bexdeep's blog

Beatles with love

2011-12-27T09:43:00.000-08:00

It was the year 1992, as far as I remember. I use to stay with my grandmother and grandfather, away from home. I would hang around with my mama (mother's brother) when ever he was free. He was in many ways, my early influence in many facet of my life : music, movies, clothes and what not :) Most of my early influence of music comes from his collection.

Imagine was the song which use to play in loop in his stereo player. I was slowly observing the music in background, which would slowly reveal itself in future. Somehow, the song Imagine and Tears in Heaven, always had be baffled. It was after many years, I would finally recognize the difference in the song. John Lennon was not even in the picture.

Then it was the year 1998, in my teen age, I finally carried away the collection of the cassette from my grand mom's house and brought it to my house. Now, I had my own room, my own walkman and my own fantasy of life. After hours of dusting out the cassettes and excitedly peering into the collection, I picked up the one with a faint impression of a label written with blue chinese pen - the Beatles. That was the beginning and have never ended till now.

Each of the characters : John, Paul, George and Ringo have made a place in my little dream house. Now, they have become more than just a mere music personalities but a philosophy for me. People have their concerns about the break-ups of the band and the tension between them. But I see them as 4 unique individual who for some period of time, came together for a purpose in this world.

My last thought :

Paul is about love,
and John is about rebel,
George is about life,
and Ringo a beautiful rhythm

- bexdeep

Give peace a chance

2011-12-08T07:45:00.001-08:00

Hidden Desire of a Monk

2011-11-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

With his closed eyes,
and calm composure,
there he is disillusioned by his own conscience.

The state of enlightenment,
which he pretends to have,
is haunted by his own existence.

Like a glowing candle,
he is caught in a conflict of
spreading a light and a desire to exist.

Like a shapeless form and an unheard sound,
he is trapped in his own reasoning.

Though he pretends to be a hermit,
underneath lies his hidden desire to exist.

[Image Credits : Abdul Portrait and Going to Atlanta]

It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.

2011-10-15T00:41:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I give myself a time to re-explore myself just to make sure that I am doing the right thing for myself. And in this exploration, I come across interesting characters and lifes that either inspires me or lets me understand myself more clearly. Usually there always has been this time period of 6 months for my self exploration. Yes, exactly 6 months of setting urself free from rules and restarting your journey.

I met Richard Feynman after I completed by A level, though I was being introduced to him during my physic class by my physic teacher. I had exactly 6 months to explore him in/out. I picked up his famous book : "Surely you must be joking, Mr Richard Feynman.", the rest is history. Every now and then, I try my best to introduce to others, but I leave the rest to them. And today, I am trying again to re-introduce him through these wonderful videos.

"Tt’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong." - Richard Feynman.

Search

2011-10-11T11:13:00.001-07:00

(Photo taken on 2010 experimenting with light.)

One more thing.

2011-10-09T11:35:00.001-07:00

Losing My Grip

2011-10-08T11:17:00.000-07:00

(Photo taken on 2009 November)

Spirited

2011-10-08T00:02:00.000-07:00

(Photo taken at Karwar Beach 2008)

The Hero

2011-10-05T23:23:00.000-07:00

Learning to fight and trying to live for your own sake,

in this crazy world, finding inspiration is hard.

But in the midst of many heros and characters,

Steve genuienly stood as the ONE for me.

More than anything, it was his perspective and understanding of the world,

which I have come to respect over time.

I believe inspiration never dies,

it lives on.

RIP Steve.

(Image Credit : http://www.apple.com/ t_hero)

Thoughts on Design by Paul Rand

2011-10-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it…. It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That’s what modernism means to me…

— Lecture, A Paul Rand Retrospective, Cooper Union, Oct. 3, 1996

Good design adds value of some kind, gives meaning, and, not incidentally, can be sheer pleasure to behold; it respects the viewer’s sensibilities and rewards the entrepreneur.

— Design Form and Chaos

Without play, there would be no Picasso. Without play, there is no experimentation. Experimentation is the quest for answers.

— Graphic Wit “Paul Rand: The Play Instinct” 1991

Mies van der Rohe once said that being good is more important than being original. Originality is a product, not an intention.

— Graphic Wit “Paul Rand: The Play Instinct” 1991

Source : http://www.paul-rand.com/site/thoughts_quotes/

(Photo : Taken by my sister on 2007 and Photoshopped afterwards)

Steal Like an Artist: Austin Kleon on Combinatorial Creativity

2011-10-02T06:46:00.000-07:00

Few days back I had posted a three series long video with a title "Everything is a Remix". The focus of these idea is that nothing is original and everything is a mass-up of previous works. Though this thought might be frustrating for some of the artists who believes in pure originality, but it is true in many extent that originality doesn't exist.

Ideas are always shared and borrowed. What matters most is the attitude with which an artist take upon others work. There are many who simple copy blatantly. With the same reasoning and principal, there is another bloggers who have stumbled upon an interesting result of his own works.

Nothing is completely original. All artists’ work builds on what came before. Every new idea is just a remix or a mashup of two previous ideas.”

Source : brainpickings.org

Steve Jobs super presentation to NeXTOS

2011-09-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

These are some of the simply superb presentation and mind opening presentation on the evolution of Internet and Online communication.

You can't Fail

2011-09-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

An idea can fail. A product can fail.
But that doesn't mean that you failed
or that the company failed.

You only fail when you stop trying,
or when you stop pushing yourself.
You fail, when you give up.
So till the time you are trying and
pushing yourself, you can't fail.

- bexdeep

(Sketch : On 6th May 2006 :Of My Father when he was young.)

Storytelling Through Animation

2011-09-24T01:37:00.000-07:00

I am a great fan of Japanese Animator Hayao Miyazaki, who has great sensibility in story telling. Some of his greatest works include : Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso. The other Japanese Animator who is also known as the God of Manga is Osamu Tezuka. His work includes the famous Animation ASTRO BOY.

One of the traits of these animators are not their animation skills, which off-course is to par with excellence, but their honestly in story telling. Now animation is a pretty time consuming process that requires a lot of planning and creativity than any other story telling process.

Though modern animation means more of 3D models and realistic visual graphics, 2D animation can also be as much interesting as any other realistic 3D animations. Below are some of the weirdest animations to illustrate the variety in 2D animation and detailing which can be achieved in story telling process.

Below is the animation from Osamu Tezuka, you can clearly see the detail of the animation and the visual effect.Now lets see some of the weirdest of all. You can find tons in Youtube. :)

This animation cannot really be told as 3D or 2D, the whole style has been merged to give completely new experience.

This is a weird example of story telling, but yet it seems subtle in its detail.

This animation just shows the level of detail simple sketches can have and its tremendous impact on viewers.

Now obviously, this doesn't mean 3D are not expressive enough. Below are some of the weird and witty animations.

I Remembered U

2011-09-23T06:44:00.000-07:00

During those moments of Silence,
and those moments of pain,
I (long pause) remembered U.

While the darkness was around the corner,
and my shadow was still clear,
I remembered U.

During the conflict of morality,
and the confusion of crowd,
I remembered U.

As the sun rose high,
and I opened my eye,
I remembered U.

As I was listening to JM,
and playing his rythm,
I remembered U.

As I was walking alone,
holding on to my dreams,
I remembered U.

U didn't come from my past,
neither from my present,
but I remembered U.

- bexdeep

(Illustration done on 2009)
JM stands for John Mayer, Jason Marz and James Morrison

Personal Projects

2011-09-18T11:43:00.000-07:00

As far as remember, I have been doing personal projects since I was a kid. From a simple stamp collection hobby to attempting to build a flying glider, my life has become an instances of projects, one after the other. The whole concept of giving form to a formless thoughts/idea is exciting and challenging.

That is why I am so in love with engineering, for me its the right discipline which deals with designing processes to achieve those visions. Channelizing thoughts from a sketch to a first prototype is a reward in itself. Throughout my experience, I have always found that people who have a hobby of doing personal projects have different approach to a problem solving. They seem to have clearer and wider perspective of the problem. They are also more practical in their approach and do not hold on to thoughts with a fear of failure. May be its because they have dealt with more failure than anyone in their lifetime. Overall, they are highly self-motivated and off course they are rare.

Self-motivation is the core behind personal projects because you have to deal with no one but yourself in terms of quality and deadlines. In my own experience, an individual goes through thousands of ideas before they settle for one which they find worth trying to achieve.

Currently, there is so many project ideas stacked inside my mind which I hope to achieve one by one. And off course I will achieve them in time, as I have never failed to try out my ideas. They just have to wait their turns. Some ideas remain for months and years, some for minutes and some simply never comes out of its cocoon.

My first project as far as I remember was making a "home work diary" and "self dictionary of new words". This must be when I was in class 3, where home work diary was still not in the trend so I had to cut white A4 size papers into square form and tie it down with threads. Soon, I decided to make the form circle and I think I was very much pleased by the eccentricity of the design. Offcourse, flaunting it among your friends was more fun. Prior to these, I do use to collect a lot of Super Hero stickers of superman and batman. :)
Keeping a "dictionary" was much more simple - I just had to get a notebook and write every new words and their meaning into it.

Beside these, I believe drawing and painting was my key hobby coupled with excessive LEGO structure building, limited by only few hundred pieces. I also remember getting a clean notebook and attempting to copy down the whole story of "Goldilocks and 3 bears". Then making your own "scrabble" board was fun too. I think these attitude made me more self reserved and self satisfied. The habit of getting lost in your own world has remained with me since then.

Its interesting to remember all those school days where I had my school work + personal work. Many friends thought I was too studious spending time studying but people rarely knew I spent time on my own personal work. Two of them rarely met with each other, until after my Olevels where I was more into studying science and mathematics. So what ever I studied had relevance to my personal work.

During my school days, I did lot of sketching ideas into paper. After many years those would help me understand engineering drawing classes much better, and it still does. It was also during those school days, where I stumbled upon a skill to create stop motion animation in diary. Soon my diary was filled with drawings at every corner.

One of my electronic projects.

Once I was in colleges, my personal projects started becoming more complex and usually took months of working on it. The project would be virtually anything for me : sketching a portraits, learning complex guitar composition, making computer software, building hardware prototypes of electronic kits, experimenting with ideas of expressing better, writing novel, composing your own songs. I don't know but the range of project never seems to correlate and was more of gamut of random artistic pleasures.

I think all these personal projects have become and expression of myself. Every idea some how found its way out in different form and medium. Also many ideas still remain unexpressed. I don't remember a day where I am not thinking of projects. Its there, hard coded in my nature. I would have compulsive desire to achieve and challenge.

The top image is that of a "Starship Enterprise" which I must have spend hours and hours drawing in my copies and books, where ever possible. I was a big fan of Captain Krik and his companions. May be it was my innate desire, to have my own voyage to unknowns and keep exploring, not with a goal to find an answer but to simply carry on exploring.

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Everything is a Remix : Innovation is Inevitable

2011-09-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

This is a three part, and more on the way, series on how ideas or innovations exist and discusses the DNA of Innovation. It basically compromises of COPY, TRANSFORM, and COMBINE.

Creativity isn’t magic: it happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials. And the soil from which we grow our creations is something we scorn and misunderstand even though it gives us so much — and that’s… copying.” ~ Kirby Ferguson

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Profession and Passion

2011-09-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

Ji Lee, currently Creative Director at Facebook and previously at Google, talks about profession and passions.

Pointless and Enlightened

2011-09-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

It was not needed,
neither necessary.

But there he was,
standing on his own,
still and calm.

Pointless and Enlightened,
meaningless and yet relevant

- bexdeep

(Photo taken at Namobuddha, Nepal on 2008)

Despair and Hope

2011-09-11T22:33:00.000-07:00

Take away, Oh Take away
this despair and hope

the uncertain growth
with the winding roads

and the unwinding dreams
with an impossible scope

- bexdeep

(Image : Old Lady drawn on 2006 )

Dream to Share

2011-09-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

At the lonely side of ur dream,
U may have discovered urself

but u still need to find a way back to ur life,
and wake up from dream to share it with your love

- bexdeep

(Image : Mother and Baby drawn on 2007 )

Capturing Beauty

2011-08-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

Act of Priority Shifting

2011-08-18T00:50:00.000-07:00

While I was back in Nepal, I met a very dear friend of mine after a pretty darn long time. She came to visit me at my house and we had great time chatting about old days. During our chat, I asked her if we should plan for something coming this week. She pulled a tattered sheet of torn paper where she had meticulously drawn a calendar with each box containing her schedules. I was impressed and embarked upon making my own sheet. We made a plan for Thursday get together with other friends. I marked in a big letters under my Thursday box. “5:00 pm Meet Up”

Source : whicdn.com

There is always some sense of gratification in planning which is interesting to ponder upon. Laying out agendas, road-maps and schedules are time consuming and interesting, only to realize the hard rules of priority shifting. Now I was home after a long time and that also only for 20 days, so I had simple agenda but no plan (Don’t confuse PLAN with AGENDA. It’s the same confusion between IDEA and EXECUTION). Some of the most important were: Being At home, hanging out with Friends, Taking a Road Trip and meeting some folks according to priority.

