10 Trends in ICT
View more presentations from Siddhi.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
10 Trends in ICT: My Talk At VIT Entrepreneurship Awareness Camp
Here are the slides from my talk at VIT yesterday. The slides may not make much sense without the actual talk though.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
"Cutting Costs With Agile Software Development" Seminar In Chennai
The Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (Govt. of India)
(MSME) is organising a 1 day seminar series on "Cutting Costs with Agile
Software Development" on Friday, 20th of March.
Topics that will be covered:
- Business Case for Agile Software Development
- Introduction to Scrum
- Adapting to changing requirements
- Benefits of self organising teams
- Releasing quality software
- Agile metrics
interested in.
Click the image on the left for all the details regarding content and registration.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
The crisis of credit explained
Via hatke, check out this awesome video on the credit crisis:
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
My Talk at Genesis
I gave a talk last Sunday at Genesis in IIT, Madras. My talk was on planning the operations. Here are the slides for the talk. Since they don't make much sense without the commentary, I have attached a bit of commentary as well.
Why Plan
The first part of the talk was about why you need to plan in the first place. Many students believe that the idea of the operations plan is so that you can show it to venture capitalists and get funded (or perhaps win business plan competitions). The point I tried to emphasise is that the plan is something that helps the entrepreneur with the big picture. Running a startup is not a matter of following a fixed set of steps until you get rich. Rather, you will be fighting fires every day as something or the other goes wrong. When you get consumed with all these small fires, it is easy to lose the big picture, and thats when you need your operations plan to get back on track.
Rules for operations planning
With that I talked about 5 rules of operations planning. Here they are:
1. Know Where You Are
At any point you need to know where you are. If your plan calls for one year of development before you release a product, then you should be able to know if you are on track at any point. For this, you need to have intermediate milestones where you can check your progress and adjust your plan accordingly. For a software startup, I would say you need a milestone at least once a month. This would be a release with a subset of features of the final product.
2.Churn, baby, churn
You may have done a lot of market research, but you cannot gauge the market reaction until you actually get your product or service into the market. Therefore, get it out as soon as possible - even if it is only a small subset of your final vision - and then use market feedback to drive the product. In order to do this, you need to break up your product or service into chunks that are complete and can be released.
3. Be Flexible
Often opportunities arise that could not have been predicted at the start. Maybe users are using your product in ways you did not plan, or perhaps a new opportunity presents itself. A startup needs to be able to take advantage of these opportunities. A small team of generalists will usually trump over a team of specialists, because generalists can change direction quicker.
A story: Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith wanted to start a company to do web based databases. It was entirely an accident which led them to develop the first web based email system - Hotmail.
4. Know What Is Important
You need to know what is important for the product to be developed. Focus on what needs to be done to get your product in the hands of your target customers. Startups will sometimes spend money on a nice office and save money on developer workstations. While this is great for the founder's ego, it's counterproductive for the business. As far as operations go, spend on productivity enhancements rather than ego enhancements.
5. Be Ready To Start Again
Operations planning is not something that you do at the start, but it's something you need to be continuously doing. New information keeps coming up which invalidate your old plans. Rather than stick to the old plan, throw it away and plan again. Don't be attached to your operations plan - its essentially useless - but the act of planning is very useful.
Why Plan
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
- Alice in wonderland
The first part of the talk was about why you need to plan in the first place. Many students believe that the idea of the operations plan is so that you can show it to venture capitalists and get funded (or perhaps win business plan competitions). The point I tried to emphasise is that the plan is something that helps the entrepreneur with the big picture. Running a startup is not a matter of following a fixed set of steps until you get rich. Rather, you will be fighting fires every day as something or the other goes wrong. When you get consumed with all these small fires, it is easy to lose the big picture, and thats when you need your operations plan to get back on track.
Rules for operations planning
With that I talked about 5 rules of operations planning. Here they are:
1. Know Where You Are
At any point you need to know where you are. If your plan calls for one year of development before you release a product, then you should be able to know if you are on track at any point. For this, you need to have intermediate milestones where you can check your progress and adjust your plan accordingly. For a software startup, I would say you need a milestone at least once a month. This would be a release with a subset of features of the final product.
