This is stalking to the extreme !
Earlier, they wanted to know what everyone is searching for - now they wanna know the locations(lat/long coordinates).
Man, this is compromise of privacy - big time :) Ppl give up privacy for services they receive - not knowing what price they might pay for it later.
The recent one in stack is Google's Dodgeball
Is this Google's answer to 2 challenges:
1. orkut not being as popular/usable as facebook.
2. need to locate folks and provide advertisement possibilities to local businesses.
well, letsee wait-n-watch what happens !
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Sunday, February 18, 2007
which company is your favorite company?
Usually, many of my colleagues ask me this question: Which is your dream company?
My reply: my own company :D
They ask: Besides that?
My reply: From what perspective?
They ask: to work for...duh!
My reply: None
My reply: my own company :D
They ask: Besides that?
My reply: From what perspective?
They ask: to work for...duh!
My reply: None
india business conference
Date: 2/16
Theme: Investing in India: An Entrepreneur's Canvas
Organized by: South Asian Business Association
Experience:
The event started off with a panel's meeting. Panel included CMU's Ashish Arora, Madan Mohan from Infosys, Rick Russow from USIBC, and some others.
Citi India portfolio owner for CitiCards managed his session over Webex as his flight from NYC got cancelled. CEO of iGate, Mr. Sunil Wadhwani had come down for one of the speeches. Besides, Rick had one speech as well. Rick is remarkably aware about India's political, economic, and cultural panorama(Of course, he had coffees with most of the bureaucrats including Montek Singh Ahluwalia and deals with bureaucrats in Tamil Nadu quite often!) Last speech was by Vish Mishra, from Clearstone Venture Capital. Clearstone invests in India-centric ventures (for instance, BillDesk)
In between, there were breaks with Indian foodstuff lined up (samosas, dhoklas, etc). I was unimpressed by CMU's Indian populace who didn't participate at this event ~ doesn't talk well about the entrepreneurial spirit of the community at the school.
Theme: Investing in India: An Entrepreneur's Canvas
Organized by: South Asian Business Association
Experience:
The event started off with a panel's meeting. Panel included CMU's Ashish Arora, Madan Mohan from Infosys, Rick Russow from USIBC, and some others.
Citi India portfolio owner for CitiCards managed his session over Webex as his flight from NYC got cancelled. CEO of iGate, Mr. Sunil Wadhwani had come down for one of the speeches. Besides, Rick had one speech as well. Rick is remarkably aware about India's political, economic, and cultural panorama(Of course, he had coffees with most of the bureaucrats including Montek Singh Ahluwalia and deals with bureaucrats in Tamil Nadu quite often!) Last speech was by Vish Mishra, from Clearstone Venture Capital. Clearstone invests in India-centric ventures (for instance, BillDesk)
In between, there were breaks with Indian foodstuff lined up (samosas, dhoklas, etc). I was unimpressed by CMU's Indian populace who didn't participate at this event ~ doesn't talk well about the entrepreneurial spirit of the community at the school.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
spring courses
Technically, the school authorities call it the spring semester - I have no idea why - this cold is getting annoying - the temperature is 8F and feels like -2F. Man, that's -18C....! that's coooooooooollllllllddddddddddddd !
I wanted to write this post since a long time but either didn't have time or didn't have an inclination towards it. However, right now, I think I am over my writer's block period and can write ...and yo, I am back !
Macroeconomics
Prof Christopher Sleet has recommended the textbook of the most influential economist in the world - Mr. Ben Bernanke !I have the fifth edition but the professor insists on the sixth one which came out midway between the mini. However, this is a semester long course.
I am grasping some important macroeconomic concepts which help give an added dimension and credibility to any of my analysis.
Some of the CMU students are so impudent - they keep their feet on the bag! Check out the adjacent picture !
Business Law and Ethics
Course on Contracts by Ashish Arora was cancelled. That made me take this course and I am so glad I took it. Prof Dale Hershey has close to 40 years of experience practicing civil lawsuits. The book by Beatty Samuelson on Business Law is exhaustive and interesting at the same time.
This gives me a perspective on strategy analysis and also good amount of information required for a manager while making decisions and taking actions.
Contracts, Corporate structuring, intellectual property, cyber law, class actions, jurisdictions, shareholder rights, insider trading, antitrust, environmental law, consumer law, uniform commercial code (UCC), CISG, etc are the topics which are broadly well-covered in this mini-course.
