India Elections 2009

India is facing two big clouds this year:

       – Biggest Global Economic melt down in more than 50 years threatening India’s nascent rise out of poverty

       – Biggest, most confusing & likely most inconclusive election since India’s independence

Though Indian GDP changes and stock market fluctuations have been less severe than many other countries, the confusion about our future has never been more dire.

There is still a lot of optimism and confidence amongst the youth (under 30 in India form more than half the population). But the recent election news and horse trading is quite depressing to watch:

      – Poll fever masks India’s gloom
      – Gandhi relative’s hate video shocks India
      – The beast that is Indian democracy

Self made MBAs…

In this day & age, with wealth of knowledge & information freely available and fabulous communication tools, I wonder why we cannot be our own self-made Masters of Business Administration…

Granted a lot of the great business training info & knowledge comes from the top business school researchers (Harvard Business Review), etc. But given that such wisdom is shared freely (not free as in dollars but free as in publicly available for a small cost), can we not have groups of interested “students” gather together in small local (or online virtually local) groups and learn.

Do we still need the same University & Classroom settings of the 19th & 20th century to really learn and be Masters of Business Administration – from an “open university of the world”. Can we not go back to the ages where most learning happened out in the world and not within closed boundaries?

For that matter, this can be extended to other branches of learning… Arts, Literature, Media – and most of the so-called soft skills.

Though, I would still hesitate to go to a doctor who had only “studied” at an open university of the world.

Laptops or Netbooks with built-in Projectors… Coming soon.

TI’s first generation DLP-based pico projectors have already been designed into SmartPhones in early 2009. Now they have announced 2nd generation DLP projector chips that will show up in 2010 devices. There are many other companies like Microvision that also are innovating on pico projector technology for various uses.

One place where these small projectors will be highly useful is Laptops or Netbooks. One major problem in confererence rooms around the world is a scramble to get projectors working with laptops. This invariably happens at the beginning of every meeting in the corporate world. And during the meeting, there is more time wasted in exchanging projector cables if someone else needs to present. Even though we have Webex, etc a need for a projector has not diminished.

A Laptop with a built-in projector would greatly simplify this problem savings countless minutes/hours in important meetings. With just a click (may be a combination Function-F8 click), you can start sharing your screen to meeting attendees. In addition in the case of smaller Netbooks, it might be a good way to make use of a larger screen to watch movies, etc while still having the netbook advantage of low-cost, small size & long battery life.

Starting 2009/2010, we should see many business laptops including a built-in projector. Netbooks might take longer to incorporate when price & size goes down.

Thoughts on “Desktop” UI Paradigm for PCs

Personal Computers have obviously evolved quite a bit. As of 2009, laptop or mobile PCs have largely surpassed the traditional immobile desktop PC.

Laptop PCs by their very nature are used quite differently from the Desktop PCs that sit on the office desk. Have you lately seen what people are doing with laptop PCs in a coffee shop or train or airplane ? Some watching movies, some reading news online, some playing games, some emailing, etc.

But the “Desktop” UI paradigm in PCs has not changed a bit in 25 years. The key aspects of the “Desktop” paradigm are:
     – An office Desktop represented by a background image
     – Tools on the desktop represented by a bunch of icons on top of the image
     – Common tools are docked on a dock or a taskbar

The desktop with its icons is fixed – just like the immobile desktop in the office.

But since the laptops are used in widely varying scenarios, why doesnt the UI change to adapt to the task being performed by its user.

For example, the UI can morph from 1) the traditional desktop mode when the user is using PowerPoint or Excel, but switch to a 2) TV-style interface while watching youtube and switch to a 3) textbook-style UI when reading news online and switch to a 4) game console-style UI when playing games… Like a personal device – “computer” is misnomer when PCs are rarely used to “compute” anything.

14 Predictions for Oct 14 launch of Apple “notebook”

Here are my predictions for the Apple Oct 14 Launch. Lets see how much of it is correct.

1. Tablet-PC style Notebook PC called iBook
2. About 9-12inch Touchscreen.Same Touch UI as iPhone
3. Only Soft Keyboard or bluetooth keyboard. No Mouse – only fingers or stylus or bluetooth keyboard
4. Hand writing recognition
5. Atom Processor with MacOS X of course
6. $500 to $800 price
7. No HDD. Only Flash drive
8. Includes iSight camera
9. Bluetooth support like Macbook
10. Includes WiFi and atleast one 3G support (AT&T 3G or WiMax)
11. Includes iTunes
12. AppStore extended to include Apps for new iBook
13. USB, DVI/HDMI Ports
14. No CD/DVD drives

Letter to a US Citizen on the eve of your historic election

Dear Friend,

Tomorrow you are going to vote in a historic US election to continue the great tradition of Democracy.

Any way you vote, you are going to make history. Either by electing a woman to vice-presidency or by electing a black man to presidency.

As you vote in the next US election, remember you are still part of a bigger neighbourhood.

Today more than ever, we are tied closer together in everything we do.