2.Churn, baby, churn
You may have done a lot of market research, but you cannot gauge the market reaction until you actually get your product or service into the market. Therefore, get it out as soon as possible - even if it is only a small subset of your final vision - and then use market feedback to drive the product. In order to do this, you need to break up your product or service into chunks that are complete and can be released.
3. Be Flexible
Often opportunities arise that could not have been predicted at the start. Maybe users are using your product in ways you did not plan, or perhaps a new opportunity presents itself. A startup needs to be able to take advantage of these opportunities. A small team of generalists will usually trump over a team of specialists, because generalists can change direction quicker.
A story: Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith wanted to start a company to do web based databases. It was entirely an accident which led them to develop the first web based email system - Hotmail.
4. Know What Is Important
You need to know what is important for the product to be developed. Focus on what needs to be done to get your product in the hands of your target customers. Startups will sometimes spend money on a nice office and save money on developer workstations. While this is great for the founder's ego, it's counterproductive for the business. As far as operations go, spend on productivity enhancements rather than ego enhancements.
5. Be Ready To Start Again
"Plans are useless, but planning is invaluable" - Dwight Eisenhower
Operations planning is not something that you do at the start, but it's something you need to be continuously doing. New information keeps coming up which invalidate your old plans. Rather than stick to the old plan, throw it away and plan again. Don't be attached to your operations plan - its essentially useless - but the act of planning is very useful.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Silver Catalyst reviewed by BangaloreInc
Silver Catalyst has been reviewed by Praveen over at Bangaloreinc. Check it out: Silver Catalyst - Web Based Agile Scrum Tool For Agile Bookkeeping.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Silver Catalyst: Agile Project Management
We've been pretty busy at work at Silver Stripe Software and today we're happy to announce the release of the online version of Silver Catalyst.
Silver Catalyst is a project management tool for teams that follow an agile software development model. We're in beta and there are a few free accounts during the beta, so if you are doing agile development, you might be interested in giving Silver Catalyst a run. Head over to the Silver Catalyst website and sign up.
Silver Catalyst is a project management tool for teams that follow an agile software development model. We're in beta and there are a few free accounts during the beta, so if you are doing agile development, you might be interested in giving Silver Catalyst a run. Head over to the Silver Catalyst website and sign up.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Proto.in Registrations Open
Registrations for the fifth edition of Proto.in are open! You can register here - http://proto.in/register/
Proto.in is an event that aims to bring together startups, investors and industry people in one location. Its a two day event. The first day will have a number of talks on startups. Usually these cover topics like funding, business plans, bootstrapping and so on. There are also technology talks. The second day has some selected startups presenting their product followed by an open house where you can interact with startups and investors.
This event is the fifth edition of Proto.in. The first three editions were in Chennai, the fourth in Delhi. This edition is going to be held in Bangalore, so its pretty convenient for people from Chennai to attend.
Find out more about Proto.in here - http://proto.in/
The cost of registrations is Rs.750 for one person or Rs.1000 for two.
Again, this is the URL - http://proto.in/register/
Proto.in is an event that aims to bring together startups, investors and industry people in one location. Its a two day event. The first day will have a number of talks on startups. Usually these cover topics like funding, business plans, bootstrapping and so on. There are also technology talks. The second day has some selected startups presenting their product followed by an open house where you can interact with startups and investors.
This event is the fifth edition of Proto.in. The first three editions were in Chennai, the fourth in Delhi. This edition is going to be held in Bangalore, so its pretty convenient for people from Chennai to attend.
Find out more about Proto.in here - http://proto.in/
The cost of registrations is Rs.750 for one person or Rs.1000 for two.
Again, this is the URL - http://proto.in/register/
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Chennai OCC November Meet: New venue - Ascendas Food Court
The November meetup of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club is tomorrow. There is a change in venue this month. We are meeting at the Ascendas food court at 3pm instead of the usual location at Amethyst. If you have never been to this food court, then the website has a handy map with the location of the venue. Basically it at Taramani, behind IIT and Tidel Park.
