The key for successfully channeling the mLearning revolution will not simply be about digitizing current educational systems. The real appeal will be allowing people to choose their own paths, leverage their talents, and follow their passions and callings. MLearning has much business potential, but the most exciting and rewarding aspect of these solutions is that students of any age or background might have the chance to pursue knowledge that is meaningful, relevant, and realistic to achieve in their own lives.

I think it is kind of liberating to learn what you want, when you want and how you want. The tools are not there yet, but there are lots of developments in this space and opportunities as well.  Here are a few stories to confirm some of the observations in this post:

• My 80+ year old parents and mother-in-law who never touched a computer in their  life are comfortable with iPad and Samsung tablet. They started swiping to see several pictures of their great grand-daughter but some of them moved on to skype with my children and even learn a few things from YouTube videos.
• In a recent gathering, one of our family members told us about a 1+ year old kid wanting her “Apple” during meals. She meant Apple iPad. She was playing with a game while eating. Another kid of similar age watches his favorite YouTube videos during meals. I am not sure whether this is good or bad. It is just that a whole new generation is feeling comfortable with touch enabled technologies and mobile devices for of learning and entertainment.
• A friend once told me that his kid used a play a lot with his iPhone. When he bought an iPad the kid made a generous offer to his dad – “you keep the small phone and I will keep the big one”. The kid was barely 2 years old. I heard several stories of kids hijacking ipads of their parents.

If you are interested in the topic of Learning, you may also want to look at these links:

How People Learn

Seven Freedoms of Learning and Social Software

Learning About Learning

Learning – A Few Quotes

Beyond advertising on Facebook or Twitter, companies are using social networks to build teams that solve problems faster, share information better among their employees and partners, bring customer ideas for new product designs to market earlier, and redesign all kinds of corporate software in Facebook’s easy-to-learn style. Social media reinventing how business is done

Heavy use of social tools has a statistically significant correlation to profitability, said Michael Chui, senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute. But it’s early: Only about 3% of respondents used social business tools for all three major uses — reaching customers, connecting employees and coordinating with suppliers, McKinsey said.

“You’ve got to let the conversations happen, even if you might not like all of that conversation,” Shurts said. “It’s going to happen around the water cooler anyway.”

if you want to check out more articles and links on Social Business try the Twitter hashtag #socbiz

A few benefits of using  social tools for business

1. Improves connection with customers and involves them early in the product design process (Dell’s examples of Ideastorm)
2. Improves internal communication and knowledge (IBM and other businesses)
3. Replaces HR handbook (with a more dynamic interactive medium)
4. Leverages knowledge of consumer tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter to provide enterprise equivalents for collaboration, social connection
5. Using inbound marketing techniques can help validate product ideas and gain early adopters and evangelists
6. Social is the new word of mouth for spreading news and information and understanding how to do effectively can help businesses gain new customers, amplify their marketing efforts
7. Using social tools are one of the easiest ways to stay aware of what is happening in your industry

1. I use ironing time as thinking time. So I seem to mindlessly do the same thing over and over again. I can easily go into an infinite loop and not mind at all since it gives me more time to think/daydream.
2. I drift into thinking about better design of iron, better design of iron board, ironing robots, wrinkle free clothes and anything but the process of ironing. This seems to be a common pattern in my life.
3. Ironing and listening to music and day dreaming  seem to be very complimentary.
4. I think I am spoiled by the ironing service in my street in Chennai. I ping them to see if they are available. I send   a bunch of washed, wrinkled clothes and get back  neatly pressed clothes. This transaction is a bit asynchronous. Ping, request, response, payload trigger images of http request/response.
5. This drift, if it lasts long enough, gets me to the meta think mode. I notice that tech terms like meta are seeping into my speech fairly frequently –  asynchronous requests, symmetric relationships, lazy evaluation are some of the more common terms.
6. I bug my wife with some of this terminology and concepts for real life actions. Some times I tell her in a shopping mall – “Let us do this in parallel.  You can do this, this and this and I will do this. We can synch up after we finish”.
7. I know I drift. This post itself is one of those examples with thoughts triggering other thoughts.

