Vote for Taj Mahal, Vote for Love !

Here stands the Taj, some call it a poem in stone , a moon white dream and an ultimate expression of love, you wouldnt believe its grandeur until you see the monument in person. As an entrepruneur i understand passion for something, but to be so hopelessly in love with your long lost wife and to glorify that state of mind you go and build such an amazing monument over a period of 20 years and using 20,000 workers is something beyond my imagination. When you see taj all that you are reminded of is the glory of love of a human being for his better half.

Courtesy: Flickmor

Come June 2007 the world is voting for the Seven wonders of the world. Other than Internet what else could be more wonderful than voting for a monument that epitomises love like the Taj Mahal. This is what you can do

Step 1: Click on the url below and submit your email id:
www.new7wonders.com/index.php?id=409

Step 2: You will receive a confirmation email. Click on a link in the same.

Step 3: Submit details as required and click the submit button to cast your vote

Tags: taj, mahal, seven, wonders, world, vote, love, poempowered by Qumana

Live in a condo that changes shape !

First there were building that could be erected in great speed. Then came the ones that can be dismantled so fast. Now here is something dubai is getting , a building that changes shape so easily. Whoa ! Whats next ?

Tags: dynamic, architecture, building, change, shape, windPowered by Qumana

Flex is a great tool for building RIA’s

A few months back i remember writing about Flex as a perfect development tool for building Rich Internet application’s and guess what i found a presentation that reiterates the same here and gives in a nutshell about Flex as a better choice for the same. Check here to find the capabilities that Microsoft Claims at the Silver light. Its got to go more ….

Tags: flex, ria, tool, web, development, internet, application, richPowered by Qumana

NASSCOM encourages initiatives like PROTO on entrepruneur space !

Yesterday I was at Delhi participating and presenting PROTO at the NASSCOM workshop on Startups chaired by Prat Amoghe and Anal Jain. It was a very closed group of 40 members from different companies (basically startups) who were there to understand the process of how to take a startup right from the founders idea to angel/ seed funding, Series A investment and then Series B Investment. According tothe regional director of NASSCOM, which has started this sort of initiative to groom startups at a macro level the results at bangalore and Pune have been very positive for entrepreneurial growth. In PUNE PROTO was again represented by Rajesh on a bid to create same awareness for the event.

The Objective of PROTO to attend this event was basically multi pronged in these directions

• To garner adequate visibility for the event among the startups and to create an awareness among the companies in and around Delhi and NCR about the opportunities on PROTO.

• To set positive tone on PROTO and to effect support and endorsement of NASSCOM for the event.

• Possibly to evangelise PROTO among the VC’s community attending the workshop and garner participation

Some of the startup companies that have evinced interest in participating at The PROTO.in SE were Labnetworx, Virtual wire, Tyroo, Zoomtra, Circuit Sutra . Interestingly there was only two firms from the VC side IDG Ventures represented by Hemir Doshi and TIE Delhi represented by their Associate director Digbijoy Shukla.

We met the regional director of NASSCOM Ms. Sucharitra Eashwar, Mr. Avinash Raghava , Senior Manager of NASSCOM Delhi and Naveen from NASSCOM who had invited PROTO to this workshop in the first place. The good news is that from my interaction with the regional director, she is all excited to support event like PROTO that is in the tone of promoting a very positive environment for Entreprunuership in India. My recommendations would be that we need to take this further by inviting a more active prescence of NASSCOM on the event which will help in strengthening the relationship further.

Prat Amoghe’s workshop on what are the essentials that need to be incorporated on a business plan was very extensive and detailed. Workshops that provide such hands on approach to startup companies will provide a lot of leverage to companies to position their value proposition in a much better light with the venture capitalist. His emphasis was that startups typically need to cover the following points in all its completeness for a impressive proposition

• Company & Mission
• Team and advisors
• Market
• Market Opportunity
• Company product offering
• Product details
• Competitive analysis and differentiator
• Customer prospect validation – quotes
• Go to market plan
• Company status and milestones
• Financing objectives – use of proceeds , team growth plans
• Financial projections

Tags: PROTO.in, proto, tkf, nasscom, workshop, startup, entreprunuer, venture, capital, funding, technology, knowledge, foundation, circuitsutra, tyroo, xylem, idg ventures, sucharitra, cleaveglobal, avinash, bravikumar, zoomtra, virtualwire, tie, tizor, prat, moghe, labnetworx, solutions, chennai, new delhiPowered by Qumana

The Knowledge Foundation and Unconference obsession

The Knowledge Foundation known for its notoriety of making headlines for whatever it does in the initiative of sharing knowledge and information has once again pitched forward on headlines today on its project Unconference.info . We had made this project launch during Wikicamp and the promotion pitch during barcamp bangalore 3.   We plan to complete the entire book before August and we invite individuals to collaborate with us on completion . Good day folks !

