A joke forward that came in:
There was this family with one kid. One day the mother was out and dad
was in charge of the kid, who just turned three.
Someone had given the kid a little 'tea set' as a birthday gift and it
was one of his favorite toys. Daddy was in the living room engrossed in
the evening news when kid brought Daddy a little cup of 'tea', which was
just water. After several cups of tea and lots of praise for such yummy
tea from father, kid's Mom came home.
Dad made her wait in the living room to watch the kid bring him a cup of
tea, because it was 'just the cutest thing!!'
Mom waited, and sure enough, the kid comes down the hall with a cup of
tea for Daddy and she watches him drink it up, then she says to him,
'Did it ever occur to you that the only place that baby can reach to get
water is the toilet??'
....Mothers know!!
MORAL OF THE STORY:
Domain knowledge is very important!!! Else your supplier will trick
you......
Monday, June 28, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Google Project
How would you go about attracting a potential employer for the dream job that you want?
You might head start with uploading your resume over numerous job portals; you might be referencing and networking. If you are lucky a headhunter might spot you and do half the work on your behalf (they actually do). You would even try every trick in your book and leave no stone unturned.
How about innovating?
Well if you are Alec Brownstein, you would just draw a focused plan with a precise marketing strategy. Few clicks over the internet and you are hired.
Google has been a way of life for many. Across the planet, millions of people have benefitted from Google’s services. What many may or may not know is that the main source of income for Google is Adwords, the flagship advertising product.
Why advertise with Google? Because Google gets you almost all the information that one needs on a subject available over the internet. Google knows what a particular user searches the most over the internet, trends and analysis. So next time you search for something Google shows you the advertisement targeted to you according to your search behavior.
So how would you leverage the power of a giant search engine and use your information to achieve the best results.
Here is what Alec Brownstein did. He wanted to get hired as a top creative director in New York. He bought Google Adword services and created his ad campaign for Scott Vitrone, Ian Reichenthal, Gerry Graf, Tony Granger and David Droga.
http://www.alecbrownstein.com/project.php?cat=3
Now every time these gentleman Googled themselves Google Adwords showed a personalized message from Alec Brownstein asking for a job and the message linked to his online portfolio. He was called for an interview from David Droga, Gerry Graf, Ian Reichenthal and Scott Vitrone. Scott Vitrone and Ian Reichenthal offered him a job. He is now working with Y&R; Tony Granger is the Global Chief Creative Officer of the company.
Ingenious? Well, I’d say! Few hours and $ 6 approximately was all he invested. How did he score the opportunity? Doing what he is best at- “Creativity”.
Alec Brownstein (is an advertising copywriter, the co-author of several humor books, and a film director. He attended The Haverford School in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and Tufts University.
References :
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
HR lessons from Up In The Air?
What is the best way to fire an employee?
We are in the business of hiring people, not firing. It falls on the lot of evil HR people on the company rolls to do the dirty job. And a dirty job it is. I have heard of people getting nightmares after having to let people go, during the slump time, in groups at a time. I have heard of HR people going into depression after having to deal with downsizing of colleagues, close friends included. A person, who has not dealt with recruitment, would not know the amount of counseling, hand holding and advising that can go into this process. Then just imagine how devastating firing can be for both parties.
In Up In The Air, George Clooney is Ryan Bingham, the “corporate downsizer”, a terminator with, of all things, a heart. He never says “You’re fired”. Redundancy can be made to sound so motivating when it is Bingham doing the talking. The loss is actually an opportunity toward a brighter future, for time with the kids which dad never had, time to follow ones dreams, time to finally take a break and change ones life as one knows it. If I were fired, I would be happy to be fired by him. He is much in demand, always flying from one site to another, always up in the air, like all the other downsizers in his company.
Enter Anna Kendrik as Natalie Keener, the new trail blazer, new blood, just cant wait to change the world. Firing is not an emotional procedure in her book. She has a new plan to reduce turnover time, increase employee productivity, and drastically reduce costs. No flying around to client sites to fire employees. She introduces video conferencing and proves that it saves time and money for her company. Bingham keeps warning of the terrible consequences but she wins first round.
And then a woman she fires over video conferencing jumps from the bridge and kills herself.
Watch the official trailer of the movie here.
Lets face it, people are being fired left right and center even today, with all the talk of economy returning to normal. While a company might handle some of the financial issues relating to the loss of job the employee has to face, what about the emotional repercussions.
This movie had created ripples in HR circles worldwide, HR blogs all featuring a review/lesson gleaned from it. However the CEO of RiseSmart, a consulting firm in Silicon Valley has this to say about the movie:
“The movie attempts to ground itself in reality by featuring interviews with real people who’ve lost their jobs,” Sathe says. “But that’s about the only thing the movie gets right in its portrayal of corporate layoffs and the human resources function.”
