Archive for October, 2005

Diwali at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. : Will the President attend this time?

Monday, October 31st, 2005

The press is speculating whether President Bush will snub the Indian-American community again by avoding the Diwali celebrations at the White House. Last year, he was at the White House but did not attend the festival. Looks like it will be the same this year. In a White House press briefing on Oct. 25th (among other pressing issues like Scooter Libbey, Karl Rove, and an ABC reporter’s scathing remarks against the reputation of the White House PR podium), somebody asked about whether the President is going to attend the Diwali celebrations:

Q Second question is on the — now again, most of Indian-American community thankful to the President for initiating — or did initiate the Diwali Festival of Lights at the White House. Now it will be next Wednesday, November 1st, when millions across India and America will — Indians will be celebrating the festival around the globe, including at the White House here. What they are saying in the Indian American community, really, just like President initiates prayers with other groups here in the White House, like Muslims and Jews, and all that, that they are requesting him, please, to the President, this time, that if he can take a few moments and be there at part of the White House Festival of Lights on Wednesday, November 1st.
MR. McCLELLAN: On Wednesday, November 1st? Well, we’ll update you on the President’s schedule later this week.

Obviously, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary was not aware. Looks like it will be a miss again. President Bush initiated the first ever Diwali in the White House in 2003. He did not attend in person, but Karl Rove lighted the lamp and sought blessings from Goddess Laxmi.
Wanna know more about Diwali, check out the Wikipedia entry.
Diwali at the Golden temple in Amritsar, India

The New Software Model

Friday, October 28th, 2005

Adam Bosworth presented at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual user conference. Here’s what he proposes as the new software model:

  1. Run like mad
  2. Try things out, watch, learn
  3. Iterate
  4. Learn from the customers in real-time
  5. Focus on Intelligent reaction and not intelligent design
  6. Real apps, API’s follow

In simple English — Run like mad (a la Andy Grove’s “Only The Paranoid Survives”?), do Beta products; iterate/fix bugs/get feedback. Launch it if people like it, otherwise move on. Product is successful? Release APIs and let people invent their own products on top of it.
Adam’s post is here.

Google Numbers Trivia as compiled by John Batelle

Thursday, October 27th, 2005
Average revenue per search (any kind of search, not just paid) 12 cents. It was around a dime in late 04
Avg. revenue per searcher $7
Avg. revenue per sponsored click 62 cents
Estimated profits for Google in 06 Roughly $4 billion (Bear Stearns) (which is about the same as their forecasted annual revenues this year)
Revenue growth of Google year to year 96%
Of Yahoo: 42%
Estimated revenue growth for next year for Google (Bear) 61%
For the average of eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon: 29%
Price target for GOOG (Piper) $445
Also: Number of employees added in the past year Nearly 2000
Amount spent on capex, 05 (estimate) $800 million.
Amount MSFT is estimated to spend: $810 million

Apple Computer Q3 2005 Conference Call Transcript – Q&A (AAPL)

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

Just saw the transcripts of the Q&A from Apple’s conference call. This is something I have been waiting for a long time. The conference calls are scripted, well scripted — but the Q&A is where the tough questions are asked e.g. “What are the revenues of (that failed) product from your last year’s acquisition?”

Go ahead, read on and find the hidden gems. Here’s a sample:

Question:“…you talked about constraints in terms of nano shipments. Just wondering to understand what the constraint was. Can you talk about what’s constraining it, is it a component, is it the process?”
Apple:“We would never allow manufacturing capacity to get in the way of shipping a lot of these products so it is a component constraint and I don’t want to go further, with this one.”

Apple Computer Q3 2005 Conference Call Transcript – Q&A (AAPL)

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

Just saw the transcripts of the Q&A from Apple’s conference call. This is something I have been waiting for a long time. The conference calls are scripted, well scripted — but the Q&A is where the tough questions are asked e.g. “What are the revenues of (that failed) product from your last year’s acquisition?”
Go ahead, read on and find the hidden gems. Here’s a sample:

Question:“…you talked about constraints in terms of nano shipments. Just wondering to understand what the constraint was. Can you talk about what

The Argumentative Indian

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s new book, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity explains the inner working of India, and brings that ideology to the Western world. In his book Sen smashes the sterotypes and myths around India, and places the idea of India and it’s Indianess in its righteous and well-deserved context.
Zoo Station quotes from The Guardian, in their review titled, Beyond the call centre:

This is a book that needed to have been written. The perception of India in the West and, indeed, among Indians themselves has never been more amorphous as it is now. The Argumentative Indian will provide a new dimension and perspective to that perception. It would be no surprise if it were to become as defining and as influential a work as Edward Said’s Orientalism.
In this superb collection of essays, Sen smashes quite a few stereotypes and places the idea of India and Indianness in its rightful, deserved context. Central to his notion of India, as the title suggests, is the long tradition of argument and public debate, of intellectual pluralism and generosity that informs India’s history.

A quick byte of trivia: Sen still possesses the blue colored Indian passport, even after living abroad for more than 5 decades.

LinkedIn: How to virtually add any known connection

Wednesday, October 5th, 2005

It all started when I was looking for a former manager of mine. I had lost all the TPAs (“touch-point attributes”) of him. Then I found him on LinkedIn. The challenge was to get in touch with him without jumping through various degrees of separation. I finally managed to connect with him by guessing his e-mail address!

Here’s what you need to do:

  1. You have to know the name of the person and the name of the company that person is working for (We are not trying to spam, spammers use the name dictionary attack)
  2. Next, the idea is to find out the pattern of e-mail address for that company. Go to Google groups or simply Google search. For example, if your contact works for HP — type “@hp.com”. You will get a lot of results for a large company esp. in technology space. The trick is to filter down the search results by adding an extra keyword in the search parameter; say we add, mySQL (a “commercial” open-source database). One of the result in the top 5 has a link to a forum which gives the answer as firstname.lastname@hp.com. There you go, you now have the e-mail address pattern for your target contact.

    Here are the three most common e-mail patterns:

    • firstname.lastname@example.com (most common on Microsoft Exchange platforms)
    • firstname_lastname@example.com (common among Lotus Notes users)
    • flastname@example.com (common on Unix based mail servers)
  3. Thanks to the pattern, you “know” the person now — Just shoot a LinkedIn invite.

Easy(maybe you already knew!)

Disclaimer: I’m not a spammer, nor I derive any revenue from hacking, spamming or doing anything like that. Nor, there is any hidden idea to discredit LinkedIn or it’s great service. I’m just an ordinary next door geek who wants to make things easy with some automation in life.