What does it take to build an ecosystem that fosters product development in the technology space? This question came up in our Chennai Open Coffee Club meeting in Jan. Here are some thoughts. You need an entrepreneurial spirit. These are people who are willing to risk their careers on building some thing to solve a… [Read more…]
January 15, 2012
This is an amazing view. I kept saying ‘No’ while I was listening to Mark Pagel but some how it seemed very convincing. A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a… [Read more…]
January 15, 2012
Favorite theories of the world’s most eminent thinkers are as eclectic as science itself. In this fascinating study, they cover: Darwin’s Natural Selection Einstein’s Theory of Relativity The discovery that the conscious, deliberative mind is not the author of important decisions Emergence Pavlovian conditioning Two brain systems Chance shaping Personality People become what they do… [Read more…]
January 14, 2012
Does that sound like an oxymoron? Not as long as we have people who think like this: The strange history of “Think Python” (Allen B. Downey) In January 1999 I was preparing to teach an introductory programming class in Java. I had taught it three times and I was getting frustrated. The failure rate in… [Read more…]
January 9, 2012
FirstDot powered by NEN’ is India’s national mentoring and recognition platform for student startups. I was at FirstDot along with Kiruba, Pravin Sekhar, Narayanan, Soundarya, Karthikeyan Vijaykumar to do unconference style sessions. Some notes from my session on Innovation and Entrepreneurship We started with – What, Why and How of Innovation and discussed Ideas and… [Read more…]
January 2, 2012
What are the n things you use your mobile for, other than making calls and sending text messages? Here is my list in the order of usage. To check email when I am not at my desk To check time and date (I don’t wear a watch) To turn off sound while going into meetings… [Read more…]
January 2, 2012
Whatever you want to do, some one either has already done it or some variation of it. I once saw a cool page on Facebook called 1000 things to do in SFO and decided to do a modest version – 100 things to do in Chennai. Last year, I did not make much progress (may… [Read more…]
January 1, 2012
What happens when books can change after they are published? An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability… [Read more…]
December 31, 2011
Let me wish you a Very Happy New Year. Here is the message as a web beep http://webbeep.it/audio/Wish+Every+One+a+Happy+New+Year.mp3 I created this from a little fun service from Danny Ayers. There are two things cool about this service. One is the ability to send your web beep as a URL. Another is that for the first… [Read more…]
November 4, 2011
I had the privilege of being at the Social Media Summit yesterday at Chennai. It was a real pleasure. From the smiling, welcoming faces of the students of M.O.P Vaishnav College for Women, to the sessions throughout the day, every bit of experience was a real treat. A few snippets. From the welcome address: echovme… [Read more…]
January 16, 2012
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