Philosophy worth quoting and emulating:

• “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission.”
• “We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do.”
• “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
• “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money”
• “We’re going public for our employees and our investors.”

Source: http://read.bi/J2uxa4

Knowledge bends light and splits atoms. Knowledge plumbs darkness and scales heavens. Knowledge witnesses the birth of everything from nothing. Knowledge peers around corners, and heralds the dawn. Knowledge gathers together our partial, splintered reality and makes it whole. Knowledge makes us powerful.

It is true that Knowledge accounts for a lot of what makes us better, smarter and more intelligent. How do we go about gaining that knowledge? How do we know what we don’t know?

On Learning and Product Managers

“The most successful product managers I have known were as comfortable reading Michael Crichton as they were reading Applied Economics. In fact, they spent much of their time in between meetings reading the latest analyst reports and marking up the margins with notes.”

On Managing

Take the time to step back and think about the overall context for your product. Here are a few categories of thoughts to consider –  market dynamics, customer and share of market, business model, pricing and value.

On Great Execution

There are thousands of little decisions that need to be made when bringing a new product to market. These decisions can be broadly classified into four categories:

• Market, customer, product, and functionality
• Sales and distribution
• Usability
• Technical, engineering, implementation, maintenance, and support

Product managers are only experts in the first area but have to drive decison making in all the four categories

On Market Positioning

Large markets represent billions (or trillions) of dollars of opportunity. But they cannot be approached at this level because large markets are really a composite of medium markets which are made up of smaller and smaller markets. Each market segment supports a specific group of market needs.

As markets mature, companies need to put more energy into positioning and choose those market segments which best align with their products, services, and solutions offering as well as core competencies.

Adjacent markets can also represent growth opportunities

On Customer Research

Customer research generates not only good, unexpected insights for your product throughout the lifecycle,
it’s important to remember to use that feedback to manage the internal discussions and debates.

On Marketing approach

The difference between “product readiness” and “market readiness.”

• What (or who) influences the customer most?is it other people (industry influencers, colleagues, friends), certain publications or news sources, evidence or proof that your product works?
• Are people ready for the whole product or do they need to try before they buy?
• What drives your audience to buy? In other words, are they viral, aspirational, data oriented etc.?
• What metrics does your company need to see in order to deem your product a success?

Customers are now the leading source of innovations globally (41 percent) and are more important than other sources inside companies, including research and development.

you need to make sure that your products are solving your customers’ needs better than your competitors’ products are—and that you are communicating that in a way that they can make that connection themselves.

On Finding Problems

Find market problems worth solving. This is often the hardest part of our job. We can get so close to our products that we no longer have the wide view to see market problems that are bigger than problems that are currently being addressed. Instead, we see the world through our products and often add new features to further enhance solutions to problems that have already been adequately solved.

It is product management’s responsibility to identify customer problems worth solving. It is engineering’s role to identify technical solutions to those problems.

On Research

Research helps you understand

1. Your customers
2. Your competitive marketplace
3. Competitors
4. Your own product (perceptions)

Two week rule

Never go more than two weeks without putting your product ideas in front of real users and customers

Steve Blank has a great line about this: “In a startup, no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.”

Markets do not buy products, people do; businesses do not buy products, people (several, or a group, but always people) do.

If your market is in the United States, consider using the NAICS database for industry and labor classifications to get your arms around the total market. Step back from your draft segmentation. Ask if this makes sense. Is it clear? Easily understood? Does it map into the real world?

On Positioning Statement

The positioning statement provides the first decision filter because it defines what you are, and any idea either needs to reinforce that identity or move you down a path defined by your vision. The positioning statement is what you say if someone with a minimal understanding of your industry asks what your product is.

Note:

This post is entirely based on the  contents from the book and except one minor summarization, I have not written anything. So this post is really dedicated to the authors of the wonderful book. If you are a product manager, it is a must read.

I love the way the book ends. Rules are meant to be broken. So while all these rules are great guidelines, make up your own based on what you learn form applying them.

the growing influence of computer science on the physical and social sciences. An interdisciplinary array of scientists will explore the mathematical foundations of computer science and attack problems in fields as diverse as health care, astrophysics, genetics and economics.

