The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

I realized today that I have not been able to make a single post in the last ten days, which is sacrilegious silence in terms of blogging(If you are not offended, I am). Let’s see how the world’s changed in last ten days:

1. The Independence Day Landmark Quiz happened at Music Academy. Teamed up with two very bright students I met for the first time and nearly qualified for the finals(How can one believe otherwise?!)- Strategic Alliance is the name of the game. That’s how I’ve always won Quiz events, earlier at school and last seven years at my company!
2. Sushil Kumar got India its second medal from Beijing- made us proud (My chest is close to bursting in anticipation of a third medal via  Vijender Kumar ).
3. Apple announced pricing of its iPhone in India(~USD 760 for 8 GB).Skimming pricing is what they taught us in Economics. Demand elasticity, bullshit?  Wait, those pricing guys at Apple studied the same economics paper as me. That means penetration pricing after a duration of price skimming. That means an iPhone in India at 10k in about eight to ten months. I still won’t buy it.Imagine,  you cannot even address an SMS to multiple people, I believe you cannot even forward a message.
4. Bought Steve Jobs biography. It has an uninspiring title called iCon (Steve Wozniak’s biography was on the shelf too – it was creatively titled iWoz).Given Apple’s innovative streak, I was hoping for the book to open sideways at least. Disappointment, it just opens normally.
5. Bipasha Basu threatened Vijender Kumar with a date- ahem, why was this offer not announced before the Olympics selection trials- this could have motivated many of the athletes, and maybe got us more medals. And just by the way, does Bipasha fully understand the ramifications if the hockey boys had qualified to the Olympics and won the Gold?
6. Oops I forgot, India turned 61!
7. Dr C.K .Prahalad gave a talk on India-at-75 yesterday in Chennai and nope, I could not get my copy of his book on innovation autographed.
8. The President of Pakistan resigned. And surprise of surprises, one week after resigning, he’s neither on a plane to some distant land, nor behind bars! Somehow I was reminded of an old Salman Rushdie book with characters whose names I vaguely remeber as Gen Faltu and Gen Bekar.Was it called Shame? Did he have this scene in mind when he wrote this book?

Good Bye For Now.

Before I start, let me say this. I am not into negative posts that make anyone look bad. But frankly, as a member of another management association, I’m quite stunned to note that the Delhi Management Association website leads you to a domain parking site. Besides the usual ads, it also gives the reasons for the same.  The site existed till few days back and has deep footprints on Google.

My curiosity takes me to a lookup and I find that the site has been renewed as late as today and valid for another year. Looks like it was paid a day after the domain expired. Quite likely, the registrar decided to park the page. And after renewal, someone forgot to unplug the domain parking.

The lookup also identifies a administrative and technical contact at Delhi Management Association and even gives her mail id ( Not shown in the screenshot). One can see another cardinal bloomer. The administrative and technical contact mail id is on the same domain(dmadelhi.org), which means that once the domain expires, the mail also stops working cutting all communication. But quite a good idea, if you have the payment discipline though.

Frankly, in the net age when even small societies are leveraging the net for communications and promotions, a leading body such as Delhi Management Association forgetting the basics is quite a shock.

Updated Aug 9 , 8 AM: The real site is back to life.

With Proto dust yet to settle down, blogosphere in India remains quite charged up about startups. As a bibliophile, I was quite attracted towards Pothi.com, which is a bring-your-manuscript-take-back-books style startup by two very talented young minds.

At the heart of Pothi.com’s value proposition is delayering, which means as a prospective author with a manuscript, you do not have to grovel before prospective publishers- you become a publisher yourself. Upload the manuscript, and Pothi.com would provide printing services as well as sell it via their website, for a commission. Sounds good so far, but the concept is nascent and evolving. Pothi needs to go a little further.

Inside every book lovers heart lies an urge to be an author one day (some author, if not a best selling author!). The role of a publishing house editor has changed and now they get involved right from the time a book is conceived. They are partners who help develop the cencept, and with their scholarship arrive at the subject gap, even suggesting to the author what will sell. By delayering, Pothi is completely removing this layer with obvious risks. Pothi.com could do well to consider getting an optional loop where an editor is introduced into the cycle.

The second is promoting a new or upcoming title. Usually, books are promoted by book clubs, reading sessions, reviews in newspapers and trade magazines of repute, sites such as Shelfari and even the blogosphere. There are some reputed book reviewers , who can really swing a few hundred copies easily. What is the plan to tap them? And have you seen Amazon and how they tap reader reviews.

