Indian Politics : Honey - Show me the money !!!!

Vijay Punya Singh softly closes the door of the conference room and punches the air with his fist, his face glowing with joy. Vijay, an entrepreneur and an MBA student of The Some Business Skool had just managed to persuade Silicon Valley venture capitalists to fund his new B2B venture paisa-de-vote-le.com with $2 billion dollars of seed money.

paisa-de-vote-le.com has a unique business model. It seeks to collaborate with democratic governments all over the world to promote their "national interests". The fundamental business premise here is that all countries have national interests that are very important for the country's people to prosper, and that these national interests have to be supported by members of the government to be successful. But unfortunately, sometimes these members of the government are disconnected from reality or fail to understand the importance of these "national interests". This leads to the formation of multiple groups who vociferously oppose each others stand on the national issue. This is where paisa-de-vote-le.com comes, as someone who understands the opposing parties opinion on the issue, it can broker a peace agreement.

paisa-de-vote-le.com believes that the members of government are not fundamentally stupid or mentally challenged. In fact, the company believes that members of the government are very good at mathematics and just need to be shown the right perspective and direction. In order to provide this right perspective, paisa-de-vote-le.com will provide a medium for effective communication between the common public and the corporate world and eminent members of the government.

paisa-de-vote-le.com proposes to select certain eminent members of the government from each opposing group to lead that group into negotiation with the other group and common public. In order to ensure that every one in the public gets their fair chance to interact with honourable members of government, paisa-de-vote-le.com will auction icon members of the government in public. This is good business strategy, as your problem and perspective on the national issue is only as important as your purse.

So members of public can logon on paisa-de-vote-le.co.in [for India], and register for a free account (WOW!!!). Then they can start bidding for the icon members. The highest bid is the winning bid and the winner will receive the complete attention of the icon member. Once all icon members have been given the right public perspective of the issue (the guidelines of paisa-de-vote-le.com say that sold is not a tactful word), the icon members will be given 80 % (paisa-de-vote-le.com will keep the other 20%) of the perspective prize (again not selling prize). Icon members must use this perspective prize to share the public's perspective with opposing non icon members and use it to change the perspective of the member from opposing groups (or national political parties, state political parties and independent political candidates in India's case). This will generate consensus and agreement on issues of national importance and also add transparency and the positive influence of freely operating market forces, which is a win-win situation for all.

Vijay Punya Singh has come up with a truly innovative and sustainable business model. It is to be noted that Vijay Punya Singh is grandson of genius Indian business man and political guru "IMMORTAL" Singh (update : this is no paa'ji with a turban).

Hollywood Movies - WALL E Movie Review

I watched the Animation movie WALL E yesterday. A beautiful, funny and a hearty Sci Fi film.

How Disney manages to come up again and again with beautiful movies is some thing that eludes me. WALL E is an animation movie created by PIXAR, now acquired by Disney but nevertheless remains a distinct entity not part of the Disney Animation Studios. PIXAR has some of the best animation movies produced to its credit including Toy Story I & II, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Cars and the recent Academy winning film Ratatouille.

I enjoyed watching this movie trememdously. This film seemed to light up and warm my soul, the bare simplicity and beauty of it was awesome and touching. The animation was like that of all Pixar films, ground breaking , innovative and visually striking. I particularly enjoyed the animation during the first 30 minutes of the movie. I was even more impressed by the sound engineering in the film. The sounds that the main characters in the movie made was very very representive of the feelings that were played on the screen. In terms of direction and technical work, this film is excellent.

Now a bit about the movie story itself. Wall E is the adventure love story of an extremely charming and sweet waste disposal robot. The movie begins against a very somber theme. Earth is a barren land, laid to waste by humans who have now left this planet. All that is now left in Earth are cities of waste. No plants, no greenery, no soil only drab dusty junk. Walks in Wall E, who's sole purpose of existance is to clear up this waste. For a robot, Wall E is a soulful creature perceiving and appreciating the value of tiny things like rubik cubes and zippo lighters in a huge pile of junk. His sole friend is a tiny cockroach. The relationship between the robot and the cockroach, although shown fleetingly, is a delight to watch. One day Wall E chances on a small plant, and takes it back to his workshop. Wall E watches Hello Dolly! on an Ipod hooked up to a VCR, facinated by the idea of love that is everlasting. One day, a super capable female robot lands on earth, sent by humans to check for the slightest indication of plant growth. Wall E is besotted with this super powerful female godess who can fly when he can only roll. Wall E courts her, making gifts out of junk and shows off. When he shows her the plant, she deactivates herself and sends a message to humans and a ship arrives to take her away. Wall E is in pain and does everything to get her back to normal. When the ship comes, he clutches to it desperately during takeoff, marking the beginning of an adventure in space.

