Month: May 2006

Graduation Speech: Cheney’s humor, McCain booed

Cheney-Rumsfeld: Long time buddies

Check out this article about Cheney’s recent speech at LSU (graduation ceremony). It just confirms that its virtually impossible for Rumsfeld be dumped as long as Cheney is around. Nice to read that Cheney at least has a sense of humor. Haven’t come across anything to this effect since the start of this administration.

Senator McCain: Kissing up to the Conservatives

Senator McCain was booed at his speech in at NY’s New School. It is understandable given that he has lately been busy playing politics to gear up for his Presidential bid. Despite being a war veteran with the image of “straight shooter” he has been actively supporting the war in Iraq. Hats off to the students for their bold speeches. It take plenty of guts and conviction!

WI vs India: First ODI

Boy! What a close match!

India unnecessarily choked (almost!) and drove the match to the brink. Mohd. Kaif fighting his way back to form almost earned his team a defeat by struggling at the very end before pulling it off with a 4 on the penultimate delivery. If India had lost, cries for Kaif’s head would have multiplied overnight. In any case, I suspect the man seems to be recovering from his slump.

Dravid’s innings was perfect, to say the least. He appears to be in the best form of his career. Leading from the front, he should no signs of panic whatsoever even when the asking rate started to climb. His pull shot and straight drive of Taylor early in the innings were absolute copy-book. His six over mid-on showed that he can make the occassional big hits when needed.

The WI are so unpredictable and that’s part of why they are an interesting bunch to watch. When WI get going, they can be match winners. A case in point. Taylor who opened the bowling was instantly attacked by both Dravid and Viru. He came back into the attack with 4 overs to go and produced a gem of an over. Kaif faced 5 balls which produced no runs and the last ball earned him a single!

The seamers bowl at a consistent 135+. Batsman like Gayle and Lara can single handedly destroy the opposition. However, the WI fielding was what made the ultimate difference. So many direct hits were missed and a few catches were dropped which combined proved too costly for the team as a whole.

TiECon 2006: Day 1

Attended TiECon 2006 (Day 1). It was packed. In fact, you realize right at the parking lot!

Here is a brief summary of the happenings based on sessions I attended.

Shashi Tharoor, Arnie and John Doerr were the big draws of the day.

Shashi Tharoor came across as a charming, British-accented, intelligent, sensible speaker. His fine speech blended UN issues such as terrorism, poverty, hunger, etc with the TiECon themes of entrepreneurship, disruption and convergence. Here are a few interesting quotes from the speech.

  • “The Internet revolution has a lot of liberty, some fraternity and absolutely no equality”.
  • “You can have Coca Cola without being Coca Colonized”
  • “We are like Egyptian Mummies, pressed for time”
  • “What you understand is very often based on our assumptions. So we should question our assumptions”
  • When asked about the relevance of UN he narrated a story about Adam & Eve. Apparently, Eve was out of sorts and kind of ignoring Adam. In response Adam asked Eve, “Is there someone else?” In other words, if not the UN who else?
  • An American agriculture expert once went to Punjab on a special mission to help Indian farmers. He asked the India farmer where his farm ends and the man pointed to him and showed him that the farm ended at the far away fence. In response the American said he had to drive for a couple of hours in his tractor to the south end of his farm, then another 3-4 hours to the other end etc. etc. In response, the Indian farmer said, “I know exactly what you mean, I too had a tractor like that once!”.

John Doerr: The chat between John Doerr and Michael Malone (Virtual Corp fame) was informative.

  • John Doerr said that KP is no longer a white boys club has a global face. He showed a picture of the KP’s team with a couple of India and Chinese faces.
  • According to him Energy, Clean tech and Green Tech are hot area for investment.
  • He also talked about social entrepreneurship. The importance of support people like Muhammed Yunus (Of Grameen Bank) and someone who runs performs Eye operations in India (Sankara Eye Foundation??) (He couldn’t remember the name).
  • John is big on the threat of Global warming. He showed pictures of the ice melting in Iceland. What the world would look like if more of that melting continued etc.

Arnold Schwazanegger: Arnie walked into great applause and launched into a standard campaign speech riding on his recent budget surplus wave. Nothing new, just the usual pitch but I thought he did a fine job of the delivery with no notes whatsoever. He didn’t fumble unlike Bush does so often. I think he is going to be really hard to beat for the Demos come Nov given their lack of star power.

After his speech each of the TiE past President (Suhas, Kanwal, Raj, Sridhar, Kailash) asked a question each. Arnie didn’t produce any great answers but did a fair job but stayed on message at all times. Kanwal (true to his style) asked him a pointed question. “When do you plan to visit Bangalore?” Without being direct or committal, Arnie launched into a long pitch about how India and US relations are important etc . etc.

