The Downside of Outsourcing

From the Seattle Times, the stress of BPO and the burgeoning toll it is taking on its young workers.

This link will take you to the Harvard B School grouping of lists of best business books for the year:

BNet Best Business Books

Harvard B School look's ahead to the biggest business challenges in 2008

What do you think will be the big challenges for your business in 2008? asks Harvard Business, which is building a crystal ball around responses from readers. Some early comments:

* The Network as Platform. “The most important trend in networking in 2008, indeed in all of IT, will be the emergence of the “network as the platform” for productivity, profitable growth, resource management and innovation. This trend will play a key role in helping determine success in business as well as in other areas of society (healthcare and education).”
* Eco Business Opportunities. “As private and public entities respond to the extension of social responsibility, many new service provider opportunities will explode in the finance, e-waste, recylcing, remanufacturing, supply chain industry, and service entities.”
* New Geopolitics. “Politically, between US election, China’s coming out party (summer Olympics), and Russia’s new (old) president, 2008 would be an interesting year. Economically, the battle for supremacy between central banks, sovereign funds, and the “real” economy could be on the headline in various disguises.
* Volatile Markets. “The biggest challenges for the managers in the short term is to counter the impact of weakening dollar, rising crude, declining productivity in US and Europe, and outsourcing as competitive strategy.”
* Dollar Decline. “For European businesses the continued decline of the US dollar against the Euro will remain one of the toughest challenges. It will be the catalyst for many changes related to repositioning within market segments, relocation of manufacturing to no-Euro zones and acceleration of innovation drive.”
* Social Networking. “Companies must learn to effectively utilize social networking tools both inside and outside the companies to keep up with what the younger workers grew up with — fast and furious communication tools like texting, facebook, My Space, You Tube, etc. that spread the word now. Not in the next quarter, next month, next week or even next day, but NOW.”
* Soft Skills. “The development and implementation of ‘soft skills’ will be one of the greatest management challenges in the future. With changing attitudes and values it will become increasingly necessary for organisations to undergo cultural change in order to attract and retain high quality young staff and to appeal to the changing values of society in general. The establishment of a culture of community which values all stakeholders, gives a strong sense of belonging and offers flexibility within a secure and diverse environment will be important.”

Is Google going for world domination?

From the Seattle Times: Google is fine-tuning a Wikipedia rival.
All's fair in love and war. Wales is planning on rolling out a new search engine - Wikia - later this month...

PDF now ISO standard

clipped from blogs.adobe.com ISO Ballot for PDF 1.7 Passed! Adobe has received word that the Ballot for approval of PDF 1.7 to become the ISO 32000 Standard (DIS) has passed by a vote of 13::1.

Terrific Eye Tracking Clues

Recapitulation from Seth Godin's blog, quoting Christina Laun at Virtual Hosting.com blog
The highlights, in alphabetical order:

* Ads in the top and left portions of a page will receive the most eye fixation.
* Ads placed next to the best content are seen more often.
* Bigger images get more attention.
* Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixation.
* Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored.
* Formatting can draw attention.
* Headings draw the eye.
* Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page.
* Large blocks of text are avoided.
* Lists hold reader attention longer.
* Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page.
* One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats.
* People generally scan lower portions of the page.
* Readers ignore banners.
* Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones.
* Show numbers as numerals.
* Text ads were viewed mostly intently of all types tested.
* Text attracts attention before graphics.
* Type size influences viewing behavior.
* Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right.
* Users only look at a sub headline if it interests them.
* Users spend a lot of time looking at buttons and menus.
* White space is good.

Mingle from Thoughtworks -for agile Agile development

Mingle - from Thoughtworks, - a project collaboration and management tool for Agile software development.

In co-founder Bismarck's words:
'...a platform that gives content owners control -- marketers accountable video advertising -- and viewers high quality interactive video with non-intrusive advertising...'

checkout Ooyala (beautiful site and one of the Amazon Web Services picks.)

Find out what users think of your site

1. You sign up for user testing.
   
2. We notify user testers.
3. You watch and listen to them use your site.
4. You read their review - what they liked or disliked, what would have caused them to leave...

One user costs $19, five users $95.

UserTesting.com

Power of the People

A move for privacy in the Facebook community has forced Facebook to capitulate to user pressure. They have now added an opt-in button so that users can decide whether their purchases may be blathered across Facebook in a move towards harnessing the tremendous user base for advertising.

Kudos to Facebook for buckling to the pressure and to Overstock.com who abandoned the 'Beacon' feature until Facebook added the 'opt-in button'. Read the Washington Post's story...

Bill Gates has expressed concern in an interview that the US is not producing enough qualified computer engineers-you would think this would be a call for more outsourcing, except that I know that India, one of the worlds' great outsourcers, is also facing the same shortage...
From the Seattle Times.

