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Who pays for your phone? You. Unless its gifted or won in sweepstake. Who pays for the internet or the data plan? You. Unless you can somehow get through so many wifi routers broadcasting/screaming, come ride on me. Who collects the data? Mobile Apps. Websites. What data they collect? who are you? where are you? what are you doing? Who is paying them to collect your whereabouts? You. Who is making money?  They. AArgh. How come there is no " You " here.  How did it happen? How did you missed the when it was rising? How did you fall into the " free " trap?  When a book is published the creator/author gets commission on every sale.  When a meal is ordered the owner gets part of the whole as profit.  You are the owner of your coordinates. You are the author of your life story.  Why don't you get paid for it? Why don't you get commission for it? How can we claim back the privacy? How can we protect so that...

Why is passion not understood well? What is passion? Is passion destructive to spiritual growth? Is passion one sided road to hell? Passion can confuse. When you work in the world you will get into many types of people. Some intelligent and some foolish. A misguided passion/जोश may want you to be jealous of intelligent and make mockery of the foolish. Jealousy could lead to unhealthy competition. Mockery could further dip their morale. In your drive to success become aware of what you ransack. Your bulldozing attitude may have been hard earned but may not be the way of success. Success happens when you gain and everybody around you also gain. It is not when other around you are crushed. Their evolution is as much your responsibility as theirs. Seeing God in Guru is simple, anybody can and does experience divinity in the realized masters. Seeing God in foolish person around you is challenge and requires effort. These are the people who dwell in your mind and in your m...

Its simple. Just work on your संकल्प शक्ति ( roughly translated as thought power). I know you got it. Now, How do you develop your संकल्प शक्ति? Its simple. Just get into a spiritual path and focus on it, single path, single vision. Now, you would want to know which path will cross lines? Its simple. +The Art of Living Now, they say success is not overnight. It took 10 years to reach the morning when overnight success happened. So where do the 10 years of life go. Here's the step by step guide. Do a Art of Living Part 1 course. Practice Sudarshan Kriya regularly. Do a Art of Living Part 2 course. Practice Sudarshan Kriya regularly and keep applying locks. Do a Art of Living DSN (Divya Samaj Ka Nirman) course. Listen to Ashtavakra knowledge tapes/CDs from  +Sri Sri Ravi Shankar  ji. Attend weekly followup regularly.  Volunteer and organize courses in your neighborhood. You need the energy of others who come into the path DUE to you. Its a...

You have crazy people. You have sober people and you have people with with families. They all belong to a tribe which creates and runs startups. Some common themes Most startups begin in consulting/services mode wherein you gather cash to burn for your idea. You pick an idea that solves a specific problem for a specific customer. Its not a ego drive. You want somebody else to pay for your product/service. Most startups begin at home either at second bedroom ( if you have) otherwise shared. The event was  http://plusconf.com/  being stictched together by Benjamin ( Could not get contact details) on livestream.com. Allan Branch - Lessaccounting.com Missed of the part due to poor audio quality, dont know at whose end Do coworking more for exchanging ideas. Working from home is difficult but you need to learn to balance. Tell hello to every customer that signs up. Todd Garland - BuySellAds Do not leave your fulltime job until cash can sustain you for a while. Yo...

Not really. It was back to basics advice. Stay focused. What is the problem? Does it really exist? Can you solve it? Segment your market and choose a line of business . Validate your real customers. Cold call. Meet on roadside. Find ways to cut across to them and say hello. Are you talking to the right audience? Grow a single line of business and then go for aggregation as value add . Bottomline - Go everywhere  Backgroud : It was fun evening. I did not have calling card. Luckily chatted with a friend in US and he said his folks had it here on 7th floor. I got the magicjack. Struggled with it till 7:45 with no luck. Only ringtone was the saving grace. No magic with magic jack. It was not my day to save money on calls. I had done my validation during the day and people suggested skype credits for good quality call. So at 7:50 I went and grabbed my credit and started punching the numbers, more than eager to lose the moolah, but skype rejected the card 5 times. Once you b...

Sales is a number. Especially so in seasonal markets like online entrance management test environment. Now that CAT has become online from this year, pioneers like testfunda are going to have a field day. To take advantage of this you can get in touch with Priyank . He is a passout from NITIE and thus knows the intricacies that go into belling the CAT. He can give you options on various strategies to manage CAT and other management test that go online from this year. His startup is focusing on similar business line. When would you recruit somebody for sales and what will keep them attracted to the seasonal game? Is it on low fixed monthly income and high on commissions? Or is it other way around.? I believe that selling is a number game and only numbers give business and only numbers come in return for your efforts that you put on the field. Thus the focus has to be on charging a bull towards greener pasteur. Its entirely upto him to ignore the grass. Be content with the dry grass in f...