Tags: unconference.info, un conference, chennai, TKF, the, knowledge, foundationTags: thehindu Powered by Qumana

While you were sleeping ….

An Amazing presentation from courtesy Rashmi Sinha of Uzanto

I remember writing a similar post some 9 months back . Recently i was reading through Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and he quotes an African proverb that i feel needs to be in our mind at all times.

" Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest Lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a Lion wakes up.

It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesnt matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.

When the sun comes up, you better start running."

Internalize your threats and you will find ways to go around it and succeed . Be graceful to adopt changes if necessary and some day you will never regret it.

Tags: rifath, outsourcing, thomas, friedman, world, flat,  uzanto, rashmi, sinhaPowered by Qumana

PODWORKS.in beckons all bloggers to Chennai !

Click on the image

Come June 9th bloggers are going to have a two day learning experience in getting to master the concept of podcasting, video blogging and thereby elevating the blogging experience to combine both audio and visual treat to the online readers. I already have a exclusive dedicated page on RFID that is just a compilation of videos that give you an insight on how RFID enable technology is very helpful in or daily life. With Podworks we aim to create such videos on a workshop and also to do chat shows so all. For those two days we are really going to dirty our hands in doing the stuff by using different tools. Get all the needed gadgets for the event and be there for an unique experience hosted by The Knowledge Foundation ! Good Day Folks !

Tags: podworks.in, podcasting, video, blogging, bloggers, the, knowledge, foundation, chennai, audio, unconference, workshop, kiruba, syed, ganeshPowered by Qumana

<a> India Counts</a>

Vote for the next Indian President here !

With the presidential election around the corner and lot of divergent views coming in from different sects of the society like
( an IT professional seems to prefer Narayana murthy , youth in india invariably prefer for Kalam to continue the second term ) each having their own reasons and mental makeup to do so … I think its high time that we take a status check on this and find the popular presidential elect for the next term.

(Pls Click on the image to go to the Poll page )

Poll Courtesy: CNN – IBN

Tags: president, india, poll, narayana, murthy, abdul, kalam, sushil, kumar, shinde, somnath, chatterjee, youth, IT, societyPowered by Qumana

Winnows Proto.in roar at IBM India Innovation Forum, Bangalore

Yesterday Vijay and myself were at the IBM Innovators forum on Official invitation from Seshadri Shanker, VP Strategy of IBM, Our basic objective for attending this event was to create an awareness and more momentum for Proto among the VC community of IBM.s circles. And guess what ? we ended the day accomplishing more than that. Here is how we did it all !

The morning we landed late at the Leela Hotel (Courtesy Kingfisher) and already Shanker and Claudia had already finished their key note . Promod Haque of Managing partner , Norwest Venture Partners was delivering his address to an elite gathering of less than 50 high powered members. The gathering was comprised of India’s top VC’s , top brass of IBM, some from TIE, few technologist from the funded companies and a fair sprinkle of Press. Morning was all about the display of the VC success of NVP and his funded companies. Then there was a presentation by TIE head of Delhi on the efforts by TIE in the entrepruneur space. Ravi Narayanan – CEO, Mentor Partners has been a patron and evangelist of PROTO since its inception..As soon as Ravi took the podium from Prof. Mahabala, I knew PROTO was on the block and we continued the evangelising part for the next 10 minutes to the entire crowd.Unfortunately Vijay missed it as he was busy on a meeting with NASSCOM . So it was upto Ravi and me to field all the questions and doubts. PROTO couldnt have asked for a much better pitch.

Kiruba was right that some of the best conversations happen at the corridors . I got the opportunity to initiate On corridor offline discussions with Promod of NVP and Andrew Clark – Director , IBM VC Group , Dravid Seetharam -VP of IBM, Prashid Gupta – Program Director IBM Corporate Development , Samir Kumar – Inventus Capital Partners and Jose Marques – Upstream Ventures about PROTO and the responses for the event was overwhelmingly positive. Every VC we met in this event encouraged the concept of PROTO (us) serving the best of india in a platform as a great opportunity for the VC’s as well as for startups to gain access to funding. Stepping out from my shoes of an organizer of the event PROTO and hearing the feedback from the VC’s our beliefs are reinforced at the great value that we are striving to create for Indian Entrepruneurs in Chennai.

Vivek Shenoy – CTO Elinanetworks and Kartikeya Iyer – Atlantis Computing were some of the technologist that we ended up meeting and they seem fairly aware of PROTO and i hope we see more of them in the forthcoming PROTO edition as particpants.