Stop those boring Power Point Presentations

Stop boring us, from Core 77 blog

If you are frequently called upon to create Power Point Presentations, click through, this post is for you.

It's that time of year again - when the Forbes Billionaire list is released. (Not that long ago, I remember when it was the Millionaire List).

"Of note, when speaking about the Indian billionaires on the list:
In aggregate, their wealth surged to $351 billion, a bit more than double last year's $170 billion, making India's 40 by far the wealthiest such group of all in Asia. The four richest Indians are worth an astonishing $180 billion. Together the foursome are worth more than the forty richest Chinese combined..."

Ok, the website looks kind of cheesy, but if you wanted to add any audio welcome message on your site, this Audio Generator seems to make it easy for you to add.

The fastest Asian computer-made in India

Tata announces that the supercomputer it built at Pune factory has been named as the forth faster in the world, and the fastest in Asia.

The rankings were announced last night during the prestigious SC 2007 Conference held last night in the USA.

This is the first time that India has made it to the top 10.
Tata's supercomputer

A faster easier way to share photos-FINALLY!

Link to story in Wired
Eye-Fi has produced a 2-GB SD memory card mated with a Wi-Fi chip. You can sync the card to a hard drive or Wi-Fi network, then plug into a digital camera and click away. Photos are routed to either the hard drive or to one of 17 photo vendors - Facebook, Flickr, etc. The card's software handles scaling and compression while privacy settings at the individual sites allow you to filter what gets published.

Another pearl of wisdom from Seth Godin about tailoring your site to fit the visitor's needs...

If you own a web page, you really owe it to yourself and to your users to pay attention to state.

Don't treat everyone the same. First time visitors want something different than repeaters. Loyal customers want to see something different from the masses.

Get your IT person to show you how to divide the world into states. Then start from scratch and make a different experience for everyone.

[PS years ago, at Yoyodyne, we had a wannabe competitor who kept stealing our ideas. We programmed the site to recognize traffic from their site and put up all sorts of fake announcements and stuff, just to throw them off. You can get really specific if you want!]

Social Networking, India style

From the NYTimes:

Using social networking to connect poor laborers with prospective employees In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism

Niche TV- I am famous...

I like this step-by-step article from SEOmoz.org on using video to get you and your product known.

A useful thought from Seth Godin for sales/marketing/development teams
" I can't afford it"." That's not true.

At least it's not true almost all the time. Very few of your prospects literally can't afford it. What they are really trying to say is, "it's not worth it." As in, it's not worth reprioritizing my life, not worth the risk, not worth what I'll have to give up to get this, not worth being in debt for.

One response to repeated cries of "I can't afford it" is to lower your prices. A better response is to tell a better, more accurate story, and to tell it to the right people. The best response is to make something worth paying for."

Having trouble thinking of the right analogy to drive your point home? No more lame examples, use this handy website Size of Wales to find the right comparison.

Vinay -Analogy King- this is a site you could have done yourself.

I am test-driving the new social web browser Flock, voted by TechCrunch as one of the top 40 most innovative new products.

Buy an SEO Tshirt

Intro on website:

With all the brains, talent, and creativity that make up the SEO world, it surprised us that no one had risen up and given the industry some t-shirt love. Maybe everyone is too busy watching results pages, gaming the engines, or generating serious online funds. All we know is sometimes an industry just needs some t-shirts.

That's where we come in...

Syncronising your office documents with Google docs

clipped from www.techcrunch.com One of the biggest drawbacks to working with Webtop productivity applications such as Google Docs or Buzzword is that they force you to work simultaneously in two different worlds: the online world and the desktop world. You can upload your desktop documents one at a time to these services, and they convert them for you into a Web-based document, but there is no easy way to bulk upload your docs. And syncing between the two worlds is more trouble than it is worth A new service called DocSyncer hopes to fix all that. DocSyncer is going to launch an invite-only beta in a few weeks (TechCrunch readers can sign up here to get first dibs). It uploads all of your Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) from your desktop to Google Docs and then keeps them in sync. Whenever you make a change on your desktop, the change is automatically reflected in the corresponding file on Google Docs, and on DocSyncer.com.

Download free version for Mind Mapping from Freemind

Link to: The Website Marketing Mind Map although it claims to make it look easy, probably needs a bit more distillation, but definitely a useful guide.

Right brain vs left brain thinkers

Follow this link to take a very quick and simple quiz and see which side of your brain dominates your thinking process. You may be surprised, I was!

Adobe's new real time collaboration services

clipped from news.yahoo.com Adobe Systems Inc. is preparing two hosted services that will allow developers to add real-time collaboration capabilities, including voice over IP, to RIAs (rich Internet applications). The company demonstrated the services-- code-named Pacifica and CoCoMo-- at its Adobe MAX 2007 user conference in Chicago Tuesday.

