I had a heart-felt conversation with a special someone several months ago about why I chose entrepreneurship as the next path in my career. I know that being an entrepreneur means freedom on various levels, but being a successful entrepreneur also means being able to make significant differences in the name of humanity. I will always admire the Gates Foundation for such efforts and hope to proportionally accomplish the same.
I found out recently that I didn’t need to be a successful entrepreneur with my new startup to make a difference. I found a case while I was in Coimbatore, India of a six month old child who was born with a hole in his/her heart. I never met the child or the parents, but I can only imagine their distress to think that their infant would die prematurely because they could not afford the cost of heart surgery. The parents are field workers who likely won’t earn enough in the course of a year to cover the expenses of the operation or the resultant hospital care.

Needless to say, the child underwent heart surgery and is recovering well. They don’t know who I am nor will they ever meet me. This experience solidifies what I already knew about myself: I was put on Earth to help people.

I tell you this because I realize the importance of helping people in a more direct manner rather than through an intermediary organization like the United Way where significant administrative costs are incurred. And it feels good.

I was unable to put the podcast together with the usual voice over without my mixer/mic setup that I have at home in the States. Rather than not do one at all, I decided to forge ahead and put out a podcast sans personal song introductions, wit, humor and overall pearls of wisdom. Surely, some of my dedicated fans will miss my soothing voice, but alas you may have to wait until I return from India. I’ll try to find an alternate method of creating the podcast by next week.

Update:  I figured out the problem.  A particular soundcard driver was behaving badly.  Fear not — you shall hear my voice once again.
Here’s a tracklist:

Asobi Seksu - Strings
Butterglory - It’s Still Raining
Pants Yell - New #4
Sam Roberts - With A Bullet
Hank - I’m A Stranger Here
Iron and Wine | Calexico - 16, Maybe Less
The Zincs - Sunday Night
Future Bible Heroes - I’m Lonely (And I Love It)
Teenage Fanclub - Time Stops
Anna Oxygen - Fake Pajamas
Hood - The Negatives
Rilo Kiley - Wires And Waves
Interpol - Public Pervert (Carlos D. Mix)
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.

May 8th marks the election day for the position of Chief Minister for the State of Tamil Nadu, India. I’m watching closely because I’m fascinated with some of the circumstances of the event.

What do George Bush, Silvio Burlusconi, Jayalalithaa Jayaram, and Muthuvel Karunanidhi have in common? They have significant influence over or direct ownership in major media outlets in their respected regions that has contributed to their political aspirations and disparate wealth compared to their constituents.
George Bush doesn’t own Fox News, but it would be hard to question his influence over the station, it’s reporters, and overall political stance. It has become the mouth-piece of the White House over the years, but the separation of the two parties gives average Americans the perception of “fair and balanced” reporting. Indeed, we know that it’s not.

Nor is Jayalalithaa’s Jaya TV fair and balanced. She doesn’t even bother to hide the fact that she owns the station and directs a disproportionate amount of time towards her agenda rather than fairly distributed airtime for all candidates.

Burlusconi, who resigned recently as PM of Italy, along with his family own the Finnivest Group, making him Italy’s richest person and the 25th richest person in the entire world. Without a doubt, his interest in major Italian media outlets has contributed in unfair ways to his dominance in politics.

Back to Tamil Nad — Karunanidhi’s family no longer owns a significant portion of Sun TV, but his relationship to the media giant is unquestionable. One doesn’t make a clean break after significant ownerhip with an organization as large as Sun TV.

Frankly, I’m appalled that the Italians and Indians allow for such obvious conflicts of interest.  A new candidate hardly has a fighting chance against wealthy incumbents who own multiple forms of media outlets including newspapers.  Nor does can a new candidate with little financial resources compete against much wealthier opponents who promise colour televisions to entire state.  But it doesn’t end there:  Not to be one-upped, Jayalalithaa promises an engineering college in every district.

Preying on the poor and uneducated with half-assed promises through self-owned media outlets for political gain is simply criminal.  And I thought it was only American politicians that had their own interests in mind.

Chris Messina spoke about microformats at BarCampBangalore. It’s a subject that I have been thinking quite a bit about lately. Specifically, I have been thinking about the hAtom microformat because of it’s relevance to my startup.

In general, microformats introduce a standard way of describing elements in a web page. Contact information can be described in a web page using hCard for instance. Applications that are aware of microformats can automatically make use of the described data in useful ways. An application can automatically get contact information where hCard is being used in a web page and store it in your address book.

hAtom removes the need to have a separate feed for content because the content becomes the feed. Users will no longer think that the web page is broken when they see the raw RSS feed by clicking on the familiar orange subscribe icons. Instead, they will be redirected to a more friendly page where they can choose to subscribe using their chosen readers much like what happens when a publisher uses Feedburner to manage their feed.

Microformats are disruptive, but they require both sides of the content to be participative. In other words, publishers and application developers must both choose to make use of microformats.