase the capacity over time to supply over a million homes with clean wind energy.

The cost barriers for implementing alternative energy sources are already so high. Alternative energy needs extremely high investment infrastructure. Reliable power is paramount as we cannot have blackouts like 2003, which could lead to national security issues. The public who are quick to complain when grid failures occur are however quicker to stall projects that solve the problems. As we modernize our grid, some people will have to live with taller towers in their backyards or unsightly wind-towers. In some cases these offshore wind towers may harm the ocean ecology temporarily. We as a nation are facing challenging times. Opposition to alternative energy sources like off shore wind farms and grid upgrade and reconstruction will only increase the overall cost of these projects.

Local townships and municipalities should understand the immense importance of educating their citizens to support such projects. Instead we see local governments opposing them in fear that some of these projects will lead to destruction of property values and hence tax revenues. To counter this, public utilities should offer greater incentives to the people or townships who are in the path of the power lines. Maybe a 50% reduction on electricity bills for the next 20 years based on current usage would get the public and the townships to reconsider the opposition to the development of a super grid. This incentive limited to those homes within 150 feet of the towers themselves. Also make these incentives transferable to enable an easy sale of the home. I believe that the utilities could easily absorb this cost over 20 years as opposed to years of legal costs of fighting local governments and public.

In the same way, we cannot be delay the installation of offshore wind turbines. In the long run the ecological cost of building these alternative power sources will be far lesser than the threat of global warming that we face.

Competition of the future & the American education system

2009-02-20T09:31:00.010-05:00

A few months ago, I sat down with friends over dinner and engaged in a passionate argument about the education system in America. I argued on the side that the times were changing and what had worked in America until now was not going to work in the future. I said that America is woefully behind on education in math and science and that the future belonged to kids who excel in math and science. The next generation of world leaders in both private and public sectors would come from countries that pushed math and science vigorously.

My friends argued that America has a more holistic education system and that it prepares kids to be more creative and artistic. They argued that they would want their kids to pursue their dreams and also consider becoming artists or go into other fields that don't necessarily need math and science. These career paths as opposed to scientists and doctors, the fields which require intense math and science reading.

I argued that it does not matter what fields people go to, but quickness of math and a higher than general knowledge of science are essential components of the next generation of workers. My argument was that it has become imperative that knowledge in these fields is now essential as the global workforce is a lot smarter and individuals have to deal with a more business savvy approach to everyday life. The discussion continued into the wee hours of the dawn, but many did not make an effort to view the scene from my point.

I talked about the documentary "2 Million Minutes", which hopefully will give them some more food for thought about the discussions we had.

I just found this other data point today and it was quite revealing in terms of some of the metrics. I hope you view this as well.

In ending, I just want to say that public school systems in America in general are doing what they can to prepare the next generation of kids, given the fiscal constraints that they work with. However, it is upto the parents to guide their children and help them succeed given the new reality.

What is Social Communications and how to leverage it?

2009-02-06T11:33:00.027-05:00

Have you wondered what is Social Media and what it offers? Who should use it and whether this new medium can be leveraged by companies, entrepreneurs and others alike? If you did, you should plan on attending the one day "Social Communications Summit" being held in New York City, on Feb 10th. Jeff Pulver, producer of this summit, wrote "We are living in a time where our phones have become Social Communication devices and that presence is quickly becoming a trigger point for communication".

As a society, we are becoming more and more connected and mobile, able to do things while being mobile. Personal Presence is still evolving as we speak. This evolution of presence, Pulver states "has huge implications for advertising, media and telecom". For me personally, as a Co-Founder of MOBOW, a startup developing products in the mobile presence arena , this aspect of presence made this summit a must attend.

The summit is interesting because it offers a preliminary glimpse as to how the various aspects of social media will play out. Pulver has invited members from the Media, Internet, Communications and Entertainment industries as speakers. I am personally interested in understanding the Investment appetite in this area, Effect of social communication on media and enterprise adoption as well.

Investment: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and an early investor in Twitter is one of the speakers. I am interested in his outlook on investment in mobile in general , and also in this area of social communications. I hope to be able to understand the implications of micro-social expression as he sees it in the enterprise arena. Twitter has been a great consumer application with lots of users and large scale adoption. I myself am a ardent fan of twitter. However , enterprise adoption of twitter-like applications are facing an uphill battle. I believe that's due to the fact that many users in large companies already work in small teams and creation/maintenance of a shared micro expression feed to expressly state what they are working on is seen as a waste of time. I believe that applications that address "goal/task oriented micro expression" with ties into existing content creation mechanisms, along with an identity/contact/group management component to identify relevant participants and smooth mobile content delivery are the keys to success in this emerging nexus between adoption of social media and the reluctant enterprise arena.

Effect on Media: David Kirkpatrick (Senior Editor - Fortune Magazine) recently interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) on stage at DLD09. David is currently writing a book about "The Facebook Effect" . It would be interesting to hear what David has to share from DLD09 regarding Facebook. Apparently Facebook's Connect will be a big focus for FB in 2009. This ties in well with Jeff Pulver's talk at the #soc09, the theme of which is "Connected Culture".

Some of the other interesting speakers are Jeff Jarvis who wrote "What would Google do". He recently spoke about the "Life is a beta" culture about how Google produces products. I have heard him speak at the NY tech meetup and he was also on the Brian Lehrer show today (Feb 6th 2009). While his fascination for Google and the way they do business or product development will be interesting to hear, I would also like to see him address how Social Communications in the realm of "Let your customers decide features", will be adopted by Enterprise Companies, particularly those apprehensive about IP protection.

Engaging Social Media for marketing: Marketing campaigns have to be carefully plotted out. Clueless campaings can face backlash especially by the watchful eyes and ears of the powerful group of Mommy-Bloggers. As many of us know, a small but vociferous self-professed "Motrin Moms", derailed an entire Johnson & Johnson Motrin television and print campaign. The campaign was met with such resistance by the likes of Katja Presnal that eventually executives apologized publicly for allegedly being insensitive and pulled the entire campaign. This incident was a little unsettling for marketers, because it proved that in this day and age of Facebook, twitter and other means of expression (where people have a huge following), news, especially one that angers a subset of the population travels fast. Has this caused companies like J&J to be reluctant to leverage Social Media or should they actually work with focus groups, before releasing campaigns publicly?

There are other tracks which discuss music, and entertainment especially as it applies to social gaming. Overall, I think that the Social Communication conference is a great opportunity for evaluating new means of communication, leveraging presence in a relevant way, advertising, investment and other opportunities in this area. Come, mingle and be a part of the new Social media revolution.