FriendFeed -social networking aggregator

FriendFeed as reported in TechCrunch

There has been an absolute flood of tech news. Lost somewhere in the shuffle is the private beta launch of a new startup, founded by four ex-Googlers, called FriendFeed. And while it may not get a lot of attention today, keep an eye on them. I have a feeling it will be a very popular service.

It’s a simple product that, like a ton of sleepy competitors (see Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand and the more recent Fuser) is trying to help people organize user data stored across a myriad of social networks.

But unlike those competitors, FriendFeed’s simple approach may the way to win. Instead of layering another social network on top of all of the ones you already belong to, FriendFeed is taking the year old Facebook News Feed idea, which may be the single most important feature contributing to the success of Facebook Platform, and opening it up to all social networks.

Good news for travellers ...

clipped from www.nytimes.com Early next month, a small company called Cubic Telecom will release what it’s calling the first global mobile phone. On this phone, a 20-minute call from the Bahamas costs $5.80 (that’s 90 percent off T-Mobile’s rate). The Cubic price from Russia is 49 cents a minute (90 percent lower than AT&T). And there’s no monthly fee and no commitment for any of this. It works like a prepaid phone, where you put some money in your account and use it up as you talk. No longer must you hand out a series of international phone numbers for each trip you make, or expect your colleagues in the United States to pay $50 a pop to reach you.

Docstoc

Docstoc

For sharing professional documents

Simonyi and intentional software

News from infoq.com from the JAOO Conference in Denmark

At the JAOO conference in Denmark today, Charles Simonyi (recent space tourist, and ex-Microsoft lead architect of Word & Excel) summarized a brief history of software as a struggle between the separation of the problem and the solution, referring to the mismatch between how domain experts think about and store their domain knowledge and how programmers have to store and rewrite that knowledge to build software to serve those domains.

The vision of Intentional Software, the company Charles founded is a world in which domain experts can write their requirements in any notation or input form that is familiar/comfortable to them (boxes, lines, tables, formulas,etc) and this "domain code" is used as a first class citizen within the software development project, used as an input around which the rest of the application gets generated. Business users write the domain code, developers write the program generators.

The vision has been developed into the "Domain workbench" product by Intentional Software, who has been working on it for over 5 years and is currently going through private beta testing and production use at a couple of consultancies, including Capgemini. The domain workbench fits all the requirements of a Language Workbench as defined by Martin Fowler.

Domain code is represented behind the scenes in a tree structure called the "intentional tree" which can be projected into multiple notations to allow business users to express domain code in different ways most suitable for them.

Read full article

Google Analytics and AIR

clipped from www.techcrunch.com That’s why I found Google Analytics AIR beta, publicly released on September 17th, to be such a breath of fresh air (no pun intended, really). This unofficial AIR version of Google Analytics delivers the functionality of browser-based Google Analytics but with greater usability and a richer experience. If you haven’t heard of AIR (once named “Apollo”), it’s a platform developed by Adobe that enables web developers to deploy their web services outside of the browser so they function more like traditional applications. This is the first AIR program that I have tested that really gets me excited about the platform. As a beta program, it’s not perfect (I ran into a few errors), but overall it has been executed very well. It’s also nice to see such a full-functional program developed using someone else’s API (in this case, Google’s).

New tool for blogging and maybe a whiteboard for the website ...

clipped from www.techcrunch.com A new site called Sketchcast launched moments ago - it’s a tool for bloggers and others to create a presentation to express an idea using a sketchpad and (optionally) a †sound recording, and then embed it into a website. Sketchcasts can also be subscribed in iTunes and RSS readers via a feed.

LeWeb3

LeWeb3
to be held in Paris, natch') is scheduled for December 11-12 and is open for registration. A sampling of speakers such as Esther Dyson, Michael Arrington, Om Malik and Facebooks's Nethanel Jacobssen promise a great two days of the latest on the web.

Flaw in Adobe Reader 8.1

The hacker who discovered a recently patched QuickTime flaw affecting the Firefox browser says he has found an equally serious flaw in Adobe Systems Inc.'s PDF file format.

"Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF documents can be used to compromise your Windows box. Completely!!! Invisibly and unwillingly!!!," wrote Petko Petkov, in a breathless Thursday blog posting. "All it takes is to open a PDF document or stumble across a page which embeds one."

Petkov said he had confirmed the issue on Adobe Reader 8.1 on Windows XP and that other versions may be affected.

The security researcher said he would not release code that shows how this attack works until Adobe provided a patch for the problem, but he has already sent other software developers scrambling for bug fixes over the past week.

Read more on PC World

One more freebie and more competition for Microsoft....from Google

Google announcing the latest addition to its free office suite, a rival to Microsoft's business presentation tool, Powerpoint.