Part science and part engineering, computer science has long been viewed warily by scientists in other disciplines. But that is changing, not only because the computer has become the standard scientific instrument but also because “computational thinking” offers new ways to analyze the vast amounts of data now accessible to scientists.

This new approach — what researchers call the “algorithmic” or “computational” lens — is transforming science in much the way the microscope and telescope did.

Computers, Big Data, Distributed Software Applications are the new tools of Science. We can see new types of applications, far beyond the traditional data processing and automation applications used by businesses.

Several factors contribute towards this trend:

1. A growing array of sensors
2. Mobile devices which also act as sensors as well as data collection devices
3. Touch computing lowering the barriers of adoption of tablets and mobile devices
4. Technologies for processing Big Data
5. Analytics and Visualization techniques
6. AI and Machine Intelligence will increasingly play a role too

Applications and Research tend to co-evolve. We can expect to see a lot of exciting new findings from this and other similar efforts.

Businesses and IT are facing a world of Apps, where the supply of technology vastly exceeds business demand or IT’s capacity to implement, integrate and operate.  The world of apps is a world of technology, as opposed to a world of gaps dominated by internal IT.  This situation is relatively new, starting in about 2009 with the large-scale availability of cloud, mobile and otherlightweight technologies.

Look at one of the new roles of IT – managing an internal appstore which is basically a directory (or even a repository) of apps. These may be cloud apps, webapps, mobile apps or tablet apps. This is s trend and a bit of shift.

It bring up lots of questions in my mind:

• Will IT evaluate/screen and filter over 500,00 Apps (they can skip some categories like games) to select a few that their organization can benefit?
• How will the App stores inside the company look like? (hopefully much better search, better taxonomy of classification and even a request/ recommendation/rating system).
• Will corporate appstores look like a cross between the vendor appstore/Quora and StackOverflow? How will they keep them current as new apps emerge in the marketplace?
• Will groups spring up inside the organization to try out new apps and recommend to IT?
• Will the App mashups become popular?
• Will IT demand that all app vendors support APIs to control, integrate apps?
• Will IT work on loosely connecting these apps? Will Apps lend themselves to be easily interconnected?
• Who will they identify innovative apps that the business can leverage?  Does this require an App spotting department or become one of the new roles of the innovation unit?

How will app vendors leverage this trend?

• Will they architect their apps to be easily interconnected, integrated?
• How will Apps reliance on certain platforms, cloud services impact the adoption by enterprise?
• Will App vendors rethink pricing strategies and site licensing agreements for enterprises?
• Will there be  new classes of App Integrators that bridge the gap betweem app makers and corporations?

It will be interesting to watch how both IT and app makers leverage this trend and work on mining a wealth of opportunities.

The problem was a simple one – given the name of company, find the website of the company. I can do it in less than a minute, manually. Search for the company name, scan the results, click on a link that looks like the closest match and copy the url. Ask me to do that hundred times. That would be an  entirely different story.

Now let us try to write a program to find the website urls given a set of company names. We need the following:

1. Simulate the process of searching through a search engine
2. Simulate the process of looking through the results
3. Simulate the process of picking the correct result
4. Verify that the result we picked is correct

Let us think through each one of these. Fortunately most search engines provide an API (application programming interface) for you to program against. So step 1 is pretty easy.

Step 2 and 3 can be combined. But if you don’t have the benefit of human eyes and mind to look through the results but only the logic of the machine, how will you simulate these steps? Try it. It is an interesting study. The reason for this study is that within a couple of iterations, you will start noticing new aspects of the problem that was not obvious when you first looked at (formulating) it.

Step 4 is even more fascinating. Given a company name and a URL, what logic will you use to verify that the URL represents the company?

Solving a problem like this requires you to think a lot more about how you solve problems. How it comes to us so naturally, but an order of magnitude more difficult when you try to automate it. When you program a solution to the problem, you do not have the benefit of human eyes and the mysterious thought process. You need to form a set of hypotheses, try them out through small programs and verify the results and iterate.