2009-02-03T14:12:00.003-05:00

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

- Thomas Jefferson

The past year has been monumentally destructive for the equity markets. Financial companies and credit worldwide have nearly been crippled. Fear has invaded the markets and there is no sense in some of the characteristics exhibited by individual investors. I sometimes sit back and wonder in awe the global effect that this economic slowdown has had. Millions of people worldwide are facing unemployment and here in the US, President Obama faces a monstrous task of injecting confidence and rebuilding the US economy.

As I sit back and think about the events of the past year, I am seeing a silver lining in all the doom and gloom of the market and the economy. The very fact that the plug was pulled from those irrelevant lofty valuations caused the excesses of the market eco-system to come out of the woodwork. What this has done is to out the nefarious schemes of people like Bernie Madoff (U.S) and Ramalinga Raju (Indian software giant Satyam Computer Services). The markets had started to flatten and slide by late 2007 and it took almost a year of falling values to trickle down to the point where the schemes laid out by these men unraveled. A lot of people have lost their entire life savings due to these alleged ponzi schemes. It is a sad thing, but in a way this downturn caused more schemes and crimes from being perpetrated. I sincerely hope that all of the illegal schemes will be revealed before the next uptick in the markets and the economy. I say this because when the markets are good and generally rising, dirt can get swept up under the rug, excesses get ignored and thievery can be hidden.

The incoming president’s cabinet members had some issues as well. Timothy geithner and Tom Daschle had unpaid taxes. Would they have paid it if it were not for the promising roles that they were about to undertake? Why did the IRS not catch them or audit them. Tom Daschle had not paid taxes to the tune of over a 100,000 dollars (Late Breaking news as I am writing this, Daschle has withdrawn). These people only chose to pay after the vetting process for the cabinet posts.

In the same way, why did the SEC choose to go after Martha Stewart and prosecute her for a pity-some gain on insider trading charges, when many others got off easy? The question here is, "Was the SEC asleep at the wheel when Madoff was concocting income statements?". Doesn’t the SEC actually do a random check of claim of trades executed as a means to verify the authenticity of income via equity trading?

Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. In much the same way, the needs, greed and excesses of society must be shed from time to time. Unfortunately the patriots pay (lose money), but the tyrants are revealed. Hopefully justice will prevail.

* Note: As the American way goes, at the time of this writing those parties that stand accused of crimes. are all innocent until proven guilty (with exceptions).

A Role Model of a CEO

2008-11-24T11:41:00.009-05:00

Everyday, we face more and more news of failed US institutions that are being bailed out at tax payer expense. Ironically many of the CEO's of these mega block buster failures get to keep their excessive compensation or bonuses in spite of having railroaded their companies into the ground.

We learnt recently that even as AIG officials pleaded with government officials to save the company, they also approved a second expensive company junket where top executives went to a secret gathering at a luxury resort in Phoenix. Just in the last day we have seen another failed institution (from succumbing to its excesses of bad toxic debt) being rescued. The Citi rescue package does not do anything to change the failing management.

As I was pondering all this, I came upon this video of the CEO of Japan Air Lines (JAL) and his reactions to the US excesses. I understand that the Japanese economy has its own share of issues, however what I wanted to point out was the humility with which the JAL CEO presents himself. There is no arrogance as displayed by many US CEO's.

All I have to say is that US executives need to take a page from the JAL CEO. In striking contrast to all the excesses of the American CEOs like those at the failed financial institutions, and the recent congressional jet trip for the Big-3 auto manufacturers, the CEO of JAL rides a bus to work, sits with the rest of the employees both at his desk and in the company cafeteria and has slashed his salary to below that of his own pilots (his 07 annual pay was about US$90,000).

Note to World: Don't Write America off

2008-10-05T10:48:00.015-04:00

The past few days we have witnessed carnage in the financial markets. The US government has had to step in and stop the bloodshed in this crisis. We can debate endlessly about the origins of this financial mess and the onset of a credit freeze and how it will affect us all. Every pundit on wall street from A to Z has some dire prediction or the other. Excuse me Ladies and Gentlemen, I just want to remind you that it took over two years for this sub-prime slime to unravel and reveal itself as this market-wrecking Godzilla. In the same note, any bailout will take time to trickle down to get us back on track. Yes things will take time, but they will surely settle down. Right now irrational fear is a big driver and we as Americans need to calm down and make up our own minds instead of being swayed by irrational 'doom and gloom' pundits.

This is America, not some god-forsaken banana republic run by some two faced dictator. We have a stable government, composed of an executive, a legislative and a judiciary branch that have come forward to take on a leadership role at times of crisis. You as an individual may not agree personally with the system or the outcomes of these decisions. However, that very same system and all the other elements in place prevent this country from going into chaos time and time again.

A number of people in America and from other parts of the world state that America's reign as a super-power is over. We have people predicting that we are not the financial capital of the world anymore. What does it mean to be a financial capital of the world? We have some in the media predicting dire consequences as a result of this crisis. In fact what this crisis proves is the opposite. We as a nation are working through this crisis and will emerge from it. Not without cost, but definitely without this country falling into chaos. I don't see gun battles and riots and looting on the streets. I don't see people hoarding food and amassing guns and ammunition. Folks, get a grip. It's not over yet. Calling a game in the first of a nine inning game is well, Stupid.

We as a nation will emerge from this crisis stronger. That is not to say that we won't face other kinds of crisis' in the future. We will weather all storms. We will hit road-blocks and face other major catastrophes', but we will prevail. We will emerge stronger, not Weaker. We will be smarter, but surely make new mistakes. We will learn and we will move on.

If you are not sure about the country, it's policies, where it's generally headed, you have a choice. People who just assume that they are the new Nostradamus of predicting doom and gloom of the United States should pack up and head over to wherever they feel is a stable country. This country is about choices and freedom. You have a choice and the freedom to leave. If not you can put your thinking cap on and help build a stronger America.

Are we done yet - part 2

2008-09-17T20:05:00.014-04:00

Early this year, I wrote a blog article titled "Are we done yet" where I created a rolling snapshot from East to west of some major market indices.

Well today I am attaching a table of the same markets and their closing value on the first day of the year and their current value (as of yesterday). Check it out. I did this as there was some dodo-bird on CNBC yesterday saying that investors should look elsewhere in such times. I looked and found none. There may still be individual plays such as gold and other precious metals left.