Other freebie news

Slashdot also reporting that the New York Times will be ending their paid subscription internet service TimeSelect in hopes of attracting more readers which should translate into higher advertising revenue.

Even IBM joining open source

Slashdot reports that IBM, after having announced last week that they are joining OpenOffice.org by dedicating 35 developers, will be releasing a free, downloadable office suite in direct challenge to Microsoft. Named Lotus Symphony, it will be based on Open Office, include free support, and probably platform support on at least Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Velvet Puffin

VelvetPuffin, check it out here

Hard to keep up! But Velvet Puffin's description is fairly self-explanatory "IM meets social networking". I watched part of Scobie's vidcast, but not all the way to the end, so still perplexed as to how they came up with the name....

oDesk and Facebook ?

clipped from www.techcrunch.com oDesk, a next generation marketplace for contract developers, has recently seen a spike in requests for Facebook developers. oDesk offers developers a number of aptitude tests to certify their programming skills in various areas - existing tests include Ajax, CSS, .Net, DHTML and ASP, among others. They’ve now added a forty minute Facebook aptitude test as well. Companies can now sort through developers based on their skill level in creating Facebook applications. In related news, VentureBeat is reporting that a new course, called Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook will be offered this fall in Stanford’s computer science department. Dave McClure is a co-instructor.

An online PDF editor next?

clipped from www.techcrunch.com Adobe’s Online Image Editor Previewed Michael Arrington 29 comments » Right on schedule, Adobe previews an online version of its ubiquitous Photoshop tool, to be called Photoshop Express. Adobe isn’t saying much, other than to point out that it is not a Photoshop replacement but rather “a new member of the Photoshop family that’s meant to make Adobe imaging technology immediately accessible way to large numbers of people.” Either way, a number of startups are not going to be having such a good weekend. Sphere It This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 12:32 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

According to yesterday, September 7th's, Hindu, Chief Mentor N R Narayana Murthy and CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan of Infosys met with Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan in Trivananthapuram to discuss the establishment of a major, international-standard Research and Development Center at the TRV Technopark.

They are also exploring the idea of finishing schools to improve education, starting first with the weakest sectors.

Good description of the science AND art of software development

From Joel on Software, read the full article

Design is the art phase, where you’re doing new, creative work. Even though what you’re doing is completely new, after you’ve gone through a few software development cycles you’ll start to get a pretty good idea of how much time it takes to design a new version of your software. I’ve usually worked with relatively long development cycles of 12-18 months, and it’s always taken me about two months to get a detailed, first-draft spec containing enough detail for the development team to create very granular estimates.

That said, when you’re building something brand new from scratch, you really can’t estimate the design phase at all, and that’s OK. Today I met somebody from a company in Seattle that’s working on a project headed up by one of the world’s great programmers, Charles Simonyi. Near as I can tell, they have been in the design phase for 16 years.

Development is the engineering phase. It’s a construction project. As long as you start with a detailed blueprint, which, of course, can change over time, but which is really your best guess for what you’re building, this phase can be scheduled with great precision. FogBugz 6.0 has a spiffy new feature called Evidence-based scheduling, which uses a variation on the Monte Carlo method for making your schedules remarkably reliable during the development phase. When I get a chance, I’ll you about it in more detail.

Debugging is the science phase. Science is difficult to schedule because you’re looking for things, and predicting when you’re going to find them is remarkably difficult. Unless you know in advance how many bugs you’re going to find, you don’t have an ice cube’s chance in the Sahara to work out a detailed estimate of how long this phase will take. Here at Fog Creek we’ve learned that for a new release of FogBugz, this phase takes at least 12 weeks, sometimes a little more, and we just leave it at that.

RR Donnelly in Technopark,Thiruvananthapuram

RR Donnelly announces the opening of a second BPO facility in Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram. This will add 1,000 employees to the existing 500 already working in Technopark, not to mention the 4,500 employees now working in Chennai.

ISO Vote 'No' to Microsoft's Office Doc Format

Apparently the ISO voted down fast tracking Microsoft's OpenXML document format. Microsoft was hoping for the adoption of their format by the ISO committee as it would directly impact sales of Office 2007 by governments and large institutions who require that all documents and communications to be archived in an ISO-approved format.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/iso-rejects-mic.html

From StickyMinds.com-11 ways Agile Methodologies Fail

1. Ineffective use of the retrospective
2. Inability to get everyone in the planning meetings
3. Failure to pay attention to the infrastructure required
4. Bad ScrumMasters
5. Product Owner is Consistently Unavailable or There are Too Many Owners Who Disagree
6. Reverting to Form
7. Obtaining Only "Checkbook Commitments" from Executive Management
8. Teams Lacking Authority and Decision-Making Ability
9. Not Having an Onsite Evangelist for Remote Locations
10. A Culture that Does Not Support Learning
11. Denial is Embraced Instead of the Brutal Truth

Read the full article

TouchGraph, Check it Out!