On a sidebar, I met a bunch of first years (MBA) students in this class for our group presentation - all of them were caught up in a crazy chase for the internships .... 2 of the 4 I worked with got offers from Amazon which are freaking amazing offers :) One got from AT Kearney and one is still looking as she wants more !
Digital Transformation
Prof Ramayya Krishnan brings in some good models to think while making decisions w.r.t. IT and deployment of IT for strategic purposes. We mostly deal with IT user category of companies and not the creators.
However, I have a complaint: As participation has such a high grade component, in order
to be fair to everyone, he gives way too much time to some of the folks in the class who crave attention. For instance, someone gives a long pregnant pause (just to get the footage) once s/he is given an opportunity to talk. Moreover, there are folks who bring in previous points while the discussion is in a specific flow (no matter how irrelevant they are to the current discussion). Then there's someone that takes at least 3 mins to describe the point s/he is trying to make.
I feel stuck in this class.... I didn't have a choice while taking this course as it has been made a capstone course which is compulsory. It must be dropped from the list of required courses - or must be allowed to be exempted if something similar is done. My strong opinions come from the fact that I had to miss the Capability Improvement for Service Organizations class due to time conflict with Digital Transformation. If DT wasn't a core course, I would've taken the Capability one !
Information Security and Risk Analysis
Interesting course with a great deal of insight in valuing risk. This is close to Options Pricing which I studied last semester. When I put up the point regarding security firms coming up with insurance for the clients w.r.t. managed security services, professor mentioned that there is lack of data. I could quickly correlate it to the fact that in case of stocks, there is second to second ticker data.
Prof Ashish Arora puts out the ideas really neat - these are useful for a consultant in general and a security department personnel in specific.
One of his TA Sasha Ramanov has a nice site which you can check out here. Another TA suggested me the WEIS 2007 event. I will try to make sure I am in Pgh around that time in order to attend it.
Lectures are conducted in Collaborative Innovation Center (CyLab hosts Google, Intel, etc offices here) for the infrastructure setup as the classes are being relayed to Kobe(Japan) as well.
Capstone project: Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking
I can't write much about this as we have to protect the interests of our client.
In order to maximize the learning experience, our advisor Dave Burke has given roles to the
folks who did not have experience in those areas. For instance, I have acquired knowledge on being an architect but never worked as an architect before - so, I was made the architect. Someone else hasn't done project management, so s/he took up prj mgr role and myself and someone else who has done it will guide him/her. This method has its own pros and cons.
All in all, a busy semester going on. I can manage to hit the gym several times a week and I am happy about that. Moreover, I am able to undertake other activities such as ice-skating, skiing, clubbing, latino dancing, etc in some free pockets of time.
I wanted to write this post since a long time but either didn't have time or didn't have an inclination towards it. However, right now, I think I am over my writer's block period and can write ...and yo, I am back !
Macroeconomics
Prof Christopher Sleet has recommended the textbook of the most influential economist in the world - Mr. Ben Bernanke !I have the fifth edition but the professor insists on the sixth one which came out midway between the mini. However, this is a semester long course.
I am grasping some important macroeconomic concepts which help give an added dimension and credibility to any of my analysis.
Some of the CMU students are so impudent - they keep their feet on the bag! Check out the adjacent picture !
Business Law and Ethics
Course on Contracts by Ashish Arora was cancelled. That made me take this course and I am so glad I took it. Prof Dale Hershey has close to 40 years of experience practicing civil lawsuits. The book by Beatty Samuelson on Business Law is exhaustive and interesting at the same time.This gives me a perspective on strategy analysis and also good amount of information required for a manager while making decisions and taking actions.
Contracts, Corporate structuring, intellectual property, cyber law, class actions, jurisdictions, shareholder rights, insider trading, antitrust, environmental law, consumer law, uniform commercial code (UCC), CISG, etc are the topics which are broadly well-covered in this mini-course.
On a sidebar, I met a bunch of first years (MBA) students in this class for our group presentation - all of them were caught up in a crazy chase for the internships .... 2 of the 4 I worked with got offers from Amazon which are freaking amazing offers :) One got from AT Kearney and one is still looking as she wants more !
Digital Transformation
Prof Ramayya Krishnan brings in some good models to think while making decisions w.r.t. IT and deployment of IT for strategic purposes. We mostly deal with IT user category of companies and not the creators.