Table 1: Select Major Market indexes

China is the one market taking the hardest hit followed by Hong Kong and India. In fact the US markets (DJIA and NASDAQ) have fallen the least from the beginning of the year. Note, If you had bought Gold at the beginning of the year and held it until now, you would have made about 3.35% gain. If you bought it last week you would have made 8.5% by now.

Until all the banks throw open their books and mark down all the values of their sub-prime gunk, we will continue this roller coaster as more and more reveal their liabilities on the day of their demise.

Knowledge and Leverage is key to any Negotiation

2008-09-17T11:48:00.006-04:00

I sat down at the table after the presentation was done. The meeting continued as our team and the excited client were now discussing actual steps of engagement. The deal was not done but they were going to try our product based on some of the feedback they had been getting from other new customers. Suddenly, the conference room door swung open and in walked the divisional head of the group. He just stood there for a second and stared down at all of us. He took a seat and flipped through a copy of the printed presentation slides. His next words and actions are something that I will never forget for the rest of my life. With his hands thumping on the table he announced in a loud voice, "Why would I want to buy this new product from a new startup when my teams have a working solution. I do not want my teams to invest their time or money learning new products. This is a waste of time". With that he got up, tossed the slides onto the table and walked out. (Keyword: Leverage)

It was a cold february afternoon in Ottawa (Hint). On the way to the airport, I was kind of disappointed about what had happened, but was reassured by the design manager of the client that he would revisit this with the divisional head soon. We did not hear from them for a while. We went about our business and were quite successful with a lot of other companies.

Many months earlier I had joined a new software company as an applications engineering manager. This new company was embarking upon delivering some ground breaking verification technology to the semiconductor design companies. The new technology had been developed in anticipation of the emerging seismic technology shifts and was built to handle the various complex technological changes in the entire design flow. Some of these design flow changes would basically force existing applications to rapidly scaleup to handle larger amounts of data. We were certain that existing applications could not handle these changes and would fail. We had worked with many of the vendors who were in this design eosystem and had the foresight to accomodate for this. (Keyword: Knowledge) Many of the design companies would encounter this as they shifted their flows to design the next generation of integrated circuits. The company in question above would have roughly about three months before this hit them. Of course we had told them about it in the presentation and the team was buying it until the Divisional head had waved us off.

In late August of the same year, we got that call from the manager at the client site. Their existing tools were failing and unable to verify the next generation designs. We went in and in less then half a business day had all (I repeat all) their new designs loaded up in our tools and verified. We were verifying the integrity of the designs faster and with much lesser memory than any of their existing solutions. To top it all, we were the only solution capable of actually completing the designs. In fact they were so bewildered by the speed of our technology that they acutually inserted deliberate flaws into the designs to ensure that we would catch them. And catch we did, everyone of them.

A few days later, I got a call from the VP of sales of our company. He was calling to ask me about my email to him regarding the No-Discount to this particular client. As a startup we were accustomed to handing out generous discounts to many companies just to get some revenues in our first year (FYI: Our software list price was around $ 150K). I basically told him that given the clients arrogance and the fact that they gave up their leverage, meaning that they were basically screwed without us, that I would not offer a single percent discount even if it meant a potential loss of sale. I mean in simple terms, we were their only option period. We had them by their balls. Why the heck would we negotiate down or even offer a discount. Long story short, they are the only customer that I know of who paid full list price on nearly 6 copies of the tool and with maintenace and support thrown in, it was well over $ 1.2M when the deal was closed.

The two keywords here are Knowledge and Leverage. Know what is your customers' pain not just for today, but for what's on the horizon. Educate your field marketing, sales and application engineers to keep a eye and an ear out for information that may help you negotiate better terms. Hot heads who some company insiders consider as god (because they usually speak in a loud voice) must be kept away from customers or even let go. This is simply because their ability to supposedly keep a well oiled machine on the inside may be compromised by the fact that they are not able to handle the same on the outside.

A Mighty Ping Pong Palooza

2008-09-14T09:08:00.012-04:00

I had the opportunity to participate in a Ping Pong Matchup organized by Howard Lindzon. The event was sponsored by BuddyMedia and held at the Wang Chen's Table Tennis Club (250 W 100th St) on the upper west side of Manhattan. However I must say the place looked more like a Wang Chen's dungeon. The basement area where the ping pong palooza was held was steamy hot. I had to be careful to keep myself hydrated as you did not have to do much to start sweating in that cramped arena. Mike and Kass Lazerow (CEO and COO of BuddyMedia) had pulled together some great refreshments for the participants.

I must say that I made it to the final 16 only to be bested by Ben Kartzman, CEO of Spongecell. He ultimately went on to win the paloozathon beating Nate Westheimer. I ran into Aaron Task 0f Yahoo tech ticker fame at the event.

Post palooza celebrations were at "The Abbey Pub" on 237 W 105th st. I also did meet some old friends Wayne and made some new friends Vishy, Adarsh, Timothy Sykes, Patrick Courtney, Scott, ozsultan, Brian, Leora and more. You can find some pictures here. I had a great time and the event was great for networking.

In the end I did get something - a Tshirt from Spiritual Gangster, a clothing company based out of Scottsdale Arizona.

A divergence of sorts

2008-09-05T19:48:00.004-04:00

Well time for a quick update.

I have been hard at work with JP and RB over the last few weeks. It seems that we may have some help finally on the Blackberry front. Very shortly we will have our software on the desktop, the Windows Mobile, the Blackberry and the iPhone platforms.

Well this update is not really about all that. I am writing this post just to update some of the readers that I will be now separating my personal blog from my professional blog. Meaning this blog will become my personal rant space. I will write here about things that I know about or things that I want to know about or something like that. Here I will also write about my personal experiences of this past year. I call it my entrepreneurial sabbatical. Don't get me wrong. Its no sabbatical. But it certainly was a welcome change from the previous industry that I was in. Going up to my Boss and saying I am resigning was hard. I had a comfy job, a great salary, good perks and all. I knew the ins and outs of the industry and the entire eco-system. But I was ready for a change and I had to get out of it. Now I am so excited to be doing the things that I have been doing over the last few months. Its been a process of discovery. Discovery of the new, the unknown and also unique ideas of how to link the new to the old.

I am moving over my technology and work related discussions to my blog on http://blogs.mobow.com/latest/. You can visit that site to learn more about our product and our future direction with MOBOW, our startup.

Good Luck. Follow me here for my rants about this and that and all things relevant.