Cool google service which shows website or search connectivity visually.

Paramount Airways to link major Kerala cities

In more signs of progress and easier connectivity (personal, that is), Paramount Airways is planning to fly between major Kerala cities such as Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Kozhikode.

For those Oops moments, when an important file is inadvertently deleted.

Cagnina Design has recently developed a unique external hard drive for Intech called Tempo. As files are deleted, they are automatically copied to the mini-trash can-shaped device, providing an extra safety net should the user accidentally delete important files. As the 250 GB of space is used up, embedded LEDs light Tempo's exterior surface from the bottom up, as if it were physically being filled.

From Core77 blog

Is this progress? The first fully automated restaurant

Hate interacting with humans? Well then we've got the restaurant for you, located in Nuremberg, Germany. The restaurant, called Bagger's, eschews waiters and waitresses for gravity operated ramps that sends food directly to tables. Customers order on touch screens, swipe their cards on built in readers, and wait for their food with a read-out that shows when the food is expected to be delivered. So, get ready to yell at your ordinateur when your fries are late...
From Engadget

Something to think about from Seth's Blog - on how to be given the benefit of the doubt instead of being used as a scapegoat for the smallest trip-up:

'You've probably seen it. The customer who's just waiting for you to screw up. The tour passenger who is itching for one thing to go wrong, the legal client who has a whole list of complaints just waiting for the first bill that comes in higher than it should, the boss who hovers, glee in his eye as you work to make a deadline.

In fact, if you're human, it's probably been you once or twice.

As a marketer, one of the most beneficial things you can do is get people to give you the benefit of the doubt before you start delivering a service or a product. Here are five brainstorms to get you started:

* Be the underdog. Nextel or AT&T? Nextel often got the benefit of the doubt.
* Underpromise.
* Build up expectations of difficulty. Magicians are really good at this. If people think what you're doing is really difficult, they root for you.
* Underhype. If others are building you up day after day, it's easy to root against you. The Germans have a word for everything and they have a word for this: schadenfreude.
* Call them on it. If you think people are being perfectionists and not giving you a chance, ask for one. It's easier to ask for a chance to excel than it is to ask forgiveness if you fail.

My favorite way to get a chance is to give one. Organizations that are a little more flexible with their customers (and grateful to them) often get a lot more flexibility in return.'

Complaining pays off

Adobe's agressive bundling of an automatic FedEx/Kinko's printing button on the latest version of Reader and Acrobat (two weeks ago) resulted in such outrage that they have now removed the button from the programs.

However, Adobe will still offer a special version of Adobe/ Fedex/Kinko'susers can still opt in to use the button, which is still adding fuel to the controversy. The reaction has been mixed at best, so expect more debate in the weeks to come.

Chaos works best for Indian retailers from WSJ for subscribers.
India, like nowhere else in the world, proves itself noticeably different when it comes to retailing as well.

Kishore Biyani has built a family fortune by ensuring that the chaos middle class customers are used to finding when shopping can be found in his large retail spaces.

Instead of long clean aisles with swept floors, Food Bazaar has adopted a cluster approach using bins-customers are used to looking down and rummaging, over the tidy stacks we Westerners are accustomed to.

The super retailer Wal-Mart approach is here to stay in India, thanks to the time factor-working mothers don't have time to go to a dozen small shopfronts to do the family shopping. And Biyani has learned to appeal to the 55 million mid-level servants which most mid to upper class families employ, who are responsible for the shopping decisions.

He has even replicated the gray concrete floors of most Indian rail stations and insists that aisles should not be swept too clean or look too orderly.

As the average Indian also likes to haggle, hires triple the amount of workers who roam through the aisles and add to the cacophony of Indian music and announcements of specials, and otherwise interact with his customers.

This is an approach that Western companies-like Wal-mart who is partnering with Bharti, as India regulates against multiple brand retailing direct to consumers. French retailer Carrefour and UK's Tesco are also studying India closely.

OF course, France already has Tati - cheap clothing clustered in bins-geared to the lower classes and immigrants but also considered chic in the 6th and the 16th, who are known to fill carts with cheap underwear and the like.

As so many things Indian, will this trend export to America?

From Chris Andersens's Long Tail blog:
The Long Tail of software

Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite, has a new company that's based on what he calls the Long Tail of software. Called JotSpot, it's building a wiki-like platform that makes it easy for firms to create custom applications for their specific business needs, much as they do with Excel spreadsheets today. He briefed me about this some time ago, but I wasn't able to talk about it until now. Fortunately, he's done all the talking for me with a really interesting post on his own blog that nicely shows how broadly the Long Tail theory can be applied.

