On The Margins

Thursday July 01, 2004

[ Web ] Liberty Alliance Interoperability Logo

Liberty Alliance has announced that nine companies (Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Netegrity, Novell, Oracle, Ping Identity, Sun, and Trustgenix) have earned the Liberty Alliance Interoperable Logo.

This follows the earlier news of Intel joining the Liberty Alliance.

2004-07-01 22:14:41.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Personal ] Jessica in Bangalore--a question of odds

What are the odds of meeting a friend with no prior planning?

Well, if you live in the same village, town, city or country, there could be some good odds.

But what are odds anyway? For example, what were the odds that you would be reading this piece of writing when the universe started or when you got up this morning? Quite slim . . . and yet it has happened . . . If life was all predictable and we could have a good handle of odds regarding everything we do, what sort of life would that be? It certainly would be a life without any true dialog, and such a life will be an unexamined life and not worth living, according to Socrates . . . but let's stop all that philosophizing.

On my first trip to India, in the first few hours in Bangalore this Wednesday, while having breakfast at the Richmond Hotel, I ran into Jessica Smith, a friend from J-School who has been working for the Marketplace news organization as the Tokyo Bureau Chief for some time. Marketplace reports are regularly broadcast by public radio stations around the U.S. You can do a search for Jessica's stories here. As a sample, I recommend a recent, wonderful story on the Honda-GE collaboration to construct new types of small jet engines.

Jessica is here, obviously, to work on some stories on the changes in India, the high-tech industry in Bangalore, not to mention the few other fun stories that she has in her plans. I joined Jessica on her dinner visit to Dr. Vasanthi Srinivasan, a professor of organizational behavior and HR management at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. What followed was a delightful conversation touching various topics. (Since Jessica has not yet filed her report, I will keep silent about the details.)

The chances of meeting Jessica in Bangalore was quite slim when I left San Francisco, and neither of us could have predicted it but it did happen . . . I wonder how any science would formulate these everyday (and yet life-significant) coincidences into neatly packaged concepts of its theories?

2004-07-01 19:32:13.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.