Living on the Edge

rishi's_home

2009-04-05T23:07:00.001-07:00

rishi's_home

Posted: 05 Apr 2009 05:30 PM PDT

Here is an interesting nytimes article about iPhone shortcomings. This is a case of user adoption problem where user is not ready to spend time with the new toy. How can you enjoy the toy if you dont play with it enough

rishi's_home

2009-04-03T23:00:00.001-07:00

rishi's_home

Google to Acquire Twitter?

Posted: 03 Apr 2009 10:40 AM PDT

There are rumours out there that google will acquire twitter and I would say that is no surprise. I really feel that Twitter search is really cool and has a lot of potential as I point in this earlier blog post.

I also think that if google acquires twitter, they should not merge it with standard search. This should become a vertical search strategy for google rather than just feed into the standard search. Twitter has very different strengths when it comes to search and that should be kept in mind when thinking about integrated offerings.

We will see what happens … I am ready for the weekend!

rishi's_home

2009-04-02T23:01:00.001-07:00

rishi's_home

Twitter Fail Whale - Is Twitter growing too fast?

Posted: 02 Apr 2009 11:49 AM PDT

This is a great article about twitter’s growth and it is indeed growing fast. I truely believe that it is emerging to be a great platform for pushing out information. I think it has a RSS like feel to it and I will write more about this in another blog entry.

Twitter Search - Another search engine or a differentiated concept?

Posted: 02 Apr 2009 11:28 AM PDT

If you have not tried Twitter Search, definitely do that. I believe that twitter search will be big for certain types of searches. If you are looking for information that is best served by individuals rather than an insitution then twitter search is the place. Let us take few interesting search examples:

Live event related information: People are twittering away their thoughts and perspective and this is the place to find out all that is going on at the event.
Traffic conditions: try searching traffic in the twitter search and you will see the power of crowd wisdom. This can become the best traffic site of all.
Another example is shopping deals and I am sure there are many more to come.

Few things that are very unique about twitter that places it in an interesting position when it comes to search is that all the data is user generated, current data, geographical information available and somewhat of a social network feel to it.

I think there will be tons of applications springing up on top of twitter search API very soon.

PCI cartoon strip

2009-03-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

by rishibhargava | Create your own Cartoon at www.toondoo.com

Moving to wordpress...

2009-03-10T16:48:00.000-07:00

Like many other bloggers, I have made the switch to wordpress. You can find the future blogs at http://rishibhargava.wordpress.com/

The Long Tail

2009-03-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading "The Long Tail" and I would recommend this a must read to anybody who is in online business (most of us are). The book uses examples of companies like Amazon, Apple and Netflix to demonstrate how online selling can change what people watch/read.

I am waiting when all Bollywood movies will be available on streaming video, the same day they are released. It is bound to happen!

Clean Tech Event

2009-02-27T16:48:00.000-08:00

PANIIT USA Cleantech Event

Register at: https://sites.google.com/a/iitbayarea.org/cleantech/

Probabilistic Computing/Quantum Computing

2009-02-27T13:54:00.001-08:00

I remember reading about quantum computer during my college and was always fascinated by the idea of trading the accuracy of results with computing speed. The green or power angle is an interesting one and that is achieved in a very different manner.

Here is a networkworld article talking about the latest research in probabilistic chips. I did some more research on probabilistic chips to see if there is any resemblance with a quantum computer. No, this is completely different. You can read the research papers from Dr. Krishna for more details but the gist of the approach is that in current computer architecture, to avoid errors chips are operated at very voltage and he is trying to reduce the voltage that is operating the chips. This definitely will lead to a whole world of algorithms that are error tolerant etc...

I believe that algorithms developed for such an architecture would definitely overlap with quantum computing as the basic idea of working with errors and developing algorithms which are error tolerant is similar.

I am no expert in this field but found it very interesting.

Amazon to Sell Wine in the cloud?

2009-02-19T12:06:00.000-08:00

Yes indeed. You can get details here. It is rather old news but I heard about it last night at a networking event. I find it very interesting to see what all amazon has doneover the last 6-7 years and what it is trying to do. The breadth of services offered by amazon is amazing. EC2, Mechanical turk, kindle, book store, genereal groceries and what not! The very interesting part is that they have got decent success in most areas and they have revolutionized some areas. The EC2 launch has changed the way people are thinking about IT infrastructure and I am sure in next couple years everything (not just your IT infrastructure) will be in the cloud.

I will write more thoughts about cloud computing in future blog posts but here is a link to a panel discussion on cloud computing to be held on Feb 19th.

