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At last somebody gets it

How and where we must be available for others to reach, is something that keeps puzzling me. While I have been very much against using email for communicating everything, one tech giant (non-american and non-asian but French) finally gets it.

Tech Firm Implements Employee ‘Zero Email’ Policy

While this works for communications and collaborations within the company, they are still looking for opportunities to reduce using email for external clients and partners.

Best of luck…people are still “STUCK” and getting “PUSH”ed through this POP/IMAP/SMTP technologies (baggage from early 1980s). Are we up for getting back to today (if not, back to the future) and stay relavant with today’s technology trends and culture.

The day when external clients and partners are comfortable to see a business card without email address would be my happy day. Now…thats something to wish for.

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – December 1, 2011

Don’t pay bail-out money

NGOs MUST NOT get any special privilege to commit financial mistakes and drain additional funds, from the government and INDIAN economy, in the name of Bailout. The concept of these bail-out would simply imply a new form of tax levied to INDIANs.
Continued…

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – November 14, 2011

Chiefs talking about heat

A brave and bold CEO is on the move. I wish he knows what he is doing.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops-in-brutally-honest-burnin/

Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop is:

  • Not a Nokia veteran
  • Not Finnish
  • Not a relaxed person within his company
  • Headed the most profitable business unit of Microsoft (Of course, I am talking about Microsoft Office)
  • Paints the reality to the rest of his Nokia team.
  • Trying to regain market share of this giant 140 year old company

After reading the memo transcript, my thoughts got re-winded immediately to a note related to Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie in 2008 (Wired Article: Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode).

Continued…

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – February 10, 2011

Governing Privacy

Citizens have the right to have privacy. Intruding the privacy in the name of security is fine as long as it is JUSTIFIED BY THE LAW.

Now we know that laws are man made. Lets look at this recent news “U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet“.

Why would the government want to make sure that you don’t use encryption algorithms to secure our conversation, unless there is a backdoor entry for them to peek into?

  • They want to know, if we are communicating anything that would harm the public interest
  • Pre-emptively/Non-Intrusively monitor the communications, as if the messages are sent in “clear text”
  • Don’t invest anything big, like computing farms and heavy duty super computers, to decode the messages being sent

Here is what I see as a problem and thereby an opportunity: Continued…

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – October 1, 2010

Half-Marthon results

I got running results from Tamil Maiyam couple of days ago. My timing chip had reported my finish time as 2:59:16. It wasn’t a surprise to me. Now I have a goal, to cut my slack, to finish it in sub 1:50:00 time and beat my PR in the next half-marathon run.

Being high endurance sport, it was great to run with more people around. Thanks for all those who ran with me, especially the ChennaiRunners.

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – October 1, 2010

Marathon this weekend

I wonder what happened to my running instinct. I guess laziness and lack of running with the groups like Chennai Runners, got me out of touch with the running events.

Without any long runs this year, I am venturing this weekend on this Chennai Give a Life Half Marathon, assuming that my night walks have kept my appetite to run.

This week the mantra is:

Eat...Sleep...Run...

Eat...Sleep...Run...REPEAT

If you are running this weekend, my best wishes to you…happy running.

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – August 26, 2010

A nice breakthrough

Getting a nice computing device for USD 10 to USD 35 price range is a noble effort.

OLPC Project is very jealous of this news post. Hail the INDIAN team work !!!

I will write about my experience in using it…when I get a chance.

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – July 24, 2010

Airtel Broadband Service non-availability today

It would be great when, non-government owned, Internet Service Providers are responsible and think more towards creating a reliable infrastructure.

Disruption to businesses due to an outage caused by Airtel Infrastructure today (8th April 2010) is just an example how much we depend on Internet Service. Fortunately, this service problem was only for Chennai, Tamil Nadu area. I just became a victim of it, since it pushed a scheduled demo with one of my overseas client.

http://beta.thehindu.com/business/article391966.ece
http://www.fonearena.com/blog/2010/04/08/airtel-broadband-internet-down.html

Telephony/Internet Services Provider market in INDIA is very lucrative and has attracted too many players (literally creating a dump of foreign direct investment to secure INDIA business). Business Continuity is a key for sustenance, with Number Portability in the radar, glitches like these would define customer loyalty.

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – April 8, 2010

Got Peek (why)?

Aircel has introduced the “Peek“. Its a service available for email users to go mobile. If your email and its responses haven’t come “handy” yet, this service is a great start (Rs. 3,000.00 for the device and Rs. 300 per month for 3 email accounts). There are too many mobile users INDIA, who haven’t started taking advantage of Mobile Internet.

Now on the other side, if you are already mobile savvy and have a good phone, please revisit your need on “Peek”. Smart Phones and Computers (Nokia N73, Samsung Corby, HTC Touch Pro 2 and N900 or any other phone that costs more than Rs. 10,000.00) are far more full-featured than Peek. Why would you want to carry a device just for email?

If you position any phone with “EMAIL” as the most important feature, I would tend to rethink. BlackBerry’s business model is all about a good email client and efficient (at a low bandwidth network) communication device. With 3G (high bandwidth network) and social communication, even email is getting irrelevant these days. BlackBerry has lived its days, it either reinvents itself or get perished. Do you have a BRICK? :-)

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – March 14, 2010

NDK (r3) promoted to one level up

Google has released the third version of Native Development Kit (NDK). The highlight is that OpenGL ES 2.0 implementations can be developed using Native Language (C/C++).

I like NDK, so much for the raw power ;-) . This release of NDK would be a great addition to Game Developers for Android and would seed some cool games for Android. So far iPhone and Symbian based Mobile OS phones were poised to dominate as great gaming platforms. Now it doesn’t have to hold true.

For now, lets just assume Google doesn’t get forced to trade Java for C/C++ layer, of the Android OS stack. Go Native!!!

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By Venkatraman Balasubramanian – March 9, 2010