However, I have a complaint: As participation has such a high grade component, in order
to be fair to everyone, he gives way too much time to some of the folks in the class who crave attention. For instance, someone gives a long pregnant pause (just to get the footage) once s/he is given an opportunity to talk. Moreover, there are folks who bring in previous points while the discussion is in a specific flow (no matter how irrelevant they are to the current discussion). Then there's someone that takes at least 3 mins to describe the point s/he is trying to make.I feel stuck in this class.... I didn't have a choice while taking this course as it has been made a capstone course which is compulsory. It must be dropped from the list of required courses - or must be allowed to be exempted if something similar is done. My strong opinions come from the fact that I had to miss the Capability Improvement for Service Organizations class due to time conflict with Digital Transformation. If DT wasn't a core course, I would've taken the Capability one !
Information Security and Risk Analysis
Interesting course with a great deal of insight in valuing risk. This is close to Options Pricing which I studied last semester. When I put up the point regarding security firms coming up with insurance for the clients w.r.t. managed security services, professor mentioned that there is lack of data. I could quickly correlate it to the fact that in case of stocks, there is second to second ticker data.
Prof Ashish Arora puts out the ideas really neat - these are useful for a consultant in general and a security department personnel in specific.
One of his TA Sasha Ramanov has a nice site which you can check out here. Another TA suggested me the WEIS 2007 event. I will try to make sure I am in Pgh around that time in order to attend it.
Lectures are conducted in Collaborative Innovation Center (CyLab hosts Google, Intel, etc offices here) for the infrastructure setup as the classes are being relayed to Kobe(Japan) as well.
Capstone project: Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking
I can't write much about this as we have to protect the interests of our client.
In order to maximize the learning experience, our advisor Dave Burke has given roles to the
folks who did not have experience in those areas. For instance, I have acquired knowledge on being an architect but never worked as an architect before - so, I was made the architect. Someone else hasn't done project management, so s/he took up prj mgr role and myself and someone else who has done it will guide him/her. This method has its own pros and cons.All in all, a busy semester going on. I can manage to hit the gym several times a week and I am happy about that. Moreover, I am able to undertake other activities such as ice-skating, skiing, clubbing, latino dancing, etc in some free pockets of time.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Rendezvous with a Mayor!
Last night, at the PNC Park, I had an opportunity to meet the youngest 
Mayor in the United States Mr. Ravenstahl. He is young, dynamic, understands business terms and concepts well, and a visionary. He is fairly matured for his age and has the burning desire for turning around the City of Pittsburgh. Accordingly, he has taken steps at the micro-levels to work on converting the "Iron City" to a "Techno City". I wished him all the best in his endeavors when I met him and briefly introduced myself to him and where my origins are from (Mumbai).
After the Mayor's event followed the Network Pittsburgh event for Alumni networking. I met a few Deloitte folks out there and met some other interesting folks from the Heinz school who I had never met before. Nice event !
Post-networking meet, we went for the happy hour to Atria's to have some more meetings with the folks. Ron, our career services director, gave me compliment for being the "best dressed MISM" - so flattering ! Thank you Ron !
The travel back home was horrendous. My lips hurt due to the extreme cold weather in Pittsburgh. I didn't drive down to the event because I was planning on having some drinks. Hence, I had to use several connections of the bus routes to reach back home. One such link made me wait for half an hour and I think the temperature was -5 F. This coupled with the thin suit trousers sent shivers through my spine...literally ! It taught me a good lesson that I must never be out in the cold - no matter what my cold tolerance is.
Mayor in the United States Mr. Ravenstahl. He is young, dynamic, understands business terms and concepts well, and a visionary. He is fairly matured for his age and has the burning desire for turning around the City of Pittsburgh. Accordingly, he has taken steps at the micro-levels to work on converting the "Iron City" to a "Techno City". I wished him all the best in his endeavors when I met him and briefly introduced myself to him and where my origins are from (Mumbai).
After the Mayor's event followed the Network Pittsburgh event for Alumni networking. I met a few Deloitte folks out there and met some other interesting folks from the Heinz school who I had never met before. Nice event !Post-networking meet, we went for the happy hour to Atria's to have some more meetings with the folks. Ron, our career services director, gave me compliment for being the "best dressed MISM" - so flattering ! Thank you Ron !
The travel back home was horrendous. My lips hurt due to the extreme cold weather in Pittsburgh. I didn't drive down to the event because I was planning on having some drinks. Hence, I had to use several connections of the bus routes to reach back home. One such link made me wait for half an hour and I think the temperature was -5 F. This coupled with the thin suit trousers sent shivers through my spine...literally ! It taught me a good lesson that I must never be out in the cold - no matter what my cold tolerance is.
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