Sumanth – CEO , InstaCol had a suggestion to host the forthcoming PROTO in bangalore and we have nothing against it . But from the kind of efforts i see that is going into PROTO, not just the online exchange but the coordination and communication and the trips and the meetings that happen offline, the organizers of the next edition of PROTO really need to step up several notches with dedicated effort as the event needs greater commitment and team work. Any takers with that dedication are always welcome to associate with us in this event current edition to get the fair picture of how things are being done.

Awesome dinner hosted by IBM with a tete with Mohammed Naseem, IBM healthcare vertical and Drew Clark and Ravi alongwith me and vijay. Later at the airport vijay shared the great news that Subex systems and Nasscom are very enthusiastic to help PROTO. What more could the winnows ask for ?

Tags: Promod, Haque, Norwest, Venture, Partners, Andrew, Clark, Director, IBM VC Group, Dravid, Seetharam, VP, IBM, Seshadri, Shanker, Strategy, IBM, Prashid, Gupta, program, Director, Corporate, Development, Samir, Kumar, Inventus, Capital, Partners, Jose, Marques, Upstream, Ventures, Vivek, Shenoy, CTO, Elinanetworks, Kartikeya, Iyer, Atlantis, Computing, Sumanth, InstaCol, Ajit, Nevis, Networks, Ravi, Narayan, Mentor, Partners, Vijayanand, Proto, Syed, Razik, Leela, Bangalore, Nevis Networks

Powered by Qumana

Free Online Storage – A Primer on what best is available to the user for free !

Online storage today is a great resource that is available to the webuser. Earlier back in the 90′s we used to share documents using the concept of " File Server " . We never used to have the luxury of attaching documents to your mail if it exceeds 512k . For that we need to set up a file server space where we used to upload the file and then pass the url by mail to our friends for easier downloads.

Today the luxury of online storage is at its all time high. GMAIL allows you to store upto 5 mb as attachments on its mail. Furthermore there is the GMAIL drive that allows you to take a back up of your files to a large extent.

Today a lot of Web 2.0 application models use the online storage to a great extent. These 2.0 applications take advantage of the storage plans available on the web and at the same time ensure that they provide the service in a planned manner.

There is this interesting site called File Crunch that allows you to upload as much as 250 MB of data and allows you the liberty of sharing that with your friends.

File Crunch is an online storage site that is ideal for beginners as personally i feel the site provides adequate storage capability for an individual user to hold data backup for his personal files.This site also allows the user to hold the space on idle for more than 90 days . Reports indicate that we can watch this company very closely as File crunch is shortly unvieling its plans for expanding its free user storage capacity soon. Try using File Crunch here.

Mozy is a new online storage tools that makes available as much as 2 GB to back up your system data on a convenient manner. This tool is very mich helpful for backing up your data. However i am not so sure if any user would be so  interested to use this tool for file sharing as it will have all the files of your drive as make it susceptible to third party access. The functionality and the purpose of this tool is very clear as limited to taking systems backups. The following link can be used to access the Mozy trial now.

There are also other tools like Box, Flip drive, and tools like Diinoallowing upto 2 Gb.

Photos and Image Sharing :

Flickr is an excellent tool that is very trendy in the market for sharing pics with your friends and also as source of online storage for the user. It allows you to upload 200 pics on the free account at a time and the Flickr Uploader is so cool that all you need to do is drag and drop the images in your uploader and the rest is all taken care of automatically. The advantage of Flickr is that it is search engine friendly and for public access is an ideal storage device to share among all.

Picasa is a similar to Flickr with the advantage for providing adequate discreetion from the bots and spider of the search engines. Picasa comes from the genre of Google .

But end of the day its a great time for the web user that too with so many options available across i think we are looking for some interesting times ahead !

Tags: online, storage, diino, filecrunch, flickr, picasa, file, sharing, storage, gmail, flipdrive, box, imghut, syed, online, photo, sharing

Powered by Qumana

Fun in the rooftop Exposed !

Rooftop fun hit the roof with this article ! What we started as a fun exercise of bringing in a lot of like minded individuals who are pretty jobless over the weekend and would rather spend the entire night talking to similar people over films and also a excellent source to loosen up has been making the talk of the town now. To think of RTFF formation at roots is about Ganesh, Dinesh, Siddarth, Nandhu and me. We all just wanted to have some fun. Last edition we had a great crowd and we are taking efforts to fine tune the entire process. For the next edition we are on lookout for a roof and we are also yet to freeze the theme. I already have an offer for hosting from one of our friends, Falguni. We invite one and all to post your inputs here. Good Day !

Powered by Qumana