LoudSpeakers

It’s the beginning of monsoon season in India. It just went from being constantly hot to constantly wet. It rained so hard yesterday that water forced its way into my bathroom skylight and flooded the entire top floor. There was no permament damage, but the heavy rains knocked out the already fragile energy supplies.
In July of 2005, Mumbai received 37.5 inches of rain in 24 hours. Pune, only 3.5 hours away by car, was also affected but not as severely.

Checkout the weather.com page for Pune to see what I’m talking about.

At 2:00 PM everyday here in Pune, I am reminded that the infrastructure can’t keep up with the demand.  The entire office has backup power, but like clockwork on most days there’s a “current cut” or what’s also referred to as “load-shedding.”  Apparently, the magic hour is designated downtime to reduce the strain on the city’s power supply for this part of town.  In rural parts of the country it’s not unusual for villagers will go without power for large portions of the day.

The general problem related to lack of infrastructure supply to fuel the demand is widely understood in India.  What strikes me as unusual was that the promises of the candidates from the recent elections in Tamil Nadu made little mention of advancement in infrastructure services.  Instead, people were promised 1kg of rice at $.05, 4g of gold for women, color televisions for everyone — all things that ultimately were used to prey upon the poor and uneducated.
Politicians are self-serving universally — so nothing new necessarily here.  What is appalling is the blatant disregard for improvement of municipal services that would end up helping in untold ways contrasted against a backdrop of corrupt politicians lining their own pockets.  Influence peddling is an a la carte service and politicians are the maître d’.
Which leads me to another post for another day:  there seems to be a universal corollary to having survival mentality vs. lack of civic duty.  I have noticed in places as disparate as areas of India and in country towns of South Carolina.

It appears that BarCampPune will be held on June 17th somewhere in Central Pune TBA.   It’s exciting (and a little odd) to see Indians adopt the advent of the “Bay Area Rejects” meetups.  As it stands right now, I will be in Delhi for a few days around that time before leaving to return to the States.

On the startup front, things are progressing better than I had hoped.  We’re making strategic decisions about architecture, coming up with new ideas and services based upon the foundation, and getting really excited in the process.  In some areas, we’re realizing that we have embarked upon completely new territory due to the lack of abundant public information about the subject.  It’s scary and exciting at the same time to be honest.
More as things develop…

Speaking of virtualization, rumor abounds that Microsoft is in talks to acquire Softricity.  It would be a very smart acquisition in my opinion for two reasons:  1) they failed to acquire VMWare and 2) Softricity has unique IP, completely differentiated from the others.

So, if their technology is so unique, what the hell does it have to do with VMWare?   Other than being in related, potentially complimentary, markets — nothing.  It would strengthen Microsoft’s story in the virtualization space if paired with their Vitrual Server product line.

I think I an even better technology suitor for Softricity would be Citrix.

Dan’l Lewin writes a must read article for AlwaysOn entitled, “Is India At The Tipping Point?” He writes about the rise of the Offshore Product Development company (OPD) building “whole products for their clients at about one-third the cost.” It’s not just about building products though — it’s about domain expertise. The labor arbitrage game is a no brainer bet — you always double-down when the dealer has a 6 showing and you have 10.

Dan’l also says that “I believe that OPDs are the breeding ground of future software entrepreneurs and will impact the local software ecosystem.” I agree that this will be a future trend because I am doing it right now along with others. There were brief moments when I thought about setting up my own Indian subsidiary, but why bother with what amounts to minimal cost savings when the basic hassles of running a business won’t contribute to my core competency: building disruptive software. Plus, the bureaucracy involved for a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) to setup and own an Indian business is a nightmare. Running an HR department and having to bribe people to get an internet connection sooner than later is for the birds

. At the end of the day, the fully burdened cost of running your own show in India is comparable to using an OPD. So why subject yourself to pitfalls that could be serious show stoppers? Mitigate risk early on and give your startup a chance….

M.Ward announced a new record, Post-War, due out on Merge on August 22.  Two words:  hay’ll yes.

I follow the market that VMWare dominates because I think that virtualization of the x86 processor is a significant achievement of mankind.  Faking out operating systems to make them believe that physical hardware exists is just really, really cool.

Whenever I ask myself if something is technically possible through software engineering efforts, I have to remind myself that mankind has virtualized the x86 processor and thus anything is possible.