Meta:

I was working on one such last week and got up to 92% percent accuracy with limited test data.  I may test it a bit more, clean it up a bit and make it available for people to use. I need to put a web interface to it (right now it is a set of python programs running from the command line).

If you have to find hundreds of thousands, however, you may use a different approach, probably with some machine learning techniques.

I heard Marvin Minsky mention in (his class) that software provides a new language for problem solving. It gives you ways to model, abstract, simulate and study processes and behavior. Even more important, it gives you a framework to express them more easily.

It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning.

Are there other similar dimensions or sequences? Does multiple intelligence play a role here? For example a person with a high degree of intra-personal intelligence perceives interactions differently than most of us (lacking such an ability) do? Do people with different levels of intelligence have different perceptions of the same events/observations?

There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.

Are we like the moths of the world, in a sense, with a different perception of reality than the reality itself?

I like this part from  the book 42 Rules of Marketing:

Your job is to document, document,document, and then go back and clarify, clarify, clarify.

Your PRDs (product requirements documents) and MRDs (market requirements documents) should be the go-to information sources for everyone working on the product or supporting the product in some way.

I will go one step further. Instead of creating a large PRD, MRD, use an internal Wiki, blog or some other tool that lets people see the evolution of your thought process and participate, question and make suggestions. I think how you start out, how and why you change your requirements, is almost as illuminating as the requirement itself. Listing various hypotheses that need to be verified may be another useful outcome of this whole exercise.

Notes:

• It is product management’s responsibility to identify customer problems worth solving. It is engineering’s role to identify technical solutions to those problems.
• Research helps you understand: 1. Your customers,2. Your competitive marketplace, 3. Competitors, 4. Your own product
• Be careful. Requirements are like chili powder. A little goes a long way, and too much spoils the pot. (This refers to the market research requirements but we know that it applies to project/product requirements as well).
• To scope market research, you ask yourself - What are my questions?what am i going to do with the answers?
• Two week rule (by Marty Cagan author of  Inspired- How to Create Products People Love ) - Never go more than two weeks without putting your product ideas in front of real users and customers
• Steve Blank’s quote in the book  ”In a startup, no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.”

Each chapter (a Rule) is filled with lots of golden nuggets. If you are doing a startup and building a product, you can learn a lot from this book. I have only covered the first 10 chapters here. Expect more posts as I read through the rest of the book.

There are several ways to find influencers. There are different types of influencers too. Industry influencers are people from research companies with large following and executive team of big companies in a certain industry/space. In this post we will look at well known people active in Social Media.

Here is reasonably good starting point – Klout. Klout is a social ranking/rating system. It looks at people’s social media activity including their following and activity and other social media signals, to rank influencers. It is not perfect, but it is a good starting point.

Let us take a simple example. Let us say I want to learn about the topic of Technology.  Here is what Klout shows you:

A few additional notes:

• You may also want to look at the top +K recepients (which may overlap somewhat with the influencer list).
• Notice that this list is the influencers for the past 90 days. So this list may change.
• Not every one likes Klout and topics is one area where Klout just started. They don’t even have a good topic discovery mechanism (search).  They don’t have a hierarchy of topics either.
• Here are some featured topics - http://klout.com/#/topics The topics you may be looking for may not be there (for example, I was looking for inbound marketing).

As  I mentioned earlier, this is just one starting point. One technique,  is to use someone you know as an influencer as a starting point and see whom they follow on Twitter. For example. you would start with Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh) if you are interested in “Inbound Marketing” which overlaps with “Social Media Marketing”.

There are lots of others ways and we will cover some of them in future posts. Here are some I can think of:

• Researchers in a particular space
• Speakers at conferences related to your topics
• Authors of books on your favorite industry or topic
• CXOs of big companies in a specific industry
• Popular columnists in a specific industry segment
• Popular bloggers on specific topics

Let me know, if I missed out any.

Update:

The chapter on Influence: Finding it and Measuring it, in the book Social Media Analytics has some very good coverage. A few snippets from that chapter:

Influence is so deep a subject that it is impossible to express everything there is to say about it in a single chapter.

