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Discussion on Social Software Development
Prakash Narayan
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Thursday Jun 05, 2008
Social Applications
Social Applications
Social Applications or Social Software is now maintream - has to be if it is listed in Wikipedia, right :)

As the definition states, the software allows users to interact and share data with others.  In other words, the applications are personalized. So, what are the features or elements of such applications that truly make them useful.

Elements of Social Applications
The pyramid to the left starts at the bottom with a broad spectrum of applications with a focus on Products and Features. Clearly all applications need to work as advertised or be Functional. Applications should also be Reliable, scalable, available and accurate. The Usability and ease of use (or Convenience) of the application are important. We are now reaching the point in the spectrum where the chasm between general applications and social applications is crossed. Social applications need to portray a memorable experience that is worth sharing - or they need to be Pleasurable. Finally, the application needs to be Meaningful in that it has personal significance. As we move towards the top of the pyramid, we observe that the focus is on the User's Experiences and their activities. It is less about the user interface and more about the features that tap into the motivations and beliefs of the consumers of the application. So, what is an example of such an application. Say you go on a family vacation and you post pictures on flickr. However, not everyone wants to go through the whole slide show of 700 pictures. So, you tag them and you would like to create an application that runs a slideshow of photos of a particular tag (which is an input to the application). Now, you want to mash in Google Maps into that slideshow so that people can see where that photo was taken. Such an application satisfies all the elements of the social application pyramid.

There have been some eminent people extolling social applications.
  • Marc Andreessen talked about it soon after Facebook opened their platform. He says, "This is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry"
  • Tim O'Reilly says, "We're just at the beginning of understanding how the social graph will change every web application... what is emerging is the identity and social subsystem of the future internet operating system."
  • BJ Fogg, in an interview with Fast Company says, "The ability for ordinary people to create something, put it out in the world, and use metrics and iterations to make it better and better. It's going through this loop of innovation and product design, being guided by users and user data. It's continuing to improve products and experiences based not on guesses, not on consultants, not on checklists, but on real data and real usage. That's very exciting, and it's only going to get easier."
Posted at 09:42AM Jun 05, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Tuesday May 27, 2008
JavaOne 2008
JavaOne 2008
I meant to follow up on my previous post on CommunityOne with a writeup on JavaOne right away. After all, JavaOne immediately followed CommunityOne in the calendar. In any case, here are my (long overdue) impressions on JavaOne.

The opening keynote (on Tuesday, May 6th) featured Rich Green. He reiterated the focus of "Java+You" - where consumers are creating and consuming content through both wired and mobile devices. Java technology enables developers to create a wide range of rich, interactive applications. To this end, he invited Ian Freed, VP of Kindle at Amazon, to demonstrate this wireless reading device. Either the demo gods were not kind to Ian or Rich Green was not patient enough - his live demo of downloading a book on the device did not work! The highlight of the keynote was an appearance by Rock and Roll legend, Neil Young. He described his life-long desire to produce media that would allow him to share an interactive experience with his fans - complete with music, videos, photos and the web. He failed at every attempt because of the shortcomings of the solutions. Finally, the combination of Blu-ray and Java technologies allowed him to create a 10-disc collection that covers his first 10 years!

Bob Brewin's keynote captured the latest advancements in Java EE, Java SE and Java FX. Roberto Chinnici led the discussion on Java EE. He rehashed Java EE 5 platform before turning his attention to Java EE 6 - which features support for RESTful web services and more extensive use of annotations across all web APIs. Java EE 6 will add extensibility points - making it easier to treat scripting languages, such as Ruby, as first-class citizens. Danny Coward next talked about Java SE 6 and the upcoming Java SE 7 - which will support scripting languages like JavaScript, jRuby, JavaFX Script. Finally, there were some cool JavaFX demos. The BeJUG folks showed Parleys.com. This is a web-based RIA that is an interactive learning platform.