The third observation is on distribution. While books are one of the items that get sold off online relatively easily, significantly larger number of copies are sold via shops such as Landmark, Odyssey and so on. These large book retailers are too big a channel to be ignored or directly competed against. And what’s is your inventory management plan once you get orders of five, or ten thousand copies or more.

Excellent concept, a little rushed implementation which cannot afford to stop evolving.  In short, Jaya and Abhay would do well to spend some energies on the behavioural model of this book publishing  business- the application usually evolves once the behavioural model is in place. I am also making a slightly contestable assertion that there are more book lovers in the South Indian cities, so a name such as Pothi (Tome in Hindi) would have acceptability issues.

At a personal level, the idea looks quite  interesting and worth following the evolution of Pothi.

No, I don’t mean outsourcing as we know it. I merely mean IT adoption and IT readiness in a general sense. It should not surprise that the Global IT Report published by Prof. Soumitra Dutta of Insead business school has Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland as the top three countries in that order. In fact, the list of Top 10 countries in the word has only one large country – USA, which has moved up three notches. The Global IT Report is quite a pointer, since it compares parameters such as ICT environment by looking a regulatory environment and infocomm infrastructure. I am also assuming this report also takes government ICT focus as a parameter to rate.

I am a little surprised not to see India in the list. It has one of the fastest growing ICT industry, and telecom is fairly well regulated. But then, one would not count India as being anywhere near being as network ready as Singapore or Korea which seem to be leading the way.

I liked Insead’s Knowledge portal and strongly recommend a look. I also found case study on Indian Railways here. I wonder how many other B-Schools have the vision to create an external knowledge community like Insead.

Many times we don’t know that we already have a prepared logic to handle a situation. Like sometimes when we say, "Don’t know why but I do not have good feeling about this move" or so on. In some such situation, we have already debated the pros and cons of such a move at a subliminal level of our mind, and though the logic is not known to the upper layers of our mind, we pretty much know what to do. Such logic that we ourselves are not cognizant of the existence of such logic but it tends to guide us. In simple words, intuition in some situation could be the result of an internal evaluation of a situation without becoming aware of such a processing. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is is all about that. It is all about the existence of what programmers would like to say – existence of pre-compiled code in human mind. If you haven’t read, do grab and read this brilliant book.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

Blogstreet is an India based feed aggregation cum rating tool. But unlike other sites such as Technorati, it suffers some major drawbacks.

1. Registration is a painful process, and it might take days or weeks depending on Blogstreet to ‘accept’ your blog.Go visit the temple.
2. It is pretty whimsical about which blogs to update, example, it has not pulled feed from this blog for ages (neither has it been merciful to my Hindi blog). The last post it picked up from this blog was , well, it has no posts right now, though for some reason it still assigns ‘rating’ to my site, which goes up and goes down, well, logic unknown.
3. There is no one to connect to, if you have any issues. If you go to Contact and leave a message pointing out the issues, well, quite likely, you would not receive a response. Probably not even in months.
4. There is no ping like feature on Blogstreet to let Blogstreet know that you have made a new post. Blogstreet has its own logic to visit your blog, well, you guessed it again, logic is pretty unknown.
5. It always asks you to classify your blog in one category at joining stage and does not allow you to move to another category or to choose more than one category.
6. It speaks about Book Reviews etc,but again pretty whimsical about which blogs and which posts to figure there.

The application itself seems pretty stagnant.

Looking at state of things, it certainly does not seem its pink of health, and not sure of the experiences of others, but to me it certainly seems going downhill. Is Blogstreet a Techcrunch deadpool candidate already?

More on Blogstreet at Technorati here

I noticed this yesterday.I have so far believed that Google bots index permalinks of websites and blogs, but this time it seem to have indexed the Blog label itself.Clearly, this seems to be bug where the spider has assumed a label to be a post.Pretty curious indeed.

Google

Google frequently gives suggestions when you run a search suggesting an spelling correction in the search string, which appears something like ‘Did you mean:Britney Spears?‘.

Google

I was a little work tied up in sending my registration cheque for Proto.in and sent some frantic mails on Friday asking the organisers if I could make the payment on the venue(Had filled the online registration form in time). Sadly, no response, and though I stay on IIT campus, decided that this event is not for me.Hence, no first hand event update from my side.Other bloggers have written on this though.