Mani's blog: Mani Chandrasekaran's Weblog

Image Linked from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Story_2050

From the "The Hindu":

Sun Micro provides special effects tech platform for ‘Love Story 2050’ :

Bangalore, June 13 Sun Microsystems has announced that it is the technology partner for the sci-fi Hindi movie Love Story – 2050.
Sun has provided the technical platform to create special effects for this movie directed by Mr Harry Baweja, starring his son Harman Baweja, along with actors Priyanka Chopra and Boman Irani.
The post-production and visual effects have been done at studios such as WETA (behind movies like Lord of the Rings and King Kong), John Cox, Rising Sun Pictures (Harry Potter and Superman Returns) and Prime Focus India.
The Sun brand also appears in Love Story through some in-film placements. The movie releases on July 4.
Mr K.P. Unnikrishnan, Director – Marketing, Alliances and Teleweb Sales, said, “Technology forms the foundation of sci-fi films. Hence, the need to get the technology right is of utmost importance for the creators of special effects and animation for these films.
“Today, technological advancements are allowing filmmakers not just in Hollywood but also back home to experiment by opening up and enabling a world of possibilities for story-telling in cinema.”
Sun has worked with Hollywood on animation movies such as Barnyard and Big Buck Bunny. Love Story – 2050 is Sun’s first association with an Indian movie.

I travelled to Chennai and Hyderabad last week, to speak at the Sun ISV CxO summit. In the process, I travelled through the new Bangalore and Hyderabad airports. My comments on the airports:

Bangalore Airport :
Its good, and better than the old airport. Connectivity is still a major pain for people living not staying North of Bangalore. I stay in Sanjaynagar, it took me just 40 mins to reach the airport. Its got good connectivity to the NH7 (Bellary Road). The baggage handling, and toilets needs to be ramped up. Its smaller compared to Hyderabad. You have free wifi at Bangalore airport

Hyderabad Airport :
Its very good, and better than the old airport. Connectivity is still an issue, as it is much farther to the city. Looks like an elevated road is coming up. You get hit by the hot Hyderabad weather, and the walk to the cabs, is a long way off. Baggage handling is great, and lots of people to help you.

My verdict (even though, I am an extreme and partisan Bangalorean), Hyderabad airport is better in terms of airport infrastructure.

It was a fantastic weekend, it poured like crazy in Bangalore. A couple of shots on June 1st 2008, Sunday night on Brigade road. Lots of rain last week, and more predicted in June !!

Happy Tamil New year and Malayalam new year !!

Happy Ugadi folks !!

Happy New Year, to all of you and your families. I am not planning anything great, probably tuck my daughter to bed, and watching "Krishna" or "Hanuman" with her.
I have had a good year, rejoined Sun, changed groups within Sun, and hopefully making an impact for Sun in India. On a personal front, the missus and the daughter have done well. The kiddo is speaking in full sentences, in english, tamil and kannada Its the air, in Bangalore which makes all of us "trilingual" !! Now, if I can only make her stop picking up my swear words

I wish everybody a Happy Deepavali . May this Deepavali bring prosperity, peace , happiness and good health to you and your family.

Linked from Shrikrishna Pundoor's photostream on Flickr.

Its a looonggg weekend for us at Sun India, the holidays start from Thursday and end on Sunday. looking forward to a great weekend of relaxation and bursting crackers I bought crackers online at indiaplaza.in and was very happy with their delivery. They seemed to offer a good discount, need to open the box to check out the real contents.

The Hindu has a nice article on the history of the various aspects of migration to Bangalore. Even though, I was born in Bangalore, it was an eye opener for me. Nice reading.

A quick link to the Fortune magazine's global forum being held in India this week. Lots of interesting material in this micro-website. very upbeat and bullish about India.

I attended a seminar by a VP, from a very well known (top 5) software company in the world, who have a engineering center in India (at Hyderabad). There were a few interesting points during the seminar, which I thought was worth sharing.