Jeet Kaul delivered the final keynote of the opening day. The theme for this session was, "Java Wherever You Are" - of applications that use Java ME to exploit constant connectivity. This was illustrated in the demos featured in the session. Loopt lets you find your friends on the map and see what they are up to. There was a demo of the Light-Weight User Interface Toolkit, LWUIT. This enables desktop-like UI capabilities on mobile devices. Finally, Christopher David of Sony Ericsson talked about  MSA - an umbrella standard that facilitates the development and deployment of a wide variety of applications, in a form that will be easily portable across a broad spectrum of mobile devices.

In earlier blog posts, I have been hinting on the project that I am working on for the last year. We had submitted an abstract for JavaOne back in November '07 - thinking that our product will be released by JavaOne and that we can talk about it. Due to a variety of reasons, the product is still not released. On Wednesday, May 7th, Todd Fast talked about the concept  and it was received very well. The following are some of the blog entries on Todd's talk that have been published since then:
 On the final day of JavaOne (Friday, May 9th), James Gosling gave the keynote. He calls it the "Java toy show" - where he invites the biggest and the best to demo their Java programs/devices on the big stage. Many of these are Duke's Choice award winners. The demo that drew that loudest applause was the Pulse smartpen - where the pen becomes a compute platform. The pen records audio and links the audio to what you write. I was among those who stood in line to purchase one immediately afterwards!
Posted at 04:25PM May 27, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Wednesday May 14, 2008
CommunityOne
CommunityOne
I was at CommunityOne and JavaOne all of last week. In this blog entry, I will attempt to capture the highlights from the various sessions, panels and demos that I attended. I expect that my report will spill over to more than one entry - to make it more readable.

Overall, the energy level of the conference was quite high - with 4000+ attendees at CommunityOne and 15,000+ attendees at JavaOne. There was a huge focus on mobility/Java everywhere/Java+You and the fact that the Java Platform is now being used by 200+ languages!

The CommunityOne event (on May 5th) opened with a keynote by Ian Murdock. Ian emphasized the role of communities to shape the computer industry. He also talked about the fundamental economic model in OpenSource. This was followed by a panel on "A Multitude of Models. How Communities Work". The panel was moderated by Matt Asay (Alfresco) and had a lot of community luminaries - including Marten Mickos (MySQL), Ted Leung (Python), Mike Evans (Red Hat), Jeremy Allison (Samba), Jim Zemlin (Linux Foundation) and Stormy Peters (OpenLogic).  They addressed questions on a wide range of topics - from "Who makes up these communities?" to "Satisfying the tension between the needs of contributors to the needs of businesses".

Rich Green came up on stage next and launched OpenSolaris. Rich Green at CommunityOne
This is completely revamped with a new logo (which can be seen on the picture to the right) and a much better OOTB experience. In fact, Stephen Hahn showed how easy and fast it is to install from the CD that was distributed to all attendees (you can download the ISO image here). Next, Jim Hughes and Jeff Bonwick demoed the ZFS data recovery feature. Jim used a sledgehammer to destroy a hard drive that was running and connected to the machine and Jeff used a power drill to drill a hole through another hard drive. ZFS quickly recovered the data from a backup onto a new pair of drives - live and onstage!

Later, I attended a session that showed a bunch of demos. There were a series of short presentations on various subjects by various speakers. The presenters quickly created demo applications and ran them, all the while explaining the language and / or environment. The JavaFX demo by Josh Marinacci was quite cool. Matt Quail provided some humor when he talked about, "You suck at WebApps".

The final session I attended at CommunityOne was by James Gosling in the NetBeans track. He invited a series of partners and NetBeans Community members to talk about their experience with NetBeans. Adam Myatt spoke about his latest NetBeans book Pro NetBeans 6. Dr. B.V. Kumar talked about the beginnings of NetBeans usage at Cognizant. Kumar also mentioned the SOA book that he co-authored with Tony Ng and me. This book should be available later this year.
Posted at 12:46PM May 14, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Wednesday Apr 23, 2008
Web2.0 Expo, Day1
Web2.0 Expo, Day 1
I caught a few sessions on Day 1 of Web 2.0 Expo. I will capture the gist of them later - once I have compiled all my notes. However, I wanted to write about Tim O'Reilly's keynote address. It was an electrifying talk - making me glad that I took the time to attend. Unfortunately, he finished 1-hour's worth of material in 20 minutes. I sure hope they make his slides available online later.

