Jayakumar Balasubramanian

It’s been a month since Apple's much hyped iPhone launched in India. In midst of huge expectations the product hit the market on Aug 22, with Airtel and Vodafone taking up the distributorship in India. In order to boost up the initial sales, both service provides kept their shop open throughout the night. More importantly India's 'tech' city Bangalore was all geared up to welcome this popular Gizmo, where many technologists lined up in the showroom to pickup their phone before their friends. The next day's local newspapers flashed pictures of proud iPhone owners from the city. The first say sales numbers were pretty good and everybody believed iPhone will take off in India in a big day, given its one billion population. Much against the expectations and media hype, the iPhone sales started taking nosedive in subsequent weeks and it has not even crossed 1500 handsets throughout India. It clearly proves that iPhone is a big failure out here. According to Geoffrey Moor...

This year's IT return filing process went like a breeze. The IT department has put up wonderful online FREE filing system, which worked perfectly. Promptly received ITR-V by email, in form of read only PDF document. In order to get it stamped, they opened up additional counters in Institute of Engineers building (opposite to Indian express, near Shivaji Nagar) exclusively for private companies (check the picture below). Ample amount of space,volunteers and guidance was available to help people, who are filing returns using printed forms. Within 5 minutes I was able to get the acknowledgment from the counter allocated for my organization. In case you have done it yet (BTW, today is the last day for filing) here are the steps to file it online: Open the site https://incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in. Register for user (give the user id also as a PAN number). You will receive the registration mail. Login to the site with the credentials provided in the mail. Go to downloads menu. Download ...

Last weekend I attended the summer edition of Barcamp Bangalore . This is my first Barcamp and I found it very interesting! To start with, its amazing to see the energy level of attendees. They were all highly pumped up and it was showing up with almost everyone I have met. Compared with a hierarchial corporate setup, it was organized as a completely an informal, flat and free-flowing setup. Every session was packed with very interesting questions, debates, critisicms and smart answers in eight different tracks . I was mainly interested in the 'startups and demo' track and spend almost the whole day (saturday) there. I was able to see pretty good web 2.0 applications (Example: http://www.lifeblob.com) demonstrated for roping in the technology enthusiasts. There was an interesting session (according to me) hosted by Prof.Suresh from NSRCEL at IIM-B on the topic 'Startup pains'. He was asking the campers about the list of problems faced by aspiring Entrepreneurs and what...

Last week I went to sub-registrar office in Chennai. I got a big shock when I saw the notice board. The e-mail ID of the sub-registrar was mentioned as: igregn.tn.nic.in (See the picture below) This exactly shows how clueless our government systems are when it comes to deploying technology. Long live India ’s e-governance!

Author: Andrew S grove Price: 600 INR Andrew is one of the famous CEOs, who lead Intel into the path of microprocessors. In this book he shares his experiences, which can be applied to individuals’ career as well as organizations. Andy introduces a term called 'Strategic Inflection Points' (SIP), which has got equal probability to make or break any business. The businesses who adapt these SIPs (paranoids) will go successful, failing which will make them to shut the shop. He explains about how the businesses are affected by many factors which he calls as '10X' forces which primarily drive the organization beyond the SIP. These 10X force could be in the form of new technology, innovation, economic reforms, business model etc. Throughout the book, Andy explains his SIP and 10X concepts with the PC business as an example. In 1970s the PC business was a 'vertical' one which was heavily dominated by companies like Digital Electronic Corporation (DEC). By ...

For the past month or so the Indian rupee is getting stronger against the American dollar, which has come down to 39 INR compared to 45 INR. This is already bleeding Indian services companies and their Q3 numbers speaks for that. When the rupee was getting weaker these service companies used to make 4-5% of their margins just by keeping their money in dollars and converting them back during the results announcement. Nowadays Indian service companies are mulling multiple options to resolve this problem -- six day working week, reduced hike for employees, productivity improvement, moving to lower cost geographies (like China and eastern europe) etc. With STPI tax sops are getting withdrawn by 2009 , Indian IT companies are having challenging times ahead. Let me take the example of product R & D happening in Indian companies as an example. Of course value creation can be done at multiple levels apart from R & D as well. Majority of MNCs which are having their engineering centers i...