Well, THURSDAY 5:00 PM Meet Up never happened and we had to squeeze last 5/10 minutes to make ourselves available before I left Nepal (This happened at the nick of time with delicate time sharing and priority shifting – a common term in design of Operating System :)). So what happened to all that planning and scheduling? Did the earth change its direction? :) Well, no but what did change was priority. That happens often in life, priority changes with time and situation. And the whole act of balancing your way means everything. At the end of 20 days, I had all my agenda ticked mark, with few missed task (Remember this, got my agenda fulfilled but missed some task).

Now that demonstrates 20 days demo of your life. Life is often taken as long journey which I think is an illusion. Your long one year journey is just a dot in your entire life. Now how important you want to make that dot depends upon you. If you are skilful you might just be able to stretch that dot into a line. (This comes from my ongoing exploration about time independent theory of aging. Which I am planning to write when I get it right:)) Just like 20 days, life is short with all your agendas and priorities mixed. At the end of your life, I think you find yourself staring at a list of agendas with Green Tick and Red Cross marks all over it.

Even after that short 20 days, my days are still on turmoil with priority shifting. Being an entrepreneur, you have to be able to shift gears and change at nick of time. I have stopped counting how many times, I have made those tight turns. Shifting is very important activity because shifting allows you to align yourself to your agenda. If you miss the shift, you end of losing one agenda from your list :) unless you find other turn and time to re-align yourself. Beside the illusion that there are ample opportunities, I try not to get overwhelmed by it. You just keep hitting and missing things, sometime you are glad you missed and sometime you are not.

I have a belief that it’s always easy to make the most important decisions of your life, but really difficult to make less important decisions. The catch is how do you know what is important and what is not. The goal of PLANNING is not to get the AGENDA right, but to get the processes aligned and executed properly. Planning is process dependent activity where you are not concerned about the agenda but only with processes and minute details of activities and getting them right. Hence, there is a thin line between PLAN and AGENDA, which ties them together and is a pretty difficult task to figure that out.

One of my artist friend had told me long time back that getting the right composition in your painting or photography is very important than getting the lines or circles or focus correct. And knowing or identifying good composition is a lifelong activity and realization, never ending. Getting right focus or straight lines are like getting things planned out. You will have to use right lenses and right brush strokes to get your content right. You may get a beautiful picture or painting if you have right plan, but the hard fact behind the art which is composition is not dependent upon your plan. It has nothing to do with the quality of your image or quality of your brush strokes or focus.

That is why it’s so difficult to understand the link between agenda and plan, or idea or execution because those underlining concept are hidden and mysterious, making the both end tied with random rules (also popularly expressed as rules of god :)). This is much more complicated than wave-particle duality which consists of only 2 states; here we are talking about multiple instances with different form and factor. Welcome to string theory, where these multiple instances are expressed as a form of energy vibrating at different frequency. Not a discrete state of particle or wave, but entirely spread over concept of continuum variable. Sorry for diverting but I had to make a shift to demonstrate just how important it is to understand the complication with getting things right.

Therefore, the act of priority shifting is the closest think (I assume) that can come to realizing your agenda or that can come to realizing your composition or that come to realizing your idea take form and shape the way you visualized. But off course, priority shifting always comes with a price of changing your plan. You won’t get it right the first time as I told you earlier; the missing link has mysterious nature. That is also why, recently a popular theory on Failure has been appearing in every innovation blogs because the closest to getting things right is to try it out.

Aug 3rd : Meaning Behind It

2011-08-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

screen-shots of my diary on August 3rd

I live a philosophical life with full concentration on wholeness rather than a single celled ideology. So I have come to see that August 3rd is more important to me than my birthday, cause this is the day when I actually started my journey into the wilderness with full consiousness.

It was on August 3 that I started my newly owned life in Bangalore. Remembering my uncertainty at that time, the only thing I was sure about was finding myself. I think I have in many ways found myself in last 3 years. There is this wonderful saying - "You change because you have not found yourself yet". So I am still changing and the process of perfecting continues.

It also happens that unknowingly, I tend to take into new journey every August. May be its because of its position in the yearly calender. But beside me, I know that there are hundred of Nepalese students who embark on their educational journey to America, UK and other areas on this very month. Which says more about the auspiciousness of the month. And I think many people out there will agree that there is certain mystery around August month.

But not all my journey on August have turned out better. I have had bitter experiences on some August where disappointment have lead me to take different path. But different path is always there for a good. So I am eagerly waiting for the new revelation which should happen this year.

But I am already optimistic about this year, as my this August have started with a wonderful delight. With new journey and risk, there is always new people to meet and create new relationships. I must say, this August has surprised me :) and I am looking forward to it. This means that I have already taken one risk, now there is the second one that I need to take.

For last 3 years, entrepreneurship has taught me lot and continues to do so, never stopping. And I always feel, its the start and not the end, and many things happen in between.

One more interesting fact about August, which I found and was delighted by it :

On the evening of 3 August 1492, Columbus departed from Palos de la Frontera with three ships; one larger carrack, Santa María, nicknamed Gallega (the Galician), and two smaller caravels, Pinta (the Painted) and Santa Clara, nicknamed Niña after her owner Juan Niño of Moguer. - wiki

Concept of Healthy Community Design

2011-07-17T13:20:00.000-07:00

I have always indulged myself observing people move throughtheir life and make a living for them. The strange dependence that human beingshave with each other is interesting to observe. But in this strange society, weall are bound by moral values, laws and expectations. I can never completelyunderstand this mere presence of poverty that stares and the meaning of it. Ifit even means anything to be poor in a society and make your way throughstruggle, or born rich and stumble through pitfalls of social disaster. Theexamples of such scenarios are abundant in our society.

Source : sscl.wordpress.com

I consider myself very lucky to have spent my childhoods inbetween urban and rural areas. I was exposed to city life and rural lifestyleparallel. This has made my experience rich in those terms. More importantly, Icould very much say that the society that I was living in was an experimentalone. It was the convergence and harmony between village and urban technology,living hand in hand. I lived in the midst of Agricultural Research Centre whichhad at that time, the most advance technology for research and science purpose. This was during 90s. Later in my life, Iwas told that the whole project was evolved to help the community make theirliving sustainable.

You can imagine that this had tremendous impact on how Iwanted to live my life in future - in the midst of research and technology,helping society figure out a way to be efficient. Interestingly, though it was90s, I happen to touch and feel laptop before PCs. My father would bring thisfoldable DOS OS laptop and I would watch him type in WordStar. The firstcommand that I ever learned was the BACKSPACE key, which my father wouldrepetitively use. At one instance, I was so eagerly watching him type that, Ihurriedly pressed the key before he did, which amused him a lot and made himrun to my mother to explain the drama. (Similar incident happened once I took ascissor and hold a cotton to clean my wounds. It was something taught in ourfirst-aid class and it amused him more, thinking I would opt for studyingMedicine in future. But BACKSPACE key was more interesting than a scissor andcotton. ) These days, he often consults with me his problems on outlook mailand excels sheets. J These things make life very interesting.

Anyway coming back to my main point, I would sometime visitresearch labs full of PCs and get lost observing the FISH theme screen saver.It was the most inspiring and interesting time, which would remain with meforever. The house I lived in was simple and well equipped with furniture andresource supply, I never thought there was anything more that I would need inmy life. The place was beautiful with changing climate, which made it allinteresting. There were times, when the sky would be filled with brown fliesand frogs all set to feed on them. We also had 7 important channels, deliveredto our house through DISH antennae. AllI wanted was to work like my father and contribute to make this societyefficient in terms of economy and culture. Ohh!! How I miss those days and simplicity.But I guess, I had to move on to explore the horizon. So among my many friendsI was the first one to live the place and move to city for my further degree.Since then, I have never found existence of any community as vibrant andefficient.

This is what brings to me the main topic - Struggle to buildan efficient and growing community. Its bliss these days to even find any,though there existence is rare. After almost 3 years of start-up experience andstruggle, I can see why it’s so difficult to have such systems. There are somany variables and difficulties in establishing a profitable business of value withefficiency. I guess more time is spent in experimenting and learning what worksand what doesn’t and you need to change as it comes around. I find themanagement of resources and involving them into goal-oriented project, the mainchallenge. You have to look at the value your company is presenting to thebusiness and how you are doing it. You need to communicate with potentialpartners to create better opportunity and scalable business. During all this,you need to clearly know the distracting factors too, because that is importantfor growth and sustainability and those factors have potential to make it orbreak your company. Similarly with the community, there are many factors whichencourage the members of the community to participate and move alone, butnegligence to counter the distracting factor could heavily falter the growthand demise of the community. I think that is what happened to the place that Ilived during my childhood, though the place exists, I hear it’s not as interestingand vibrant as before.

So the final thought, how can we build a sustainablecommunity? Can they be designed? If so how? Here are few thoughts of mine.First of all, the landscape of the community is very important because that isgoing to define a lot of things like economy, culture and population. The spacewhere people live is very important, as they affect the emotions of people. Ibelieve that space can affect human’s senses in lot many ways then we canimagine. Along with landscape comes the important role of resources and theremanagement. A community is a combination of people with variety of skills andinterest, which can be channelized for betterment of the society. Any rejectionof such human resource could result into migration. Then comes the efficient economyof the society and how they can be managed without much lose. The continuousflow of financial transaction between people is one of the parameters toconsider the health of the society. Off course the culture is important whichbinds people together with the feeling of oneness and one. Absence of culturecould result in frustration and dissociation of the community because communityis the higher realization of individual which is as important as individual.

The last statement could be controversial as it raises thedebate between individualism and communal behaviour, but there is somepractical implication where both fail to answer deep rooted question of lifeand society. Being open-minded can only be the way to resolve this issue ratherthan following some hardcore philosophies.

As you can see, thequestion of community design is important in today’s society. It can come in aform of an organisation design or community design. I believe both follow similarline of thought.

Creative Product Development Process

2011-07-15T23:46:00.000-07:00

An interesting topic, as this means a lot to me and my everyinstances of life. Product is far more different then Service, in terms ofengagement with customers and expectations. I find it similar to animatedmovies versus actor-acted movies. There are certain freedoms in making animatedmovies, due to freedom of choice of characters, whereas in case of actor-actedmovies you have to deal with the personality of the actor before you even go toexplore the character of the story. I chuckle every time I remember one of thestatement from George Lucas, “I like working with animated characters as I hatedealing with people.” Off course, that cannot be the only reason for making animatedseries, because at the end it’s about great story telling. In case of productsand services, it’s all about solving problems and adding value. What differentiatesis how you want to approach it.

Source : brainpickings.org

So let me dwell intothe aspect of product development process. It starts, I think, with etch. Etch, is important because it definitely showsyou the area of problem and a point where value can be added. The greater the ETCH, the great the value the product can add.

Once that is identified,the whole system starts to reveal itself in terms of system variables andcontrols variables. And this whole process is gratifying in its own terms. ButI am not going go through all these process of identifying variables andimplementing them as a form and function in terms of software or hardware. WhatI want to explore is this development process, where the product is still notmatured but is on its way of becoming the required solutions.

Imagine, designing a building (building structure is theperfect example for me in terms of creativity and engineering solutions). Ithas aspect of aesthetics and ingenuity of engineered solutions, making aperfect combo for any kind of analysis. And the variable becomes the flow ofnature, resources and humans in and out. But there is one aspect missing andthat’s the mass production. Unlike products, building becomes the definingaspect of itself attracting visitors to marvel its engineering feet. Butproduct on the other hand, reaches to mass through calculated production andsupply chain. It has aspect of packaging, pricing, distribution, sales and soon. On the contrary, modern web solutions or products are much like designingbuildings rather than products. It’s about attracting visitors and maintainingtheir flow in the system. Traditionally software products were too packaged anddistributed, but now it’s much simpler to reach out to mass. Today, internet is a platform where you needto build a software or solution, similar to constructing a house. It has to be aestheticallyappealing, functionally simple and lot of value addition.

Difference between buildings and software lies in the riskthat you can take on, which means you cannot afford to do lots of trial anderror tests with building as with web platforms. In case of buildings, theevolution happens in slow and steady way, encouraged with lots of off shoreresearch and testing. So I would like to see, web product design as more thanjust designing a building, but designing a community and a society. Because incase of designing landscapes and community you have lot more flexibility, interms of experimenting with elements of society. It has to have every aspect ofa community, especially after the social media revolution.

Now, why is it that it’s a creative process and not juststacking of functionality? Well, it doesn’t have to be. Back to my saying, thatit depend how you approach and the vision behind it. But I am more inclinedinto taking it as a creative process, as that happens to be my passion.

