Batting at number 12: News and politics

So Yahoo! India WAS hacked after all!

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 21:15:23 GMT

I blogged a bit about it last week. I was hoping that it was a false positive and never analysed it much but today I came across a post that looked at it in more details. Looks like it really was hacked within days of its launch. Yahoo! has started its cleanup act but I wish it was detected and fixed earlier.

Stories on Indian Startups

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:55:34 GMT

Recently there has been some talk about immigrant/Indian entrepreneurship and the Indian startup scene. Dharmesh Shah has a couple such articles here and here. As he notes, the scene in India is changing fast and startups are mushrooming around the tech hubs in India. But the so called Silicon Valley of India is still thriving mostly on the outsourced jobs and "off-shore" development centres of major corporations.

When I was working in a well known software services company in India, we tried to push hard into being a product company. The drive went on for about 3 years after which profitability of the whole effort was reviewed by the execs. The initiative was soon cancelled and projects mothballed.

Apart from the reasons Dharmesh highlights for why consumer software products did not take off in India, I think the mother cause of it was the need. A software product is just simply an effort to reduce the manpower requirement in doing things and India has never felt a need to do that thanks to its billion strong population. That's also the reason why the indispensible vacuum cleaner that you find in every home in the western world, is a hard sell in India . If the data entry operator can do the job for me cheaper, then why would I invest in an OCR software and workflow system, which needs some manual intervenation anyways?

This I think has some positive side to it as well. This way the wealth of the new economy is trickling down to the masses. Hopefully reducing the gap of haves and have-nots by some amount.

Bach ke rehna re baba...

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 17:42:09 GMT

When in Rome, you might get away not speaking Roman (ok Latin...) but American folks don't seem to be as accommodating. Last week an Indian man was interrogated at the Seattle airport. Apparently he was heard talking something non-English (Tamil) that sounded suspicious. Well you cannot really blame the poor security fellow here. He was just doing his job.

May be we should all speak English when in public places. But hey even if a desi was speaking his heavily desi accented fast English, that security dude couldn't have figured out the language anyways ;) I guess next time I travel I am going to pretend to be a mute or just mime. :p

Apple - The King of hype!

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 06:26:17 GMT

Apple is the King when it comes to drumming up hype. Back in the limelight with its ubiquitous iPod and metrosexual imacs, Apple is all set to announce some new products tomorrow. Word is out that it includes a movie store, an update to ipod and a wireless media streaming solution. Nothing really ground breaking but gadget sites such as gizmodo and engadget were teeming with news and rumours about this for past week or so. As if there was going to be some earth shattering coming out of today's announcement...

Microsoft's UMPC had generated a bit of a hype recently and the windows marketplace caused a beep on the gadgeteers' radars but nothing comparable to what Apple has generated. Microsoft has at least two consumer product launches coming up, Vista and Zune I hope they learn some tricks from apple :)

IISER off to a humble start!

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 04:25:38 GMT

India created lot of technical geniuses through IIT's, the institute that has the repute to be the toughest school to get in. Now We are aspring to do the same thing in the field of pure sciences with IISER. The two schools started in Pune and Kolkata recently.

I hope the Government adopts the same hands off approach for IISER that it used in case of IIT to let them grow organically to be amongst the best in the world. Redirecting some of India's new found corporate wealth to these institutes might also help them jump start on infrastructure and facilities.

Kudos to the eduation ministry for this and I'm looking forward to some great research coming out of IISER.

Cyborg...made in Japan

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 02:03:56 GMT

Came across an interesting article about the two most successful consumer robots, Roomba and Aibo. Jeff Yang does a nice analysis of the cultures that created them concluding the robotic revolution is more likely to take place in Japan than in US. The reason?? Quoted from the article...

Deep in its heart, America finds the idea of technology with personalities to be
... spooky. After all, the notion of objects with minds of their own runs
counter to deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian values -- creating devices that
can move and think without human intervention veers a little too close to
playing God. And what if we do manage to create machines that are smarter,
stronger or more capable than humans? Our subconscious paranoia about
machines has prompted us to create dystopian visions like "Blade Runner" and
"The Matrix." If asked, many Americans would no doubt admit to being
concerned that evil humanoid robots might "take over civilization" (beginning, of course, with the California governor's office).

Maybe the author hasn't yet seen this