His interview about the 5 myths and misconceptions about HR in the movie can be found here.
All in all, it is a very trying process to fire people, a task HR people need to undertake often enough. It would be good to remember that technology is an enabler, a means to an end, and the end needs to be human. Just like one needs hand holding to get into an organization, much more help is required when one has to leave. And HR has to keep that in mind.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Reboot to Reinvent a Start-up
Three years ago, Odeo was a struggling startup on a path to nowhere. Odeo's core offering--a set of tools for users to create, record and share podcasts--was facing serious competition from Apple and other heavyweights. The management team made a radical decision to "reboot" the company, and Twitter was born.
As I read the Twitter story, narrated eloquently by Dom Sagolla, I can't help but look back over the many startups that I've been associated with over the past twelve years. In my various roles as a founder, an investor, a board member, and an advisor to startups in Silicon Valley, I'm constantly fascinated by the mechanics of reinvention. Which approaches to reinvention succeed and which ones fail?
Startups flounder for countless reasons. Perhaps the market opportunity is not as big as imagined, or perhaps there is a mismatch between the technology and the market. Maybe the world changed in some significant way, invalidating the key assumptions on which the startup was based. For example, an established company such as Google or Microsoft might enter the market. Or perhaps the deepest recession in recent history dried up demand for the original product or service. In these cases, the founders and management team have to ask themselves the question: should we push ahead, assuming superior execution will win the day against long odds? Or should we change what we're doing?
Companies that decide to reinvent need to acknowledge the bad news first: most startups fail, even the reincarated ones. Those are just the odds. The good news is that certain approaches to reinvention work better than others, and companies can increase their chance of success by carefully calculating their reboot strategy.
Every technology startup has four core components: team, technology/product, market, and business model. Rebooting involves changing at least one of these components, while leaving the other factors unchanged. Let us look at each component in turn:
1. Team. Reinvention usually leads to changes in the team. To qualify as a reboot rather than an entirely new company, however, there must be at least part of the team -- and usually at least one of the founding members -- who continues to remain with the company through the transition. In my experience, one model that usually does not work is when VC investors replace the entire founding team with new management. I've never seen a startup with none of its founders remaining succeed.
2. Market. Many startups try the most tempting option: to keep the same technology/product and look for a new market. After all, the investment in product development has already been made. Unfortunately, while this approach seems the most logical, it is also the least likely to succeed. Why? The hardest part of a startup is understanding the requirements of the market, not building the product. After the dot-com bust in 2000, many consumer internet startups tried to reinvent themselves as enterprise technology providers (remember Chemdex?). The startup junkyard is littered with the carcasses of dot-coms that took this route and failed.
3. Business Model. A very attractive strategy is to keep the same product and market, but change the business model. In my experience, this is the most likely option to succeed. For example, enterprise software companies can reinvent themselves by open-sourcing their software and providing consulting services, or a premium version. A software vendor can reboot as a software as a service (SaaS) provider on the Web. Consumer websites can move to a subscription model from an advertising model, or vice versa.
4. Product. Another smart reinvention approach is to addressing the same market (or a closely related one), but change the product or the business model. This option works best when the market need is real, but the product does not adequately address the opportunity. I've found that the key to success is to throw away the old product completely and start from scratch, using the hard-won learnings about the market acquired from the first iteration. In some cases, it makes sense to move the old product to "maintenance mode" and reassign the bulk of the team to developing the new product.
I've applied this particular model of reinvention to both companies where I have been a founder -- Junglee in 1997 and Kosmix ten years later, in 2007.
We started Junglee in 1996 to create virtual databases that integrated data from multiple websites. Although we had some initial success, we quickly realized that the architecture of our first product limited our ability to deal with rapidly-changing information, a key success factor in certain markets. We completely rebuilt the product from scratch in 1997, and created the world's first comparison shopping service. This service was enormously popular and led to Junglee's acquisition by Amazon.com in 1998.
We introduced Kosmix as a vertical search engine, initially in the health sector. Our idea was to find a better way to help users understand open-ended queries such as "diabetes", which have no single right answer; that is, explore topics rather than find the needle in the haystack. We'd planned to take a vertical-by-vertical strategy, launching sites named RightHealth, RightAutos and RightTrips. Very soon, however, we realized that the vertical approach carries severe limitations, because it's hard for consumers to remember to go to different sites for different topics of interest. We decided to rewrite the product from scratch, and we relaunched Kosmix.com as a horizontal site. Kosmix lets you explore any topic and gives you a 360 degree view of anything than interests you -- including information from the Deep Web that is inaccessible to the usual search engines. This transition from vertical to horizontal was much harder than it sounds; it required us to rewrite our technology from scratch. But we did it because of our passionate belief that the problem is real and the market opportunity is vast.