Selling Ice to Eskimos

2009-02-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

The phrase "Selling Ice to Eskimos" is used often to praise a sales person and it is easy to understand why that is such a big compliment.

Well I believe that you can "Sell Ice to Eskimos" but it will end up becoming "shelf ware" and the shelf life would be pretty good for ice :). Any company where the product becomes shelf ware ends up dieing sooner or later. It is incumbent upon Product Management team to make sure that the product sells well and deploys well too.

There are companies out there (RIM) which pay the sales people only after the product is deployed or in use and such a model goes long way in creating a company that is "Built to Last".

While on the selling topic, one of my favorites is "Selling the Wheel"

Product Design - What is the killer feature?

2009-02-13T13:41:00.000-08:00

Recently I bought a Warm mist humidifier for my home. The product works great and this blog post is not a review of the product. I will try to put myself into the shoes of the product manager for this product. When the product was under design, the product manager and the engineering teams studied competing products and listed certain features that the competition has:

Support for adding the inhaler or cough suppressant
Auto shutoff when it runs out of water
Should last 8 hours

In addition they must have considered the pricing to make sure that it is few dollars cheaper than the competition. I am guessing under the competition and market pressure what they forgot to do was add an on/off switch to the product :)

The product does auto-shutoff when it runs out of water but to turn it on again (when I fill the water), I need to pull out the plug and put it back.

Interesting learning for me as a product manager: Create a list of basic features that a customer cannot live without in addition to studying the competition. Assign weights to each feature in the list so that you don't ignore the basic features.

Can an upstart replace PayPal – Noca thinks they can

2009-02-13T13:36:00.000-08:00

Noca is an online payment startup that claims it is more secure and also cheaper for merchants. Techcrunch(www.techcrunch.com) has a great article titled “Is Noca the next paypal(http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/09/is-noca-the-next-paypal/)”. Yes, I could not come up with a better title for the blog J. Here is one of the comment on the blog which describes how this works in depth:

Fraud in checks/ACH is substantionally less than fraud in credit cards. The reason is simple - credit cards don’t require “two way” identification. Doing an ACH transaction requires both transacting entities to have bank level verification as opposed to credit cards. If I have somebody’s credit card info I can commit virtually unlimited fraud. Having somebody check/bank account number doesn’t give me that ability.

As far as individual indemnification is concerned the user is indemnified by the bank and NACHA (federal govt body that regulates ACH/checks) regulations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.....ring_House

“In accordance with the rules and regulations of ACH, no financial institution may simply issue an ACH transaction (whether it be debit or credit) towards an account without prior authorization from the account holder (known as the Receiver in ACH terminology).”

At surface this looks very secure but really painful from a customer experience standpoint. Imagine that you have to approve each transaction with your bank. Doing approval for large transactions does not make sense either as that is when I need a credit card.

If the ACH transaction were to become mainstream, then the NACHA compliance will become a big software industry just like PCI compliance. This approach also heavily relies on consumer cell phones. What about the security on windows mobile? Cell phone security is becoming a bigger market with the growing use of smart phones and services like this will make mobile devices a target for hackers!

Long blogging break...

2009-02-03T12:16:00.001-08:00

It has been a while since I wrote a blog. A long vacation and then all the work that got piled up while I was on vacation has kept me busy :) or should I say kept me away from writing...

I am going to start again and start writing about some different topics.

Motorola embraces Android

2008-10-29T10:05:00.000-07:00

Recently motorola announced that they are going to adopt three different operating systems for all the cell phones. One of them being Android. I am a big believer of open source and think that this is a big step by motorola and also think Techcrunch comparison of this with IBM adopting Linux is a very appropriate one.

BUT....

I am not very happy with the first phone with Android. Every review I have read about G1 is clearly stating that it is nowhere close to iPhone.

Apple Appstore and Android Market

2008-10-23T16:14:00.000-07:00

I strongly believe that whoever wins the application market wins in the long run...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/23/android-market-takes-on-apples-app-store-games-still-rule-but-should-they/

This is a techcrunch review of the Android market version Apple Appstore.

Andriod vs iPhone - Coming Year

2008-10-06T16:11:00.000-07:00

With the release of the first android based cellphone, the game has begun. I am now tempted to predict that Android will win over the next couple of years. Here is a link stating that motorola is going to invest heavily into this.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/28/motorola-building-up-350-person-android-team-nokia-also-sniffing-around/

Also considering the economic situation, Apple will face a lot of price competition from other cellphone manufactures and Android will win in this battle.

iPhone apps and network effect

2008-08-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting article on Techcrunch about this

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/07/most-iphone-apps-are-failing-to-leverage-the-network-effect/

I completely agree with the author. In addition, I have been pondering if Apple is doing something to promote apps that can become iphone only apps and hence driving the iPhone sales. This is a similar idea to certain video games driving the game console sales.

