Jayakumar Balasubramanian

When Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) visited India couple of weeks back, he appeared in a TV show in NDTV profit channel. The program name was ‘Bridging 2 Indias’ and Naraya Murthy (Chief mentor of Infosys), Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala (Professor at Electrical Engineering department at IIT Chennai and a famous personality who is promoting entrepreneurship in a big way) and Mr. Manvinder Singh(CEO of Ranbaxy) appeared in the panel discussion along with Mr. Ballmer. The theme of discussion was bridging rural-urban India using technology and it was really interesting. For people who are reading my blogs regularly, would have found out that I am a strong believer in ‘empowerment’. It is the only way to solve major problems that India is facing today. In order to empower people, technology would definitely play a very key role and all the panel members shared the same opinion. Having said that, empowering people using technology (mainly using PC) is not all that easy in rural India becau...

The word ‘Innovation’ seems to be the latest buzzword in the tech industry. Last week Steve Ballmer (CEO Microsoft Corporation) visited India and re-iterated the need for innovation in Indian software companies. From my personal point of view I have been struggling hard to do innovation at my workplace and finally able to see some light at the end of the tunnel. In this blog I am going to share my reflections on Innovation. Even though the word ‘Innovation’ sounds very flashy, it’s very difficult to innovate in Indian software companies because of the following reasons: Most of the projects we get to do in India are more of maintenance and enhancement type. Since the technology is already matured, there is little room to innovate. Since most of the companies are operating in the ‘offshore’ model, engineers are completely kept away from customers. We don’t get to see how exactly the customer is going to use a particular product or service. This also means that we don’t understand custom...

The Embedded Systems domain is poised for a huge growth as more and more embedded devices are flocking into the market. These Embedded devices range from small consumer electronic devices (like mobile phones) to enterprise devices (like telecom switches). Even though the size of these devices varies, the programming fundamentals remain almost the same. In this article we will discuss about building blocks of embedded systems from a programmer’s perspective. Before getting into these blocks, we need to understand that programming embedded systems is very much different from application programming. Also embedded systems programming has a set of challenges because of the following reasons: 1. Embedded systems have very limited resources (in terms of memory, storage, processing power) compared to a general purpose computing device like PC. 2. Because of the less memory availability and requirement of faster response, embedded systems have Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS). These RTOS ha...

Couple of weeks back I wrote a blog about Muhammad Yusuf and his micro credit concept . This trigged interested discussion among my friends circle and finally we all converged and agreed about a single word: ‘Empowerment’. The empowerment is the only way to solve problems like poverty, illiteracy in countries like India and it needs to be done at all levels ranging from family to government. When individuals are empowered, they get access to information and knowledge which will improve the quality of life. The raise of Indian middle class is a standing example for empowerment. Economists (Especially ‘swaminomics’ ) are predicting that economic empowerment will result in betterment. Of course the betterment cannot be achieved in a near future and it will take at last another two to three hundred years. In the mean time it is important that we march towards the future with confidence, pride and patriotism. In these lines one of my senior Alumni Mr. P.R.Iyer wrote an article and sent it ...

Last weekend I got a chance to visit bangaloreit.com-2006, an annual IT tradeshow promoted by Government of Karnataka along with Software Technology Parks of India (STPI). Following are some of the stuff which I liked this time: IP Zone This stall was dedicated for ‘Intellectual property development in India’ and it was really amazing. This had about 11 participants who demonstrated their products (Completely developed out of India) and felt ‘special’ when I saw the ‘Made in India’ logo in some of these products. Yes! It’s happening! Products can be completely developed out of India. Following are some of the companies and their products: a. SemIndia: This Company deserves a special note because it is promoted as a public-private partnership, supported by Government of Andra Pradesh. I was able to see their Broadband routers (One with single Ethernet-DSL and another with multiple Ethernet ports with Wireless) and it was simply amazing. This organization is setting up their hardware m...