Now if you are unsure of what the Chennai OpenCoffee Club actually is, its a place for entrepreneurs, would-be entrepreneurs, and everyone else involved with startups to meet informally (that means no need to join a group or pre-register and no entry fees). We have a meet on the first Sunday of the month. The meetups are open to everyone. Join the Chennai OCC website to get an email notification before every meetup.
On the topic of the OCC website, I just wanted to point out the Chennai OCC website has a forum, so do join in the coversations.
Plus a new feature that is available is that all discussions on the website are now available as an RSS feed — Click here for the Chennai OCC forum feed — so its a really good idea to subscribe to the feed in your favourite blog reader. That will allow you to keep track of the Chennai OCC forums and, if you have joined the website, you can then join in the coversation.
Now if you are unsure of what the Chennai OpenCoffee Club actually is, its a place for entrepreneurs, would-be entrepreneurs, and everyone else involved with startups to meet informally (that means no need to join a group or pre-register and no entry fees). We have a meet on the first Sunday of the month. The meetups are open to everyone. Join the Chennai OCC website to get an email notification before every meetup.
On the topic of the OCC website, I just wanted to point out the Chennai OCC website has a forum, so do join in the coversations.
Plus a new feature that is available is that all discussions on the website are now available as an RSS feed — Click here for the Chennai OCC forum feed — so its a really good idea to subscribe to the feed in your favourite blog reader. That will allow you to keep track of the Chennai OCC forums and, if you have joined the website, you can then join in the coversation.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Must watch videos from DjangoCon
I was recently going through some of the videos from DjangoCon. Two must watch videos are Cal Henderson's talk titled "Why I Hate Django" and Mark Ramm's talk "A Turbogears guy on what Django should learn from Zope". Both Cal and Mark bring in interesting outside perspectives that I hadn't really considered before. Both talks run around an hour each and are well worth watching if you have the time.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Cave Story coming to WiiWare
The most exciting news I've heard in a while. Cave Story is coming to the Wii through its online WiiWare distribution channel. Cave Story is a totally kickass game. It's actually a free game on the PC (Get it here). I played it earlier this year and it was really awesome (Cave Story Review). And it's free. So I can hear you ask - if I've already played it, and its free on the PC, why pay to play the same game again? Hmm, good question. Because its an awesome game? Plus a good way to give back and support the time put into the free game. And there is going to be new content not found in the free game. Can't wait for this one.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Choosing a scripting language
CIO magazine has an article titled You Used THAT Programming Language to Write WHAT? They took five "scripting" languages — Ruby, Python, Javascript, PHP and Perl — and then get Zed Shaw, Martin Aspeli, Michael Morrison, Kenneth Hess and James Turner to write about what kind of applications the language is good for, and where you are better using another language. Check it out.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
India Unconferences and Events
Chennai OCC isn't the only thing to turn one year old this month. India Unconferences and Events, a group to track unconferences and community events in India also turns one.
Over the last year, the number of community events has increased by leaps and bounds. There is an event happening somewhere almost every week. Unfortunately, it isn't always easy to track these events. Often, you only find out about the event when someone blogs about it after it's over :(
Thats where the India Unconferences and Events group helps. This group tracks tech and startup community events happening around the country. Over the last year, this group has tracked more than 120 events around the country (check out current events and past events tracked by the group)
Once you join this group (you just need a Yahoo ID to sign up), you can subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified of events as they are added. It's an open group, so if you come across a tech community event that is not in the group, you can add it to the group.
Over the last year, the number of community events has increased by leaps and bounds. There is an event happening somewhere almost every week. Unfortunately, it isn't always easy to track these events. Often, you only find out about the event when someone blogs about it after it's over :(
Thats where the India Unconferences and Events group helps. This group tracks tech and startup community events happening around the country. Over the last year, this group has tracked more than 120 events around the country (check out current events and past events tracked by the group)
Once you join this group (you just need a Yahoo ID to sign up), you can subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified of events as they are added. It's an open group, so if you come across a tech community event that is not in the group, you can add it to the group.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
The problem with ebooks
The problem with ebooks is that its too easy to lose them. I recently bought an ebook, and now I have no idea in which directly I put it and I can't find it. Rather more difficult to lose a paper book. How do you solve this problem? Do you keep burning ebooks to a CD after you buy them? Give me some ideas.
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