Just like any other contribution to mankind, virtualization has become a commodity over time.  Microsoft and VMWare now offer some such products for free, marking what I think is a trend towards enterprise competition in the attention economy.  Symantec/Veritas just announced a free version of its highly popular Storage Foundation product.  I don’t forsee a day anytime soon where enterprise data center software will be monetized through advertising, but near-term possiblity of end-users seeing advertising in exchange for collaboration software for example is another possibility entirely.
XenSource further solidifies the commodity status of the market with its open source offerings.  Though technical differences exist between the vendors as to whether an OS is completely isolated or just partially virtualized, the end result is very similar:  hardware resources are more efficiently managed when multiple operating systems share resources.
There’s also Virtuozzo and moka5, another new entrant to the space.  Which brings me to my point:  do we really need another virtualization vendor when the technology is so freely accessible?  And what type of exit can a VC expect to make in such a saturated market?  EMC acquired VMWare only after watching Veritas fumble what was setup to be a perfect alley oop, but not before a bidding war broke out with Microsoft.

But there’s very little public information on moka5 and there are some extremely smart people running the company and backing them financially, namely Vinod Khosla.  I’ll eagerly await information to find out what differentiates them from the rest of the pack and hopefully it will be something more than just a few incremental features.

The soundtrack to Qurbani, an Indian film from the early 80s, was on the mind and helped me connect the songs for this podcast. The film and the songs are quite famous in India. It’s interesting to hear the influence of primarily Western pop music in non-English pieces — and this record is heavily influenced by the Disco sounds that I grew up with.

Here’s a tracklist:

Mogwai - Acid Food
Crooked Fingers - Call To Love
Colin Meloy - Dance To Your Daddy
Bloodthirsty Lovers - Postcard From The Sea
Young And Sexy - The Night Wears A Sombrero
The Brunettes - Polyester Meets Acetate
The One AM Radio - What You Gave Away
Loose Fur - The Ruling Class
The Raconteurs - Steady As She Goes
Midlake - Roscoe
The Weather Machines - Northern Lights
Butterglory - The Captain Stood Sturdy
Nazia Hassan - Aap Jasa Koi

To play with iTunes:

1. Download iTunes version 6 and install it

2. Select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and enter this into the dialog:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/internmentcamp/loudspeakers

LoudSpeakers At InternmentCamp. Alternately, you can play the mp3 here.

The BBC interviewed a taxi driver by mistake that was waiting to pickup a computer expert. Notice the look of shock on the guy’s face at the beginning. Talk about a total screw-up.

Link:  YouTube

Via: Nik

I had a conversation with a friend of mine recently about the cost of goods in India.  Some things are still a bargain compared to the West.  I routinely have dinner for under $2.  Lately, I have been topping dinner off with a Falooda for an extra 60 cents.  A rather complete lunch is served for about 40 cents in the office canteen.  A ride in an auto (a motorized rickshaw, not an automobile) that would cost upwards of $5 in NYC costs about 50 cents here.  Custom tailored clothing can be less expensive than the “ready-made” alternatives.
One of the most noticeable increases here in India is in the technology field.  With 15% year over year salary increases, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for employers to retain valuable employees.  Even when the country is crankin’ out 400,000 technology workers from schools each year, the supply is simply not enough to keep up with the demand from the West.

It’s all very reminiscent of the late 90’s when technology workers in the States were jumping ship from the mainstays and heading to the .com companies in droves.  In India, workers usually have to remit 30 days notice to their current employer, but a prospective employer can acquire that notice period for some agreed sum.

The level of experience in India compared to the States is noticeably different.  Indians with vast amounts of experience are usually already in the States.  5 Years of development experience here and one is branded as a “Senior Engineer,” but it’s just the nature of the scale that exists.  A Sr. Engineer who is in search of a new job will likely have between 3-6 offers soon after being declared a free agent depending on various factors of experience and geography. Employers must be quick to make an offer knowing that the market is extremely competitive and driven largely on one thing we all understand:  personal wealth.

At the current rate that salaries are growing, within 5-7 years India will be very close, if not on par, to American software engineering salaries.  The value paradigm will shift from a model built primarily on economics of using offshore resources in developing nations to one that stresses the growing domain experience of Indian developers.  I met an Indian company recently that knows as much about the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as any US healthcare software vendor that I have ever met.  But it’s not just related to US laws and regulations — they understand our industries and they’re starting early.

I walked up to my 9 year-old cousin who was sitting at the computer busily spouting off seemingly technical jargon in his quasi-English accent.   The 9 year-old was teaching the 7 year-old HTML — hand coded.  He wasn’t using any slick Integrated Development Environment (IDE) — he was using Notepad.  And he knew more HTML than the geek who was standing behind him with his jaw on the floor.

Things to know when travelling in India:

1.  In India, a hotel isn’t necessarily a place that has rooms for overnight rental.  The word hotel is also used synonymously with the word restaurant.

2.  Chat has two meanings.  Chaat (proper spelling, pronounced ch-aught) generally means snack food.  To chat is what you do with a friend over instant messaging or the phone.
3.  A “call taxi” is just a taxi that you call to schedule pickup.