You will and should breakthrough only after five years. You will be making loss till three to five years. Your dreams will rub with market and market will polish them with reality check. Unless ofcourse you are lucky. Words of golden advice from Subodh and did you believe it that I was meeting him for the first time. Any venture needs time to mature. When you see the fields you dream of eucalyptus oil but the tree needs nourishment and support till atleast three years before it can even start smelling. You may wonder that its only a tree and all eucalyptus tree grow the same way and you will also zip through. Well it rarely happens that way. He gave example of Google taking seven years to turnaround even though it was world beating idea.Till that time all good ventures run in Stanford hostel. Some don’t even see the light of the day. It never sunshines. Some persist and make it work thorough "Com'on man, you are an intellectual and if you don’t make it work then who else can....

A good business mind knows that if he has to make money in toll then every instant a vehicle should whip past the toll gate. There should be no interference of whatsoever, neither at the start of toll nor at the end. A government and administrative mind will not care about the money that went into the pipeline to construct this huge infrastructure. Whether you recover the money or not is also beyond question. Also, thoughts should not be spared on little things like "Traffic pile up at start and end of junction". But instead let people wait and lose patience and then you announce a flyover construction to begin simultaneously near the start and end of new sea link highway. It will also go back to dear Mr. Oil , a highly price sensitive commodity to announce a raise just after they have won an election. Remember, before the election there was a drop of Rs. 5 and after election there is raise of Rs. 4. The common man gains Rs. 1 advantage. Along with that will come cess to incr...

Guy talks about reality check on what kind of business you aspire to create? Is it for money alone or will it entail a greater meaning, something that will take it to the next curve. A good example in point "Ice breakers to Ice Makers to Refrigerators to maybe biotech" and nobody who was doing the previous business got converted to the next one. The point in question is, Is your product emotive, elegant, intelligent, deep?

Suppose you are developing the concept of rural tourism for a village. You start getting enquiries for weekdays trip or for bulk booking say 50+ people or for overnight stays. Now what will you do? You only thought that the village could be a weekend destination with 10-15 people per day but its not. I would recommend that you discuss the same with your local connect and lt him have a internal discussions with various stakeholders in village and come back with his commitment. Show him the stretch goals but do not enforce them. Its their village and they know best as to how much capacity they can build and how much timeoff they can take from their routine farming tasks. Its their business to decide how much they want to take/make? Its not easy for them to accept money in return for the hospitality they provide, they treat it as their duty and do it out of pure love. You may want to go beyond tourism development and will get an urge to develop village. Resist your urge and allo...

blogger for for text,youtube for video,picasa for photos,google maps along with photos for location,revenue sharing with google adwords pick up a theme that appeals to masses like mumbai coast line and develop a story around it and do a daily update on any of social networking site explore the open platforms like facebook/amazon, think of ideas for applications and outsource using "craiglist" develop your personal strategy and execute a business plan conforming to it. The only tools in this age of collaborations are broadband and laptop and you have both of them. Determine who your partners will be, who your customers and how will you sustain your vision. simple words, requires steady clear mind with no constraints, offload your constraints to people who believe in your personality explore ideas , they hook, they hold and they will drive you to develop your professional identity. Your personal identity is intact and preserved and you will be always loved by your...

Brand me please For creative freedom you need a supervisor who empowers you but for your growth you need to market your achievements more strongly in different manners and on multiple occasions. Your supervisor could be weak because of his personality or lack of data points. You cannot control the personality but you can supply the data points. You need to create a plan to generate data points and publish it either daily or weekly as your accomplishments.     Designations and their fallacy Names like project manager and technical architect do not matter. You like to do something and sometimes that something is driven by technical pull or managerial pull say people/customer/technology management. Designations are to play with human need for putting a name that is associated with certain benefits like access to internet or that implies your number of years in job. Ultimately you do what you like to do. If you love people then you would devote most time to people ...