Tim started by examining the deep trends in the industry:
  • Internet as a platform
  • Harnessing colletive intelligence - applications become better as more people use them
  • Data as the "Intel Inside"
  • Software is being delivered as a Service
He then looked at the Opportunities that lie ahead:
  • Enterprises - it is all about letting users into the back office. Providing real time user facing services based on data provided by customers. One of the examples he gave here was Dell's Ideastorm.
  • Cloud Computing - this is the next frontier. Amazon pioneered here. Google seems to be following suit with their App Engine. Another interesting player here is EngineYard. 
  • Mobile phones - It is no longer about computers, but a wide variety of devices. He mentioned Microsoft Live Mesh (which they announced yesterday). In fact, he said, mobile phones will drive the paradigm shift from the "participation age" to the "ambient age".
He challenged the audience to think of audacious goals. He gave two examples here:
  • Microsoft's vision in the 70s to "Have a PC on every desk and in every home" (which was ridiculed by DEC's Ken Olsen)
  • Google's vision in the late 90s to make a business out of search by indexing all of the world's data
He asked, "Are we done yet?" and the answer was a resounding "No"

He concluded by reading a moving poem, "The Man Watching" by Rainier Maria Rilke.
Posted at 11:28PM Apr 23, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Tuesday Apr 22, 2008
SNAP Summit 2.0
SNAP Summit 2.0

I attended the SNAP Summit 2.0 on March 25th at the Commonwealth Club. While I had a lot to write about my experiences there, I was not able to sit down to do so until today. However, as I have mentioned in the past, this topic of Social Networking and Web 2.0 is fresh enough that even an almost month delayed blog entry remains relevant.

Besides, I wanted to get this entry in before I wrote about the Web 2.0 Expo that I will attend later this week :)

First, I should mention that all the slides for the event have been posted.

Joshua Porter, of bokardo design talked about the 5 major principles in Effective Social Interaction Design:
  1. Personal Value precedes network/social value.The example here is del.icio.us, where the user gains personal value by creating the social bookmark.
  2. Tie Behavior to identity. The example here is seller feedback on eBay.
  3. Give Recognition. The example here is digg. Another example he gave here was threadless.
  4. Show causation. We have seen this with Netflix. To get the best suggestions, rate the movies that you have seen.
  5. Leverage Reciprocity. We have seen this with LinkedIn. To get a recommendation on your profile, you give a few yourself.
Jim Benedetto, of MySpace taked about the MySpace Developer Platform. He talked about their commitment to OpenSocial. They have 200m users. They recently launched their developer platform and provide the applications access to information on a member's profile page in a safe, secure manner. They also have some technology (including a Javascript sanitizer called Caja) to ensure that applications are safe to run. He also talked on the business side of Social Platforms. He said that with their Hyper-Targeting technology, they have the ability to deliver directly targeted ads.

BJ Fogg gave an excellent presentation on Mass Interpersonal Persuasion (MIP). He claimed that Facebook is changing the behaviors of people through the psychology of persuasion. Not since the radio was invented in the 1890s has there been this significant an advance to change attitudes and behavior through persuasion. He talked about the six components of MIP:
  1. Persuasive Experience. To install, use, invite, comment, customize, join
  2. Automated Structure. Do not leave persuasion to chance and deliver it with fidelity
  3. Social Distribution. Applications must have a social angle and credibility matters
  4. Rapid Cycle. This builds momentum and enthusiasm - which in turn feeds into a higher rate of involvement
  5. Huge Social Graph. This can result in broad adoption
  6. Measured Impact. Instrument and measure everything (how many times the app was installed/run, etc.). It is also important to iterate constantly.
He compared how the other (familiar) genres of persuasion (Urban Legends, Chain Letters, Networking, email Forwarding, Software Virus) use these components.  None of them have all six components come together in a single system.