1. Start small with one or two products. The product selected should be fairly complete and end to end development should happen here. This should include engineering (test and dev), program/product management and other stuff.
2. Cost was NOT the factor for doing product development in India, but the talent factor, growing economy etc are the main drivers. He mentioned that, if there was mandate at the executive level, for example 10-15% work should be done in India, then all the BUs will dump some work here, just because they have a mandate to do some work here. This was not a desired state to be doing work. I agree on this point.
3. Things like product management which require interacting with customers, may not be available in India for all products. In these cases, product managers should travel to the markets to meet the customers.
4. Things like number of patents filed, are a good indicator of the quality of work being done at an engineering center.
5. After establishing a foothold, the next step is to look for innovation to happen here at the center. This means new products, entirely incubated and developed from India.
6. Contrary to a popular perceptions, testing is a fantastic career path at this company. They have hired people from IITs into test. Their role is on par with dev engineers.

Challenges faced and being faced:

1. Finding people who have worked for several years in the same product line.
2. Finding people with product planning/product marketing and user experience skills in India.

Other interesting tidbits:

1. For any idea to be interesting to this company, the product should have a revenue potential of at least $100 million, in the next few years
2. The most growth in India is in mobile (I heard something like 6 million new users every month), entertainment (TV, films), retail.
3. Finding a way of making money from product revenue, continues to be a challenge in India. Is it ad based, subscription based?
4. There was a interesting comparison of how many months, it took different companies to achieve a million subscribers: iLike < 1 month, Skype - 3 months, Hotmail 6 months and MySpace - 10 months

Finally, however cool the technology could be, but the focus should be ON the customer and what the customer needs.

Disclaimer: This is not a complete transcript of the proceedings, I could have misheard some stuff. I have tried to provide a few interesting points, which were of interest to me.

India played Australia in Bangalore on Sep 29th, 2007. I had always wanted to see a day and night match, and bought tickets for the match. It was a fantastic experience watching the match from close quarters, but alas the rains came and played spoilsport. Australia looks invincible and if we win a single match, I would be happy. The latest news is that India is two matches down against Australia Please enjoy the few images, I shot with my Nokia 6681 phone camera. very grainy and low res !!

My hometown is Bangalore, but I worked and lived in Boston for a few years (and I loved Boston). An interesting billboard, I noticed near the Windsor Manor bridge, Bangalore - seemed to be very apt in describing my situation !!

Disclaimer: No, I am not promoting anything here, budt bangalore

Seva sadan is an Girl's orphanage located at Malleswaram, Bangalore. I have known about this orphanage for many years, and they have been doing a fantastic job of adopting girls and bringing them up as good citizens. We started donating a little bit since last year, and I would request everyone to please donate whatever amount you can. The place is located opposite MLA High School/College on 14th cross Malleshwaram, and its hard to miss. The complete address is as follows:

Ms Vimala Rangachar, Hon Secretary 
Seva Sadan
Available - Mon-Sat 8.00-5.00 IST
14th Cross Road, Malleswaram, Bangalore - 560003.
Ph 91-80-23347830 

We selected this place, as it seems to fit our cultural ethos and the organisation is a purely voluntary one, with NO political/religious connection. Of course there are quite a few other organisations in Bangalore as well, which are doing a good job.

An interesting report from reuters in the the New York Times.

India Overtakes U.S. As Nokia's No.2 Market
By REUTERS Published: August 23, 2007 Filed at 6:21 a.m. ET NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Nokia , the world's top cellphone maker, said on Thursday India overtook the United States in the second quarter to become its second-biggest market by sales after China. Nokia shipped 60 million handsets from its factory near the southern Indian city of Chennai in the 18 months to August, and CEP and President Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo expects demand to remain strong as India's user base surges. "India has quickly become one of the largest markets," he told reporters in New Delhi, adding he expects demand will not be limited to low-cost phones. Globally, Nokia sold 100.8 million phones in April-June and, according to research firm Gartner, had a market share of 36.9 percent.
Read more at the website. On a personal note, we have four phones from Nokia between my parents and my family