The Viability and Monetization Potential of Social Networks

2008-07-12T10:26:00.019-04:00

Is there money to be made in social networks (SN)? Well if you are interested in SN’s and are a developer or an entrepreneur building tools that leverage SN’s in the web 2.0 world, or for the mobile arena, then that is a very important question for you. As an entrepreneur myself developing products for the mobile presence space, I am constantly quizzing myself with the single question “Can the business model work or sustain in this changing eco-system”? Well, if you are interested in finding out more, you should set aside the last Monday of this month (July 28th 2008) and come to the Mobile Monday event at the Samsung Experience Center (10 Columbus Circle, NYC) for an expert-panel discussion. Lubna Dajani of Stratamerge ™ and Co-founder at mobilemonday-NY, will be moderating a panel of experts, entrepreneurs and others with the discussion centered on the subject “The Viability and Monetization Potential of Social Networks”. She does plan to share some of her initial findings of Stratemerge™’s study on social networks and debate the findings and potential market implications.

Current methods of monetization come from two areas. One is the advertisers, who flock to the sites despite the anemic response rates. The second method involves the user who pays for some premium service. SN operators, who rely solely on ad based revenue models, have to convince their customers that there is continued value in advertising on these networks.

A recent BusinessWeek article titled "Generation Myspace is Getting Fed Up" revealed certain shocking advertisement metrics; Response rates of 0.04% (on SN’s) compared to a 0.2% in general on the web. Response rate numbers like 0.04% to 0.2% cannot continue to be an acceptable ROI number for those who spend money on advertisements on the web. One industry executive put it right when he said, "it’s really hard to make money when the click through rate is that anemic". Read my article "Ad Deluge on our senses" written earlier this year. Another report in "VentureBeat", reported flat to falling ad revenues for June 08. What is interesting to note in that report is the pubmatic's ad price index of web publishers by site type. One can clearly see that SN sites have the lowest ECPM's among the other site types. You can find more details on the report at pubmatic's site.

Will consumers pay to play in a SN? The value of the extended social network fades over time unless there is a continued exchange of relevant and contextual dialogue. One has to ask the question, “What is my network’s NET-worth”? How exactly am I benefiting by participating in the SN’s? SN’s will need to continue to provide overall value to the community and unique value to each user. If this duality is not satisfied, the users will leave.

In my personal opinion, as the world moves toward mobile gadgets and phones, factors such as relevance and context become more important. Desktop centric SN users’ initial euphoric experience of finding and reconnecting with old friends is usually followed by information overload and eventual disillusion. The ad model will also have to change and provide users with a meaningful experience as opposed to pure product promotion. It is imperative that new applications provide a platform for intelligent information delivery, one that provides immense value to the user in their daily activities.

SN sites will also have to control spammers and unwanted business solicitation that irritate users. Twitter (a microblogging site), a service that I use, is an example where this happens. Many businesses hide their real identity, get accounts on twitter, try and get people to follow them so that they can spam them with the irrelevant material. As for me, my current rule is to periodically scan my followers and delete/block those who have no profile information. I try and control what’s relevant and contextual to me. Recent reports by bloggers and other SN site users have evidenced the fact that some of the SN application sites are resporting to spam themselves in an effort to increase their user base leaving a very bad user experience for the end user.

SN’s will have to create new forms of attention aggregation and inform, entertain and allow for fulfilling content consumption to effectively provide a platform for monetization.

Consumer Freedom and Choice in US Wireless market. Is it here yet?

2008-06-01T21:39:00.012-04:00

Yes my dear friends, I have been in radio silence for the last few weeks due to a number of reasons. Over the last few months we have been busy at work at our mobile startup travelling and meeting people from NY to CA. We have spoken to a number of people about our project and assessed our current tack. We are also running into road-bumps and challenges that most every startup faces. Our market validation has proven that there is a need for the type of product that we are building. Well, enough of that. Lets move on to what I want to talk about now.

During a recent trip out to California to attend the TIECON conference, I sat through a panel discussion featuring some big-wigs from the telecom industry. During the open Q&A portion of the session, I sent in my SMS question to the panel and asked this of them: "Do you think that the american conusumer has the best experience and choice when it comes to wireless services"? Most people on the panel which featured representatives from multiple carriers and others including Google, agreed that the American consumer does not have the best in service, technology and choice when it comes to wireless services. For ex: Until recently consumers had to pay steep fees of upto $ 175 to change or stop the service midway through the contract. For years, carriers have charged steep fees as a means to either recover their costs for subsidizing the phones early on or to prevent churn. Another issue is that the American consumer has to buy the phones that the carrier issues. In most other developed and developing countries, you can walk into a store, buy a phone of your choice and then get service from the carrier of your choice. Once again, consumer choice is limited by this. Recent press announcements by Verizon and their CEO's words from the recently concluded D6 conference suggest that this control is on its way out and that real consumer choice with respect to handsets is coming soon. You can watch some of the video excerpts from the event at http://tinyurl.com/5jt3dv.

The other area of concern is the control exercised by the carrier in terms of what software you can actually load onto a device. With the advent of feature rich smart phones, these devices can do a lot more than regular phones. I mean these smart phones are actually mini mobile computers. Up until recently, carriers exerted control over what software one could load on these devices maintaining that it was imperative that any 3rd party software not jeopardize the phone operation. For a carrier the ability of the device to make or receive that call is very important. Due to this reasoning, many innovative third party companies had to play by the carriers' strict guidelines. In this "pay to play" scenario the carriers wanted the software manufacturers to charge the users for the software. For many innovative companies that may have not been the ultimate business model. This made it difficult for many of them to survive or succeed. Most recently, at the same D6 conference (http://tinyurl.com/5jt3dv), Verizon Wireless' CEO announced that by the end of this year (2008), they will have a two day turn around on certification of 3rd party software. This would enable consumers to download any certified application and use it. This quick turnaround in the certification process would enable innovative new companies to develop smart new applications, have them quickly certified and available for release to mobile phone consumers. Only time will tell if Verizon will keep to its word.

Change is visible on the horizon and many things are moving in the right direction. But any change in the communication arena is a slow process in the US.

Doing my part to combat Global Warming

2008-04-21T10:33:00.009-04:00

Oh well, I am taking a small break from my usual tech-rants to rant about something else today. Today's blog is about doing my part to combat global warming. Last Thursday night, I picked up a box full of tree saplings that I had ordered about 2 weeks ago. I had ordered about 80 saplings of various tree types. They range in variety from dogwoods, oak, lilacs and some evergreens. I am doing this as part of my contribution to “Earth Day” (4/22/08) and “Arbor Day” (4/25/08). My goal with this sapling planting project is to drive carbon sequestration. I sincerely believe that many of the existing methods to fight “global warming” do not really address how to increase the utilization of Carbon-dioxide (CO₂). Excessive CO₂ levels in the atmosphere is one of the reasons often cited for global warming.