So, can I say it’s like movie making experience? Hmm may benot entirely. But there are certain aspect of film making that can beimplemented into the product development cycle, especially the scripting part.Script writing is certainly the blue print of films, so I think even a goodproduct would have more benefit if a basic script can be formed in terms ofactors, plots and functionality. Lately, I have tried to go through some of thestandard scripts of movies, I found them expressive in terms of scenedescription and how that helps to take the story forward. In similar, way agood description of a product feature in terms of user perspective and systemperspective would be great. May be characters could be users, interaction andsystem services. Ahh... ya it’s all so interesting to feel about this creativeprocess of dealing with lot of variables, but it’s better not to get intoprocess so much that you forget the main pictures, that solving the problem.

Don't forget to see the post on GOD COMPLEX, its a great talk on trial and error process.

Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex

2011-07-15T05:10:00.000-07:00

I really don't have anything to write this time. Though I have many thoughts winding up in my head. But then, after a very long time I stumbled upon a good video in TED. This is regarding the complex system and solving the real problems through trial and error.

Though I could not help noticing Tim Harford, calling Hans Rosling the Mick Jagger of TED. By the way, Tim's book Undercover Economists is a great read for any one.

Bottom Line : "Its very difficult to make GOOD mistakes."

Unsettling Dream

2011-06-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

{Rambling with myself} My last few weeks have been reviving and insightful. After almost 2 years, I returned to my home and met old friends and family. I don’t know why, but whenever I think of them, it seems as if I am looking at the other side of the coin. The side which I have been neglecting, the side which somehow exists to keep me reminded of my roots. The side, I am trying hard to polish and shin.

While I was with my family and friends, I kept asking myself why I didn’t settle for a normal job and lived like everyone else. What is it that I am pursuing in this life? Everyone seems to be going through some phase of transition, and I found myself utterly confused and stunned. To make best of my time, I went on a trip with my friends to see if I could find consolation with my questions. But I didn’t. By the time I had to return, I had more questions than before. The unsettling dream kept haunting me.

Entrepreneurship is a hard choice because you are on your own, figuring out the rules of life. There is no syllabus or any course work to guide you. No books that can give you enough idea about life. Moreover, there are no marks to grade your performance. You just have to figure out by playing it and that’s it. May be its ignorance within me that prompted me to go this way, but I could not go any way either. Honestly, I had no idea of what entrepreneurship or leadership is all about, until I started playing the game, the only game which made sense for me to play. The idea was not to win the game, but to play and figure out the rules as I go along. For last 3 years, I have figured out enough rules to make some sense of life. But sometime, certain unexpected moves keep proving me wrong.

There is a saying that a “filled cup can never be filled”, and that “a rolling stone will never gather any moss.” But my cup never gets filled. Every time I look into my cup, I see it empty. Looks like, nothing stays in my cup beside the left over impressions and stains from unproven facts. On the hand, I see no reason why a stone should gather any moss, rather than rolling and being always in motion. At the end, may be rolling stone would not gather any moss, but you will find the stone beaming with perfection of its roundness which is absent in the other stone. This sense reminds me of a story from Hermann Hesse, “Siddhartha”. A young man in search of truth, who ends up finding the answer late in his life, similar to the character in the movie, Into the wild.

I have been blogging with all my passion to keep reminding why I started it all - for the love of the life and my unsettling dream. The dream is to be able to architect my life in my own way and be able to do great things. But my doubtful nature keeps challenging me of my path. I could not help noticing how people fail due to lack of faith on their instinct. The pressuring nature of social casualties are powerful enough to generate fear. This fear is interesting, it is the core of what makes you what you are. If you have read enough of J Krishnamurti‘s books than you will find that his main stress is always in removing this fear from oneself. The fear weakens your senses to judge and to make right decision. I have tried hard enough to ignore my fear and move, but sometime I falter on my own reasoning, the only thing that I trust.

Both side of the coin adds value to life. Dream and Reality are two different perceptions of life and balancing your way through it, is all one needs to do. But the act of balance is much more complicated than it sounds and one needs to figure it out. It’s always the fear that plays against your balance. I think, if one can control it, there should be no problem.

Being an Artist and Being an Entrepreneur is almost similar

2011-05-21T03:03:00.000-07:00

Most people flock to big cities to pursue their dreams and struggle for years. Some people succeed but many still find themselves waiting for the opportunities. They consider that opportunity is the biggest thing that can actually leverage their talent or skill. But I believe that it is not always so.

There are couple of examples that proves that opportunity along is not everything. Moreover in today’s media hyped world, opportunities are everywhere from a reality TV shows to your own youtube channel, twitter account or facebook profile.

If you look around in youtube, there are lots of artists doing great with their skills and scaling them to offline. This gives a lot of encouragement to all those people who want to pursue their passion. But there is a reality beyond pursuing your dreams that everyone considers once in a while. It’s how far you can take yourself with what you have. Most people get stuck on it and lose their passion in mid way, and some people simply cannot go beyond what they already have.

Take examples of hundreds of reality shows winners and contestants who were given the lime light exposure through grandiose celebration. Most are not even there in the industry and some have wandered away, and some have simply disappeared. I am not really the greatest fans of reality shows but they have their pros and cons. But at the end, all those participants for whatever reasons they competed starts to make no sense. Along the path of life, all the opportunity and exposure goes into nothing. I think, they become unable to push themselves, or they realise that it’s not only about opportunity or exposure, it’s about honestly and perseverance. And it takes hell lot of time to become what you really wanted to be.

Source : starway.org/Titanic/

So I have been wondering what it takes to make that jumps which takes you to the next level. Entrepreneurs also fall into similar category. They start with some idea and work very hard to seek opportunity and exposure. Along the way, they fail and some move along, some take another chance and some just disappears. It takes a lot to work on your ideas and to shape them into the existing industry. It doesn’t matter, if you are trying to create a new industry or market, or be part of an industry, the work is equally challenging.

Most entrepreneurs, similar to an artist cannot push themselves out of where they already are and get hindered by their own limitation. If we look into great artists, you will notice that they always make a jump to something different and take risk to fail. To explore ones horizon is very important for artists, because they are always in constant pressure to create something different. No artist has become successful by just making one masterpiece. It’s the continuum of those master pieces and variety which takes them to their status. This is true even for entrepreneurs; great entrepreneurs are always pushing the envelope and innovating to reach that extreme end. Some fail, but its always worth taking a risk.

So my final note is that, to be what you want to be, you have to scale up and see the bigger picture and keep struggling. Coz the goal is not always to reach where you want to, but to make sure that every day is a worthwhile to live for. Even after more than 2 years of my experience in entrepreneurship, I may not have reached where I want to and I may have failed in many ways, but every day was worth living for and making sure that it continues that way is I think the biggest challenge.Most people query me, why entrepreneurship, I mean you are a graduated engineer? And honestly, for me I see no difference between engineers and entrepreneurs, for me both stands for someone trying very hard to create something and innovate everyday.

No great movie director rests on their previous movie; he/she is continually working on the next great things. No great musician stop making music coz they think they have had it, they explore till they die. No great writers stop writing coz they think they have succeeded. No scientist stop thinking, they are continually jumping from one problem to other. And no creative entrepreneurs stop experimenting with ideas, they keep exploring till they can. Not to settle is hard and a choice has to be made. It’s always up to us to decide if we want to reach the dream.

Where Good Ideas Come From

2011-05-04T05:44:00.000-07:00

Passion and Flying

2011-04-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting aspect of flying which grasps everyone's imagination. The freedom and the control of moving around the space without any obstacle is just too much to ask for, in one man's life :). Isn't it?

As a young kid like everyone, flying was a dream. Not to mention the great stories of Leonardo Da Vinci and the Wrights brothers, who not only dreamt but also went on designing one, would inspire you to believe that some day in future it would be possible to fly like a bird. So let me tell you a short story about myself where I took myself to some limit into achieving this. :) I have been wanting to tell this for a long time but never found any occasion or reason to do so.

It was long ago when I was still in grade 3/4, should be around 1993. Space Channel was just installed into our home and I would spend time watching cartoons and other science programs. That was when I noticed gliders and parachutes. The shear simplicity of the design took me by surprise. Just to be satisfied, I would take a small stone, tie it around a hanky and throw up in the air. Then I would watch it fall in a slow and balanced manner. It was only after years, I finally understood that it was a phenomenon called Terminal Velocity.

But throwing plastics around was not much fun. So I would take umbrellas of different sizes and jump from certain heights. :) It was very discouraging. Either Umbrellas would flip upside down too fast or nothing would happen. I surely needed to try more than just jumping. This is when I decided that I had to make my own glider. So I waited for TVs to show gliders. I wish information was much accessible then. Around that time, libraries was not very accessible and internet was still much of sci-fi things. But I managed to get enough of the design aspect, though it was some what wrong.

Back then, I was big fan of Star Trek.

So one fine Saturday morning, I got up with a shear determination that I was going to get it done. During those days, Saturday was only the time when you had the whole day for yourselves. School use to run on Sundays and we use to have half-school during Friday. So on that day, I got up as usual, eat my breakfast, carried my small sketch book and spend some time sketching my design under a sun. I remember carrying such sketch book till the time I was in class 7. After which I some how got lost into mathematics and other heavy reading :). But the shear joy of sketching ideas on a paper still remains.

I figured out that I needed bamboo sticks for framing the glider, plastics for the body and some ropes to tie things around. It was the most basic design you could every find. It had to be triangular in shape of which I was so sure even not knowing its advantages.

So I went around woods to collected bamboos which was not that difficult. The place where I use to live was a decent quarter provided by the office where my father worked, and there were lots of families living nearby. It was a small and healthy society and a lot of children to hang around with. But mostly I was on my own. The picture on side was the taken at the time, when I was big fan of Star Trek and forced my mother to take the picture of me carrying paper guns and paper badge on my belt. :D

So once I had the bamboo, I tore down long sheets of plastics which I found in the store house of my home. I use to have tough time getting permission from my mother. A little kid trying to fly on his own is not something that can be encouraged :). But my parents rarely objected me from doing anything. I had my own space to play around. I would do all sort of things like I would wander collecting leaves and naming them, sometime I would collect rare stamps. :) It was all fun. But my mother never let me collect stones, she was very much against bringing foreign materials inside the house. But whenever I sneaked stones in my room, the other day I would find all gone. I would stamp around the house but mummy would not melt down. :)

Well by the noon time, I had everything around me and I was busy bending bamboos and tying the joints. Mother had hard time calling me for the lunch :). But I would hurriedly go back to my work and start finishing my project. By the evening, everything was ready. The glider almost more than twice that of my size was ready and I was all happy and smiley for my success. So what was next.

Off-course I use to have my audience for the final demonstration. My audience were the same kids around the place, in front of whom I jumped with an umbrella :). So every one stood by to see me take a flight. Hahaha I love the feeling of remembering those times of utter joy where it was not about any status quo or success, it was about simply doing it and seeing if it could work. I even remember one Saturday going every where carrying a muddy water. I had read in my science class that when a muddy water is placed in a bottle, each particle would settle according to the weight. So I asked my father if that was possible, as my father is majored in soil science there was no way for me to go anywhere else for the reference. So he helped me add muddy water on a bottle and left me with it. So I carried it along the entire day showing off to the kids around. :D I even remember the other kid carrying a bug in a small box and showing it to me. His father was from the Entomology section.

Source : sketchingjourney.files.wordpress.com

We use to live in the midst of agriculture research center, you can image the place we were living in. It was a living research center with high and low lands with fields, trees, and nurseries. Our place was surrounded by small walls made of bamboos. So I planned to jump off the bamboo wall. It had height enough for me to give flight and protect from strong crash landing. By the time I was ready for the flight, I really had no expectation if I was going to be successful or not, there was no pressure, it was just fun. I think in lot of ways, I still retain those characteristics of being very open to the end result. So here I was with hand made glider, rough and tough. It was already getting dark so I made the move as quickly as possible and made the jump :).

What happened? Well I crash landed and sprained by ankle a little but not that seriously. I had a full grin on my face for achieving it and all my audience was laughing and having fun. Kids can laugh about anything. But during my jump, I did manage to gain a flight, a true flight that lasted for micro-seconds but I felt it through my heart. It really filled my heart with joy and gave me the belief that it was possible to fly. The experience was real no matter how long it lasted. I was on the air, master of the flight for at least few seconds and that was enough for me.

Off-course, the only thing I feared then was getting bitting from my mother. :) The night was over and the show had ended. I abandoned the left debris from my flight and entered the house. A yet another day had ended but full of delight and experience, which was sure to be etched in my memory for a long time. Now I remember those times and feel happy about it. I still try to make everyday count in some ways by doing things that gives me a full experience of being in control. I think I never stopped doing so and will never. Everyday is yet another day for me to experiment with my logic and make yet another glider and take for a flight.

The Art of Story Telling

2011-04-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Hayao Miyazaki

Here I am going to write about one director who have absolutely taken me by my heart and soul. His name is Hayao Miyazaki, a Japanese animator who have produced one of the most fascinating series of animations, but more properly I would tell he is one of the best story teller that I was seen.

His animations are not just figures and shapes moving but a manifestation of a story which is larger than life. The first movie that I saw of his was "The Spirited Away". Before this I had watched other Japanese animations but they were more into actions and adventures. But this was completely different, I think I was lucky to have watched it.