The long tail doesn’t just apply to music and movies. There’s a long tail for software as well. Here’s why.

First, every business has multiple processes. Things like hiring, firing, selling, ordering, etc. Second, while some of these are pretty common in name from business to business (recruiting, for example), in practice, they are usually highly customized. Finally, there are simply a large number of processes that are either unique or that are common to millions of very small markets and therefore not traditionally worth the effort to buy software for (for example, the process by which an architecture firm communicates between it’s clients and the city planning office).

These three facts

every business has multiple processes
processes that are similar in name between businesses are actually often highly customized
there exist a large number of processes unique to millions of small clusters of industries.

means that there is a combinatorial explosion of process problems to solve and, it turns out, little software to actually support them.

Said another way, there is a long tail of very custom process problems that software is supposed to help businesses solve.

Panoramic vistas

Panorama's

Very cool site with panoramic views, for a little break with routine! Incredible landscapes as well as many constructed wonders of the world.

From CIO Today
s the Party Over for Indian Outsourcers? By Manjeet Kripalani

The tech industry in India is so pampered by New Delhi, and so admired by ordinary Indians, that it has been lagging behind the competition. Industry trade group Nasscom recently released a report on the necessity of Indian companies to begin to innovate to survive, and suggested an ecosystem for innovation, helped by policy initiatives.

Organizations need assurance and information security programs aligned with business goals and effective in managing risk. ISACA�s Certified Information Systems Auditor� (CISA�) and Certified Information Security Manager� (CISM�) designations can help ensure your organization's success.
In late July, rumors swirled that Infosys Technologies might be readying a takeover offer for Cap Gemini or another major tech-services player in the U.S. or Europe. So on July 25, when the company alerted the press and the markets that it had a major announcement, there was a great deal of anticipation.

Instead, Infosys unveiled a $250 million outsourcing contract with Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands. It was an acquisition of sorts, the company said, at least of the outsourcing centers that belonged to Philips. "We're taking the model to a newer level," said Chief Executive Kris Gopalakrishnan.

Landing a new contract certainly isn't bad news, but the development was somewhat deflating for those who believe that Infosys needs to redefine and reposition itself in the multibillion-dollar arena for global outsourcing services. In fact, Infosys and other Indian outsourcers are facing a raft of competitive challenges that will require some dramatic new strategies.

Adversities Add Up

True, India's biggest outsourcing firms continue to rake in the profits, at least judging by the latest earnings season. The top five players -- Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, and Satyam -- reported robust profits in the quarter ended June, 2007. And executives generally forecast strong growth ahead.

"We're very happy with having beaten the forecast," said CEO and Managing Director S. Ramadorai of the $3.1 billion Tata Consultancy Services in Bombay. "TCS, as the leader, is doing well." Ramadorai predicts $60 billion in tech-services exports for the industry by 2010, nearly twice the current $35 billion, plus $20 billion in revenue from domestic business.

Yet behind this show of supreme confidence lurks deep unease. A confluence of adversities is at play. They include an appreciating rupee that is cutting into earnings, a severe shortage of qualified talent at home, and a cap on H-1B worker visas to the U.S., along with pre-2008 election protectionism threats.

Diminishing Returns

On top of that, there is the end of preferential industry tax benefits at home and the growing success of multinational competitors such as Accenture and IBM on Indian turf. Perhaps most challenging for the Indian players is the pressing need to move up the ladder into business consulting Relevant Products/Services, a domain that companies such as IBM have dominated for decades. Indian outsourcing firms need to invest heavily to secure a position in this arena, and that will erode their fat profits, at least in the short term.
Read on

LOP-ing Off Language-Oriented Programming

Taken from iHack therefore iBlog>
July 27, 2007

I’ve been fascinated by Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and metaprogramming for a while (particularly in Ruby), but just encountered the larger concept of Language-Oriented Programming (LOP). As someone who’s been an OOP weenie since the late 1980’s, I am intrigued by the question whether LOP and Language-Driven Development (LDD) will prove to be a similarly transformational paradigm.

As usual, once I discover something “new” it turns out people quicker than me have already been talking about it for years. Still, there’s probably people slower than me who haven’t heard of it yet, so for them I’ve collected some of the more useful resources below. Enjoy!

• Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm (PDF) by Sergey Dmitriev of JetBrains (IntelliJ)
• Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages? by Martin Fowler
• Intentional Programming: A Talk With Charles Simonyi
• Code Generation Network - Andy Evans of Xactium

The best car advertisement ever

http://www.steelcitysfinest.com/HondaAccordAd.htm

Supernova/TechCrunch 2007 Picks- connected innovators

Wize, Zing, Adapt-tv, Spock, Soda-head, Jangl, Critical Metrics, Cast TV, Adaptive Blue, Aggregate Knowledge, Pando Networks, ZenZui, ZapMeals are the 12, oops, yes there are 13, can you spot the fake?

