Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Got this information via my college alumni group. This shows how much optimization can be done :) Last week I took some friends out to a restaurant, and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed a little strange, but I ignored it. However, when the busboy brought out water and utensils, I noticed he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket. I then looked around the room and saw that all the waiter persons had a spoon in their pocket. When the waiter came back to check on our order I asked, "Why the spoon?"Well," he said, "the restaurant's owners hired Anderson Consulting Experts in efficiency in order to revamp all of our processes. After several months of statistical analysis, they concluded that customers drop their spoons 73.84% more often than any other utensil. This represents a drop of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour. If our personnel is prepared to deal with that contingency, we can reduce the number o...

Following are some of the books I have read and their reviews. I have posted them in my geocities homepage. Since some of my friends are interested in this posting it as a seperate blog. Read them and let me know your comments :) Envisioning an empowered nation – Abdul Kalam with Sivathanu Pillai This is the last by Kalam and it gives a very clear picture of what should be done in each sectors of India. India as a country is very diverse and only the knowledge based economy will help India to become a developed nation. This books talks about agriculture, healthcare, information and communication, critical sectors, biotechnology sectors. He explains clearly what is been done in each and every sector and gives a proposal of what should be done in each sector. This is a very nice book to understand India’s economy in a very top level. Count your chickens before they hatch – Arindham Chaudhuri This is one of the best selling books in India. This book consists of two major sections. The fi...

I got a big shock when I came to know for the first time that 300 million Indians earn less than one dollar a day. As a matter of fact what we get to see in urban India is just the ‘top-brass’ of English speaking, educated, knowledge workers. No doubt! The 1991 economic reforms has definitely turned out very good for middle class population in India, but the poor and uneducated population of the country continue to suffer. Access to basic education, healthcare and food is still a huge problem for these poor people. The next question came to my mind was ‘How to solve the problem of poverty?’ After observing Muhammad yusuf’s ‘Microfinance’ revolution in Bangladesh for quiet some time, I am getting confidence that the poverty problem indeed can be addressed to a major extent. Before getting into details of Muhammad Yusuf, let me classify educated Indians into two categories. The first category is ‘best-and-best’, which consists of intelligent, educated people. These people in turn go to b...

In recent times I have been observing the digital photography business. The fast growth of internet and mobile network growth is fuelling the photography business big time. About ten years before the Personal Computer (PC) was the only avenue for digital photos but today everything is revolving around internet. According to statistics, there would be roughly 650 million digital photographs would be available by the year 2009. This huge growth will open up lot of opportunities for camera manufactures (including cam-phones), online photo portals and print-media. Unlike any other businesses, digital photography got to do more with people’s emotions. People feel happy when they share these digital photographs in electronic or print format with friends and families. Online portals (Which include big players like Yahoo photos, Google picasa) offer end-to-end photo solutions like editing, sharing and printing are on-demand. Apart from big players lot of small players are entering into this se...

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This book is in my ‘to-read’ list but got a chance to read the review written by professor Sadagopan. I have never seen such a comprehensive book review. Felt as if I have read most of the book itself. Thought of sharing the link: http://ss.emergic.org/archives/2006/08/10/book-review-the-search/

This weekend I got a chance to read one of the IEEE papers titles ‘Modeling terrorists’ which was sent by my cousin Shanmuga . Predicting and preventing terror attacks has become a very essential task for any country today. There is a traditional ‘analyst’ approach using which these terrorist attacks can be predicted. This analyst approach includes spying, tracking people using satellites, using detectives and tapping various signals like telephone, mobile phone and internet traffic. This analyst approach requires lots of people to perform these tasks and churn out huge amount of data to come up with predictions. What if we can model people’s behavior using software and predict their actions? How about using a simulation program which can help predict how a particular group of people are behaving at this moment? What about a computer model which can help intelligence agencies to unleash the terrorist networks? This is exactly what couple of Universities in the US is trying to achieve. ...

If we look back the Entrepreneurs in India and their background, one pattern comes out very clearly. They were mainly from ‘family-oriented’ businesses and I can quote numerous examples like TATAs, Birlas, Ambanis, Godrej and Mittals. Individuals starting from the scratch and becoming successful was less heard in India, till the economy got opened up in 1991.Even after a decade after that Entrepreneurship is not very popular among Indians. Regular salary from a MNC, 2BHK apartment in any of the metro and Honda City cars are the necessary requirements for people and Entrepreneurship not even comes last in that list. For a long time a question was going on in my mind ‘What stops anyone in India becoming an Entrepreneur?’ Of course the first and big reason was the adverse economic conditions that were prevailing in the ‘pre-reform’ times in India. But there is ‘cultural’ reason behind that as well. Then the next question comes up to anybody’s mind is what does a country’s culture got to d...

Famous Author Edward De Bono, in his book ‘Six thinking hats’ talks about the ‘lateral thinking’ concept. This new way of lateral thinking is commonly known as ‘out of the box’ thinking and our right side of the brain (which is intuitive in nature) is responsible for this. The author argues that the lateral thinking can be cultivated in any individual or organization by ‘connecting’ things. What is this connecting is all about? How different this lateral thinking is from ‘sequential’ or ‘normal’ thinking? Can we cultivate innovation by connecting things? Yes. It is possible with ‘De Bono’ style thinking. De Bono suggests choosing two random page numbers in English dictionary and pickup words in the right hand bottom of each of those pages. Now try to connect these two words. Say for example if my words are ‘programming’ and ‘desert’ then I can think of ‘writing a computer program to measure temperature of remote desert’. This will open up new opportunities and the ‘sequential’ thinkin...