The story line of "The Spirited Away" was magnificent and out of the box. The experience it set was unquestionable. There was nothing in the movie which sounded cheap or pretentious. You could easily notice the thoughtfulness and the passion gone into making the movie. After that I started watching his more movies. Till date, I found that he has made nine movies and after having watched all of that, it got me into thinking that there is a place for soulful movies and stories and not all the world is full of crap :)). Yupe you can find lots of movie making business out of selling their soul in the movie for the sake of viewers. But once in a while, a good movie, a good story, a good book fills you heart with love for the life like nothing else.

So what is so important about the story telling which is unique? I think its the love for life, if you see all the movies of Miyazaki, you won't fail to notice the passion to life, he brings to his stories. From a humble Kiki's Delivery service where a simple girl is just trying to run her small delivery service to a complex world of ghosts and demons in The Spirited Away where a girl fights her way.

I could not help to notice that all the leading characters are female full of courage and passion. I think that means a lot to him. But I found that most of the Japanese Animations have similar strong story telling in their movies. The other one movie which I found strange and strong story was "Grave of the Fireflies"

These strong movies have also made me think that lot of stories and movies being made in leading movie studios don't share similar passion for the art of story telling and they are very rare. May be its not the choice of the mass, but anyone who watches movies for passion rather than entertainment would understand the point that I am making.

Well, I really don't have any ending to this post rather than encouraging you all to watch it :) And do comment below if you have found similar passion of the art of story telling. So this is what I think Life is about : Discovering beautiful and interesting things and sharing with the world for good.

Simple Rule of Success

2011-04-01T07:42:00.000-07:00

Simple Rule of Success. Passion. I won't argue and I won't justify. Its there for everyone to understand.

You read hundreds of books, watch thousands of movies and read millions of blog, but the fact is not going to change.

There was one old Archie's comic strip which I remember reading. When Archie asks Dilton, "How to pass an exam?" Dilton replies, "Just Study." And I think that was well put.

But people are lazy by nature and are always looking for hacks in their lives and many people are ok with living their life that way.

But if you are truly looking for success coming from within and unpretentious, then its passion. Look every genuine winners around and you will find that they had something unique to offer with their passion to gain in real terms and not in terms of hacks.

Building a Business is like Writing a Novel.

2011-03-17T12:21:00.000-07:00

First question! Have you ever tried writing a Novel? You should because it will teach you to think from different perspective. I had written one when I was in college, and it took me more than a year to complete the story. I was trying to narrate a story around an adventurous journey which I and my good friends had undertaken. It was easy, in a sense that I was aware of the story and had some knowledge about the characters that I was trying to describe. But within those time period, I went through lots of ups and downs which were affecting my story line and my characters. This was happening unknowingly and I seemed to have no control over it.

While writing and describing one character I would unknowingly portray the character as something else I had no clue of. Somehow the story had its own life and it was urging me to change things. This was a strange and a beautiful feeling.

Now what has it to do with building a business? When you start your company for the first time, you are unaware of the characters and their nature. You are unaware of the story and its climax. You are just finding your ways and the only way to figure things out is to make decision and move ahead. You make wrong decisions and you sometime get lucky. But that is how you learn. Similar to the writing experience, the experience around building a company in a way changes you and your perspective.

When you start with nothing but a passion to do something, you are unaware of the market forces and the eco-system. The eco-system is even not visible to you at the beginning. It unfolds itself slowly and sometime painfully. At every instance, you just need to have faith and that’s all. Even the characters in the eco-system are undefined. You are always on the dark side unable to make quick decision due to the lack of visibility. But as time passes by you begin to see the eco-system opening itself to you. This happens when you have built enough credibility in the market. Now when you begin to see the entire eco-system unfold, there are two things that can happen. Either it will be something that you predicted or it will be entirely different. But you can always move on and that’s the whole beauty.

Novel is also similar. You start with fresh characters and with time they mature to reveal their true identity giving whole story a shape and climax. Even in writing, either you end up writing exactly what you wanted or something entirely different.

At the heart of building business are the people. You are always affecting people and their ways of living. To introduce your-self to already existing market needs much more than just passion. You have to seriously justify your existence and your value to the society. In case of failure to show your value, you are sure to be lost in the crowd of that 99% failure list. This is why the failure rate of entrepreneurship is so high. It’s very difficult to find people working to add value to the society.

Each story has main characters that are leading the way. Each eco-system has a leader that is leading the way. If you want to survive than you will have to justify against these leaders. If your eco-system is healthy one than you will have helpful leaders otherwise, you are literally on war. But I think it doesn’t always have to be this way.

Value is the key to sustainable business or company. Absence of value can only take you so far, value is the one that will define your space on the Global Market. Similarly each novel has a story that defines the life, in absence of this definition story has no meaning at all.

Just check out my other post which I had written some year back. Fearful Consumer Market.

Importance of Free Information

2011-03-08T12:23:00.000-08:00

I have never been a die hard FOSS guy. I don't even remember attending any FOSS conferences or joining a FOSS community. But as an observer, I deeply value its presence and its motive. FOSS is about freedom in information and its owner ship to the audience. Allowing users to have complete control over the information fosters innovation and provides better opportunities.

The freedom in information does not only means source code or design blueprints, but every aspect of knowledge. Knowledge has to be shared freely and openly to public. Here, I am not pointing to wiki leaks phenomenon or other piracy issues, but simply the openness of valued information.

I remember getting fully excited during my A levels , when I heard that MIT will be sharing their lecture videos and materials to the public under the name of Open Course. As I was deeply interested in learning more about science and technology, I thought this was the greatest news. It meant I no longer had to beg for knowledge. It gave me huge opportunity to explore the horizon of science without being restricted or questioned. I believe every form of education has to be that way, unrestricted.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koencobbaert/

Prior to this news, I use to visit British Councils and other libraries in search of good books and envied the pricing tags it use to bear. I hated being unable to own them and access the knowledge. Often I would borrow books and take home to study. I would then spend hours coping the content of the book into my thick notebook, just to make sure I owned it. I think I still have those notebooks, where I drew every figures and charts in the book. It gave me sense of ownership which I enjoyed a lot.

Now I try to trace my childhood and remember that I had done similar activities when I was in grade 3/4. I had borrowed a story book from my friend to read. Because I enjoyed the story so much, I decided to copy the whole story in my notebook in beautiful handwriting :). It was a story of "The Story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears".

This brings me to say that knowledge should not be a privilege but a right to everyone. No one in this world should be valued based on their basic knowledge. In this I don't mean that every companies need to share their secret chemicals. I mean to say that, any kind of information that deprives human from extensive knowledge benefiting a single identity needs to be challenged and shared freely.

There is more I want to share about my thoughts on the fabric of economy and how it can be disrupted by information. But for this post, I simply wanted to give a perspective on the need of free information.

Creative Desire

2011-03-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

One of the difficulty of being creative is not being able to conform with the surrounding. Almost every thing around you starts to become an extension of yourself. Every living and non-living things become a part of you and you try to make sure that it is the part of your conscious extension. An urge which pushes you to define your surrounding space.

Some people say that Artist is born with an ego which is unsatisfiable. This ego does not have any rule and boundaries and is very moody in its nature. It has no value proposition to the society. It simple exist within the realm of ego of an Artist. You can see the example everywhere in the history of creativity from Leonardo to modern artists. It is the only think which I have found that defines an Artist, in a good way.

But this urge to define your space can be a frustrating experience when it does not conform with your command. I don't know why this urge is so strong among creative people. It simply doesn't obey the rules and breaks the boundary of thoughts. It simply stands as the only reason to be living and this can be very troublesome, sometime. But I think you should never doubt your creative urges and move along with.

Many creative people living among us has a very hard time fitting into the realm of life, but I see everyone living for only their extension. Its like trying to do everything just to save your identity. It may be not the only helplessness of creative people but also to some extent nature of general human being.

Social Media and Artistic Integrity

2011-02-26T13:32:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, I am starting to feel that there is some sense of freedom among artists in today’s society. This I realised after I observed the trends in YouTube and other social networking channels where creative people were freely expressing themselves without any need of mediator.

Artists are always known for their eccentricity and individualism. Their ego defines their works of art and that is what people around love the most. But in between the artists and people, there were always critics and mass media who defined the image of the artists. These mediators were people benefiting from the whole game. Though not all are as bad as I am making them sound :)

But the reality is that platforms and media always had a control over making or breaking an artist and they still do. Publishers always control the content of the book and records label always control the content of the music. Because behind this whole setup is a big business model running. There is nothing good or bad about it, it’s just the way it is. But there has always been an independent group of artists revolting this whole system.

Source : informationliberation.com

For example, along the line of mainstream cinema you can always find independent films breaking the norms of main stream culture and similarly garage bands breaking the trends of posed culture by main line music industry. But look around you today, you will find that nothing can stop these artists from reaching out to people.

There are free platforms for people to share their creativity and earn from them. Hence I feel that power to control the creative work is going back to the creator rather than to distributors. But it’s not that there was never any freedom before. But it took a lot of effort for creators to control their work.

Recently, Paulo Coelho, author of alchemist, told in his interview that he sold his recent books all through twitter and facebook and without any kind of promotional activities in main media. I think that is very encouraging for artists. Also youtube is full of self made artist doing great in their walk of life. This proves that a true and genuine artist always have a place in the world.

But why did I put the title as Social Media and Integrity? Well integrity is something that is very much the only assets of artists, as far as I am concerned. So I believe that social media is giving people to think freely and express in any way they like, irrespective of what others have to say. Hence preserving their integrity.

Destiny over Choice

2011-02-21T11:09:00.000-08:00

I think I was born to be an Industrial designer. How do I know? I don't, but I just feel it that way though I am not, yet. In similar ways I could say, I was even born to be an Entrepreneur. But ironically, I never knew about these fields until few years back. This happened cause I stopped the speeding clock of my life. I took off from a steady pitch road started venturing into no man's land. I feel glad that I did.

Everyone is not born with an opportunity to know it all before hand. And not every society has a condition where one can find their destiny. So, I feel glad that I was able to find my dream. To find a thing where you could give all your life, its like finding a love of your life.

My understanding of myself begins with a realization of my interests and my choices. Irrespective of what you have been doing so far, you need to be sure of your likes and dislikes. It takes an immense effort for anyone to choose their choice, I am not able to know why? A wise person have told that you are defined by things that you don't do. There is an immense noise in today's world blocking one from figuring out clearly on what they want to do and don't want to do.

World is certainly a very noisy place and getting through it is the most difficult task of all. From the very beginning, we are told about the right and wrong, and about our moral values, only to be proven wrong latter when the reality hits you hard. Finding factual and authentic information has become difficult with time.

The satisfaction that you receive after reading a good book or watching a good movie or listening to a good music is unparalleled to anything, why? Because no matter what people say and no matter what critics say, good thing always matters. Good thing are never justified, they are just accepted and lived. You find yourself blessed to have found your passion.

So, I am still questioning over this conundrum, the choice of destiny over choice. There is a big difference between flowing along the current of a river and walking against it.

Design is more about Process

2011-01-21T01:47:00.000-08:00

Stumbledupon a good article about Jonathan Ive :

Ive's team at Apple isn't the usual design ghetto of creativity that exists inside most corporations. They work closely and intensely with engineers, marketers, and even outside manufacturing contractors in Asia who actually build the products. Rather than being simple stylists, they're leading innovators in the use of new materials and production processes. The design group was able to figure out how to put a layer of clear plastic over the white or black core of an iPod, giving it a tremendous depth of texture, and still be able to build each unit in just seconds. "Apple innovates in big ways and small ways, and if they don't get it right, they innovate again," says frog design founder Hartmut Esslinger, who designed many of the original Apple computers for Jobs. "It is the only tech company that does this."

Article : Who Is Jonathan Ive? An in-depth look at the man behind Apple's design magic

Black Hole of Normality

2011-01-07T12:02:00.000-08:00

Black Hole!! A very mysterious element of our universe. Science has it, that it engulfs every existence of mass around it and takes them to singularity. Apparently, singularity is a point in a space where every physical law collapses.

But here, I will not delve over the singularity of black hole. Instead I will point you towards the interesting phenomenon of human behavior. Its the black hole of normality. Its a place where every human being is pulled to become normal and insignificant. Its a space where most human being delve into and gets lost into the rules of normality and only few can struggle to come out of it.

source : google.com

You may be getting my point. If not let me elaborate. Every human being is given an opportunity to do something different and great. I think everyone has that right and opportunity in their life time to act.

But some how the black hole of normality pulls them into it to succumb. And yes, I mean to literally succumb. Its a poor dilemma of human beings but I think only few can break it. The pull of normality is so strong its unavoidable. But I have no offense to it. I think moving towards the normality is the nature of human beings and only few have enough strength to go against it. But few who go against it in a right way or wrong way are always glorified by the society. There are many examples in the history about it.

Just like many laws, the fundamental principle is that every thing wants to spiral down to stability. Chemical reaction happens because the final state of the reaction is more stable than that of initial. Similarly look at many principles of physics, starting with motion of inertia - every mass wants to be in a state that they are until and unless an external force is being applied on them.