Yes, there are actually 80 saplings in this picture.
Each little stick will grow up to be a tree (aided by some serious TLC)

Let’s face it. We are massively dependent on oil as our main energy source. The alternate fuels market (ethanol etc) currently requires the use of precious resources such as clean water and arable land and therefore is not a truly viable substitute for oil. Wind and Solar are the main source of renewable energy which do not have substantial natural resources requirements. However, the input materials cost and maintenance costs for these energy sources are still high and these power sources are still out of the reach of most people as the end product is expensive. Many local zoning requirements (U.S) also prohibit or have controls on these installations as some people view them as an eyesore. Moreover, all of these alternate energy sources put together do not even come close to meeting our future requirements for energy.

As for me, I believe that it would not be prudent to suddenly change all our daily activities to accommodate a reduction in consumption of energy. Any temporary band-aid solution only goes so far and may in fact harm the environment in the long term while seemingly providing a short term remedy. I will try to reduce my carbon footprint, but however that will require a lot more thought than some random action that results in other kinds of environmental issues.

So, I have decided that from this year on, I will plant as many tree saplings as I can, so that in very near future, they will help in the generation of O₂ and utilization of CO₂. My aim at a minimum is to somehow balance my carbon output by planting enough trees that create oxygen. I truly believe that, by doing so I have acted in a way that provides a solution for the long term. So with this in mind, over the next week or two I will be planting these saplings. While we cannot change our methods in one day, we can certainly take small steps toward doing our part for the environment and for the future of our planet. I hope you do your part. Go plant a tree.

Cash is King. Cash-Like is Not

2008-04-06T11:05:00.011-04:00

I am writing this article in an effort to refocus the blame on who is really responsible for the recent write downs and charges that companies have been forced to take due to the drop in demand for auction rate securities.

There have been posts by many VC's recently on this issue including one by Fred Wilson Our Run In With Auction Rates And What It Taught Me About Markets where he explained what actions he personally took on his holdings in such debt-instruments to avoid such write downs or losses. He was prudent and also his investment advisors called him in a timely manner so that he could act on it. I am sure there were others who understood the potential risk of "cash-like" financial instruments and took timely action to mitigate the risks.

It is absolutely important to understand the complete risk and the liquidity situation of all your finances and investments. I am sure if the right questions had been asked and answered, and if the papers signed at the onset of the agreement stated that there are certain inherent risks associated with these arcane debt instruments, then the people who signed them bear the ultimate responsibility. One can't blame an institution for writing down the auction rate debt instrument and hence a loss on the value of the original cash investment, unless a fraud has been committed.

Late Last year after, after some of the initial shudders in some of the banks and brokerages, I re-evaluated all my accounts that I hold at various institutions, verified that they met the FDIC insurance limits (for MMAs) and that all the other accounts were under the SIPC limits as well. I called the various institutions, asked them to reconfirm the federal insurance amounts that they had taken on accounts, asken them what extra insurance they carried and how I was protected in case of a bank failure. Basically I did a complete "risk assessment". I did this to fully understand my "risk picture" - so that I knew what was "SAFE" and what was risky.

This is the same mentality that should be exhibited by a start-up company. The management along with the investors must assess and fully understand the risks associated with different kind of debt instruments. Past safe practices of such instruments does not necessarily mean continued safety. If someone made a suggestion to put in the company's cash originally acquired through Venture Funding, into auction rate securities, here are the questions that I would have asked.

1: how different is this from a money market account or a CD?
2: Are these deposits insured by the government if the bank failed or there was a "run on the bank"?
3: I understand that this has been done for the last X number of years, but can you tell me what are the possible scenarios under which this so called "cash-equivalent" can lose its value? Please give me the scenario however remote it may be. If you can't give me a scenario, then you the "bank" has to give me in writing that this is truly "cash" and is fully convertible to cash equivalent at a minimum of the original deposit.

The bottom line is, if the debt-instrument cannot be federally insured, then the accounts are not the same as "cash". Hopefully the investment professionals who advice on the portfolio construction for the cash that a company is sitting on, are astute regarding the risks associated with these debt-instruments. Its more important for you to ascertain if "cash-like-investments" is "cash".

You need to have an investment policy which you should review and question constantly. Ask those questions regarding risk freely without hesitation at the risk of appearing stupid. After all it the money with which you plan to build your company. You should always assume that no investment is risk free and the higher the apparent return the higher the risk.

Cash is King. Cash-Like is Not

Are We done yet?

2008-04-05T12:49:00.049-04:00

Recession (the "R" word) is a word easily bandied about these days by everybody. It seems that it has become the most used word for Q1-08 already. With job losses in the US, the sub-prime slime, and the recent Bear Stearns Circus, we seem to have our hands full with financial news on a daily basis. Some have started to use the other "R" word, Recovery and have predicted that we have hit the bottom and that Q2 and the second half of 2008 will lead to a recovery. As i thought about this, I just wanted to take a quick snapshot of how our markets have fared over the last 6 months v/s other major markets. So I did a quick computation of percentage drops of
1: % drop 52 week highs v/s the closing numbers for 4/4/08 and
2: % drop of index value at open on Jan 08 v/s closing numbers for 4/4/08.

Here's a rolling snapshot from East to west of some major market indices. Note the numbers are approximate. (All graphs & Numbers from Yahoo Finance)

The worst preforming index:
Shanghai Composite down almost 44% since its 52 week high and down 34.5% YTD

The best (of the Worst)
Dow Jones Industrial Average down 11.7% since its 52 week high and down 7.13% YTD

You decide if US markets have reached the bottom. I know there is no sense in comparing some of these indices directly, but still I thought it was interesting to show the difference in the percentage drops between the majors.