A couple of Arnie’s humorous quips.

  • “I am finally at a place where I am not the only one with an accent”
  • Looking at all the TiE Presidents he said, “No women here?”

Web 2.0 Panel: I attended the session on Web 2.0 moderated by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame. The panel featured a couple of VCs and founders of “digg“, “Kaboodle” and “Sphere“. The gentleman from Sphere was extremely articulate and his comments were by far the best of the lot. I was disappointed about the lack of concrete discussion on business models. Why are VCs investing? What d they look for? What excited them in this space? It appeared as though there was none. From what I could gather, Web 2.0 has a lot of cool things happening, but is quite speculative at this point from a purely business perspective.

The Complex Sale, Inc.: Rick Page, author and founder of this firm spoke about Sales, Sales strategy etc. The slides were very good but I wasn’t necessarily bowled over by the pitch. Maybe I am just too jaded from all the sales stuff I have heard over the years (hunter, farmer and the works..).

Personally, I think the Internet has changed sales dramatically, especially, when selling a commoditized low cost product, where the Internet is the primary medium for lead generation. In such scenarios, for a large part, the actual sale itself happens via the internet. You make the sales very often without ever meeting the customer. The customer signs up for free asks a few questions (support) during use and then signs up. There is no warm body making the actual sale and coming home with a p.o.

This is very different from conventional sales. I don’t think the sales person who can accomplish this fits into the conventional sales categories. In fact, it is a combination of marketing savvy and sales. There was little or no discussion on this topic at this talk.

I think this market is ripe for growth of consultants! (Seth Godin comes to mind). How do you sell on the net? What’s an effective sales strategy? What does a good sales person who can make this happen look like?

Ballmer Interview

Check out Steve Ballmer’s interview in the Mercury News (reg required). I liked his response to this question in particular…

Q A bunch of companies are offering Web-based applications that could replace Windows. How do you decide which applications to rewrite for the Web?

A The question is, which ones can the user benefit from if they’re rewritten? We did the first real Web application. It’s called Outlook Web Access, which was the first Ajax application. Why? Because there are systems that don’t have Outlook on them. That one made sense. Word, it’s not as clear. You give up something when you move to Ajax, vs. a rich client-user interface. So we’ll run through, and see where it makes sense.

There are so many Web 2.0 companies out there doing so many cool things without even a semblance of a reliable business model. The above response is a clear indication that MS is actively look at these cool new ways of doing things. I suspect MS will strike when the time is right, and destroy a bunch of these startups in one sweep unless of course a new Google is born out of one of them!

Browster is cool, sometimes

Check out this plug that saves you more than a few clicks. I find this most helpful when I search. You get a bunch of results on the search page and you can just point to each of the search results and a window pops up automatically when you just point to any of the links. The window goes away when you move the cursor away from the link. Its kind of a virtual window but you can still click for links inside this window to see other pages.

It is a nice feature, but can be annoying at times when it opens when you don’t actually want it to. (This works for any links on any page and not only for search results pages). Once you get used to it, its hard to live without it.

Viru missing Dada makes no sense

I don’t see how the team could be missing Ganguly. The team has been winning like never before. Dravid has done a terrific job as captain (even standing up for Viru!). So much new talent has come to. In fact, Viru’s place in the team has been questioned! I don’t see how he could have said that the team missed Ganguly. Certainly, the couldn’t have missed him on the field!

Viru was unnecessarily re-starting the Ganguly controversy. The BCCI was right to warn Viru.
I wish someone had asked him how and why the team missed Ganguly! Perhaps just at an emotional level? If so, just too bad. Dada just didn’t have the personal form to justify his continued presence in the team.

Pramod Mahajan

Pramod Mahajan had a bright future in Indian politics ahead of him. He was articulate and a great communicator. Given that he was one of the younger (relatively) leaders in the BJP, India’s leading opposition party, he had a great opportunity ahead of him in the years ahead. In fact, it was rumored that he was next in line to take over the party Presidency and that the current President was only a stop-gap arrangement.

Wonder what will happen to his brother, Pravin Mahajan now. Life imprisonment perhaps? You never know, chances are we won’t hear about it in the press!

Immigrant Workers Stay off Work

Immigrant workers staying away from work on Mon had one positive effect yesterday in the bay area — less traffic on the freeway! In any case, the “strike” has given the much needed immigration reform greater visbility. However, given that it is an election year, its unlikely that it will turn into any concrete legislation.