Archive for January, 2010

Is it possible to do a venture when you do not have money?

Monday, January 18th, 2010

… that was the question from a IXth grader after a talk I gave to the students of IX-XII grade at a recently held event called Disha 2010. The event is an initiative to apprise the students of the potential in alternate career streams. Engineer, MBA, MBBS, LLB are typically the first choice and “viable” (read, monetizable) options for a “normal” career.

After I did my sales pitch of becoming an entrepreneur (slides below); another student asked about finding the information related to venture funding, grants, incentives, seed capital! (Wow, I thought we already talk a lot!) So much so there is a chatter around all of these things, they are mostly targeted around the “grads” and above. We at Morpheus Venture Partners are thinking to do something about it (if you wanna join hands, drop me a note).

So what do you tell a 9th grader to do when he is eager to start and doesn’t have money? “Take the Plunge!”, I said.

Laptop to Loadbalancer: Is your LAMP hardware infrastructure growing like this?

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Lamp Growth Plan

Lamp Growth Plan

The visual image conveys the thoughts. The data legends represent a hypothetical configuration using Webservers, Database Master and/or slave or DRBD, Memcached nodes, etc. The size of the circle represents the relative amount of money spent on monthly hardware lease.

How did your web presence grow?

Disclaimer: The above does not include security, disaster recovery, backup and other attachments which are a must.

Are we Pavlov’s dog to email, twitter, facebook?

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

pavlov's dog on twitter, facebook, gmailThat sweet sound of an @reply on my twhirl makes me rush to the laptop, a new email alert makes me fire the browser irrespective of that email being read & replied later. The list goes on and on..the itch to check/change the status on facebook, to continuous monitoring of analytics data.

I hate my mobile email — I check, check, check..but postpone the response ‘coz the form factor is good for reading only — so the email doesn’t get responded or time is wasted to revisit it.

Feels like we have become a Pavlovian dog to the ever increasing distractions on the web. If you are developer on a maker’s schedule, the loss of concentration is busting the efficiency.

We are not going to kick the Pavlovian habit, nor we gonna kick the tools we have — but the tools have to get smarter in their delivery of these small bits of information, which they are falling behind on. I’m still waiting for a combined email, social network tool which prioritizes, filters, reminds, and work as personal crm tool rather than separate units of email client, social client, mobile client, readers, etc.

“When I’m in a deep Java debugging session on eclipse, please do not email me, pause all the tweets except from my wife, cousin and investor” — huh, the desktop anti-virus applies a bit of that intelligence already, why can’t my email do the same?

One of my resolutions of 2010 is to do something or get something done in this area (or aggressively consume a product if someone is already doing it).