As far as I am concerned, this may be a good film to watch with a very pissed girlfriend (or girl friends depending on how unlucky you are :-) ). It is romantic, funny and clean entertainment.

WALL E may very well become the most loved robot in cinema.

Rating -

Overall: 9/10 , Story: 8/10, Screen Play: 9, Technical Excellence:9/10, Watchability: 10/10

Poster Design - Wham !! Boom !! Whew !!

I just happened to come across some posters that I and one of my friend (a guy named Kannan) designed for some inter departmental events at college. We hung these posters as huge 6 feet by 8 feet banners throughout the entire length my my college corridors.

The ones below was designed for a basketball tournament.

The ones below were for the annual festival that I instituted.

It is great feeling to go back in time once in a while. :-)

Technology Takes - WWW & Internet (Take 1)

I just woke up to a fine Saturday afternoon. I am doing a lot of things right now which include studying for the GMAT, reading some eTOM specifications and watching Kamal's movie Dasavatharam. Work pressure has been pretty compelling last week, and I am trying to chill by writing and reading.

This post is the first of a 2 part post. I will touch base with historical developments that pushed the internet to become what it is now. I will also, in the second part of this post, expound in detail about technologies that I think will power the evolution of the internet for the next 5-10 years. I am not very sure why I chose this topic. I have been having muddled dreams of the Apple IPhone and 3G in India in sleep. I also faintly remember Eric Schmidt graciously dropping in and saying some things that I dont remember right now. Anyway, here it goes -

The WWW and Internet have metamorphosed in countless ways since the invention of the concept of networking in 1969 at ARPA , development of the first TCP/IP specification at Stanford in 1973-74, adoption of TCP/IP by the US Department of Defence as standard for military networking in 1983 and the invention of the web by Tim Berners Lee at CERN in 1990. The internet has certainly created a border less world, becoming ubiquitous in and radically transforming the way we lead our lives. What is incredible about the evolution of the internet is that this evolution is linked to and is the result of the invention of newer technologies.

The invention of Mosaic, a graphical web browser, released in 1993 propelled the internet to definite glory. Most popular browsers today retain the primary features of Mosaic. This was the beginning of a revolution because browsers in the early 90's were still text based. Mosaic was entirely different because it was based on point and click functionality.

Then in 1995, the invention of WebCrawler, a search engine that could search web content. Before WebCrawler, only web page titles could be searched. Lycos, which also offered web content seach also was introduced the same year and achieved critical business success.
Search was big business, and was ruled by Yahoo until 1998 when big daddy Google entered into the fray with a search engine powered by PageRank and started selling search ads (Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimates the size of this business in the next five-ten years to run into billions of dollars) in 2000.

The web in the end of 90's became the pretty much the in thing and made a lot of commercial sense. A lot of applications were built, and email became pretty ubiquitous. Businesses invested in the web, starting with a bang and a frenzy and ending with the 2001 dot com bust. This I think pretty much sums up what is known as Web 1.0.

Collective failure in any industry always results in critical introspection. The from the shadow of this failure emerges light and a newer outlook of things. The dot com bust in 2001 changed the internet in a number of ways. The most important was the emergence of new technology (or existing technology applied in newer ways). And so descended upon us thus the wisdom of crowds, or as I like to think - "From Collective failure arose Collective intelligence". Enter the Web 2.0.

RSS, AJAX, CSS, SOAP, REST, XML, PHP and Cloud Computing. These together, with other newer technologies make the new web extremely different, from a technical perspective in 3 ways - Rich Internet applications, web syndication and web services. I am sure non of this makes any sense :-). The point I am making here is that these allow you as an end user to do the following -
1. Experience applications like GoogleMaps, Orkut and Facebook
2. Actively distribute content that you put on the web to people who want to access it.
3. To socialize and network on the internet, exchanging information and ideas in ways never possible before.

Such collective efforts result in applications like Wikipedia and characterize Web 2.0. The web becomes a platform in its current avatar. Being a platform, Web 2.0 applications engage users and transform them into co-developers. Web 2.0 applications also become more rich in terms of the functionality they offer when more people use it. In effect, a Web 2.0 application is the result of the collective intelligence of the crowd.

Then there is also the phenomenon of virtual worlds like Second Life on the internet. The underlying concept is not new. The availability of cheap bandwidth which is only going to get cheaper, and advances in graphics and processor technology are making this possible. More on this in Take 2 of this topic.

This is a rather long post, but the ideas conveyed make it necessary to be that way. Any way gotta go !!!!