Your child plays with a toy made by a young girl in China. Sugar on your table came from cane cut by a young man in Brazil.

Your car is powered by oil dug out from a well in Saudi Arabia by a middle-aged man from Indonesia.

You work for a European company that makes electronics that go into
Korean phones sold in India – and that pays for your bills for gasoline, sugar and toys.

When your city (No! our city) was burning after 9/11, we all watched in
horror and cried with you. We all joined you and went to war against terrorists.

When your soldiers treated prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Iraq filthily, we
all watched in shame and cursed you. We all tried to stay away from you.

When your hero (No! our hero) Phelps won 8 gold medals, we all watched
in awe and cheered with you. We all joined in the Olympic celebrations.

So, when you vote tomorrow, remember that we are all watching anxiously, just like you.

We share your concerns about our interdependent future – about the
slowing global economy, about global warming, about world peace – about
the only Earth we all have to share.

So, when you vote tomorrow, ignore petty politics about pigs and lipstick.

We all know you can rise beyond prejudices and narrow fundamentalist beliefs. Think
about the bigger issues that will affect your grandchildren – and ours.

Any way you vote, you are going to make history !!

But if you vote for party politics and “USA-alone-matters” politicians, we will be quite sorry for you.

Vote for a stronger and stable economy. Vote for a just and peaceful world. And we will cheer for you.

May God bless the world and everyone in it !

Your loving neighbour.

My First iPhone App – “GMAT Prep using iPhone”

It is still a prototype (works on my iPhone) with only the above two questions at present

Above questions copyrighted by – http://www.gmatbuster.org.

This book got me biking regularly (for the last 2 days ;)

We have cars or bikes. We regularly service them so that they dont break down.

We all have brains. We should probably look after them as well.

If you want to know how, check out this book: http://www.brainrules.net/.

Its a good general reading book on how the brain functions but also has some insights on how to leverage that information for practical use. At times, the book might seem like a no-brainer (pun intended) and its just common sense. But there is good science and research behind it as well.

I dont know how useful others might find it. But I happened to read it and at least it got me biking the last two days.

Banking and the Global Economic Model

Articles like these are eye-openers (but only partially):
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/washington/14guarantee.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/11/news/economy/fannie_freddie.fortune/index.htm

If large banks and the government cannot fully fathom the complexities of the banking internals and its impact on the economy, how are common folk supposed to understand what is going on ?

I’ve been trying to read as much as I can about economics, banking, etc. But it always seems fuzzy. Can someone point out a contemporary book like Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” ? Or perhaps a simple Economics 101 book written for everyone.

And if we can’t explain our economic model in a single book, have gotten too complex for ourselves ?

As my favourite comment goes, “Simplicity is the result of profound thought”.

Could Android be a Cross-Platform Mobile App Development environment ?

Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX are all vying to be the next generation cross-platform development environment (for both Desktop and Mobile) – going beyond just language, libraries to full fledged application development frameworks. Apple, of course thinks cross-platform is running on Mac and iPhone

Meanwhile for Mobile App development, could Android solve that problem ?

I had been playing with Google Android SDK and it seems nice and simple (I for one dig simplicity, my favourite quote being “simplicity is the result of profound thought”). Of course, the documentation could improve a lot, the APIs need to stabilize and the emulator needs to get faster. Most of all, there have to be real phones that can run Android.

But because of its simplicity, I’m wondering if it would be easy to automatically port Android applications to other platforms like iPhone & its clones and Nokia smartphones. What if there was a converter that could take Android projects and convert them to iPhone SDK projects – likely even direct source code translations ?

I think everyone agrees Mobile platforms (called smartphones today) will be the mainstream (in numbers) computers of tomorrow. And many software developers are jumping on board to develop innovative applications. But there are quickly beginning to be too many Mobile App platforms. In spite of iPhone’s success, its unclear what will be prime platform of tomorrow. Hence a developer has to be ready to target multiple platforms in order to be successful.

The Apple iPhone SDK in true Apple-style forces you to learn Objective-C, have a Mac, use Xcode – all adding to the learning curve. Though I’m an Apple-fan and also comfortable with dealing with new languages, this combined hurdle is annoying me – not sure how many others share my opinion. Nokia of course has its own Symbian OS and app frameworks. There are also other frameworks like OpenMoko, etc and the above mentioned JavaFX, Flash.

Instead of a developer having to port their application manually to different platforms, why not leverage Android as a Cross-Platform Mobile App Development environment ? Unlike massive platforms like .NET, Android is a much smaller because of its narrower Mobile focus. Even .NET was ported to Linux by the Mono team. So, it should be possible to have it running on other platforms like iPhone. I’m wondering if even a source code translation would be possible to take Android applications (.APK projects including XML, Class files) and convert them to iPhone source code or Nokia Symbian source code.

Perhaps there are better ways. But my key need is – take my Android app and convert it into a native iPhone App. If such a platform was available, I’d use it immediately – I dont know about others.