Thought Garage

"There aren't really good and bad people. We all have parts of both. What matters is what parts we choose to act on" -  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix How do you choose to act on? What is your point of inflexion? How do you choose to act on to be one or the other? Is it the opportunity? For many people to decision to choose to be good or bad (right or wrong) is influenced by opportunity, ambition, greed  or desperation. As I mentioned in my previous post When opportunity knocks the door….values often shut blind.  I argued that for most ,  the decision to stay on one or other side is directly influenced by external factors and opportunity at the top of the list.    Opportunity presents itself in two forms: time and price. Is it the price? : Price is arguably drives most decisions. So some times people don't want to pay the price to stay on right and look for opportunity to avoid it even though they might cross ...

Read a thought provoking post on Seth's Blog about the tacit honor system in our society,  the notion of 99% of people are good and only 1% of the people are actually bad. So if you treat everybody as if they belong to that 1%, you might loose the 99%. Just about everything in civilization works on the honor system. No armed guards at the local grocery store, no pat down as you leave the library. Most people cross the street without fear of crazed hit and run assassins. Great marketers are able to deliver customer service because they're willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. They tend to take your word for it. Of course there are bad actors. One out of a thousand people will cheat on that test or rip off that store. When LL Bean or Patagonia offers a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee, some jerks decide to buy an outfit, go on a trip and then return it all. If you spend all your time worrying about these folks, you end up underserving the other 99% of the ...

Seth Godin on 'How to make a million' says tyring to make a penny from hundred million almost never works. Instead try to make a dollar from million people. One popular method is to make a dollar in profit from each of a million people. Or a penny from a hundred million. This is the China strategy. It almost never works. It almost never works because the challenge of reaching that many people is just too great. It's too risky and too expensive. Doesn't matter that you're only hoping for a dollar or a penny. The price isn't the challenge, it's the difficulty in spreading your idea. Far easier to make a thousand dollars from each of a thousand people, or even $10,000 from a hundred organizations. You can focus on a small hive of people, a group that talks to itself. You can push through a smaller dip and reach a level of recommendation and dominance that makes incremental sales far easier. And you can learn much earlier in the process if you've gotten it r...

Excellent visual showing almost all Apple products. I did not know most products. I haven't even heard of most of them except a very few.   Evolution of Apple's Products | created by Edwin Tofslie   A visual I created to show the evolution of most all Apple products created over the past 30 years.This was created to show the evolution of the form factor and industrial design of the products, not to show every single model or upgrade Apple has launched. Click here to view big Source: Apple Product Evolution

Another book on the block that is vehemently complaining about internet and its ill effects on Culture.   The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture    I remember an earlier discussion about Wikipedia, complaining about its amateurish mob made content compared to so called validated and trusted expert content from famous encyclopedias. Whether there is any truth in that matter or not, first website I and most of my friends and collegues refer to when in doubt is undoubtedly wikipedia. On subjects we knew in depth, we compared the quality of content and found no truth in those allegations.    Coming to key arguments made in this book, here are few exceprts (taken from 37Signals post, linked at the bottom of the page, highlights by me) Mr. Keen argues that “ what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather tha...

Quite an interesting innovation and very promising for all of us. Whiteboards right on the refrigerator.  No more stick-its and post-its on the regrigerator. Go head scribble your thoughts on the refrigerator itself. When GE launched “Imagination at Work” as its new slogan to replace “We Bring Good Things To Life”, the most eye-catching part of its online campaign was a virtual whiteboard that visitors could sketch and scribble on. Apparently, someone at GE had the smarts to transfer the ad’s essence to the gleaming white surfaces of GE’s appliances. White goods + whiteboard…? Witness the birth of the sketch-a-fridge. Currently only available in Brazil, where it is sold as Risque Rabisque (roughly: Scrawl & Scribble), the refrigerator is covered in a special coating similar to dry erase whiteboards. Replacing the age-old practice of sticking grocery lists and children’s drawings on the fridge, missives can now be written directl...

Excerpt from Bill Gates commencement speech at Harvard: Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives. You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer. Knowing what you know, how could you not? And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities… on how well you treated people a world away who...

Frustrated with multiple web silo services (about 20 different websites I regularly use and ofcourse I hate to manage 20 different logins and bookmarks), I have started moving to 'All Google' services. With a single sign-on, I can access most services and the most interesting benefit is an excellent integration between different services. And, I really did not know until today that Google has acquired Feedburner. That makes my moving to 'Everything Google' camp little closer than I thought.   Google has acquired FeedBurner  More » We are happy to announce that Google has acquired FeedBurner. For more information related to the acquisition, read our FAQ .   Source: FeedBurner With feedburner moving to Google camp, all web services I use(except wordpress and central desktop)  are now Google services.  Search Engine: I rarely used any other search engine so far. (except for proving my point ocassionally) Google Reader : This is the secon...

Its quite unusual to see a book like this in India.  In US, if some one is successful in one venture, then their second venture is to sell that (so called) success formula. He/she spends the rest of their lives in selling that success through books, seminars, merchandise.. any thing that can be sold. I don't believe that  if you read those and probably follow them you will succeed. But it is good to see what their success made them to believe in. It is quite unusual to see similar books in India. Don't know why, I don't find (m)any books where Entrepreneurs and successful Indians wanted to share their stories. There are so many untold stories and unsung heroes. One of my friends, who share a similar mysterious belief, sent me a link to this book to prove the point that times are changing. It also has its own website to promote ( http://www.ithappened.in/ ). I The book is sold online through futurebazaar.com. But, the website shipping options only a...

A recent report by  Kauffman Foundation infers that there is a strong correlation between educational attainment and entrepreneurship. A report released by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation that tracked the educational backgrounds of immigrant entrepreneurs who were key founders of technology and engineering companies from 1995 to 2005 shows a strong correlation between educational attainment (particularly in science, technology, engineering and math) and entrepreneurship. Click image, above, to read Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part II . Click image, above, to read America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (part 1 of the study). But before jumping to 'any' conclusions about  role of Educational Attainment to Entrepreneurship, (which I believe is construed and a misquoted wisdom), consider the following points from the report itself: The report  studied only Technology and Engineering companies....

Why iPhone does not support 3G? I am not sure whether Steve Jobs said that 3G might cause battery issues, but here is an interesting discussion on whether 3G cause battery issues for iPhone. Obviously, the issue is not battery related but presence of 3G network in USA. As pointed out in the post, if Apple had released in Europe, it would have definitely considered 3G. Read on. | Link to Article | )