Gmat Wars - Best Books for GMAT

I have finally booked my GMAT examination. I am supposed to take it on 06-Aug-2008. This action is solely to make me scare/ inspire/ push me to start studying. So far it does not seem to be working. We have to wait and see :-).

In this post, I am going to write about GMAT books that I found very useful. I will write about other GMAT resources in a different post.

The Official Guides published by the GMAC are very good and pre-requisite resources for GMAT preparation. There are 3 Official books. The first book contains nearly 800 questions for both the verbal and the quantitaive section and also discusses the AWA section. The second and third books have nearly 300 questions each and discuss the GMAT Quantitative section and the GMAT Verbal section respectively. The official guides are very good resources for problem practice. Working on the official guides is very important because they represent the actual nature of the questions that you will encounter on the GMAT. I found the explanation to questions in the guides to be adequete, but many people think that the explanations are not clear enough. I will recommend that you solve every problem in the official guides, and read the explanations of all problems, irrespective of whether you got it right or wrong.

Verbal is my biggest weakness. As a matter of fact, I am very comfortable with written and spoken English, and in most cases can identify by ear if the sentence sounds right or not. Unfortunately, this is not good enough for GMAT Sentence Correction (SC). I have a fundamental feel of grammar, and instintively determine the grammatically correct form. But I cannot define a conjunction or an adverb. The only advantage is that GMAT tests only a handful of grammatical concepts. So SC is simply identifying and applying rules. The Manhattan Sentence Correction Guide is the best resource to learn GMAT SC rules. I improved my SC scoring by nearly 5 points. This is absolutely cool. The other major advantage is that buying any one of the Manhattan books gives you access to 6 free and very good online CAT exams that you have to buy otherwise by shelling out US $25.

GMAT Critical Reasoning (CR) is pretty easy. I am pretty comfortable with CR questions. Nevertheless in order to improve my scoring abilities on this, I figured I could do some reading. I found the PowerScore GMAT CR bible very good for this. I think that the explanations and the strategy outlines are very good.

GMAT Reading Comprehension does not seem to be a big deal to me. I am not making many mistakes here, and I think that working on the official guides is sufficient.

In order to get more practice, I also got the Kaplan 800. The Kaplan 800 is a pretty good collection of difficult problems. I have not started working on this in a big way. I will soon in a week.

I also reviewed the Princeton and the Kaplan Premier books. I do not find them to be very helpful. I think that if you are pretty good at Math and the English language and are scoring above 600, these books may not be suitable for you. On the other hand if you do need to start from a more ground level, these might be the books you are looking for. I think Kaplan is much better than Princeton.

Anyway, end of day no point in having any of these unless you really want to crack the GMAT !!! :-).

Anyway catch you later.

Technology Takes- Web 2.0

Recently I came across a question that I found very interesting. The question was how can Indian technology companies help their clients to derive business potential out of Web 2.0 technology.

You are looking at an example of a Web 2.0 technology right now - yes, a blog is an example of Web 2.0 technology. Orkut, Face Book, Meebo, Wikipedia, Twitter, Flikr, Youtube are other examples. Now what is so interesting about Web 2.0 ? For a minute, think what is common to all of the examples above. Aha, you got it. In all of the above applications, a lot of people do a lot of things. People share stuff, give and take advice, communicate and network. I google for information and probably find what I am looking for in the blog of a guy sitting in Africa.

Web 2.0 has fundamentally changed 2 thing about the web -
1. Huge social communities are being created.
2. People are interacting with each other in newer ways.

I think that Enterprise customers will perceive maximum value from Web 2.0 technology that will enable the following -

1. Reaching out to consumer communities for (a) maintaining credible information channels, maintaining/ expanding competitive position and customer base and selling new services (b) engaging in meaningful two way dialogue to receive feedback and detemine consumer perceptions and new ideas.

2. Effectively engage with business partners and suppliers to improve communication.

3. Capitalize on the inherent potential of social communities to foster information and knowledge exchange, collaboration and networking to drive product design and development within shorter time scales.

We need to articulate propositions that can resonate at highest executive decision making levels of our clients. Such a proposition must alleviate business concerns, must clearly be aligned to the client's business strategy and must also offer economic and competitive advantages over any other non Web 2.0 alternatives.

Blog Building- Mix and Match

I have just done with giving final personal touches to this page. Had to fiddle around with Bloggers template for some time.

I am thinking of rewriting the entire blogger template. Watch out on this space for more on that.

I have also replaced the Google Ads in the left side of the page with Google news :-).

These will be the last of the changes I will be making to the look and feel of this page.

It is a lovely Saturday afternoon here in Macau. I need to get goin now.