While most startup reboots involve rethinking only one or two of the four core components, in some rare cases it makes sense to go the whole hog. Sometimes it pays to be bold: go after an entirely new market opportunity, create a new product, find a new business model, and make large-scale team changes. This approach is fraught with risk; but there have been a couple of spectacular successes. One clear example is Twitter. Another is Twitter's cousin SMS GupShup, a similar service in India. SMS GupShup was born as Webaroo, a company that wanted to create offline copies of large parts of the web so you could browse while offline. A couple of engineers there launched the SMS GupShup service as a lark and it took off; once the management team saw the traction of GupShup, they re-oriented the company around the new idea.
Some startups are born great: the right team starts with the right idea at the right time, and the rest is history. Some have greatness thrust upon them: the right conjunction of market forces propels an unlikely startup to dizzying heights. Other startups, not so lucky as those in the first two categories, need to earn their greatness. And sometimes that requires a reboot.
Notes on The Author :
Anand Rajaraman is a co-founder of Kosmix, an internet startup focused on organizing the wisdom of the web. He also teaches a class on web-scale data mining at the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.
In his VC avatar, Anand is a Founding Partner of Cambrian Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. Anand's investments include Kaltix (acquired by Google); Transformic (acquired by Google); Neoteris (acquired by Juniper); India Infoline (IPO 2005; INDIAINFO); Facebook; Efficient Frontier; Aster Data; Mobissimo; The Find; and Chaupaati.
Prior to founding Cambrian in 2000, Anand was Director of Technology at Amazon.com, where he was responsible for technology strategy. Anand helped launch the transformation of Amazon.com from a retailer into a retail platform, enabling third-party retailers to sell on Amazon.com's website. Third-party transactions now account for over 25% of all US transactions, and represent Amazon's fastest-growing and most profitable business segment.
Anand came to Amazon.com in 1998 through the $250 Million acquisition of Junglee, an Internet pioneer that he co-founded in 1996. As Chief Technology Officer, Anand played a key role in developing Junglee's award-winning Virtual Database technology.
He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where he won the President of India Gold Medal for graduating at the top of his class, and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Anand has been featured in articles in Business Week, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other leading national publications.
Anand can be contacted at: datawocky@gmail.com
As I read the Twitter story, narrated eloquently by Dom Sagolla, I can't help but look back over the many startups that I've been associated with over the past twelve years. In my various roles as a founder, an investor, a board member, and an advisor to startups in Silicon Valley, I'm constantly fascinated by the mechanics of reinvention. Which approaches to reinvention succeed and which ones fail?
Startups flounder for countless reasons. Perhaps the market opportunity is not as big as imagined, or perhaps there is a mismatch between the technology and the market. Maybe the world changed in some significant way, invalidating the key assumptions on which the startup was based. For example, an established company such as Google or Microsoft might enter the market. Or perhaps the deepest recession in recent history dried up demand for the original product or service. In these cases, the founders and management team have to ask themselves the question: should we push ahead, assuming superior execution will win the day against long odds? Or should we change what we're doing?
Companies that decide to reinvent need to acknowledge the bad news first: most startups fail, even the reincarated ones. Those are just the odds. The good news is that certain approaches to reinvention work better than others, and companies can increase their chance of success by carefully calculating their reboot strategy.
Every technology startup has four core components: team, technology/product, market, and business model. Rebooting involves changing at least one of these components, while leaving the other factors unchanged. Let us look at each component in turn:
1. Team. Reinvention usually leads to changes in the team. To qualify as a reboot rather than an entirely new company, however, there must be at least part of the team -- and usually at least one of the founding members -- who continues to remain with the company through the transition. In my experience, one model that usually does not work is when VC investors replace the entire founding team with new management. I've never seen a startup with none of its founders remaining succeed.
2. Market. Many startups try the most tempting option: to keep the same technology/product and look for a new market. After all, the investment in product development has already been made. Unfortunately, while this approach seems the most logical, it is also the least likely to succeed. Why? The hardest part of a startup is understanding the requirements of the market, not building the product. After the dot-com bust in 2000, many consumer internet startups tried to reinvent themselves as enterprise technology providers (remember Chemdex?). The startup junkyard is littered with the carcasses of dot-coms that took this route and failed.