Similarly the black hole of normality acts on a similar way at human being. Every human beings are attracted by this law to be normal. For years in my work and life, I have experienced people delving into normality easily. And it takes a lot of vision to pull them back to move forward boldly. But ultimately, many human beings fail to resist the stability of normality.

I don't know how much sense I am making to you. But you are getting my point then I am more than pleased. Resisting stability is very difficult for many reasons. Political, economical, personal and many others. But I just want to urge that if you want to reach to greatness in any terms or in any philosophical way, you need to identify this black hole of normality before it engulfs you by surprise. Moreover, make sure that you are not already inside the belly of black hole. If you are then you have every opportunity to come out of it, just don'r surrender.

Rejoicing New Year 2011

2011-01-01T10:15:00.001-08:00

Well Happy New Year 2011.

This New Year is a special in many ways. Numerically, its a beginning of new decade. Secondly its 1/1/11 :)

Well I really don't know what to write today but I just had a small thought that could be interesting to share. If you have noticed, there are always few people who basically are pessimistic about the new year celebration. They express there views by saying things like, its just another day which means nothing.

But I think people tend to forget that the new year is not just a other day. It is a special one because on that very day, billions and billions of people make a commitment to themselves to start a fresh life. They promise to themselves to do things differently and in a better ways. They resolve their issues in relationships or careers or life and build a strength to move forward. Many people set their past issues aside and move forward.

And I think that when billions and billions of people make a commitment to change themselves and start a fresh, it makes a whole lot of difference in the world and in your surrounding thus making it an auspicious day of all.

Building simple system takes vision and discipline

2010-12-21T08:40:00.000-08:00

Almost every entrepreneurs are building something today. From a mobile application to hardware systems to simple services. But the key challenges is always getting users to adopt them. This brings to an interesting field of product development which is off-course understanding your users.

Understanding users doesn't require any technical understanding of the system but instead requires more in-depth understanding of human senses and how they react. May be this is why today, the term "design" can be seen overused over the literature and talked about in conferences. I believe people use it often to catch eyeballs.

Source : macmothership.com

But I think that design is a core discipline of an engineer which is being taught but not stressed upon. The fundamental of control system is about creating efficient system that works better and that can be used better.

The excerpt below is taken from a blog post that essentially talks about making simple to use enterprise software. It is an interesting one. If you find it useful, you should check out the original post here.

Mark Twain (or Ben Franklin, depending on your source) said, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” This, in essence, is the challenge with simplicity. Building simple technology is not easy; it inherently takes much more work to reduce complex problems into simple solutions for people. Building products that suck is far easier, as David Barrett of Expensify pointed out in his post yesterday. Simplicity requires that you have user experience drive product management and solve problems with exceptional design. And it also means you sometimes have to say no.

Best of Steve Job from his 1985 interview

2010-11-21T11:40:00.000-08:00

In 1985 interview of Steve Jobs with the Playboy magazine, we can see some of the early vision in regards of Apple's future and business fundamentals. This was also the time when Apple had build its first MAC. Here are some of the most inspiring statements from him:

Source : theapplecollection.com

JOBS: Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.

JOBS: What happens in most companies is that you don't keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know, because that's how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.

JOBS: There's an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: "For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you." As I'm going to be 30 in February, the thought has crossed my mind.

JOBS: And I'm not sure. I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back. And that's what I may try to do. The key thing to remember about me is that I'm still a student. I'm still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I'd keep that in mind. Don't take it all too seriously.

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. That is why it's hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, "Bye. I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

JOBS: I still don't understand it. It's a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime—and I feel I have to spend it. If you die, you certainly don't want to leave a large amount to your children. It will just ruin their lives. And if you die without kids, it will all go to the Government. Almost everyone would think that he could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than the Government could. The challenges are to figure out how to live with it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it away or using it to express your concerns or values.

JOBS: No. There are some simple reasons for that. One is that in order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy—there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can't succeed or fail, it's really hard to get better. Also, most of the time, the people who come to you with ideas don't provide the best ideas. You go seek the best ideas out, and that takes a lot of time.

JOBS: Well, my favorite things in life are books, sushi and.... My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time. As it is, I pay a price by not having much of a personal life. I don't have the time to pursue love affairs or to tour small towns in Italy and sit in cafes and eat tomato-and-mozzarella salad.

Occasionally, I spend a little money to save myself a hassle, which means time. And that's the extent of it. I bought an apartment in New York, but it's because I love that city. I'm trying to educate myself, being from a small town in California, not having grown up with the sophistication and culture of a large city. I consider it part of my education. You know, there are many people at Apple who can buy everything that they could ever possibly want and still have most of their money unspent. I hate talking about this as a problem; people are going to read this and think, Yeah, well, give me your problem. They're going to think I'm an arrogant little asshole.

JOBS: The minute you have the means to take responsibility for your own dreams and can be held accountable for whether they come true or not, life is a lot tougher. It's easy to have wonderful thoughts when the chance to implement them is remote. When you've gotten to a place where you at least have a chance of implementing your ideas, there's a lot more responsibility in that.

Here is another great resource about Steve Jobs Perspective.

John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript

Source : tech.fortune.cnn.com

Collective Intelligence : An Interesting Thought

2010-11-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

Here I was at the end of the week, and after a tiring Table Tennis match with Binit dai (brother in nepali) I walked with him to his flat. Till then I was unaware that I was about to have a very interesting conversation with him. And it all started with a vague question, "Dai, when do you think Sharukh Khan will die?" I asked this question as I was watching his photographs in a daily newspaper.

To this vague question, he replied "Most celebrity have less life expectancy due to their stressful lifestyle." Then he added, "There is this basic formula for life, the more you push in your life the less your lifetime becomes." Then he added a scientific fact to the statement that the heartbeat per second defines the total life expectancy. Large animals like elephant have very low heart beat rate compared to a rabbit, so comparatively elephants live more than rabbits. In same lines, tortoise has a very low heart beat and it can live up to 200 years. Then suddenly I remembered an old documentary about human body where it was mentioned that the main reason of aging is oxygen. Though oxygen is the life support of human being, it also has a double edge to it. Different form of oxygen is the main factor behind degradation of cells.

brainbasedbusiness.com

After a long silence to this thought, I asked yet another vague question, "Why do human beings have to be so restless? Why are they always thinking and doing something? Can't we simply exist?" To this he rebutted by saying that its not only humans but every living organism has a quest in life to exist, and continuously act accordingly. He then gave examples of how dogs and rats have adapted to the city life and have made their existence possible. And this is a true fact. Look at dogs how gullible they are? They have pampered human being to such an extent that a dog that doesn't wag its tail in front of their boss is simply not a good dog. Look how they have made their ways into human lives and co-existing as a part of human family.

This was the turning point of the conversation. Suddenly, from a simple scientific observation we were venturing into the reality of life - "Existence". This is when he shared a remarkable fact about human cells. Inside the cell we have something called mitochondria (power house of cell). But in the history, mitochondria and a cell was a different life system. Unicellular organism usually feed by engulfing other cellular organism. So in some faith of life, a cell engulfed mitochondria but instead of digesting it, a remarkable thing happened. Both the cell and mitochondria co-existed as one organism. The presence of mitochondria somehow enhanced the efficiency of cell, so someway they communicated to exist as one or we may say agreed to be one. Now its very similar to a dog and a man, somehow the presence of a dog in a family have started to make a family complete, making a presence of a dog important. As the new generation of the family exist, so will the dog's.

Every human cell has a unique identity of their own and is in a way an independent life. But its remarkable to see how millions and billions of these cells have coordinated in a godly fashion to exist as a human being. How do they know how to coordinate with each other. Who is commanding them? Because in all these examples there is no single commanding cells or identity involved.

For two human beings to coordinate, we have to communicate. Communication is a very important part of a society. But in case of cells and other life forms, how do they communicate with each other. What kind of consciousness do they have?

yerbamate.com

With casual seep of tea and popcorn, the conversation was a perfect ice breaker for some innovative thinking. So the next phase of this conversation, was to dwell deep into the aspect of matter and their consciousness. Then Binit dai said that there is something that have always fascinated him about life. The embroic process of human development is an interesting process. Initially, we have only one cell and the same cell multiply to be an embryo. But how do each cell know which part of the body they want to be? What guides their faith is a question that is interesting? This suddenly reminded me about the paradox of quantum theory. The fact that electrons show wave behavior has baffled scientific community for ages. Out of this fact a very important question have emerged - "During electron diffraction, how does one electron know where to land and what guides the path of an electron." Now I know that this has been explained by the wave nature of particle but it is an interesting question which shows that somehow these matter can communicate with each other is some interesting fashion.

This is the point where everything started to go murky. The whole question boiled down to collective intelligence of life. The fact that earth in itself is a living organism could be hard to take it, but once you follow the path of collective intelligence of how cell emerges to be human and human to community to Earth and may be to universe, it looks elementary. Though I have no evidence to prove, its an interesting thought to have.

This theory has an immense implication in every field. With this thought lingering in my mind, I looked at my cup to see it empty. So there it was a cup full of innovative thinking :). I jumped to my feet and left the flat leaving Binit dai to his thought and mine to jot down to this blog post. Hope you enjoyed.

Opportunities and Success

2010-11-10T14:03:00.000-08:00

Just before sleeping I decided to go through the first chapter of Outliers, one of the bestselling book on success and innovation. The chapter was so intriguing that it pushed me to think hard about myself. And I had only begun to read.

A very valid point was made in the chapter about the opportunities that people get in their life which pushes them to success and how baise these opportunities tend to be. A very intriguing example was given of how a hockey players in a specific region turned out to have similar birth months. No, it had nothing to do with astrology but a simple set of opportunities set out by the council of hockey which gave more opportunities to the people born in January, February and March.

strongodors.com

It turned out that the council enrolled young kids for training at specific time which unknowingly gave kids born in January more chances of fitting the age bar and entering the hockey team.

As a result, these kids got head start in their life and rode on the opportunities towards success.

Though, it is not ignoring skills and intelligence. It surely points out the missed opportunities for other kids. In the chapter, more examples are given for different games, education and different scenarios.

And seriously, we have witnessed these facts even in our day to day life. We find people with opportunities more equipped with things to handle the day to day challenges. And I looked at myself and said, "What opportunities did I have and what I didn't?"

To start with, I was born in a city which gave me excess to advantages of city dwellers. But ironically, I spent most of my childhood in a small village, on eastern part of Nepal, which was a base for advance research on Agriculture (PAC), where my father was working.

Though, I did my early schooling in a village school which had less to offer than city school. The place I was living in was nothing like a village. It was a merge of high end research labs and villagers living in harmony. The people and the culture of the place is still something I idealized.

It was in this very village I had witnessed computers and large computer networks, despite the fact that the village had no telephone for inter communication. Amazingly, though the time was between 80s and 90s, I was able to see and experience Laptops before Desktops. I still find it strange because it was only after a decade I was able to own my own Desktop while I was doing my A level. Here I have given you an example of few gained and missed opportunities, based on location. But I have noticed that location sometime does not bother people who have strong will to succeed.

flickr.com

Now lets go to parenting. Today I have an engineering degree and a passion for building things and making it work.

This passion was seeded into me early on when my father gave me a LEGO as a first toy. I still remember the day he opened the box and gave me the pieces to solve. Since then I have never stopped dreaming about building and designing systems and working with it.

But my main point is that I did not become an engineer because I was given a LEGO and that I had fun with it in my early days. The important thing is that I was given an opportunity to explore things which luckily resonated with my interest and skill sets. (Because I still remember my father buying me a General Knowledge book on which I simply had no interest :) ) I was even lucky to have an uncle who was amazingly creative and inspired me to draw, build and even play music. Somehow, I still have a taste for music similar to him. This doesn't mean I was influenced, it means that I was lucky to have people around me with whom I could resonate. Now that is very important. I believe that every people have something interesting inside them and that they should get an opportunity to explore it.

Now, this opportunities to explore your interest is much more important than an opportunity to go into formal schooling and get a degree. Because once a kid finds his passion, he is bound to follow it till the end and success in itself is defined by his path. But in this weak education system, modern schools have a habit of narrowing down your options. I still remember how the amount of Art and Music class lessened as we marched to higher grade.

My point is that though opportunities play important roles in people's life sometime a little more hard work can balance the missed opportunities. Because looking at myself, I know that there were many points where I could not achieve certain things due to the lack of opportunity, but as time went on the homework paid off. My experience shows that when you realize that you are not able to do certain things better than other due to lack of knowledge, just remove your self from the rat race of trying to win. Step aside and work on your weakness and do a strong homework.

I could go on and on. But I thing thats enough. Further I do not know how the book will move forward and may be there are certain things that I still have not explored in this post. But when I get time, I will certainly do so. Also, feel free to share your thoughts on it.

Not all gears have to be round

2010-10-28T04:45:00.000-07:00

Team management and collaboration is something that management and project leaders spends their whole time thinking about. The challenges is always about making every one perform to their optimum and at the same time improve the efficiency of the team. There are many thoughts regarding the team collaboration and management.