A simple process to manage ideas and help them transform your team. You can use Sharepoint portal solution to manage all these steps. Idea management Friday, June 29, 2007 12:04 PM   Generate Collect from appraisals Brain Storm Prepare Wish Lists   Capture In a team discussion on sharepoint portal email chain Team meeting with note taking   Sort/Categorize Do they sound similar to other? Can you think of one word category or buckets? Prioritize Which address immediate need? What are the current pain points in the team? What would team like to improve in future? There would be three priority level like 1 for immediate,2 for within a month and 3 for this quarter. Action Plan The list of item for next week,fortnight,month and year Tasks Assigns person Create topic/task Give date/dateline   Events helps follow up Recurring weekly ta...

My current strengths are in operations/execution and most notably in team building and technology management. Given an opportunity I am able to break it up into manageable pieces and assign it and empower people to deliver on time. I am not averse to research during analysis phase. The weakness is in terms of specialization in technology but the strength is no technology is daunting or causes fear of embracement. I have personally participated in projects that have scaled to monolith size and also to college type experiments where in the size is small but turnaround time is minimal. The weaknesses are in sales, marketing ,finance, customer and social network management. How to sell to customer who will bluntly ask you " what is the specific solution that you have for me? I need to get more exposure to customers who can stump me and I need to learn to respond appropriately. Build Case Study I need to build a convincing case study for successful product lifecycle with appropriate re...

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We have enough content to create a university out of it. This content is locked and is available for internal consumption only. What if this content is exposed to outside world in a selective and gradual process? We will have enough Indians exposed to quality education material. This material is relevant to current context in which we operate and the students will be up to date with what we are teaching. We can have a selection filter in place that would certify that these students have absorbed and understood the materials and can apply them to practical problems. Their application and logical reasoning can also be tested. We need to find the cost of deployment of such infrastructure. This should be also compared to the side effects that are created when such infrastructure is freed up. The expenses on training can be saved along with the lodging and boarding costs. The time and the resources can be diverted to more productive usage like creating specialists and technologists...

Are you a knowledge worker? A person who can think, interpret trends, visualize existing scenario and predict future. Data is just a number like population of india is 2 Billion. Information can say 75% are youth. Knowledge compares this with rest of world and says developed world will have 75% old age population. A business man sees a opportunity and finds ways how to tap this youth say analyses this youth data, finds their current skill sets and matches that with market trends and comes out with a business plan that will train these youth to be ready for the next wave of outsourced work. A normal lead is normally sandwiched between his subordinate aspirations and his superiors deadline driven approach and is reduced to a mere taskmaster and facilitator. He needs to be persistent in delivering same message again and again to his subordinates and also endure for small failures that might happen during the journey. In a work environment that is exploratory in nature there should be enco...

What can a novice player bring to market that a established player cannot? There are four types of player in the market. The vertical/horizontal player, technology provider and service provider. The fourth is the small player. The vertical player has employees, management and customers. Its employees follow processes to satisfy customers and internal housekeeping driven by the vision and directive of the management. Information flows from management to employees and back, from employees to customer and back and sometimes from customers to management and back. There are also industry analyst and market trends that influence decision making capability of management. Also there could be innovation that could come from anyone of them that could influence disruptions in current processes or business models. The technology provider are also similar to vertical player except that their customer are vertical player/enterprises or consumers. They need to maintain a product portfolio in line wit...

The objective should be clear. The roadmap should be in sight and best practices along with the set processes should be in place if one needs to seriously pursue one's dream. Apply the principles learned in books and internet. Find the gaps and strengthen them. Don’t get into the habit of simply learning and getting thrilled. Learn to burn rubber on the tar and feel the heat. Lets take example of any of the idea conceived in the past. Where do they stand in terms of progress? Do you simply want to be a idea generator and feel good about it? Where is the process of taking these ideas to market or to repeat a process if one comes out with newer ideas? Innovation is a repetitive process and to put it into practice you need well defined process. You need learning's of past captured as a best practice so that you reduce the effort of future. Unless you act you will simply be where you, cuddling in your comfort zone. Saints say that you are the energy. I am energy and it is upto me t...

Customer A customer who will buy your product or service. Identify him first. This could be done through existing customer base at current employment. Develop a rapport with existing client base and win their trust so that they may be willing to carry forward their business with you even when you move out. Getting a customer in open market will be really tough and will involve more challenges than understanding and gaining their trust under the employer umbrella. Proper accounts No lacunae left for the tax man to close or question your company. Everything should be accounted for and recorded in detail. Every expense from rent to petrol charges. Have enough capital to start with. Enough contains the capex and opex. Plan also for expenditure to sustain current lifestyle. Monthly EMI’s, child education and other capital commitments. Patience Frustration will be easy to come by and plays spoil sport. Stick around with current employer for about a year until you have gained trust of the cus...