4.  Using your left hand to give someone something or eating with it can be considered slightly faux pas in some areas.

5.  An Indian that shakes his/her head in a side-to-side motion with their neck as a pivot is really expressing an affirmative even though it could appear as if their expressing negation.
6.  When accepting business cards, it’s courteous to receive the card and read it rather than immediately filing it in your front pocket.  Consider this in other parts of East Asia as well.

7.  A “love marriage” describes people who fall in love and get married.

8.  An email ID is the same thing as an email address.  In the West, we typically don’t pluralize email by adding an ’s’ although it’s not incorrect — in India, it seems to be the norm.

9.  Vegetarians abound in India.  It’s paradise for a person (like me) who seems to have a laundry list of questions to ask of waitstaff before ordering.  When they say vegetarian in this country — they’re serious.  Packaged food items are duly indicated as being vegetarian using a green dot.  Foods containing “non-veg” related items use a red dot.

10.  A red dot on a woman’s forehead has nothing to do with meat products (as noted in point 9 above).  It typically signifies that she is a married, Hindu woman who’s husband is still alive.  Young, unmarried, girls will also wear the chukkha or bindi. The position of the bindi is significant as a center of energy, according to schools of Hindu thought.  The bindi itself can be comprised of either a pinch of red holy powder or what amounts to a sticker.

Keeping cool during the summer months is key to survival in India.  Combined with the humidity, the heat can be absolutely punishing.

Tender coconuts seem to be the preferred cool-down beverage down South, but here in the North it’s lime soda — either sweetened with a syrup concoction or salted. One would think that the salted version would lead to further dehydration negating any interim benefit of a cooling effect, but the locals seem to buy into it.

At my Uncle’s place in Coimbatore, a man would come by every evening and climb up one of several coconut trees in the backyard to fetch one tender coconut for each person.  He then uses a sickle to lop off the top creating a convenient opening from which one imbibes.

A VC friend of mine who focuses on the consumer space recently quipped that the word “repository” means “proprietary” to him. To a certain extent he’s correct in that the back-end data models of repositories are always unique by vendor, but a repository might be a necessary evil in the enterprise.  Without repositories, user-behavior can be left completely unchecked.  Yeah, I know —- one can setup security here and there, but that requires a human to do something and security is not all encompassing.  Let’s face it:  most users have complete disregard for corporate assets — they could care less.
User-behavior in regards to applications in the enterprise can be a double-edged sword.  Every developer of enterprise software applications is worried about user-experience.  An application that requires drastic alteration of the usual point-an-click semantics of a Microsoft Office application can be quickly relegated to the “it’s too hard to use” pile, rendering the application and the investment dead weight.

Without managing (and mandating) user-behavior in the enterprise with a repository, a process is all but completely shot.  Forget about requiring users to follow procedures when they depend solely on generic tools like Windows explorer, Adobe Acrobat, and Microsoft Word without repositories on the back-end to enforce business rules.

As an example, how do you force a user to perform version control for all modified Word documents so that you can see the delta between all the revisions?  Without a repository, you can only hope that a user follows unenforceable rules regarding file naming conventions when they save newly modified files in a directory tree somewhere.  Oh, and good luck forcing them to save things in the right directory.
Vendors who try to sell you on “we don’t alter user behavior” are really saying, “you can continue to let the users do whatever they want.”  Repositories are a necessary evil indeed.

I’m in Pune, Maharastra for an extended period of time before visiting Delhi and then returning back to the States. I’m here working with a group of software engineers on my startup. Things are getting off to a good start — more on that subject as things evolve later.

Pictured above is the view from the balcony of the house where I am staying. The white bungalow in the foothills belongs to the Mayor apparently.

This is Hemant. He doesn’t speak very much English and I speak neither Marathi nor Hindi with the exception of all the bad words, but we somehow manage. Hemant is the caretaker of the house and visits every morning and prepares breakfast, etc. Most North Indians, unlike South Indians, prefer chai over coffee and as a result, I have been drinking much more of it than I typically do in the States. There’s an instant chai/coffee machine in the office that makes a fantastic cup of cardomom chai. You would never know that it came from a machine.

Overall, I like Pune. Not unlike the rest of India, the people are quite friendly. Quite a few technology companies have setup shop here and in Bangalore. Pune is emerging as the next best alternative to Bangalore considering the high cost of living there now.

That’s another subject entirely for a different day —- India is getting expensive on a number of levels because of the gold rush. The weak American dollar doesn’t help either though. I feel sorry for the millions of already poor Indians because things will just get more expensive for them without getting better first. At some point in the next decade, Africa will be the only place left to use as outsource venues.

Let me get something out on the table:  I’m a schwag whore.  I’m too modest to ask for it, but will gladly accept it when offered.   And if I can have it delivered monthly for the low, low cost of $14.95 —- well then sign my ass up.

Link:  Valleyschwag