Source : technabob.com

But one notion that everyone in the team needs to have equal efficiency and ability to work as a team is an interesting and contradictory one. Because its not always true. In a team every one can put their own effort in their way and help the overall team to move forward. There is no such thing like important entity of the team or important person, every one has their own importance and space in the team work.

Just like a engine, every part has their importance and even failure of the smallest component can result in a disaster. Therefore, the idea that every gears need to be round is in a way illusion. If all were round than it could be beautiful but the reality simply doesn't allow that to happen.

So I stumbled upon this wonderful video on weird gears which demonstrates strongly how a different kinds of shapes of gears can be coordinated to allow efficient running. Remember that the coordination in gears are irrelevant to shape of gears but the coordination of the teeth of the gears. Similarly, team is not about efficiency and ability of the individuals but the coordination of them

Enjoy the video

Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small

2010-09-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

Ed Catmull, Pixar talks about avoiding the crisis of success.

Is Design the result of Frustration?

2010-09-12T11:50:00.000-07:00

Design is a complex thing to define and further designer is a difficult thing to figure out. What you call design may not be a design at all. Moreover, it is very difficult to make out even if there has been any designing.

I have been trying to look into myself for answers and figure out what is it that makes me think that something is a design. I have been a passionate observer of design since my childhood, and I have promised myself to follow it till the end.

Source:georgebuehler.com

Recently, I have found that Design could be a result of a frustration. An immense urge to act so that the frustration could be pacified. It is similar to problem solving.

In one of the interview, Richard Feynman (physicist) said that problem solving is an act of getting rid of frustration.

He gave a good example of a monkey trying to reach out to the tree for the fruit. But the monkey could not reach out, so out of immense frustration, he grabs one of the stick and tries to shake the branch of the tree. This act is in it-self is a first act of solving a problem. In other sense, it could be a first act to design something to solve a problem.

Have you ever notice that all the scientific theories are born out of problem and not through the need of scientist to express. But on the other hand, every form of art like music, painting, writing has come out of need of artist to express. You can always find a trait or style in an artist, but you rarely find traits in scientist. The approach of scientist could be different but the solution always turns out to be independent of the style.

Therefore, every design is always trying to solve a problem. If it is not than I am sorry but its not a design. I would rather call that an art. Now this is a very controversial for me to be removing design from art. But seriously, I do not think art has anything to do with design. Every art is not a design, but all good design could be taken as an Art.

Art is always a result of self expression, an act to express your idea and thoughts and give them a form. Form could be writing, painting, music, blogging etc. But in the whole process of art, you are always dealing with your feelings and your identity. Your culture, your past and your values come out expressively through art, but not in a design. Though I could have some inner conflict with this idea, nevertheless I can live with it.

But a design and art could be fused together as well if necessary. For example, a sofa or a chair could be designed perfectly with a touch of art. Many would try to defend their artistic side to their design but I think it is up to the designer to decide what experience he wants to express, that is if he wants to.

In the same line, I would want to share something that Bruce Lee told in his rare interview. We all know that his way of fighting was precise and powerful. He said that when he wants to punch someone, he could display complex movement (like traditional Chinese Kong-Fu ). But he said that it was inefficient, instead he would focus all his energy in delivering a powerful punch. So we can argue that his way of fighting was not a art but a resolution to a problem - a problem of either truly defending yourself or attacking your opponent. Similarly traditional Chinese Kong-Fu can be taken as an art of expressing your body's strength and following a discipline.

Source:cluelessdesigns.com

Art always has rules(discipline) that you are not suppose to break. But not design. Design can be as revolutionary as possible coming out of nowhere and no relevance to past or present. Art can be priceless, but design always comes with a price of performance. You cannot compare arts, but surely you can compare design.

Remember that I am not arguing based on traditional definition of design and art. I am just using the words to identify certain form of process which we see day to day. I am not even trying to define art or design. I wish I could use any arbitrary term to describe what I am trying to but that would make no sense.

So yes, I think that design is a result of pure frustration of seeing something not work the way it should. Also art is always governed by an ego of an artist and it's existence are never questioned or justified. But a design is always governed by a problem and not by designer, hence they always need justification. Sometime mixing these two in your work could lead to disaster.

So when ever I see any form of so-called design, I like to ask 3 questions:
1. Does this solve any problem?
2. Is the decision made by Designer encouraged by the problem?
3. Do you see any sense of brand in the design?

I find the third question important to ask because most of the time, design becomes a style statement rather than being a true design. In such cases, designer is evolved in justifying himself rather than a design. Because when a design comes from a pure frustration, problem drives every aspect of design.

Well, I think I should end my monologue here for now and keep my mind to rest for a while :).

Clifford Stoll on ... everything

2010-09-11T03:59:00.000-07:00

The Fountain Head and Steve Jobs

2010-09-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

I have been following this persona for quite a while, not because I own one of his products or that I find him god like. But simply because I find his character interesting and the decision he makes intriguing.

Long time back I had read a novel by Anny Rand (The Fountain Head), the main protagonist of the novel - Howard Roark is an individualist who has high value for human integrity. He is also an architect which gives him more reasons to have those values. The whole story is a conflict between the ideas and value of human.

In overall perspective, it is a battle between objectivism and collectivism. The story also has other 5 strong characters with different ideology. Some are salve to society, some are manipulator, some are lost, some are broken and some are as strong as steal.

This was also the novel which pushed me to contemplate about the effect of media over human and how they are influenced to position themselves. I could not help reminding myself of the conflict between the artist and critics which the novel has portrayed. After, years of my journey into entrepreneurship I still face those challenges of justifying decisions. Obviously, which can be mocked by many ideology.

The story and the philosophy had a strong influence on me too. It also had to do with the fact, the time I was reading this novel I was going through a lot of personal conflict. It was hard for me to put aside the story and its consequences. But since then, I have started to have my own perspective of the case and have somehow come to an equilibrium.

I have an impromptu characteristic, usually I make my decision on a blink of an eye. Sometime I feel I know what I like and what I don't instantly. It was on year 2009 that I stumbled upon Steve Job and was immediately pulled into his character.

Before that I hardly knew about Apple, though I was familiar with Macintosh and iPod, I had never cared to go in detail with their philosophy. Till then, I never thought that companies could have such high value engraved into them. May be this was because, I was never brought up to look around that way. But now, I can see their relevance in the society.

But once I started reading about Apple and its design, I was immediately drawn into it. Further, I could not help myself comparing the character to the character of The Fountain Head. It might have been my fancy but surely it is hard to find such similarity between the fictional and real character.

It has been now more than a year for my passion towards Apple products and I can definitely say that I have great respect for the company. But nonetheless, I donot have any reason to criticize other companies. I find that in this eco-system everyone has their own role to play.

Recently, I found a 1995 old interview of Steve Job. It was still the time when Steve was involved in NEXT and the first fully animated movie "The Toy Story" was still to be released. Steve talks about education, society and responsibility of human. I will just share few interesting remarks from the interview. If you have read Fountain Head you will understand that the resemblance of the philosophy of Apple or Steve is not a coincidence but a real one.
SJ: One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part.

DM: And the artistry is in the elegance of the solution, like chess playing or mathematics?

SJ: No. I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that insight so they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing.

SJ: I get asked this a lot and I have a pretty standard answer which is, a lot of people come to me and say "I want to be an entrepreneur". And I go "Oh that's great, what's your idea?". And they say "I don't have one yet". And I say "I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you're really passionate about because it's a lot of work". I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard.

SJ: The market competition model seems to indicate that where there is a need there is a lot of providers willing to tailor their products to fit that need and a lot of competition which forces them to get better and better. I used to think when I was in my twenties that technology was the solution to most of the world's problems, but unfortunately it just ain't so. I'll give you an analogy. A lot of times we think "Why is the television programming so bad? Why are television shows so demeaning, so poor?" The first thought that occurs to you is "Well, there is a conspiracy: the networks are feeding us this slop because its cheap to produce. It's the networks that are controlling this and they are feeding us this stuff but the truth of the matter, if you study it in any depth, is that networks absolutely want to give people what they want so that will watch the shows. If people wanted something different, they would get it. And the truth of the matter is that the shows that are on television, are on television because that's what people want. The majority of people in this country want to turn on a television and turn off their brain and that's what they get. And that's far more depressing than a conspiracy. Conspiracies are much more fun than the truth of the matter, which is that the vast majority of the public are pretty mindless most of the time. I think the school situation has a parallel here when it comes to technology.

DM: You need passion to build a company like Apple or IBM or any other major company. Once you've taken the passion to that level and built a company and are in the position like a Bill Gates at Microsoft or anybody else, yourself, what are the responsibilities of those who have succeeded and have economic power, social power? I mean, you've changed the world. What are your responsibilities within that?

SJ: That question can be taken on many levels. Obviously if you're running a company you have responsibilities but as an individual I don't think you have responsibilities. I think the work speaks for itself. I don't think that people have special responsibilities just because they've done something that other people like or don't like. I think the work speaks for itself.

For full interview visit here.
By the way, when I decided to write this, I wrote it because I found the character in The Fountain Head and Steve Jobs very compellingly similar. So after posting it when I searched for the similar subject, I found that I was not only the one who thinks so..

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

2010-09-04T14:34:00.000-07:00

Decision making is a fundamental action that we are involved in our day to day life. Every time we make decision, we have this feeling that we are making a right one. We look into the pros and cons of the situation and try to understand the effect of our decision. But we tend to forget that when we make decision we have cognitive limitations similar to physical limitation.

This video below is a very good presentation by Dan Ariely on how we are affected by the choices and how that influences our decision. It is a wonderful presentation.

Kevin Kelly on how technology evolves

2010-07-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Innovation Series: Design in Business

2010-07-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

This is a very interesting discussion.

Ten Graphic Design Paradoxes

2010-06-22T05:29:00.000-07:00

In this age of information, graphic design has a very important role to play. It is the medium through which we perceive information. Hence, we find many materials regarding design and design thinking scattered around in the internet. I must say, design is one of the top topic which is always discussed in social networking sites like Twitter. And I myself, follow those discussions ardently.

Artwork by Tea Design

There is one site called designobserver where many designers express their thoughts on the design philosophy.

Adrian Shaughnessy is a graphic designer and writer based in London. In 1989 he co-founded the design company Intro. He has written this wonderful paradoxes about Graphic Design that people usually relate with.

I will list the 10 points here, for full read click here.

01: There’s no such thing as bad clients: only bad designers.

02: The best way to learn how to become a better graphic designer is to become a client.

03: If we want to educate our clients about design, we must first educate ourselves about our clients.

04: If we want to make money as a graphic designer, we must concentrate on the work — not the money.

05: For designers, verbal skills are as important as visual skills.

06: Ideas usually fail not because they're bad ideas, but because they're badly presented.

07: “I’m a professional: I know best

08: “All the good jobs go to other designers.”

09: The best way to run a studio is to be domineering and forceful.

10: If we believe in nothing, we shouldn’t wonder why no one believes in us

Cameron Herold: Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs

2010-06-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

At TEDxEdmonton, Cameron Herold makes the case for parenting and education that helps would-be entrepreneurs flourish -- as kids and as adults. Bored in school, failing classes, at odds with peers: This child might be an entrepreneur, says Cameron Herold.

David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve

2010-06-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

This is a very interesting talk on how the vessel or the medium is the key of how the emotion takes its shape. David Byrne goes on to compare different music style and their venue and how they fit perfectly to each other.

At the end, I could not help remembering Marshall McLuhan's statement "The Medium is the Message."

Carol Bartz: Pyramids, Not Ladders

2010-05-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

Walking along with your careers and making decisions along the way is a difficult choice to make. But then I found this beautiful video presentation given by Carol Bartz who talks about doing lateral things and creating a foundation.

I think this is one of the best way an entrepreneur can grow ahead, by doing a lot of lateral works and getting the bigger picture.

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

2010-05-25T05:37:00.000-07:00

This one is another of Sir Ken Robinson's finest talk on education. In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning -- creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

2010-05-25T03:53:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Haidt talks beautifully about the moral values that we gain as a basic instinct and how they change with time. The presentation also sheds light over who the liberals and conservatives plays as a yin and yang of our modern society.

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

2010-05-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

This must be one of the most powerful and yet simple presentation on success and failure. Simon Sinek simply puts the basic facts of life with corroborative examples and case studies.

The main idea behind the story is that we have three layers of communicating our ideas to people : Why, How and What. If you move from Why to What, you are most likely to succeed but if you move vice-versa, its the opposite.

How Brands should leverage Social Media

2010-05-12T03:25:00.000-07:00

Gone are the days, when you would sit in front of your TV set and watch your favorite show bugged by regular advertisements. Today, we store our favorite shows or subscribe to their channels, and watch them when we want to. We are even ready to pay for the favorite shows and watch them. Because contents have become so abundant, the demand for authentic and genuine content is rising. This is not bad because we all seriously need a proper content which adds value to our social life.