Internet newspaper Huffington Post uses Klout Scores and the Adaptive Semantics platform to define the influence of its readers

There are several ideas about what creates the influence we are trying to measure and how far back in time one should go to determine it.

• Authority Score (Sysomos),
• Peek Score (PeekYou),
• Page rank,
• Compete visits (when available),
• Alexa rank,
• Back links, and
• Updates (posting frequency)
• Being listed in Web Directories

A body of running water may be called any of many different names, the most generic being stream, the most common being river.  A river can be defined as ‘a natural stream of water of usually considerable volume’. General terms for smaller streams include creek (smaller than a river) and brook (smaller than a creek). Very specific types of water currents  include anabranches (river branches that rejoin the main body of water) and distributaries (branches that don’t).

I think I knew most of these terms and knew that they had something to do with water but never knew the relationships.

Trivia:

I even stayed in a place called Babbling Brook Inn in Santa Cruz, CA a couple of times. I thought it was a cool name.

So I went got a domain name – tipstoolsandtechniques.com and will soon start another blog. My initial goal is to post something a couple of times a week.

So, what do you think? Will that be useful?

The basic problem with browsers is that they’re manual tools. Your browser only downloads and renders websites: You still need to decide if the web page is relevant, if you’ve already seen the information it contains, or if you need to follow a link to another web page. What’s worse, your browser can’t think for itself. It can’t notify you when something important happens online, and it certainly won’t anticipate your actions, automatically complete forms, make purchases, or download files for you. To do these things, you’ll need the automation and intelligence only available with a webbot, or a web robot. Once you start thinking about the inherent limitations of browsers, you start to see the endless opportunities that wait around the corner for webbot developers.

We realized that and built services to track pages, aggregate and filter information. But this post is not about them either.

Can browsers get smarter? Here are a few thoughts:

• What if we can take most frequently used functions and made them into verbs. Some imaginary statements:
  • Repeat my daily searches and show me new stuff (programming speak – take 3 searches I saved, run them on the browser, get the top 100 results, compare them with the results I got yesterday and just show me the new ones)
  • Go to amazon and get me the new deals for gadgets (programming speak – Go to amazon site, pull the daily deals, filter them by my interests (or look at my wishlist) and let me know if there are any I should look at.
  • Find recommended books for subject x (Go to Amazon, search for book on subject x, find similar books, rank them based on popularity and sentiments from reviews and show me a list).
  • Find me the best deal from Amazon, ebay and other deal sites on my list,  for  the most popular Android devices mentioned in my favorite review sites.

17 Apr

Conflict between making a living and doing interesting work is one of the challenges most of us (not just scientists) face in life.

… when you’re heading into the unknown, desire is all-important. You simply want to be doing something that you love, or something that is logically going to lead to something you love, in order to do your best work. That desire will make you more creative and more resourceful, and will help you get further faster.

And, it will help you persist. When you’re trying something that’s never been attempted before — beginning an unusual project at work, or trying to get a new business off the ground — you’re going to face a lot of obstacles. You don’t want to be giving up the first time you encounter one.

But, let’s be real. None of this guarantees wealth, or even financial success.

It is true that doing interesting work does not guarantee financial success. I think of it as a Venn diagram. The larger green ellipse is your opportunities for making money. The red ellipse represents your interests/passion. Depending on your specific interest areas, the overlap may be very different and in some cases, may not exist at all.

Here are three scenarios I can think of.

There are lots of opportunities to make money from the areas you are interested in.

There may be some overlap between your interests and opportunities to leverage them for making money.

You may not be so lucky, and your interests and your opportunities to make money may have no overlap at all.

Meta:

• This model is a little too simple. There may be other components to the Venn diagram related to some of your natural skills.
• Note that I have not defined interests/passion at all. We need a deeper discussion about this topic.
• Note that I have not elaborated on opportunities, either. That depends on a lot of other factors including your education, skills, location, attitude, comfort zones and a variety of others. Again, another topic that demands a deeper discussion.