3. Business Model. A very attractive strategy is to keep the same product and market, but change the business model. In my experience, this is the most likely option to succeed. For example, enterprise software companies can reinvent themselves by open-sourcing their software and providing consulting services, or a premium version. A software vendor can reboot as a software as a service (SaaS) provider on the Web. Consumer websites can move to a subscription model from an advertising model, or vice versa.
4. Product. Another smart reinvention approach is to addressing the same market (or a closely related one), but change the product or the business model. This option works best when the market need is real, but the product does not adequately address the opportunity. I've found that the key to success is to throw away the old product completely and start from scratch, using the hard-won learnings about the market acquired from the first iteration. In some cases, it makes sense to move the old product to "maintenance mode" and reassign the bulk of the team to developing the new product.
I've applied this particular model of reinvention to both companies where I have been a founder -- Junglee in 1997 and Kosmix ten years later, in 2007.
We started Junglee in 1996 to create virtual databases that integrated data from multiple websites. Although we had some initial success, we quickly realized that the architecture of our first product limited our ability to deal with rapidly-changing information, a key success factor in certain markets. We completely rebuilt the product from scratch in 1997, and created the world's first comparison shopping service. This service was enormously popular and led to Junglee's acquisition by Amazon.com in 1998.
We introduced Kosmix as a vertical search engine, initially in the health sector. Our idea was to find a better way to help users understand open-ended queries such as "diabetes", which have no single right answer; that is, explore topics rather than find the needle in the haystack. We'd planned to take a vertical-by-vertical strategy, launching sites named RightHealth, RightAutos and RightTrips. Very soon, however, we realized that the vertical approach carries severe limitations, because it's hard for consumers to remember to go to different sites for different topics of interest. We decided to rewrite the product from scratch, and we relaunched Kosmix.com as a horizontal site. Kosmix lets you explore any topic and gives you a 360 degree view of anything than interests you -- including information from the Deep Web that is inaccessible to the usual search engines. This transition from vertical to horizontal was much harder than it sounds; it required us to rewrite our technology from scratch. But we did it because of our passionate belief that the problem is real and the market opportunity is vast.
While most startup reboots involve rethinking only one or two of the four core components, in some rare cases it makes sense to go the whole hog. Sometimes it pays to be bold: go after an entirely new market opportunity, create a new product, find a new business model, and make large-scale team changes. This approach is fraught with risk; but there have been a couple of spectacular successes. One clear example is Twitter. Another is Twitter's cousin SMS GupShup, a similar service in India. SMS GupShup was born as Webaroo, a company that wanted to create offline copies of large parts of the web so you could browse while offline. A couple of engineers there launched the SMS GupShup service as a lark and it took off; once the management team saw the traction of GupShup, they re-oriented the company around the new idea.
Some startups are born great: the right team starts with the right idea at the right time, and the rest is history. Some have greatness thrust upon them: the right conjunction of market forces propels an unlikely startup to dizzying heights. Other startups, not so lucky as those in the first two categories, need to earn their greatness. And sometimes that requires a reboot.
Notes on The Author :
Anand Rajaraman is a co-founder of Kosmix, an internet startup focused on organizing the wisdom of the web. He also teaches a class on web-scale data mining at the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.
In his VC avatar, Anand is a Founding Partner of Cambrian Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. Anand's investments include Kaltix (acquired by Google); Transformic (acquired by Google); Neoteris (acquired by Juniper); India Infoline (IPO 2005; INDIAINFO); Facebook; Efficient Frontier; Aster Data; Mobissimo; The Find; and Chaupaati.
Prior to founding Cambrian in 2000, Anand was Director of Technology at Amazon.com, where he was responsible for technology strategy. Anand helped launch the transformation of Amazon.com from a retailer into a retail platform, enabling third-party retailers to sell on Amazon.com's website. Third-party transactions now account for over 25% of all US transactions, and represent Amazon's fastest-growing and most profitable business segment.
Anand came to Amazon.com in 1998 through the $250 Million acquisition of Junglee, an Internet pioneer that he co-founded in 1996. As Chief Technology Officer, Anand played a key role in developing Junglee's award-winning Virtual Database technology.
He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where he won the President of India Gold Medal for graduating at the top of his class, and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Anand has been featured in articles in Business Week, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other leading national publications.
Anand can be contacted at: datawocky@gmail.com
Paternity Leave Around the World
New York Times screams "In Sweden, Men can have it all". Well, actually they can. I quote: Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, put it this way: “Machos with dinosaur values don’t make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women’s magazines anymore.” Ms. Ohlsson, who has lobbied European Union governments to pay more attention to fathers, is eight months pregnant, and her husband, a law professor, will take the leave when their child is born.
“Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy,” she added. “It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”
Sweden is the front runner when it comes to relieving harassed mommies and giving daddies a chance to actually play dad. Pre school from 12 months is highly subsidised, grandparents get state sponsored care, leave-taking parent can take one year off at full salary. And both parents can work 6 hour days till the child starts school.
Which other countries have gone the "daddy months" way.
US does not have any rules regarding mandated paid leave, though their rules mandates unpaid leave to most US fathers. Portugal has mandatory leave for dads, but for one week only. Iceland has 3 months leave for fathers, 3 months formothers and 3 months shared. Germany provides 14 months total leave for parents, 2 of which are reserved for fathers. In Denmark, 2 weeks of 52 weeks leave is reserved for dads. Bulgaria has one year maternity leave, but the father can swap this with the mother. Most of Europe has about 5 days to one week leave.
The Americas however is far behind. Only Brazil has 5 days leave. Canada has unpaid or semi-paid leave which can be shared with the mother. Some countries like Uruguay, Guatemala and Chile have one day to 3 days leave.
Kenya leads the African countries with 2 weeks paternity leave while some countries like Tanzania and Seychelles have 5 to 10 days. In Asia only Philippines currently has 7 days fully paid paternal leave, Israel dads can take leave in place of mothers, Indonesia, Myanmar and Saudia has 1-6 days leave.
(Stats from Wikipedia)
The blogger 'An American Dad in a Swedish Fatherhood' has taken all the data available on wikipedia and have made a world map of Maternity and Paternity leaves. Its available here.
It has been seen that women take more leave for their children not because they are socially driven to it, but because they are paid lower. This is a vicious cycle of course, the more leave women take the lesser they will be paid. A study published by the Swedish Institute of Labor Market Policy Evaluation in March showed, for instance, that a mother’s future earnings increase on average 7 percent for every month the father takes leave. (NYTimes)
Is it time to rethink child related leaves through out the world?
“Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy,” she added. “It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”
Sweden is the front runner when it comes to relieving harassed mommies and giving daddies a chance to actually play dad. Pre school from 12 months is highly subsidised, grandparents get state sponsored care, leave-taking parent can take one year off at full salary. And both parents can work 6 hour days till the child starts school.
Which other countries have gone the "daddy months" way.
US does not have any rules regarding mandated paid leave, though their rules mandates unpaid leave to most US fathers. Portugal has mandatory leave for dads, but for one week only. Iceland has 3 months leave for fathers, 3 months formothers and 3 months shared. Germany provides 14 months total leave for parents, 2 of which are reserved for fathers. In Denmark, 2 weeks of 52 weeks leave is reserved for dads. Bulgaria has one year maternity leave, but the father can swap this with the mother. Most of Europe has about 5 days to one week leave.
The Americas however is far behind. Only Brazil has 5 days leave. Canada has unpaid or semi-paid leave which can be shared with the mother. Some countries like Uruguay, Guatemala and Chile have one day to 3 days leave.
Kenya leads the African countries with 2 weeks paternity leave while some countries like Tanzania and Seychelles have 5 to 10 days. In Asia only Philippines currently has 7 days fully paid paternal leave, Israel dads can take leave in place of mothers, Indonesia, Myanmar and Saudia has 1-6 days leave.
(Stats from Wikipedia)
The blogger 'An American Dad in a Swedish Fatherhood' has taken all the data available on wikipedia and have made a world map of Maternity and Paternity leaves. Its available here.
India has 12 weeks paid maternity leave but no provision for paternity leave. Even Bangladesh is planning 15 days leave for new fathers. Both India and Bangladesh have 6 months maternal leave. (B'desh law pending from 4 months presently).
Let us take this a step further. Does paternity leave spell greater gender equality? Lets take Sweden again. In this land of Viking lore, men are at the heart of the gender-equality debate. The ponytailed center-right finance minister calls himself a feminist, ads for cleaning products rarely feature women as homemakers, and preschools vet books for gender stereotypes in animal characters. For nearly four decades, governments of all political hues have legislated to give women equal rights at work — and men equal rights at home. (NYTimes)
Men are expected to take leave and are not penalised. Womens paychecks benefit, and socially too, divorce rates have gone down. Most important, the socially accepted norms of masculinity is changing in the country.It has been seen that women take more leave for their children not because they are socially driven to it, but because they are paid lower. This is a vicious cycle of course, the more leave women take the lesser they will be paid. A study published by the Swedish Institute of Labor Market Policy Evaluation in March showed, for instance, that a mother’s future earnings increase on average 7 percent for every month the father takes leave. (NYTimes)
Is it time to rethink child related leaves through out the world?
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