Manthan

Seems like Google search is effective without ad sense. Turn on the “adblock” for chrome and the Google search results are less accurate and often you cannot find what you are looking for in the first 10 results. Case in point

Search for “Chrome Plugins” and listed below are the search results

What I was hoping to find was “https://chrome.google.com/extensions” at least in the first 10 results.

Run the same search without the adblock and the correct URL is the first sponsored results.

One of the few acts that can justify selling albums vs track.

Earlier this week, Robert Howe QC, appearing for the group, said the the band’s deal with EMI stipulated that their "seamless" albums should not be split up and that they "wanted to retain artistic control".

I would hate to see them disappear from iTunes.

I have bitten by “App Out of Quota” error on google app-engine more than once. So it become critical for me to load test all my apps before publishing them to the rest of the world.

Looking around , Loadstorm offers a simple solution to load testing. It a web-service with a free and premium service. Up-to 50 concurrent users is free and there are different tiered pricing if you want more.

Load Storm, has a simple UI where you can

• Authenticate your website
• Create test steps
• Schedule one or more load testing session etc.

Having worked in different companies on both side of the ocean, I had been mulling over what makes a company succeed in outsourcing. What to outsource and factors to consider before outsourcing. Listed below is a summary of what works and what doesn’t

Commitment, motivation and security: Commitment to outsourcing from the whole team is absolutely required for success of any project. Its vital that the current team looks at Outsourcing as away to augment their strength. Its very easy for organizations to get into US vs Them situation, creating un-necessary conflicts. These can be limited by making sure that the current team is secure in the belief that that outsourcing is a way to compliment their work and not to replace them. Travel, more face time, flat organizations help a lot in these areas.

Competency loss in US: There should not be any loss of competency as a result of outsourcing. The whole idea is to increase competency and allowing the organization move further, faster. The team in US/HQ should be so strong, that if tomorrow the IT location in Asia has to be closed, the team in US can pick up the baton and run with it.

What to outsource ? : Non core business areas. IT , help-desk, admin work, testing, development etc. Any area of work , which doesn’t add value to the business the company in.  Start with those areas and evaluate. Start with support work, then with projects that are autonomous. Say development of tools like time-card or employee expenses etc. There is always a shortage of DBA’s and these can be outsourced to get 24/7 coverage. Helps the DBA’s in US and they appreciate to off the hook at nights/vacations. Target job reqs that are open for years and an equivalent resource could not be found in the US.

Cost: Evaluate the cost every quarter and analyze the cost advantage that the company gains by outsourcing. Is it worth it ? There are some in-tangible costs to outsourcing, like more layers of management. Extra management time spent by leadership, to make sure outsourcing is successful. The salaries in India raise at a much higher rate , compared to US. Cost of outsourcing is a moving target and has to be re-evaluated every quarter. With inflation at 11.5% in a country like India, there is only this much that anybody can do, to ensure that cost remain in control.

Attrition: Be prepared for higher attrition and the possibility that the some of the resource end up coming into US and start working for a competitor. Working at the same “Title” for five years is unheard of in India. Resources in India are very highly mobile, very motivated and are always seeking new challenges. Therefore there is a high possibility that they would leave the company in span of 2 years and work for a competitor in the US.

Innovation cannot be outsourced: If your core business is innovation, outsourcing would be suicidal. You cannot outsource innovation, not even to the next state, let alone a distant country. What ever success the company has today, is a direct result of leadership, innovation and hard-work of the current / past employees and that DNA cannot be transferred to another city/country so easily. The reason innovation thrives in a place like Silicon Valley is because of the eco-system there fosters innovation. That is a reason, people from India thrive in Bay Area and start great business, great product companies.

• Have you heard of any product company from Bangalore?
• How many patents were filed from India in FY08 ?
• There is no question about the quality of resource from Asia. They might be even better, but does the environment in that country or that regional office foster the kind of innovative environment that the company needs?
• Is it easy to replicate the same model there ?
• These questions have to be answered with an Emphatic YES before the decision on outsourcing is taken.

Loss of Resource Advantage: It is very tempting for any company to reduce costs by freezing hiring in the HQ and hiring in Asia. But every potential great candidate you fail to hire in the US is a potential competitor. Every MVP who doesn’t get drafted is a potential game winner for the competitor few years down the line.The current level of success of any company is in no small measure to these heavy hitters, who changed the game. Companies are always competing for the best from the next generation. One should guard against the inclination to hire in Asia at the cost of potential MVP’s in the US. In the battle of resources, companies like Google hire the best, even if they have no defined work for them. Its great to have self-motivated people, because they will find ways to prove their worth and value.

Evolution: Outsourcing is a more like a 10 year plan. It has to be gradual, organization has to experiment and learn at each and every move. Case in point, Oracle India. Started in 1994 , but it really grew in the year 2001, when the economy was down and outsourcing got the management blessings. Today it can be considered the gold standard of outsourcing, with 10K plus employees in the India in almost every domain area. Oracle started with outsourcing Support and Staff augmentation for their consulting business. Over period of time, they improved the process , learnt the best practices and moved to development. Today lot of the teams are self-sufficient and are able to develop quality products based on designs developed in HQ.

Strong Leadership: This is the single most important aspect for success of outsourcing. There has to be strong leadership on both sides of the ocean and preferably old timers. People who have the company DNA in them and can replicate it in the outsourced location. Going out and hiring managers from the market is going to dilute the work culture, adaptation is going to difficult . Depute leaders to India, put them in charge of hiring, mentoring and building teams. Have close interactions, by encouraging travel in the beginning. Unless these are done right, there is a risk that you end up running two different companies , one in Us and one in India. Create an environment to encourage leadership and pick managers in the outsourced location from within the ranks. Once this starts happening, then the organization is almost on Autopilot.