Finally, Dave Morin of Facebook talked about the Facebook platform. There are 67m active users on Facebook. Half of them are outside the US. 100+ applications get added every day! There are 300k developers with 30k applications. He mentioned the $10m fbfund through Accel and Founders Fund. He said that they were looking at creating long term value by offering:
    • A Frictionless platform. This allows developers to gain trust, provide valuable information and show meaningful activity.
    • Leveraging the social graph. This enables asynchronous conversations with the people in your social graph.
    • World class applications. Increased utility and functionality of applications. They will provide commerce functionality to applications with developer APIs and secure purchasing

Posted at 05:26PM Apr 22, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Monday Mar 17, 2008
"Hot Topic" on Developing Composite Applications
Sun Microsystems "Hot Topic" on Developing Composite Applications
Hot Topics video on Developing Composite Applications
Over six months back I had recorded a video on Composite Application Development using Java EE 5 with NetBeans 5.5.

Just recently I became aware that this video is now published. You can view the video from the Sun Learning Hot Topics page.

The demo would work just as well with NetBeans 6. You can follow along the demo that is shown in the video by downloading the InsuranceQuote zip file from wiki.netbeans.org.
Posted at 02:32PM Mar 17, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Friday Mar 07, 2008
Awards
Awards
After a hiatus of over two months, here is my second blog entry today! While we are working on a few interesting things here, it is not public yet - so I am not at liberty to blog about it (hence the sparse nature of my blog entries).

There are a few bits of good news that are worth mentioning:
Posted at 09:45AM Mar 07, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

VLab Panel on Social Networks
VLab Panel on Social Networks
I have been meaning to write about an event that I had gone to two weeks back and have not found the time to write down my thoughts! In most cases, the shelf life of a blog entry is quite short (a common analogy is a banana!). However, this event heralds the dawn of a new era - hence this blog entry will remain relevant for many more months.

On Feb 19th, the MIT-Stanford Venture Lab (VLab) hosted a panel at the Stanford Graduate Business School titled, "Shaking the Money Tree of Multi-Platform Social Networks". The moderator was Jeremiah Owyang, a Senior Analyst for Forrester Research. Jeremy maintains a blog here.

In the panel were, Kevin Marks from Google, Steve Cohen from Bebo, Jia Shen from RockYou, Sourabh Niyogi from SocialMedia and Ken Gullicksen - a VC from Morgenthaler Ventures.

Kevin Marks shepherds OpenSocial for Google. He spoke about OpenSocial from an academic viewpoint - what capabilities it offers and how people can use it. OpenSocial provides the application access to friends in the social graph. It manages the persistence of data and also manages the user's activity. Thus, compelling social networking applications can be built and these will immediately become available on multiple platforms.

Jia Shen talked about the value that an Application Platform brings. Application developers have the ability to add functionality in ways that the platform creators could not have imagined.

Sourabh Niyogi talked about how developers use the SocialMedia ad network to monetize social applications. They have 40+ developers making > $10k with them. 35 applications are generating > $500/day. "All this points to a social media economy", he said.

The discussion veered towards understanding what people do in social networks today. The set of responses included, Update Profile, Browse Profiles, Stalk / Peep, Connect with Friends, Communicate, Send Friend Requests, Listen to Music, Read Blog Posts, Write on Walls, etc. It was pointed out that none of these have any commerce associated with them. Steve Cohen responded saying that we are in the early stages of the new era of Social Computing. It took 3-4 years after we used the first browser in the nineties before we saw monetization of the internet by way of ecommerce. We are now "spoiled" and expect monetization from day 1. We need to wait for the platform to mature and then the monetization opportunities will get sorted out. The VC in the panel said that, "the dollars will follow the eyeballs".
Posted at 09:19AM Mar 07, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Wednesday Jan 02, 2008
Happy New Year 2008
Happy New Year 2008
Heres wishing all a very Happy New Year. Hope you had a restful and relaxing holiday break. Now it is time to go on the offense once again.