(JAPAN) NIKKEI 225 Index Value: 13,292.22 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 11,691.00 - 18,297.00 [% total drop = 27.35%]

Year open at 15,155.73: [% drop YTD 2008 = 12.29%]

(CHINA) SSE Composite Index Value: 3,446.24 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 3,271.29 - 6,124.04 [% total drop = 43.72%]

Year open at 5265: [% drop YTD 2008 = 34.5%]

(HONG KONG) HANG SENG Index Value: 24,264.63 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 19,386.70 - 31,958.40 [% total drop = 24.07%]

Year open at 27,632.19: [% drop YTD 2008 = 12.18%]

(INDIA) BSE SENSEX Index Value: 15,343.12 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 12,904.80 - 21,206.80 [% total drop = 27.64%]

Year open at 20,393: [% drop YTD 2008 = 24.76%]

(GERMANY) DAX Index Value: 6,763.39 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 6,167.82 - 8,151.57 [% total drop = 17.02%]

Year open at 8,045.97: [% drop YTD 2008 = 15.93%]

(U.K.) FTSE 100 Index Value: 5,947.10 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 5,338.70 - 6,754.10 [% total drop = 11.94%]

Year open at 6,456.89: [% drop from start of 2008 = 7.88%]

(U.S.A.) DJIA Index Value: 12,609.42 @close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 11,508.70 - 14,280.00 [% total drop = 11.70%]

Year open at 13,261.82: [% drop from start of 2008 = 7.13%]

(U.S.A.) NASDAQ COMPOSITE Value: 2,370.98 @close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 2,155.42 - 2,861.51 [% total drop = 17.16%]

Year open at 2653.91: [% drop from start of 2008 = 10.67%]

Well I sincerely hope that we have reached a bottom in some sense here. I say this because if U.S. markets continue to fall further to be more in line with India and China we have a long way to go to the bottom. Well is the economy in a recession? I was at an Apple store today and the place was humming. Kids and parents buying more gadgets. Heck I myself bought a few items.

As for India, Food Prices Drive India Inflation., rapid inflationary pressures recently forced the government to stop the export of all non-basmati rice. The finance minister even lashed out at western nations regarding the use of corn for ethanol production when the world's poorer countries were going hungry. The rise in food prices is not just in India, it's a worldwide phenomenon. Q&A Rising World Food Prices.

While the inflationary pressures are not so high in the U.S, the prices of wheat and other staples have increased in the past few months. Americans only seem to relate to prices of fuel with increasing urgency, but respond with the "Boiling Frog Syndrome" mentality with respect to the rise in the cost of food.

But some do notice and it's not the poor. It is real surprising that the ones who do notice are the real wealthy. One such person recently came back home after a long vacation and complained about the increased cost of a bagel (from a micro blog post that I follow). Maybe that's why they get wealthy in the first place.

Social Isolation - Physically present but mentally absent

2008-04-02T22:09:00.008-04:00

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go astray

– Robert Burns

I sat down the other day reminiscing of a class during my MBA days. The Professor gave an analogy comparing the IT industry to the plumbing industry. He talked about a time when people became more absorbed in the details of the fitting and pipes, but forgot about the water. It made me think of how the world has built up network infrastructure for information without actually stopping to think of how much of the data that traverses it is actually relevant. The arrival of new gadgets and gizmos that utilize both the infrastructure of the wired and the wireless world are giving way to a new social isolation phenomenon sweeping the planet; Physically present, but mentally absent. Anywhere I go these days, in the city, at airports, restaurants, and malls, people are either peering into a mobile device or its hugging their ears. Even among groups of people there’s always one or more distracted by a device. As I pondered for a bit, Clint Eastwood’s “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” came to mind.

The Good: One of the areas that availability of the network infrastructure is really making a difference is in the area of education. You can now have virtual class rooms half way across the world where students from distant countries join in via an interactive video conferencing classroom. An individual student or a classroom full of them can interact with the professor and other students who are hundreds of miles away as if every one of them were physically in the same room. Information delivered through this technology has made distance ignorable, while creating a highly productive educational session. The existence of the network infrastructure has also helped other industries such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals and many others.

The Bad: These days most everyone has a cell phone, and a personal laptop computer. I have personally seen instances when people are replying to text messages, talking on their phones and looking into their laptops while driving in vehicles at highway speeds. Does this “instant-gratification” world we now live in really make us that much more productive? I believe that the existence of these technologies have cut down the intrinsic delay that used to allow people to think over a query and respond in an astute manner. The perceived expectation of responses in real time has really cut down on the quality of the interaction between people. We have to question ourselves if technology has really increased productivity or caused more disruption? It is sad to note that the very same people who benefit from the education at virtual classrooms are also affected by the high tech distraction of texting and email while the class is in session.

The Ugly: One recent afternoon, as I came to the end of the running trail at a local park, I happened to notice a family setup on a bench near the tot-lot. The father was working on his portable computer with one child by his side playing a portable videogame. The mother was talking on a cell phone while minding the other child that played on the swing set. Each to their own space; Is social isolation the future we are building for our kids? The next generation of kids are going to be mere “Talking Heads”.

Conclusion: There are significant benefits and some bad side effects to society from technology. It is up to the people to control how technology will not become a disruption in their lives. Etiquette coach Colette Swan says that, "We are becoming an internalized society. We are living in our laptops, our cell phones, and in our texting". See Michael Parekh's blog Gadget Etiquette in meetings. Dan Saffer of Adaptive path coined the phrase topless, where companies and universities are forcing meeting or classroom participants to ditch laptops and phones. Some of the participants swear that their productivity has increased by leaving behind their electronic gadgets to such meetings. I am sure some other die hard tech fans will argue that Text messaging, emails and cell phones have not distracted the prioritization of activities.

Simplicity, will be key to success with Mobile Applications

2008-03-06T22:54:00.010-05:00

These days there is a lot of buzz about the newest applications that are available or coming for the mobile phone. Hundreds of companies are getting venture funding for developing the next set of applications for the mobile device. Much of the focus here is on delivering fragmented applications that take the user away from the core phone use. Any application developed for the phone has to consider the core phone use and be designed specifically for the limitations of the device with respect to the form factor and usability. Fact is, typing on the small key board makes it more difficult for people to have to enter a lot of information or click through many levels of menus to get the information that they require. Applications need to keep power consumption in mind. As much as the battery life has improved, graphic intensive applications are draining them already. One of the fundamental issues that need to be accomplished is that the software for the mobile device has to be designed from the device out, not the desktop/internet in. It is not about having the internet on your phone. The application designed for a mobile device should allow access to all the information that a person normally wants at their fingertips, at the time that they want it, without having to search for it. Tie in location, and time and context and my mobile phone should do all the work for me. I don’t want coolness of an application to drain out the battery and keep forcing me to tether myself to a plug-point frequently.