From TechCrunch

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: They are fresh from college but not desperate for a job!

Eight engineering graduates from this state, known better for its thriving tourism industry, are looking to give jobs to people in their IT startup that is already being valued at around USD seven million.

This team of graduates, which actually shaped its destiny by setting up 'Torque' to provide IT solutions across verticals, now dreams of turning Kerala into the 'Silicon Coast' of India.

"I come from a middle class family. I don't have a big family tag to my name. The state has given me a good education. And, now I think, I have to pay (it) back," Torque CEO Sanjay Vijayakumar told media on asked about the inspiration behind the venture created a year before they left campus.

Obviously, the team also drew inspiration from Stanford University graduates, who helped the Silicon Valley in the US to become the metonymy for world hightech ventures.

Their brainchild Torque has in a short time grown into a pioneering technology business incubated company being currently valued at $5-7 million based in Technopark here.

"Our initial cash investment was Rs eight lakh raised by eight of us while we were in college some 18 months back," Vijayakumar said.
Read on: Young turks dream of a Kerala Silicon Coast

CNN Money -the 50 who matter most in biz, trends, and ideas.

Wet (and dedicated) Geeks at Hack Day London

Only in London does a programming conference get interrupted by a downpour of rain -- indoors.

Hundreds of geeks gathered for Hack Day London at the huge Alexandra Palace broke out umbrellas Saturday to stop laptops from getting soaked when rain poured in through the roof. A lightning strike had shorted circuits and opened the building's electronically controlled skylights.

From Wired, read more...

Real-Time Collaboration for the Web

Thinkature

IBM and Adobe?

Excerpted from Seeking Alpha Blog

IBM buying Adobe? The the rumor millers are getting creative these days. At present, ADBE has a market value of just under $26 bln vs. the market cap of IBM at $153 bln. Big Blue also has around $10 bln in cash on its balance sheet. So it is conceivable that IBM could engineer such a deal, but I find it hard to believe that ADBE management would sell out and find it harder to imagine how ADBE culture would mesh with IBM culture since I know IBMers here in the Hudson Valley and what's going on at Big Blue these days.

Incidentally, ADBE will post earnings Thursday evening. While press reports say the rise in ADBE today was due to optimism about earnings, the IBM rumor did indeed hit a number of trading desks that I'm in touch with. There's no doubt that ADBE will also post strong results tomorrow night. 36c is the Reuters consensus estimate for the bottom line, 730.1 mln is the top line estimate.

The better bet with ADBE is likely to go with the earnings story, and avoid speculating on the outlandish IBM for ADBE rumor.

From O'Reilly's Radar
Adobe had several major announcements today. They released the Beta of Apollo (now renamed AIR). Adobe also confirmed that AIR will be using SQLite as a local database (just like Google Gears). They began the process of opensourcing Flex and they pre-releases of Flex3 and FlexBuilder are available today.

I had the opportunity to speak with the Product manager of FlexBuilder, Steven Heintz. We discussed the announcements, Google Gears, and some of their new IDE extensions. Steven also pointed me to a Gears SQLAdmin tool that is built in Flex.

Here are some links about today’s announcements:

* Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)
* Flex 3

Motley Fool forecasts strong Adobe
If you've ever done anything creative on a computer -- except perhaps writing fiction -- you've seen the content creation tools Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) makes a living out of. The company releases second-quarter earnings Thursday night, so we're checking up on this mighty, mighty software creator for you.

What analysts say:

• Buy, sell, or waffle? Thirty-one analyst firms follow Adobe. There are 21 buy ratings, 10 holds, and no sell recommendations. Our Motley Fool CAPS players have issued over 600 ratings on the stock, giving it a solid four-star rating.
• Revenues. Management guidance points to a $700 million to $740 million range, and the average Wall Street forecast says $728 million. That's 14% above the year-ago $635 million.
• Earnings. The official guidance zone ranges from $0.34 to $0.36 per share, and the analyst consensus falls exactly between the endpoints at $0.35 per share. That's up from $0.31 last year.

What management says:
In the last earnings report, CEO Bruce Chizen prepared us for what he called the biggest product launch in Adobe's history. More on that below. Chizen also said that he was "excited about our opportunities and bullish about our prospects for another year of strong performance."

What management does:
The slipping gross margins are hardly ideal, but they're acceptable in the light of tasty revenue growth. A similar bottom-line downtrend in margins was just reversed, but trailing dollar earnings have actually declined lately.