This can be approached in two ways:

Business route of locking up app providers in some kind of exclusive. I am not sure how this would be taken by app builders but I believe if the financial incentives are well aligned, this could be done.
Being a technologist, I believe this is always a better way :). So the idea here is to be able to promote app developers to build apps that have networking going between two iphone users. For example build an app that could use GPS features and send messages that can be opened on iPhone in GMAPs on iPhone. Another idea could be an application built on top of SMS capabilities and uses powerful iPhone features related to music or itunes website.

I am not sure if Apple is thinking along these lines but I think this is one way Apple can use the power of a platform to enhance the sales.

Andriod vs iPhone - retake...

2008-08-02T12:39:00.001-07:00

Take a look at this video where people are predicting the fate of andriod...

Except for few people, all the people believe that Apple will win the war. I am holding my breath to see what the hardware vendors do with google software stack.

Android vs iPhone

2008-03-03T15:19:00.000-08:00

Upcoming announcement about the iPhone SDK by Apple and the recent (few months old) announcement about the android platform from google make me think that this could be an interesting battle. The biggest advantage in google's approach is that the applications developed will not be tied down to a particular phone and hence customers would have broader choices. Also the companies that will be developing applications for the platform can use this to sell to larger customer base as well... so it definitely is a wiser business decision but let me pose another question:

Which of the approaches get me (a consumer) better phone and applications?

Some people think that Android platform is better in lots of ways (including UI).

But having better UI capabilities does not mean much. You need UI designers like apple has to build intuitive and clean applications.

VMWare - Should you buy it....

2007-10-08T08:06:00.000-07:00

I am no financial consultant to give you advice but here is what I think about a blog that does give you advice.

Every comment on this blog till now has claimed that VMW is overvalued. My question is : "What is the real value of the stock anyways? Is it based on earnings potential/executive team/Market size or something else. If you look at Google historically, they just had one product - search and that gave the company fuel to move forward. Here are some of the places virtualization technologies can take the computer experience: network devices virtualization to reduce cost of datacenters significantly, change the way people deploy software and make the software deployment obsolete (you can start deploying new VMs). At home you can imagine, applications do not run on OS but run in virtual
environments and hence never interfere with each other. Imagine how secure is that environment...

Oh! you asked if I work for vmware. No I don't and I am neither a big investor. I just like to think "Out of the Box".

What is luck?

2007-08-14T12:23:00.001-07:00

A very interesting post by Marc Andreesen:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/08/luck-and-the-en.html

I could not agree more with the content of the blog and how the writer has defined luck.

Social Networks and Stock Trading

2007-07-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

Recently I came across: http://www.zecco.com/

Zecco.com is an online stock trading house but they are not just a traditional stock trading company. The big differentiation they bring to their customers is communities. People can get a peek into what other people are trading.

This is one of the most innovative application of social networks that I have seen till now. I am sure this is just the starting of social networking applications. If anybody else has any such stories to share, feel free to post on the blog.

Controlling Feature Bloat in Products

2007-06-24T23:52:00.000-07:00

I recently presented in a webinar about "Controlling Feature Bloat in your Product". You can find the recording here:

http://www.featureplan.com/community/2007/05/controlling_the_feature_bloat.asp

Speed of innovation

2007-01-19T21:23:00.000-08:00

Here is an old article from Discover magazine talking about Web 2.0 technologies. Reading about science and Web 2.0 in the same magazine made me write this blog entry:

http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-05/departments/emerging-technology/

"Speed" in true physics definition is always relative to a frame of reference. When you talk of "speed of innovation" in high tech startups, the frame of reference is the technology that the startup is working on.

If you look at the startups in Web 2.0 technologies, the speed of innovation is much higher than compared to companies in the other high tech areas like network systems. This could lead to application of other concepts like "Relative velocity" from Physics world to hi-tech world. This could be an interesting framework for evaluating startups.

Product Management in a startup

2007-01-17T07:56:00.000-08:00

Product Management in a startup is like a journey to unknown destination. In most software startups, the direction changes 3-4 times before the startup either has a successful exit or closes for business.

These changes in direction pose a big challenge for PM team . The PM team is the connecting link between engineering and sales. The responsibility of aligning the engineering with the new direction lies with PM. This might not only mean change in product features, new technology development but also change the way QA and development teams think.

This alignment, if not done in a timely manner can result in people rowing the boat in different directions. Imagine white water rafting where two rowers are not aligned and the raft keeps going in circles and does not move forward.