Here is some of my favorite magazines! These mags are targeted to a specific audience, providing vital information. I started liking these type of stuff as they are catering to my interests. They also give altogether a 'positive' outlook of India . 1. Dare ( http://www.dare.co.in ): This is published by cyber- media completely focused on Entrepreneurship. They started the print edition from Oct '07 and the website is yet to be populated. Got a chance to read their Nov '07 and found it very interesting. It covered various aspects of Entrepreneurship -- new business ideas, VC/private funding, value creation and guest columns by successful Entrepreneurs. I also learned that their advisory committee consists of stalwarts like C.K.Prahlad, N.R.Narayana Murthy, Kanwal Reiki etc. Welcome effort from cybermedia! 2. Smart techie ( http://www.thesmarttechie.com ): This is a technical career magazine launched from Bangalore , which is a sister concern of Silicon India . I foun...

I really liked the caption of TOI's 'Lead-India' initiative: "D.O --Two simple letters" Keeping my opinions apart, this is one of the very few initiatives which really emphasizes about 'doing' something rather than 'talking' about it. In my point of view doing is the only solution for all the problems India is facing today -- be it poverty, illetracy, pollution, politics or traffic problems. As 'Argumentative Indians' we tend to 'talk-talk-and-talk' about every other issue on the planet and do nothing about it. Every Indian is aware of all the problems surrounded by him. When it comes to taking concrete actions to attack the problem, we fail miscerably. If I look back the post-independent history of India, there is very little that is 'done' compared with the amount of planning or talking.I can satisty myself by saying 'mera bharath mahan' and point out our achievements in certain areas. Is there an example in India...

Looking at my blogs in a critical mood a few days back, I was both happy and a little guilty. Happy for the fact that my blogs cover a variety of topics, but guilty for the fact that they do not provide much of my views on my love for technology. Wanting to keep pace with the happenings at the technology arena, I have started co-authoring an exclusive technical blog- 'tech trends, impacts and innovation' , with some like minded people. It has proved to be an immense pleasure for me and has provided me with a sense of fulfillment to be a part of this blog space. It would be wonderful to hear your views about the blogs.

Author: SS Kshatriy Price: 180 INR ISBN: 81-259-1459-5 When I visited Silicon Valley in the year 2002, I was amused to see so many Indians out there. Not only Indians are one of the major immigrant communities in the San Francisco bay area (which consist of counties like San Jose , Santa Clara , Fremont, Sunnyvale etc.) they are also one of the most successful group when it comes to Entrepreneurship. I remember reading one of the WSJ articles where as much as 30% successful Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are from Indian origin. Thanks to Nehru’s socialistic democracy, bulk of highly educated (mainly from IITs) engineers migrated to the US and made fortunes there. Right from 1970s these folks built tons of high-tech organizations and generated abundance of wealth, which built a very strong brand for India . Two decades later when Indian opened up the economy in 1991, it was ‘homecoming’ experience for these wealthy entrepreneurs as they acted as a bridge between Ind...

In my blog titled ‘Am I proud to be an Indian?’ I briefly touched upon Indian’s glorious past and the abundant knowledge in Vedas and Upanishads. Having said that it is very difficult to interpret Vedas and understand the real meaning. This is mainly because the language of Sanskrit is much more complex than any other languages and each word conveys many meanings. But my simple question was ‘If we have so much of knowledge and intellectual wealth, why can’t we use them for welfare of human beings?’. To my surprise, recently I found one classic example for this. Before getting into the details let me give some background information. One of my very close friends is working for an IT company in Bangalore and couple of months back they celebrated ‘technology day’ in their organization. They invited Mr. Satish Chandra (who has supposedly demonstrated power generation using Vedic methods) for a guest lecture. I also got to know from my friend that he has proved that the output energy ...

It was 5:10 AM on 26 th January when I reached Bangalore railway station and I was supposed to travel by general compartment. The ticketing counters open by 5 AM, and there was a long 'hanuman tail' queue in almost all counters. I was cursing myself for getting late by 10 minutes (normally I go sharp 5 AM and stand in the as the first person in the queue) and thinking whether I will get a place to sit in the 6:30 AM train to Chennai. Also our Indian junta was giving me 'dhakka' from all directions :( All of a sudden I discovered a ATM like machine with touchscreen saying 'Swipe your Credit/Debit card and get tickets to Chennai and Mysore' and I was taken by surprise. In the past I have done some case studies about photo kiosks and with lots of excitement, I approached the kiosk. It had a simple touchscreen which had four different combinations for Chennai and Mysore. I selected 'chennai' and 'super-fast' combination and swiped my debit c...