On the other hand, the current crop of mobile social networking platforms do NOT enhance interpersonal communication or reduce the clutter of asynchronous communication. They only add more distraction and noise and completely drown out meaningful communication. Recently I have talked to some Myspace and Facebook users, who claim to have over 800 contacts. I probed further to note that the core group of people that they communicate with is very limited are listed on their mobile devices and after a while the interaction with all these contacts on facebook and myspace also gets limited. Now translate that to mobile. Would you really put up with more noise on your mobile device? Ask yourself if the unbounded network that mostly becomes irrelevant over time is what you really want to use the device for. Recently I saw an ad for Facebook on an iphone; Novelty YES. Usefulness ZERO. What personal value does that add to anyone’s daily routine, especially on the mobile device? Does having access to Facebook on your mobile device really enhance personal productivity? A “boredom-response” application does not enhance productivity.

Yahoo! also announced onePlace™ (to be released Q2 – 08) claiming that it brings together all your interests, passions and important information into a single location, creating a rich, highly personalized experience around it for you. What will that do to power consumption on the device if it has to constantly bring loads of data to your device?

Other mobile widget apps offer to take web based content from a variety of sources, restructure the data and then push so called customized content to the phone throughout the day. All they do is offer yet another fragmented application of force fitting the web based information infrastructure onto the mobile device. Relevance and context are once again left far behind.

It is very important to note that coolness of an application is not necessarily monetizable in the mobile world. Ability to provide value to the general user and designing with respect for the form-factor of the device is imperative. Connecting relevant people and the pertinent information behind them is what is needed. Successful applications for the mobile world will be those that keep it simple and relevant.

Make My SmartPhone Smarter

2008-03-02T09:54:00.005-05:00

I have been thinking about this and I wonder why my mobile phone can't do more for me. I want to delegate more work to my phone. I want to tell my phone in advance all of my interests, tastes, likes and dislikes and want it to constantly scan things out there for me instead of sitting idle all day waiting to send or receive a call or email. I want to be able to just pick up the phone at any time and have the information that I normally look for instantly available. Well I have a smart phone with more processing power on it than some of the first Rockets that went into outer space. You would think that it can do more.

Current Mobile Phone use model: Most people use their mobile device to mainly talk, send & receive txt messages & email, listen to voicemail, access & browse a few websites, take pictures and video etc. Most of this activity requires a lot of keystrokes on that little form factor keyboard. It is difficult to type even for someone experienced in typing away like me. Yes, the iPhone has eliminated the keyboard and gone with the bolder touch screen version. Maybe that's the way to go in the future. However some people don't like the iPhone specifically for that because their fingers are too big or their nails get in the way. That’s a discussion for another day.

Let's get back to the original conversation. The current crop of applications for the mobile devices that are out there get or retrieve information from some place when you click on a link or a news item. You are forced sometimes to go from one application to another to get all the data that you want. I don’t like to leave one application to another to get the things I want. I want a better phone and I want it to be constantly updating itself of things that I care and follow and discard items when I either move out of a certain location or a certain time has passed. How do I go about getting this? and what are all the things that I want it to do?

I want my phone regardless of which make, model, OS, network, carrier or technology to be able to keep me updated on certain things that I most care about. Now first: what do I care about. Well for starters the most important thing on my phone is my contact list. If someone made it in there, then they are family, friends, colleagues or businesses. All of whom or which I interact on a daily basis or with a certain frequency. This small bounded relevant network is most important to me. Do I care about other people beyond this network? Yes I do, I may meet new people, interact with them from time to time, however if they become important enough or relevant to my personal, professional or social life, then they move into my address book on my phone. Are you all with me so far? OK good!

Now think about this. I am a busy person, highly efficient and I don’t have time to waste. I am sure you are in the same situation. So the things that I don’t like are calling someone to get to their Voicemail, or them having to call me a leave me a Voicemail. If I have to talk to someone, then I need to know if they are available for me. If they are busy then I don’t want to call them. If I knew they were busy then I want to send them a quick Voice note (not text) asking them to call me when they were free. But I want to do this without having to dial their number, going through their voicemail system (precious seconds wasted) and then leaving a message. Wherever they are, however busy they are, they notice that I have a Vnote for them and listen to it or read (via voice to txt) it. Now how cool is that?

Now as for other types of mixed media needs I would have to categorize these based on certain people that I follow. If I wanted the general news, then I could just go to CNN, Fox or any one of the other major news networks. But let’s say that I want to track some one’s blog which I follow. I want my phone to have that information and then tell me that it’s ready to read. This person may or may not even be a contact on my address book, but they can exist as a named person in my contact list and anything and everything that I need to know about them (changes to their website, streaming video broadcast availability, hosted events) must be made available on my phone for me. Why do I need to go to the desktop and be forced to read through a whole lot of other stuff before I get to the component of the news that I care about. In addition I’d be subjected to advertisements that I am not really "interested" in and I don’t especially want to view them on my mobile device. I would never be interested in looking or clicking-on an ad on my mobile device unless it knew exactly what I wanted, where I wanted it and gave me some incentive to follow through with it.

On the other hand, the patterns in my life are not overly complicated. I'd like my phone to start learning about how I live my life. Yes, I want my smartphone to start tracking my moves so that a resident application can track all that and somehow I can take all that information feed it into a different application and learn something more about efficiency. Am I turning into an efficiency evangelist? No not really, I just want to constantly reform myself to be more efficient in the surroundings that I am presented with everyday. So let's say that I am in NYC, its 11:30 am and I just finished a meeting uptown and have to head to a downtown meeting in 2 hours. I want my phone to tell me based on my current location, my next destination, my interests, the traffic situation along my with need to be replenished with food(energy) what are all the things out there for me to do in that time. I could search for things to do, but what fun is that when i have to do all the work. I want an application that suggests things that I should do, in the available timeframe and still make my meeting on time.

Oh Gotta go, my phone's telling me that if I leave right now, i could pick up a gizmo that I always wanted at 30% off at a store on the way to my afternoon tennis game.

Be in the "know", when on the go.

Delegate to your smartphone and make it do more for you.

Coming soon to a phone near you. http://www.mobow.com

Ad deluge on our senses

2008-02-15T13:31:00.006-05:00

The recent BusinessWeek article titled "Generation Myspace is Getting Fed Up" - http://tinyurl.com/2sbebp is interesting in that it reveals certain advertisement metrics which are really pathetic and shocking.