Read more

from Techcrunch

Adobe moved its new Apollo Platform forward this evening by releasing the beta version (the href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/18/adobe-apollo-launches-so-go-build-something/">previous Apollo release was a developer preview). They’ve also renamed the platform to Adobe Integrated Runtime. They’re referring to it as “Adobe AIR” (meaning Adobe is in the name twice, but who’s counting).

The new version fully supports HTML and Ajax, meaning Apollo applications can be created without using any Flash at all. They are also releasing an extension to Dreamweaver web development software.

Adobe is also now saying that AIR will be fully launched by end of year.

Akamai
20% of the world's Internet traffic is delivered over the Akamai platform. We combine this global scope with constant data collection to construct an accurate and comprehensive picture of what's happening on the Internet. Bookmark this page to check the world's online behavior at any given moment -- How fast is data moving? Where's the most congestion? What events are causing spikes in Web activity?

Previously, only Akamai and our customers had access to this information. Now we're opening that window into the online universe.

Place your votes

clipped from www.webware.com

Over 30 Indian Americans Named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Finalists

clipped from www.indiawest.com Dipak Jain, dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., is among those named regional finalists in "Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year" awards for 2007. Most of the regions will have their awards dinners during the month of June to select regional award honorees - eligible for Ernst & Young's national awards. The state of New Jersey has the strongest representation of Indian American finalists - seven - with awards to be given June 21. Ranjani Posddar, president of Artech Information Systems in Morristown; Imran Shah of Princeton Junction, N.J.-based IBB Consulting Group; and Karmit S. Sidhu, vice president of business development at American Sensor Technologies in Mt. Olive, N.J.

Great business cards designs
From Creative Bits

For all Mac lovers/users
Fifty greast desktop widgets

India's richest man to build 60 story home

Clipped fromCore77 Blog

More details at Mumbai Mirror

Innovative Biz Card

Check out this lovely design for a business card that sprouts a miniature garden when you dip it in water:

The result was a business card that worked like a miniature house-plant, growing alfalfa or cress when dipped in water - a business card for 'another bloomin' designer'.

The logo was also cut into a 'seed stencil' that allowed the logo to be grown on either earth or lawn; on uncut grass, the message would remain hidden until the area was mown.

Clipped from Boingboing

Good news for Apple Admirers

Apple Outlet

Clipped from Core77 Blog.

Smugmug - The Ultimate in Photo Sharing

Adobe in India

Adobe for anti-piracy watchdog in India
Adobe Systems, the $2.6 billion San Jose (US) based desktop publishing software company, wants the Union government to create an anti-piracy regulatory body for a faster redressal system with a country-wide campaign to spread awareness among the people.

Sandeep Mehrotra, the country sales manager of Adobe, who was in Kolkata to announce the company's plans for the eastern region, said for every Adobe product, there are 8 to 9 pirated copies in India. Adobe plans to introduce its latest offering Adobe Creative Suite 3 product line in the eastern region.

"In the last one year, piracy in India has come down by one percentage point, which is not at all satisfactory. To make things more effective, we need a separate government body," Mehrotra said.

He said Adobe is bullish about the eastern region as there is growth in demand for books, magazines and newspapers. "We see more demand of our software products in the publishing industry," Mehrotra said.

Adobe has decided to tie up with educational institutes both at the school and college levels to provide tools and software to the institutes.

Ze Micro-Blog

In France, they call 'twitter'ing microblogging, making a twitter a microblog.

Lifehacker

Ten million hits a month- need I say more?

clipped from lifehacker.com Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the software downloads and web sites that actually save time. Don't live to geek; geek to live.

Bringo - an idea whose time has definitely come

clipped from www.folksonomy.org Bringo (a.k.a. nophonetrees.com) is the new site in town that aims to eliminate annoying customer phone tree waits. With Bringo, say goodbye to having to wait in a customer service queue to speak to a person that can help you with your problem. Stop Talking to Machines and Talk to a Real Human Tired of dialing 1-800 numbers and not being able to get through to a human who can help you? Here's how it works: Find the company you'd like to call by category (credit cards, mortgages, loans, health care) Enter your phone # (we will never disclose your phone number to anyone, not even your mother!). Wait a few seconds while we navigate the phone tree. When we call you back, pick up your phone and you're done. No more phone trees. nophonetrees.com/

Thank you Clement Wang and Mark Grazman!

Google Domination Continues-$100 Million Feedburner Purchase

clipped from www.techcrunch.com Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years. The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point. Huge congratulations to Feedburner. The company was founded in 2003 and has raised just $10 million in capital over two rounds. Portage Ventures funded their $1 million Series A round in 2004. The $9 million Series B round was closed in mid 2005 (second close in 2006), from Mobius Venture Capital and Union Square Ventures. Sphere It The above reported by Michael Arrington, but I must offer congratulations as well. I had some glitches with Feedburner and their customer service was always prompt and helpful. Much appreciated.