But when this happens, what will the advertisement agencies do? For many years, firms and companies have been ignoring the rising popularity of social media networks like Youtube. Brands were not just yet ready for the change. But once the cheese is removed from their original place, its best to re-start again.

Read Full Article here.

8 Rules of Prototyping

2010-05-09T06:32:00.000-07:00

As an engineer or a project leader, it is of utmost importance to get your product ready for the market. And all this starts with an idea of the product itself. Today, the information is so omnipresent that it is easier to get lost into the jungle of products and forget the essence of engineering, which is prototyping.

There are many people around us who can build things and do unimaginable things, but there are very few who can make it to the market and succeed. In my years of experience and engineering studies, I have noticed that engineering is all about following the discipline of innovation and being serious about the overall picture of the innovation. Hence comes the importance of prototyping, cause, it’s the initial step which gives you the clear idea on how your product is going to look like and function.

Prototyping gives you a vivid idea about the essence of the product and lets you make further decision. Early today, I received a mail from NI instrumentation on their regular newsletter and the topic was 8 rules of prototyping, as I read through the paragraphs I found the article very relevant and thought of adding my own views on it. Below are the eight points noted by NI, but I am going to add my own understanding of the scenario and make a clean breast of it.

Read the Full Article here.

Sherlock Holmes - The Art of Deduction

2010-05-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

Sherlock Holmes might just be a fictional character but there is a great deal to learn from the story about the art of deduction.

Here, I have found a compilation from the TV Series played by Jeremy Brett.

Part One

Part Two

Toward a science of simplicity

2010-04-30T12:24:00.000-07:00

George Whitesides talks about the nature of simplicity and how they can be achieved. The conclusion of the presentation resides on making simple, reliable and functional components at cheaper price, so that they can be scalable to support complex systems.

Marshmallow problem and Team Building

2010-04-24T14:30:00.000-07:00

Provides a good insight into the product development process and the importance of team building. The main point is that every project has a deadline and a goal. Learning to reach to the goal in an efficient way is aim of every engineers and designers.

The video below shows how different people from different background perform with the test project of building the tallest structure.

Jeremy Brett and Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes

2010-04-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

If there is any fictional character that I take seriously, than its no other than Sherlock Holmes. I was glad to have read his stories at a very early age. There is so much to say about this amazing consulting detective, through whom I have learnt a great deal about the Art of Problem Solving.

During my adventure with the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. James Watson, I came across a real character who had a tremendous influence on me - Jeremy Brett. Though I have watched other actors portray the legendary Sherlock Holmes. I must say there was no one better than Jeremy Brett.

Though, many might argue with me for many reasons, I stay by my words. I have no rights to compare another legendary actor Peter Cushing with Jeremy Brett. But, I stumbled upon two videos which makes a perfect case for me to point out the energy and the passion Brett brought to the scene.

Below are the two scenes from a same story - The Blue Carbancle. The story is superb and has many elements to it that makes the scenes below an important one.

The scene includes an important statement being made by Holmes. When Holmes asks Watson to examine the hat, Watson queries about the hat. And Holmes says laughingly,"Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles."

The statement below is not included in the TV adaption : [Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being criminal. We have already had experience of such.]

Now, the statement is certainly one of its kinds. Its long and complicated but has deeper philosophical meanings to it. Now watch how both of the actors deliver them and you will understand my point. In the second video, its better to start from 3:40.
Peter Cushing

Jeremy Brett

Sketching and Experience Design

2010-04-17T16:56:00.001-07:00

More Resources :
Bill Buxton's Column in Business Week
Bill Buxton's Website

How Steve Jobs figured out his market place

2010-04-14T13:09:00.000-07:00

1993 interview re: Paul Rand

2010-03-28T01:29:00.000-07:00

Dieter Rams’ ten principles to “good design”

2010-02-24T06:24:00.000-08:00

Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design helps us to understand a product
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is long-lasting
Good design is consequent to the last detail
Good design is concerned with the environment
Good design is as little design as possible

Source : Wiki

Buzzom : Social Media Management

2010-02-04T05:27:00.001-08:00

Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when

2010-01-30T01:06:00.000-08:00

The World is Flat

2010-01-13T12:29:00.000-08:00

Robert Sapolsky: The uniqueness of humans | Video on TED.com

2010-01-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

Robert Sapolsky: The uniqueness of humans | Video on TED.com

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Interview

2010-01-01T13:49:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia and Crowd Sourcing

2009-11-30T04:29:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia stands out in a mass with integrity and undisputable value addition to the community. It marks the beginning of cultural revolution in internet history and a source of inspiration for today’s online social community. But what is happening with Wikipedia? Why is it that every year, the Wikipedia community have to beg for its existence to be justified? Every time you visit Wikipedia you find a donation bar staring for your support.

Design in Business

2009-10-12T07:07:00.000-07:00

Here is the excerpt from the blog post which I wrote in Global Thoughtz. The main idea behind the post is to relate the thinking process behind any entrepreneurial urges and business process.

Its a tough time to chose a career with economic turmoil around you. Not entirely due to this, many have walked on the path of entrepreneurship, which nonetheless is always being hyped by media. All the effort that media and society are making to encourage “Leadership and Entrepreneurship” has only made more to join B-Schools. Can’t say if the sole reason for promoting “Leadership” was to encourage confused student to enroll into newly opened B-Schools.
Read More . .

Theory of Everything

2009-09-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

Being from the scientific background, things like this really brings a sense of wonder. The whole purpose of life unsettles itself and gives you a kick on your back. I have loved mathematics and physics since the time I remember pursing science. This is not only a remarkable theory, of which I still haven't grasped much but the things he says at the end is really touching and emotional.

"I got my PhD and looked at my options. I love differential geometry, general relativity, and particle physics. But the only options available then for a postdoc in those combined areas were in string theory, and I thought string theory was overly speculative. There are many really impressive aspects of strings — anomaly cancelation in particular — but there are other things that just seem wild and physically unsubstantiated. I had gotten lucky by investing my graduate stipend in a little company many thought was going out of business (AAPL), so I decided to go to Maui, learn to windsurf, and work on physics on my own."

Source : wiki

Though I have not gone through the whole of theory, it will take lot time to understand but here is a link which you can follow to understand and if u do let me know ;).

1. the reference frame

Beautiful Nepal

2009-09-15T06:10:00.000-07:00

Design can change.

2009-09-14T10:43:00.001-07:00

This is a wonderful video on how design can bring change to the business.

Aspect of Form and Design

2009-09-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

Design is an adaptation of features into form - be it anywhere. There two types of form which comes to my mind- one is with features and the other is without features. Now, you may say what is the difference between these two things? But it is the very difference which takes my thoughts from being practical to highly philosophical.

If you look around yourselves, you will find that everything has a form. Starting from your own hands - five fingers in each hands with specific reasons. The shape of chair you sit on, the brush you use to brush your teeth, the mobile you use to communicate and so on. All these human made forms are designed with every aspect of solving a problem.

On the other hand, there are certain forms which are featureless and don't solve any problems. Music and Art are one of these areas which I am referring too. Music is a form of your emotions and its an expression of your thoughts, similar goes to your art. But what is the whole purpose of these form?

Cymatic is a particular field of study that is trying to bring the visual form to sound. But what purpose would that form provide, beside the visual pleasure. Like energy, form can be converted from one to other. If you look into these images than you will find that these images find itself into a fractal community - the subject of randomess and chaos. I told you earlier that this is a featureless form or you can say in other words a pure form.

Nature in itself is a manifestation of energy into form, but for what purpose. But every natural form are efficient and beautiful at the same time. What triggers you when you look into these forms below.

Orderness, isn't it? Finding an impeccable order into chaos really triggers our inner self and makes us feel something strange. Millions of people confined in a limited space have resulted in a complex and yet organised society is an order in chaos. Our own economic system which is highly complicated in itself is an order in chaos. Similarly, our universe is an order in chaos.

Chaos is something we cannot comprehend, therefore even if its a randomly scattered stars in night, we have delicately grouped each one and have defined them. Its not only to define form but also create forms that we live to.

The theory of form and design is not limited to shapes and sizes but also to the ideology. Each one of us have their own view and thus there is a conflict between different ideology - this is chaos. That is why there is war which tries to bring this whole chaotic ideology into one form - one freedom, one democracy.

Every conversion between form requires a huge struggle - war is one of them. In case of practical problem solving its the struggling in the mind which tries to make sense of the chaos and bring out the solution. Problem solving in itself in an art of finding order in chaos - be it any problem.

Though the featureless forms introduces many philosophical problems, their importance cannot be undermined. But every form or design must be solving certain delicate problems be it building a house or painting your thoughts. Art may be the form or solution to the chaotic mind of ours.

What is Information?

2009-08-31T01:51:00.000-07:00

This is a very consises and beautiful presentation which demonstrates what an information is.

First Pod Casting Interview

2009-08-29T12:17:00.000-07:00

I would like to thank Srinivasan from Corpezine for giving this opportunity.

Buzzom Desktop - a Twitter Client Applications with Spam Control

2009-08-25T11:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, the title itself says much about the application it self. Twitter, what can I say? Its a whole world shouting at an instance. Some are buying groceries, some are at bathroom, some are sleeping in the class, some watching movies, and so many things that its just amazing to listen to them. Wait!! there are bots too, some are very useful bots who brings great information but some are hopeless and irritating.

In this chaos of information, we need a perfect client application to mine through these information and at the same time allow you to grow your relationship with the people and grow in the network. As per the need, we felt that we must come out with our own client application and here is the first alpha version, which you can download for free and use free.

1. Hide users who are spamming with too many or useless tweets without unfollowing them.
2. Get updates on what the twitter elites like GuyKawasaki, BBC etc. are saying without following them.
3. Configure your buddy list and be in touch with them by viewing only their tweets.
4. Find news and people using keyword Search for tweets, location and biography.
5. Auto shorten your long URLs when they're sent using http://nxy.in.
6. Drag-drop video and pictures to auto upload and tweet about them.
7. Choose how you want to see your tweets, by auto refresh or manual refresh.

Don't forget to provide your views on the application, Buzzom Desktop team which involves Binit, Laxmi and Arun have worked really hard to bring this application to the public, so that we benefit from it.

The Paradox of Choice

2009-08-25T02:30:00.000-07:00

The Entrepreneurs (from all about Steve)

2009-08-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

The Entrepreneurs (from all about Steve)
Uploaded by rmoisescot. -

Young Entrepreneurs in Nepal

2009-08-07T19:40:00.001-07:00

Among the midst of the political turmoil and its entertaining melodrama, its difficult for any serious young innovators to work their vision out. With the deadlock in the western economic situation and there overwhelming influence in the developing nation, ultimately it comes to us - the young minds to stand against them.

I have seen the rising entrepreneurs in Nepal, especially Kathmandu in this span of 1 year. Last time, I remember me and few friends trying to share in a platform that was not entirely focused on young innovation. Well these kinds of things usually lead to expected over look on the ideas. But now the situation is quite reverse. Today there are not only handful of young innovators but network of them, with serious attitude to change the attitude towards better future.

Today is the start of such beginning - BarCampKTM. The concept of BarCamp is to come together from different walk of interest and share your passion among others. Do not be mistaken for the field to be narrow or any particular, its an open invitations for ideas which will get a place to foster to a tactical actions.

Though I am far from KTM, I still would be making an effort to follow it through Twitter, @barcampktm. (unless it crash like it has been lately) I hope every Nepali young minds make some effort to bring this change where things are govern by the sole passion of young entrepreneurs and innovators.

Relation of Design to Everything

2009-08-06T01:10:00.000-07:00

Designs are worth caring about.

In the memory of Randy Pausch

2009-07-25T02:56:00.000-07:00

Don't Complain, keep your self focused and keep working towards your dream. The dream will some to you.

Absense Note

2009-07-04T04:45:00.000-07:00

Haven't been updating my blog for at least a month. I have been busy with many things lately. Our company, InRev has also made its journey to the third quarter and everyone is excited, with the fear within which our team has learnt to dominate already. The word "start up" has been a cliches for me. Everywhere I go, I keep seeing a banner saying : "Entrepreneurs or Start UP." And I find myself grouped among them. Trying to make your stand in a crowd is never so easy.

Not to mention my presence in the twitter, where I have made many friends and learnt a lot. Thanks to all of you for sharing, listening and off-course RTing :). Writing a blog in itself has become not only a passion for me, but also a way to outlet my vision to bring a better future. There are many friends along with my, moving forward with such determination to make a difference, which I salute and deeply admire. I wish, I had time to write to my blog often. But in my absence I have almost written many blog in other sites of which I have made no track of. Few to start with my own company's blogging portal, Global Thoughtz, Buzzom Blog and F-Cube Blog.

Now you make ask why so many blogging portal. I think its necessary for each company to have their blog for each of their product, cause each product has so many things to talk about. This will also create a path for people to find their queries answered immediately. A habit of reading that I had gained long time back has been a very fruitful thing for me, it has not only allowed me to write better but also think and understand better. Nope I am not trying to boast but I think its important that being a blogger you need to read a lot to understand what other's are talking about. Some time, I land up reading about things of which I have no idea. But the habit has made it easier for me to grasp the themes and get the moral of it.