Strong Process: Does the system you are trying to outsource have a well defined process ? Is it too people dependant ? If Yes, then its not a candidate for outsourcing at this time. Outsource systems which are people independent. Management should be tweaking the system and not spending time managing people. Put self-managed people to run the system in the outsourced location, who are go-getters and have proven experience in doing this successfully before.

Learn from success stories: Oracle , SAP, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, CISCO etc  are good success stories in the domain of outsourcing. Their models are worth evaluating and replicating. CISCO is especially interesting because they matured to the extent where they are doing a lot of R&D in outsourced locations. While not recommended for all companies, its a model worth looking at.

Recommended Readings

Crawl, Walk, Run Strategy Leads to Success in Offshore Outsourcing

http://whitepapers.silicon.com/0,39024759,60039273p,00.htm

With the excitement surrounding Firefox 3 launch, I gave in to the temptation and upgraded to Firefox 3.

To my shock, I realized how much I depended on firefox and how it has become a virtual OS for my daily needs when none of the plugins worked. I use the following plugins daily

1. Grease Monkey
2. Google Tool Bar
3. S3 Organizer for Amazon S3
4. FireBug
5. FireFTP

These plugins are absolutely essential for my work. I have got so used to not installing software , instead installing plugins for Firefox, that Firefox is the new OS and upgrading firefox is like upgrading the OS.

So make sure your plugins are supported before upgrading Firefox.

Now about the downgrading process. Un-install Firefox 3, then download the previous version of Firefox from Mozilla releases website.

When I just installed the release 2 over the existing Firefox 3 release, the browser just wouldn’t open up. It kept on crashing. So make sure you un-install the existing Firefox 3 installation and then install firefox 2. The only saving grace is, all the plugins are intact, inspite of the un-installation process.

Update : One of the readers  pointed out that FireBug works in Firefox 3, but it the automatic update doesn’t do the job.

firebug does work in FF3 you just have to go to the Firefox add-ons page and get it from there. For some reason the updater doesn’t do it.

While Google Appengine is a giant step for smaller companies to host scalable applications there are few things which make it totally not practical for building serious application.

There is a limit of 1000 files per application.  Add a few libraries and one hits the 1000 files limit.

Google’s response

We encourage developers to find creative ways to reduce the number of files in an
app. For example, a zip file with many small files is much more efficient than many
small individual files. 

Well learning to work around Google Appengine’s limitations in itself requires quite a bit learning curve and creativity. Add to this 1000 file limitations, it makes more sense to go with other hosting provider and use Amazon S3 as a scalable storage solution.

Google develops products in an iterative manner and I hope these limitations would dealt with in the future.

Our county is affected by the SoCal wild fire and we are in an evacuation mode right now. A lot of my friends have evacuated and crashed at my place for the night. We have been hunting for news all over the network/web etc. The best source of information so far have been Local News Channels, Local news paper websites and FM channels.

It makes my blood boil when I see the futility of posts like this and amount of bull that is percolated in times of such tragedy. Google news has been irrelevant and so has been blog search. Its FM radio or news channel who are giving immidiate and relevant information.

No, I don’t have time to check flickr, Wikipedia , Youtube or any other Web2.0 phonies when my house is burning. When it comes to saving ones life and property, its either Fox or the government website.

There is bigger coverage for Apple’s quarterly results and thousands of posts devoted to it. While the TV0.0 has been faithfully tracking what matters most. The FM Channels suspended programming/advertisment to cover this exclusively for 2 consecutive days and prepared to take a revenue hit.

It is downright stupid to think that Web2.0 can solve all problems, cure AIDS and make pigs fly. Sorry but this is lame.

Tried Clip Blast after reading this post by Robert Scoble. After doing some searches, one can see its not yet ready for prime time. Did a comparison video search for “Matt Harding” on ClipBlast and Google Video search. Google video search has more than 300 results and clipblast has 12 results. Since Matt Harding was a very “youtube” thing, I tried  “Microsoft Surface”. Same results. Google has over 200 video’s  and clipblast has around 20.I guess Scoble was over-excited since all his video’s are indexed. 

Yi-Wyn Yen has some great advice for young entrepreneurs who are looking for exit options. Writing about Zenter, which was recently acquired by Google.

On getting acquired

That’s like being a single woman who desperately wants to get married. Of course you want it to happen, but 99% of the time if you purposely try to get acquired (or married), it won’t

On founder’s dilemma of getting killed by the market leaders

Big companies like eBay (EBAY) and Microsoft (MSFT) may have more manpower and financial resources, but they also have disadvantages. “Often times, they’re not as driven. They’re not willing to make the sacrifice, like two guys sleeping on air mattresses, to make their product really good,” says Graham. “Microsoft has to think about web-based applications that don’t threaten Windows. A company like Zenter doesn’t care about hurting Windows.All they want to do is make the best application.”

Great stuff and a must  read. 

Am I missing something here. WallStreet Journal as an article about how recruiters are conducting virtual interviews on Linden Lab’s second life.

Some employers are experimenting with Second Life, the online virtual community owned by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, to screen prospective hires. The program allows job seekers to create a computer-generated image to represent themselves — known as an “avatar” — and communicate with executives of prospective employers as though they were instant-messaging.

What kind of Job requires Second Life Avatar’s for screening process. Is all this for real ? The article gets even more hilarious

Mr. Dowler didn’t have any major technical problems, although during the job interview, he couldn’t figure out how to manipulate the avatar to sit in the chair — so he sat it on top instead. (Others at the event began floating in the air while doing their interviews.)

Are these jobs for real ? Or are they jobs in Second Life virtual  world.