Let me explain. The article says that social networks have some of the lowest response rates on the web, and advertisers and ad placements firms all agree on this. Well the shocking metric here is that only 0.04% of people who see their ads on social networking sites click on them compared to 0.2% on the web. How can 0.04% be an acceptable number for ROI? In fact how can even 0.2% be an acceptable number? These kind of response rates should make those who spend money on advertisements on the web do a double-take and stop to think about it. As one industry executive put it, "its really hard to make money when the click through rate is that anemic". I mean empires have been created based on these rates!?

MySpace and Facebook have supposedly recognized the issue and seem to think that increased targeted advertising will spur users to pay more attention. Let me be clear about this. I am willing to bet that any user who goes to an application as a "boredom response" will not be interested in any ads. You have to give the user products and services that actually help them and provide greater value than these unbounded desktop centric social networking sites to be able to monetize them. Just tying relevance to a search or tying relevance to a location ain't going to cut it. You will still frustrate the user because they were not interested in seeing the ad in the first place.

How exactly do the current crop of social networking sites bring value to a paying customer? The above rates are a sure sign that while there are millions of users on the sites, none of them are interested in looking at or clicking on the ads. There are some very stupid people who aren't realizing that they are losing a lot of money to display ads on a medium that only promises the huge potential of impressions, but delivers none.

The current idea of relevance as voiced by many of these companies (portals, search engines and social networking sites) is that if someone searches for something then display an advertisement based on the text entered in the search. Can you really tie relevance to that. You have to think bigger. You have to find ways to capture the real intent behind the search. The above response rate metrics prove that relevance certainly cannot be gleaned from the search "text" alone.

Innovation lies ahead, in being able to track the intent and then tie it to relevance and deliver information to the user that is of value to them.

Is search going to be the core function for monetization of the mobile phone

2008-02-12T08:11:00.002-05:00

Well i find that hard to believe. Just think of the number of times that people use the mobile device to search in their daily phone use. I have one simple question. How many times do you pick up your cellphone to look for your next meal?

"Oh I am hungry, I need my phone to tell me where the nearest pizza store that offers the most competetive price/slice is." Or for that matter how many times do you use search for the most mundane things in your daily life. I will let you answer that question yourself.

Lets talk about this. People use mobile phones when they are up and about. Lets just assume that it means that about 12 hours of the day are available to look at the mobile device. That does not automatically translate to constantly staring at the mobile phone. Most people lead predictable lives, and go about their lives in a robotic fashion. They wake up, shower, get dressed, have breakfast at their favorite place (either home or the bagel store down the street), get to work, work, go to their favorite hangout after work (gym, bar or whatever), eat dinner and get back to bed. This leads me to believe that the total "search" time when most people need "search' as a way to lead them to the next step of their daily activity is all but a sliver of their total daily time.

I would argue that if you are mobile and are constantly in need of a search mechanism to lead you to the next step, then you are either constantly lost or are traveling in a new place. The former leads me to believe that you need more help than just a cellphone. If its the latter, there exists the possibility that you would "ask" someone where to eat or what place to visit. This would most likely be a colleague, a friend at the office in the new city you are visiting or someone with local tacit knowledge.

I know we need more discussion on this point, but I question if "search" is going to be the core function for monetization of the mobile phone. I think not.

Watch Rich Miner of Google on his monetization scheme, from his World Mobile Congress interview on youtube at

My Rants

2008-02-11T20:31:00.001-05:00

I am happy to announce that I have begun to blog. Hmm, lets see what interests me. First I have to say that I have always been a technology and gadget geek for as long as I can remember.

I was one of the early adopters of TIVO (though after some persuasion by Tom Churylo who I do not consider to be a gadget geek by any means) and just recently upgraded to a HD-THX series 3 version. I must say that TIVO completely revolutionized the way we watch TV. I couldn't believe it when in my MBA days, during a marketing class we did a TIVO case study and I was the only one in the class to have one of those. Well anyway to cut a long story short I had a hard time defending my purchase of TIVO after the class discussion. Who cares, I still love it. I will convince Jomy Pidiath one of these days that it is a worthy gadget to have.

Well on to other things. I love to apply technology in meaningful ways and not in wasteful ways. For example: I have serious issues with these so called energy saver bulbs, hybrid cars (especially huge hybrid trucks) etc., and believe that short term technology bandaids only serve to cause greater harm. We'll discuss this more later and I will explain all this in more detail. This intro blog will not do justice to this issue.

I am also interested in politics. But lately I have been removed from it due to my focus on my startup which is now taking up most of my waking hours. I am all for flat-tax (single postcard method), or better yet, held at source. You know the tax system is out-dated when the government and the companies in this country have to outsource some of the tax related work. I hate the AMT. It was never ever meant for me. I have been paying it for a long time now. Since CONS@gress never ever seems to fix this issue and instead seem to adopt some bandaids, the AMT will haunt me a lot longer than it really should. On another note, you know something is wrong with the Tax system when Warren Buffet's secretary pays more taxes (% wise) than him. Well that's what he told Jane Wells a few months ago on a CNBC show. I am all for fair taxation, and a complete overhaul of this archaic and gigantic bureaucratic organization. Well more on this later. Well about this economic stimulus package with the rebate checks. If you asked me, those people who are going to get it, are promptly going to spend it on Chinese made imports at Walmart. Does that really stimulate our economy!?

Hmm. What else interests me. I love to play golf (though Tom thinks I can knock out a few people with my drives). I love to sail and I sincerely wish I could devote more (if not some) time to this. Well maybe after MOBOW, I will have all the time in the world to do so. I have also promised myself to run "a" marathon. I do love mountain/trail biking and hiking. I love photography and though I am not that good at it, I believe that i do take some good pictures (thanks mainly to the expensive cameras I purchase)

and last but not the least I love baseball. Yes, i admit I am a hard core Yankee Fan. (I routinely have these great discussions/arguments with Sean, Shawn, Tom, Boyd and Bobby about it). My low point in being a baseball fan was when i had to watch game 6 and 7 of the 2004 ALCS in San Jose during a business trip. To make it more difficult Jeff Fleider was calling me every two minutes. The worst part was all the Oakland fans in the bay area were rooting for the Sox and I felt like I was the was the only Yankee fan in the bay area those two days. I felt so lonely. It was a difficult time. Well The NY Giants certainly helped me in some strange way this past SuperBowl. I can call all those 18-1 boston fans and get back. I am not such a big fan of the NFl though.

Well I want to end this initial blog/rant on this note as its time for dinner. Well this is a start and more will come, I promise. Good Stuff.

Go MOBOW.

www.mobow.com