1. Data Analysis and Mining
2. Cloud Computing
3. Social Computing
4. Mobile Computing
5. Internet of Things
6. Learning Technologies
7. Robotics

Data Analysis and Mining

My interest stems from the fact that our products deal with a lot of data. We track web pages, aggregate RSS feeds, collect Twitter streams etc. There has to be a better way of consuming these large amounts of information. So any technologies that summarize, mine, connect, extract useful information is of interest to me.

Currently, I use some simple Python tools and dabbling in  R programming. Related to Data Analysis, there are different overlapping topics – Data Science, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Big Data, Visualization. It is an exciting field to dabble in.

Cloud Computing

My interest in cloud is very elementary. But to process big data, you need to understand many aspects of scalable computing and cloud presents some interesting options. I want to research challenges and opportunities in the Cloud Computing Space and as I dig deeper and find out more, you will learn from them. I am far more interested in the Applications related to Cloud computing than the technologies. Since they are related, we will cover a bit of both in future posts.

Social Computing

Social computing has many aspects with Social Media and Social Networks being the most visible. Social computing is interesting from a technology point of view. The impact of Social technologies can be used to reach out and engage with prospects, customers, partners and peers. As more uses of Social Computing become evident, the apps and technologies will co-evolve.  This will be an interesting area to watch and learn.

I am currently dabbling in a few apps to mine Twitter using Python.  We will certainly try to talk about how to leverage tools of Social computing to build a business, market products, interact with customers, track competition etc.

Mobile Computing

Mobile Computing is another one of those big waves that will have a lot of disruptive power and lots of opportunities. There are murmurs that mobile apps may make web irrelevant. I don’t believe that it will happen in the near term (next 3-5 years).

Mobile computing gives rise to App Economy and there are lots of interesting technologies to watch in this space. Mobile may also bring new life to Sensor networking and accelerate the movement towards the Internet of Things.

Internet of Things

One of the best starting point is this article from Read Write Web on Tim O’Reilly Explains the Internet of Things 

My interest in Internet of Things is related to the work I do at Innovation Cell (at KCG Tech). It is one of those areas where students can work on different autonomous projects with a broad theme and a big picture.

Learning Technologies

Most of my work with colleges is focused on improving innovation and learning. With the advent of Touch Computing and a variety of devices it spawns, there are lots of opportunities for innovations in both learning and teaching. The best way to build these technologies is the iterative model. Build a bit, let students and teachers use these technologies and iterate.  I can’t think of a better way to innovate than letting students come up with ideas for these tools, build them and improve their learning and improve the tools.

Robotics

Of all the topics I listed, Robotics is the one, about which I know the least. My interest is very specific to building small teaching/learning robots for children. I feel that these inexpensive devices can impact education a lot, especially in rural areas. I am coaxing a few students to work on these.  I will come back and report about these explorations as we learn from them.

As I learn about each one of these topics and my knowledge about each increases, I will come back and share my learning with you.

Meta:

Cross posted from my Tech Blog

I kept looking at the number 999 for about two weeks, trying to decide what I should write about. I tried a few times but none of them seemed appropriate.  I finally decided to share a few thoughts about my blogging experience.

Here is a list:

1. I experimented a lot initially. I tried to write one post each day and then several posts a day and realized that I am an informal blogger, not a professional one.
2. I read a lot about blogging. One lesson stuck. Posts with lists seem to work best.
3. Sharing my experiences seem to work fairly well, too. I could speak with comfort and have  the pleasure of reliving some of them.
4. I realized that not all blog posts need to be written from scratch. Quoting some one and providing your view seems to work.
5. I cover multiple topics – mostly Technology, Innovation, Learning, Teaching and Entrepreneurship. I may start creating separate blogs for each topic.
6. I am a bit more comfortable writing now than when I started. I find short posts of a couple of paragraphs are easy to start with. The are easy to write and I am sure, easier to read too.
7. Whenever i see people reading a post I go and reread the post. Some times I update them as well.
8. Blogging is therapeutic for me. So I really try to find something to blog about.
9. I made lots of friends because of this blog, an unexpected bonus.

So, thank you for reading my posts. It is one of the biggest motivations for me to keep blogging. I  would love to meet every one of you. Not sure whether I can, but would love to.