2007 just flew past too quickly. 2008 promises to be an exciting year. With the Beijing Olympics, the Elections and, of course, our product release (since we are operating under a cloak of secrecy, I am not able to talk more about it here. All I can say at this point is that we will be revealing it at http://buildtheweb.org) there is a lot to look forward to.

The year has certainly begun with good tidings:
Posted at 04:06PM Jan 02, 2008 by Prakash Narayan in Personal  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Wednesday Dec 05, 2007
NetBeans 6.0 ships
NetBeans 6.0 ships
You may have read by now that NetBeans 6.0 has shipped - at least the English version.

With NetBeans 6.0, the team has succeeded in consolidating all of Sun's IDEs into a single product. Remember that we used to have separate IDEs for visual development, Enterprise development, etc. The feedback we got was that while it was convenient for us to think of our users in mutiple quadrants, the users did not think of themselves that way! In addition, NetBeans 6.0 introduces support for Ruby and has become the best IDE for Ruby.

This has been a huge effort by the NetBeans team. They were given a target to ship before the end of the calendar year. They made it with a month to spare! Congratulations to them.

This release is receiving huge accolades from just about everyone who has used it - even from some of NetBeans' harshest critics in the past. Here is a sampling:
 If you are using any other IDE for your development, here are the Top 10 reasons to switch to NetBeans 6.
Posted at 05:55PM Dec 05, 2007 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Friday Nov 09, 2007
IEEE Computer Paper
IEEE Computer Paper
The November issue of IEEE Computer is all about Service Orientation.

In this issue there is a paper on "Full Life-Cycle Support for End-to-End Processes" that was authored by Bernhard Steffen and me. We discuss methodologies and platforms that support an end-to-end and round-trip engineering experience at the user level and how NetBeans can be used to realize this.

In addition to the above location, I have placed a link to the paper here.
Posted at 05:25PM Nov 09, 2007 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[2] Add to Technorati Favorites

Sunday Oct 28, 2007
SNAP Summit
SNAP Summit Ever since Facebook opened their platform, there is a new creed of social networking applications that seem to be generating usage numbers that were once thought possible for only Google to muster. Suddenly, in a matter of mere months, RockYou and Slide are becoming household names.

The Facebook platform was the topic of discussion at a day long summit at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco on Friday, October 26th. I was one of the 320 paid attendees. The first session was a panel on designing for Virality featuring, among others, RockYou CTO Jia Chen. There were'nt any revelations as such. The panelists concurred that it is important to track granular details from the beginning. The first 10-20 clicks that a user makes will determine if the application will be viral. They recommended to perform A/B testing once you have the analytics.

Ami Vora of Facebook gave a "State of the Platform" address. Apparently Facebook generates 60 billion pageviews per month - that implies 50 pages/day/user. Given that I don't even come close to that on my Facebook profile, there must be people who view a lot more that 50 pages/day! There are over 5,400 Facebook applications. Facebook has given 88,000 developer keys. Ami said that she attributes the success of the Facebook platform to three properties:
 Mark Mayo of Joyent spoke about scaling Facebook applications. He spoke of the phenomenal success of the "Are You Normal" (you need a Facebook account to view this link) application. This application (from Kizin) is adding 50,000 users/day and is completely hosted by Joyent. He talked about Vertical Scalability (maintain all state in the database) vs Horizontal Scalability. His advise was
 This was followed by a few panels on The Future of Social Network Advertising, a Blogger Roundtable moderated by Robert Scoble (who claimed to have 5,000 friends on Facebook!) and Platform strategies that work.

