Yielding to the Cloud

The signs have been everywhere but I didn’t notice them before.  Well, I noticed them individually but didn’t integrate them.

• My web site was built with minimum investment: bought the domain name and did the rest myself, and hosted it on Google’s servers because the price was right ($0).
• The e-mail is now hosted at Google.
• When it comes to sending documents through e-mail, I don’t any more. They get put on Google Apps and links get sent to collaborators.
• The logo of my web site was designed using the Google Font.

So is my world, slowly but surely, yielding to Google (check out this link, it’s funny!)?  I hope not, but it’s yielding to The Cloud. To wit:

• My to-do list is hosted by Toodledo.  I don’t even know where they are!
• My blogs are hosted at WordPress.  I don’t know where they are either.
• The hottest trend in software is SaaS: Software as a Service.  At least a couple of new companies they talked about at 128ICG last week were SaaS companies.
• My ex-business-unit is switching over from internally hosted web applications to SaaS.

I think this baby has legs and it’s starting to run.

The Zen of Time

Did you ever read Alan Lightman? An essay on Time seems to have stuck with me after all these years. Too lazy to look for the book for exact quotes, I will summarize what I remember of it, although Lightman was much more eloquent:

There are two kinds of Time. First, the Time of clocks, schedules, indeed the Time of Physics. Second, the Time of living, growth, retrenchment — perhaps the Time of life? They are not the same Time!

One is the Time of alarm clocks, driving to work, schedules, meetings, Outlook Calendar, weeks, weekends, deadlines. The other is the Time of to-do lists, endless hours spent doing just one thing, doing things till they’re done. And discovering, perhaps, that they’re still not done and must be done again.

One is in a world where relationships are defined by lines on an org chart. The other is where people don’t have to call you back if they don’t want to. They are not the same worlds.

One is Father Time. The other is Mother Time? I’ve never heard the phrase but it makes sense. A month ago, I crossed from one Time to the other.

Is it possible to integrate the yin and the yang?

Where’s the Engineering?

In the past couple of weeks, I have been looking at what’s being taught at the local CS colleges and how well things like performance and security are part of the curriculum. Turns out they are not!

No matter, I said. I will contact some of them and see about teaching it. So I went to the Barnes and Noble looking for an appropriate textbook — the one in Burlington, it’s a two-story behemoth of a store. I already had one textbook in mind but wanted to see if there were any others that might be better. Turns out they don’t have any potential textbooks on this. They have shelves full of computer books: the “for Dummies” books, books on Java, PHP, Python, SQL, Oracle, … Nothing on how to engineer systems that work!

Over at ACM.org, the Mother Church of Computer Science, things are definitely better. Look over their recommended curriculum for colleges. There is but a gentle nod to engineering (you’ll have to click next a couple of times). The links to actual course descriptions were broken today so I wonder…

When I first saw this article about the go-fast switch, I filed it away as an amusing story about an urban legend. With this blog post as context, I’m saddened.

Testing the web site

The web site is ready, now what?

A recommendation to test it. Test the web site? Not like a QA person would test it — by pushing all the buttons and making sure it all works. No, not like that.

My IIT friends will all fondly remember Prof. Ramamurthy. Well, maybe not uniformly fondly. Prof. Ramamurthy taught Physics. He was the toughest professor we ever had. We would come out of his tests feeling that we had done pretty well. The feeling would persist until we got the grades back! He would have gone over every proof, every assumption, and challenged every step. At the end of it all, I felt that I had learnt not only Physics from him but also how to make persuasive arguments.

Selling isn’t like doing proofs. People who buy our services won’t all be like Prof. Ramamurthy.  We hope not, anyway We still have to reach the right people. There are a lot of non-technical factors that go into buying decisions. But I am an engineer. I can’t sell pet rocks. I want to sell a service that provides real value. Once we know we have a good service, we will figure out how to sell it.

Two questions: 1. does this offering address the problem I set out to solve? 2. How executives running large projects would be persuaded by the thoughts on the web site? That’s my next step: to solicit opinions from people who can at least think like potential buyers. We want to test the web site like that!

Any volunteers? Know anyone who might be willing to play this role?

How to subscribe to this blog

Some friends aren’t sure how to subscribe so here’s a very brief tutorial.

I originally thought that to subscribe to a blog would mean that one would enter their e-mail address someplace and every time the blog was updated, they would get an e-mail. This is possible but not preferred. To get an e-mail every time the blog is updated, you can sign up for it at FeedBlitz.

The preferred method of subscription is from news readers like My Yahoo or Google Reader. The advantage is that if a particular post is changed 5 times, you don’t get 5 e-mails; you just get the latest version.

Here’s what my My Yahoo page looks like. Notice the subscribed-to blog?

To get this (or any) blog to show up on your news reader, look for the icon on the blog page and click on it.  It will ask you what reader you want to use and you’re in business!

Once it is on the page, you can move it around. Unless you’re my mother, you probably don’t want it at the top of your news page

Good luck.

Remembering my Grandfather

Starting something like this is as much a personal growth thing as it is a business or career thing.

A recent article in the New York Times got me thinking along these lines. I knew my Grandfather as one of the most loving and inspirational human beings, and successful. On the success question, family legend was different: he had started a number of businesses in his youth that had all failed. After all those failures in the late-30s and 40s, he got a series of jobs and paid off his debts. Then in the late 50s he struck out on his own again. I guess he was wired for Growth.

He dusted off his educational certifications and opened his Architecture practice in Chandigarh. Chandigarh was just starting to come into its own and he did well.

I won’t dwell on the parallels between his practice and my new thing — it is still evolving and who knows what shape it will take. My key take-away from the article is that after years of avoiding failure, I feel prepared to embrace it.

The Company Name

Two months ago I couldn’t even spell aunt-pre-noor and now I are one

I went to this class on Entrepreneurship on the weekend. Of course, that set of  flurry of activity in the early part of the week.  The first order of business was to find a name for the business.

Thanks to very inspired suggestions from some friends, I have settled on Quantitecture as the name.  It’s easy to spell.  Saying it is difficult the first time but then it practically rolls of the tongue – hey, it much better than having to say or spell Entrepreneurship!

Choosing a new name also meant getting a new domain name and rebuilding the web site while incorporating lessons of that one-day class in shaping the offering.  All that now done, I am back to marketing starting tomorrow.

Meditations on a New Venture

Update Jan 5, 2009: This blog was expected to be a documentation of starting my new venture. It has turned out to be more of a meditation. It has allowed me space to write and to discover its joy. Today, I changed the name of the blog to Meditations on a New Venture from New Venture Experiences.

The response I have received from family, friends and colleagues has been tremendous.  I am truly fortunate to have this support.  In the past I have reached out to folks by e-mail and gotten a response.  There is only one problem: you don’t get to decide when I should not be sending you e-mails.  The intent of this blog is to put that control back in your hands.  You may (or may not) subscribe to the blog.

I will post questions here rather than send e-mails.

I am very enthusiastic about it and rather than composing e-mails to tell friends and family of the various milestones on this journey, it may be better to blog about it — that way, those that are interested can subscribe and get the information and others who are perhaps not as interested wouldn’t get “junk mail” from me.

As I write this blog, I will be mindful of confidences.  It will not be a tell-all type of thing.  Unless I have your explicit permission to mention your name on the blog, I will not do so.

Of course, if there are successes, I will let you know about them.  If setbacks, not so much!