Phew... it seems I haven't really been writing on my own blog, cause I am not finding any reason to stop now. But I will. This was just a blog to mark my re-entry. I have lot to tell my readers about things I have been learning lately. I hope I will keep the promise. The title should have been "I am BACK", :) but I guess "Absence Note" is OK.

Capturing the Voice: Social Media

2009-05-25T01:34:00.000-07:00

What if you could capture your every voice and your every status of mind? For example, everyday, we talk and think of different ideas. Wouldn't it be interesting to- you know - go through them at some time in your life, like a movie or something. Many concepts regarding recording your life has been portraited in the Hollywood screens.

We are continuously expressing ourselves, and all that is being permeated in this universe. Some how if we could capture each individuals voice it would be very interesting. Today, it just occurred to me that, may be we have such things in our service.

I was going through my old Twitter Post and Facebook Post, somehow I could feel my presence on it. Every thing being written on the blog or posted in Twitter and Facebook, is my voice, isn't it? All the comments on my friends' photo are the conversation between my friends which has been captured. All our characteristics have been imprinted on it. As if, we are living on it.

I know these are the obvious thoughts that come and go on each individuals mind. I just thought of sharing it. Yes, I am capturing my Voice.

What is Design?

2009-05-25T01:25:00.001-07:00

Very interesting Video on Design.

Source : http://www.youtube.com/user/wburnett1957

Wolfram is NOT Google

2009-05-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

There I was going through a magazine. As I was flipping the pages, a complex looking image caught my eye. Underneath it was written:

The much anticipated computing engine Wolfram Alpha will be officially launched on 18 May.

Suddenly, it struck to me, ya its this new search engine they are talking about in the Internet. Hmm. Getting all excited I started googling it. Soon I was buried into reading blogs and reviews from the people. After an hour, I found out that its barely anything like Google, its not even a search engine.

So what is it? They were calling it a computational knowledge. Wait a minute, how do you compute a knowledge. Knowledge is the facts and figures, and logical understanding of this universe and society that we have earned. How can it be calculated? There were few facts I found interesting:

1. Wolfram does not have database of web pages like Google does.

2. Wolfram neither has the resources of knowledge like Wikipedia has.

So, on what basic does it calculate the knowledge. The answer was, the backbone of WolframAlpha - Mathematica and NKS (New Kind of Science). Well I have not used Mathematica but have been knowing about its existence since my engineering days. I was more familiar with the MATLAB instead. After seeing through couple of demos and more article. I somehow seemed to have grasped the idea of Computational Knowledge.

You see Mathematica is a huge resource of mathematical functions and thousands of models of our natural science. It has a tremendous implication in all fields of engineering and financial problem solving. So it seemed very natural that such resources could be used to calculate the factual knowledge.

There was one example given in the article:

When you ask the distance between the moon and the earth, traditionally the answer would be searched from the vast resources of text people have put into the web. But here, it does nothing of such thing, instead it seems to have a mathematical equation which calculates the distance between the moon and earth and gives it to you. That sounds super cool. So all kinds of factual knowledge can be calculated. That is what I seem to have grasped of the new WolframAlpha.

So instead of showing you the way to the answer, it gives you one. But only certain kinds of question is allowed. As I was making my understanding clear on this new buzz. I started getting goosebumps... Wait.. and it was not a fear but more of an excitement. I think I can tell what is it or share.

Suddenly I realised that computation knowledge is something that InRev is also working on. Since the start of our company, we have been working in a way of bringing factual information to the people rather than a huge bulk of data. We want to answer people's question and let them make efficient decision. To clarify, the whole propose of F-Cube (our economic reporting portal) is to forecast the economic scenario to people in free. The only way to forecast is to compute what we know with the mathematical model of economy. That is computational knowledge, I grinned to myself. We also are working on creating a library of models to fit into the system.

The philosophy seemed quite similar, add value to the data by providing relevant information. This is why I got to excited. Hope I was able to explain what computation knowledge is. Please provide your comments. I have to be sure of it :).

Malaysian Economic Report

2009-04-24T03:21:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Krishna at InRev for making such a wonderful presentation on Malyasian Economy.

Malaysia

View more presentations from Deep Sherchan.

If any of you are looking for such comprehensive presentation on any topic let me know of it, InRev team caters to such services.

Fearful Consumer Market

2009-04-20T23:48:00.000-07:00

Consumer market is something, I always feared. During my engineering days, I knew it was one area where I would not find myself working. I always feared the harsh competition of the market. I worried if ever, anything I made would sustain in the market. Or how people would react to it? You can say, I feared criticism and all the yap yap of group of people, who knows only how to suggest but not to act. Thus, I kept my interest into custom projects and not related to anything that a single consumer would use, rather it was something of community service. But with changing time, I knew I had to make a plunge into the ocean of consumer market and face the competition. "Be a man! Dude" That is what I would say to myself. I knew I couldn't swim, but I had to give it a try.

Journey into the consumer market is like that of 20000 Leagues Under The Sea. There are so many different kinds of creatures around to look and be fascinated. Some are small living in tiny groups. Some are sharp predators chasing and making a hunt, they would kill you if they want, it depends on how much threat you pose to them - or how hungry they are. There are herbs and many different kinds of plants that grow organically and animals feed on them. These are harmless and friendly. And there are giants like whale which no one can touch or poke around, they have been living there for ages and will remain their more. These giants neither rule nor control anything, they are just their, making their presence- completing an ecosystem. Then there are some freaky looking creatures -like squid (which can be as large as ships)- which makes you puke, but yes they are there too. You can't ignore them. They stare right into your eyes as if they can read your mind. These creatures act like parasite and feed on dead, sometime they eat their own kind too.

Then there are mythological creatures which exist if you want them too. Everyone fears them but we know they only exist in our mind. Well, the last kind is the most fearless of all, its sharks, its strong, powerful, agile and quick on instinct. They virtually rule the sea. There are more of it but they rarely interfere with each other, but when they do, its a fight the whole world watches in amazement. But, its not always this way, there are among these predators and giants, an intelligent being, an innovative and highly creative creatures which are changing the way of life at sea. These are the being which marks a change and the change that is truly for good.

So far, I have only reached till here. My journey is beginning to take shape and form a story. Slowly I can see a transformation in me, and the transformation is subtle. I wonder which creature I would transform into. Its a long journey but a beautiful one. There is a difference in growing in a depth of ocean and growing inside a protective glass.

I can only sing a song by Beatles:

I'd like to be under the sea

In an octopus' garden in the shade

He'd let us in, knows where we've been

In his octopus' garden in the shade

I'd ask my friends to come and see

An octopus' garden with me

I'd like to be under the sea

In an octopus' garden in the shade.

What is F Cube ?

2009-04-15T05:28:00.001-07:00

Lot has been told about F-Cube in Twitter and Facebook, now it time to understand it more better.

F Cube

View more presentations from Deep Sherchan.

There are more to be said and shared regarding the F-Cube. Hope this little introduction made few of your queries clear. We are building it into more comprehensive portal and all we need is your thoughtful suggestions.

If you liked it or if you are interested to know more then you can join the Facebook group.

Essence of Design

2009-04-13T05:48:00.000-07:00

Design is very important in any product development. There are many aspects of design, considering the field that you are involved in. The design could include the structure of beam in a building or it could include the architecture of your application. But there is one design which is visible to the user - the interface design of the product. This aspect of design could make or break the product in the market place. It doesn't matter which segment of your market you are targetting, the interface design has to be efficient.

Mainly, I consider these three factors :

1. Functionality - What it can do?

2. Purpose - How important is the product?

3. Experience - How do you feel when you use it?

Its always few basic human needs that drive designer to make a product which suits user purpose. among them these days, user experience is in the top priority. I stumbled upon the slide below which throws some interesting light into the matter.

The ESSENCE Of Design — for Startups

View more presentations from J. Arun.

Do not forget to share your views. Its important to understand what works and what doesn't and this is a long process.

Analytics Industry

2009-04-02T04:43:00.000-07:00

Following is the analysis made Analytics Industry world wide.

The chart above shows that the 90% of the analytics company is from USA and 6 % from U.K. Whereas India covers only 1 % of the total analytic industry.

This shows that Singapore, India and Australia are very low with respect to the western counterpart. China is not even in the category. Overall, US has the majority of the share.

Analytics in itself is not an industry, it can associate itself with any data intensive industry. Lets look at the industries where analytics is applied.

The above table clearly shows that the major players of analytics are related to the Business Services. Then there are Software & Internet, Health care, Consumer Services, Retail and Financial Services.

Most of the fields like Telecommunication still seems to be unexplored properly. But I assume that with the increase in the telecommunication sector, in near future we might see increasing use of analytics in the those fields too.

Now lets move on to the range of the employees in these analytics industry. The table and the graph shows that the average of employee is around 1 - 100 range. But in some it could increase beyond 100K. This is a great contrast.

Now lets look at the revenue range of these company. The majority of them have a revenue of around $0-10Millions. The distribution of the employee range and the revenue range seems to be correlated with each other. It might also suggest that for a company to increase their revenue it needs to increase its infrastructure and grow big.

All these details on the analytics company shows that the industry is growing and that its penetration is still low in the eastern region of the world. Industry wise, there are many sector which still have not employed analytics as the part of their solution.

Being an analyst and related to analytics field, I would consider the importance of the field is increasing with the rise of information age, where there are millions and millions of data uncovered and unexplored. With so many data floating all around us:

Data for Analyst is as Gold is to Miners.

I hope above presentation was useful.

Note: The Above analysis is based on the data downloaded from http://www.jigsaw.com.

The total record was 725.

iPhone Design

2009-04-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

Happy April Fool Day.

Good Ad Versus Bad Ad

2009-03-30T01:39:00.000-07:00

At InRev, for past few days we have been working on our new project. The project is about collaborative blogging, from the blogger around the world. As Bhupendra and I have been blogging for long time, with his immense experience, our team has been working to revamp the globalthoughtz and create a new blogging experience. In this site, we are planning to add a section where people can add their advertisement. We thought lets start by our own :), with already so many products on the line, it was obvious.

So there goes an effort to create a small 128 px by 128 px logo. If you are a designer, you know that designing is a very time consuming process. For hours, you just test around with colors. Remember there are 256 X 256 X 256 combination of colors!! Its hard job selecting one.

Lets start with F-Cube: In short F-cube is a Free Economic Reporting Site. Let me exhibit some Ad made for it and its pros and cons. (Please don't click on the image. Wait till the end. Thank You)

OK, how does this one look? At a glance, it might sound interesting, but with time you will find that its irritating. Really! There are too many things written, and all in different colour. There is two unnecessary image at the right hand side making the Ad look clutter. The company's name is too large and obnoxious. You see, you are selling service not company.

FOCUS on product, dude. I don't care how long it took, its too inefficient. Try again. And most of the advertisement really looks like this. I must confess, before I made this I had done lot of exploring. This is what happens when you start searching for inspiration at the wrong place.

So what did I do. [ Shift + Delete ] Start all over again, fresh and remember, simple. And this is how it went.

Looks fine. Its simple but too simple. It doesn't contain any tone what so ever. The problem with this is the blank white space at the right top and bottom left corner. Any space not contributing to your Ad should be deleted. But you can't delete space. So.. So you add something. Simple. :)

Now this is wrong. It didn't solve your problem. It created more. Instead of filling the empty space, it created a total distraction and confusion. It created more useless space on the left top and the right bottom.

Finally, this is fine. The reason is very logical and simple. First, the red and the blue color filled the space that was making it look odd. The complementary color always works fine, especially when its your company color. The text is simple. FREE ECONOMIC REPORT. That's the service you are after. When you sell a chocolate, you don't go around telling him the story of how the factory was started. Unless the product has no value.

But as usual, we humans have a tendency to be overwhelmed with design and become wild. Just look at what I did, after completing the above design.

Dumm Dumm Dumm. You got a be dumm. This is a mash up and totally unnecessary. Know when to stop your creativity, this makes all the difference. :)

Let me share two more design that we did for our TwitIn Application.

I purposely did this to show, how messed up you can get when you don't understand the color combination. Its not bad to make stupid design but its wrong to believe that you have created a master piece.

Phew! Finally I am at the end of my post. The picture at the left is the one we chose for our TwitIn Application. The colors are simple and soothing. You know you can't be perfect but you can at least try.

Design requires not only creativity but also wisdom to understand what these designs actually mean. Few things you need to remember while designing:

1. Don't shout! Unless you are an activist.

2. Don't say too much. Unless you are a liar.

3. Keep it simple but not lame.

4. Be creative but not boastful.

Hope I covered most things that I wanted to share. One last thing, does long post really bore you? Just a question I have on my mind. Its a long process of understanding what works and what doesn't. You can see that all the above design might be beautiful but not the one that is necessary. The only way to find it is to keep exploring the horizon.

By the way, now you can click them as you wish. :)