For me networking with like minded people was extremely valuable. I collected over 20 business cards and promised to get back in touch with them soon.
Posted at 11:20PM Oct 28, 2007 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Wednesday Oct 10, 2007
Sun CEC 2007
CEC 2007, Las Vegas
Paris, Las Vegas
Speaking at CEC 2007, Las VegasI have been in Las Vegas since Sunday for a conference. This is Sun's
internal conference for Customer Engineers and Partners called CEC,
or Customer Engineering Conference. Todd Fast and I are here to
speak about the project that I referred to in my previous entry.

Our talk went quite well. I got a scare on Sunday when I was
informed that not every partner attending this conference is covered
under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. So, we began our talk saying,
"Do not talk about this. Do not blog about this. If you are not a Sun
Employee and are not covered by an NDA, we still love you, but
we request that you leave the room now."

No one had to leave and we received a lot of positive feedback on the project.

On Monday evening, there was a "speedgeek" session. There were 10 tables and each presenter had to provide their spiel for 5 minutes
as the audience rotated from one table to another.

At the end, the audience got to vote on the "best project". Our project won the top prize.

Drummers before Jonathan's sessionOn Tuesday, there was a keynote session by Jonathan Schwartz.
With over 4000 people Jonathan Schwartz's keynote session at CEC attending the conference, the energy level
was quite high - the drummers (pictured to the left) only
accentuated this energy. Jonathan, as always, delivered a highly
motivational speech. He was in his element when someone asked
the question if we should be worried about the NetApps law suit.
He said, "No" and qualified it by saying that NetApps actually did
us a favor by filing the law suit in the first place. They validated
our technology and they did not have a basis for the law suit!


Sun CEC 2007, Las Vegas
Posted at 10:03AM Oct 10, 2007 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Monday Sep 17, 2007
Been busy
Been Busy I have been truly swamped for the last two months - hence the lack of postings on my blog. I have been working on jump starting a new project here at Sun. I cannot say too much about it as yet. Hopefully, I will have an entry on this project in a month or so - assuming that everything goes according to plan.

There is, however, plenty of activity on the NetBeans front. Starting today, NetBeans 6.0 Beta is available for download. NetBeans has been in the news of late. Just last InfoWorld's award for Best of Open Source Softwareweek, InfoWorld gave a Best of Open Source in software development (BOSSIE) award to NetBeans. They said, "While Eclipse has worked to broaden its scope, NetBeans has zeroed in on creating a lightweight, responsive, and easy to configure IDE. NetBeans stands out with great collaboration tools, a superior GUI designer, and good tooling for services-based development." InfoWorld goes on to say, "NetBeans has hewn closely to the vision of a lightweight, responsive, and easily configurable IDE. It works to provide top-of-the-line plug-ins (its Matisse GUI designer, performance profiler, and online collaboration tools are category leaders) and to integrate them seamlessly into the IDE. This year, NetBeans had the courage to completely redesign the code-editing experience to emulate the most user-friendly editor available for Java (IntelliJ) — resulting in a greatly improved user experience. For its commitment to quality over quantity and for the courage to rip and replace modules to improve developer productivity, we salute the NetBeans team and its stellar IDE. NetBeans wins the Bossie." The full article can be read here

Quite a few bloggers have been writing about their positive experiences with NetBeans. Here is a sampling of a few:
  • Adam Bien, a German Java developer and blogger, discusses how he is seeing a shift to more of his peers using NetBeans vs. Eclipse in the past year.  He attributes this to strengths in the platform starting with 5.5.1 that include Matisse, the visual JSF editor, and UML support.  He also praises the rewritten code editor in NetBeans 6.
  • Nick Carroll talks about how he has not been satisfied with any of the available IDE’s for Ruby on Rails until he tried NetBeans.  He describes how features such as code completion, source navigation, syntax highlighting, code folding, JRuby integration, SVN integration, and contextual menu items make him productive with his Ruby on Rails development.  He also says that he is considering switching to NetBeans for his Java development.
Posted at 03:40PM Sep 17, 2007 by Prakash Narayan in Sun  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites

Thursday Jul 12, 2007
IIT2007 Global Conference
IIT2007 Global Conference
I spent this last weekend at an alumni reunion - IIT 2007 Global Conference. It was a fantastic event - with over 4000 people (including spouses and children) in attendance at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The attendees bonded on their interest in technology and how it can transform the world. The program featured a who's who in technorati and glitterati.

Jeff Immelt at the IIT2007 Global ConferenceJeff Immelt gave the opening keynote. He noted that GE employs 1500 IIT graduates. He mentioned that GE's $170b revenues come from:
    o Infrastructure
    o Emerging Markets
    o Environmental Technologies
    o Demographics - focus on Healthcare
    o Digital Connections
He urged the audience to look at four vectors when considering what it will take to be a technical leader in the industry:
    o Economics of scarcity (eg. consumption of energy is surpassing availability and production)
    o Reshaping financials (eg. 70% of the healthcare dollar is being spent in diagnostics)
    o Simplification (Using IT to improve workflow)
    o Globalization (When building product, always think about the world market)
He mentioned a personal incident during his recent visit to India. He was reading Forbes magazine on the plane and it listed India's billionares. He thought he would impress his wife and turned to her and said, "You know, I do business with these guys - Premji, Ambani and Birla". It backfired when she responded, "What are you feeling so good about. I don't see you on any billionare list". He concluded saying that more important than money, title or power is to build something.

I tried to catch sessions on topics that I would not normally encounter on a day-to-day basis - such as energy strategies for the future.

Senator Hillary Clinton had a keynote session later in the day on Friday. Unfortunately, she could not appear in person. She tried to cover it up saying, "It is appropriate that I appear via a satellite feed to a conference that is focused on transforming the world through technology."  

Arun Sarin at the IIT 2007 Global ConferneceArun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone, an alumnus of IIT Bombay, gave the keynote on Saturday. Vodafone has a $200b market cap and has 40% margins. He touched on three topics in his talk:
  • IIT and leadership. He started his talk by kicking the audience in their pants! He talked about the importance of leadership and the resulting ability to do good to others. He was disappointed, however, in not seeing sufficient people rising to the rank of CEO. He noted Rajat Gupta, Umang Gupta, Ujjal Kohli    and Suhas Patil as the exceptions. The important tenets, he said, are to be Strategic - have a clear view of what you want to accomplish; Operational - the ability to set goals and meet goals and People - the ability to make ordinary people do extraordinary things
  • Communications. He sees a trend in services convergence - where providers are bringing their experience in internet and entertainment to the mobile world.
  • Globalization. He talked about Vodafone's recent acquisition of Hutch - a large mobile provider in India. Since he was competing with other, large, Indian players, he talked a bit about his experiences in doing business with India. He was disappointed, he said, that things happened outside the normal business processes to influence the decisions. In order for India to succeed it needs Transparency, Infrastructure, Capital and Talent.

Venkat Krishnamurthy, Javed Akthar, Chitra Bannerjee, Harish Saluja and Shekhar Kapur

I attended a session on Harnessing Creativity that had Indian Poet Javed Akthar, Author Chitra Bannerjee, Film Director Shekhar Kapur, Academy Award winner Venkat Krishnamurthy on the panel. It was a fascinating to hear the source of creativity for these extremely talented folks. 

Alex Filippenko, George Smoot and Arno Penzias

I also attended a Nobel Laureates Panel with Arno Penzias and George Smoot. The panel was moderated by Alex Filippenko of UC Berkeley. They talked about the State of Cosmology. In fact, our knowledge of the Universe is only on the 4% that we know - made from protons and neutrons.

The evening concluded with a scintiallating musical concert from the doyens of Indian Classical music, including vocals by Pandit Jasraj, flute by Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, Mandolin by U Srinivas and percussions by Vijay Ghate (tabla), Vikku Vinayakaram (ghatam) and Selvaganesh (kanjira). Through poetry and sound they brought out the true meaning of India's national flag.
Posted at 03:26PM Jul 12, 2007 by Prakash Narayan in Personal  |  Comments[0] Add to Technorati Favorites