Category: Random Draws

If you are an entrepreneur seeking funding for your brilliant idea, it pays to understand how VCs and angels think. Sramana Mitra over at Sramana Mitra on Strategy has a series of interviews with VCs and angels. Feel free to contact her if you need advice on any specific ideas you have which requires funding. If she likes your idea, she would provide you access to her extensive investor network, as well as help with business development and customer acquisition.

[Remember: If you get funding, you owe this blog big time. Don’t forget to send in a large check. 🙂 ]

Om sarveshaam swastir bhavatu
Sarveshaam shantir bhavatu

Sarveshaam poornam bhavatu
Sarveshaam mangalam bhavatu

Sarve bhavantu sukhinah
Sarve santu niraamayaah

Sarve bhadraani pashyantu
Maakaschit duhkha bhaag bhavet

[Translation]

Auspiciousness be unto all
Peace be unto all.

Completeness be unto all
Prosperity be unto all.

May all be happy
May all be free from disabilities!

May all seek the good of others!
May none suffer from sorrow!

“In India, the Future of the Internet Will Be Built around the Mobile Phone” reads the title of one of today’s articles at Knowledge@Wharton. It is an interview with my colleague, Rajesh Jain, CEO of NetCore. Rajesh believes that the mobile phone will be the primary device for interacting with the web for a vast number of users in India. It is easy to follow his logic.
Continue reading “Mobile Internet and India”

New and improved 🙂 feature on this blog: “Found on the web.” The inaugural item is the Hubble Space Telescope pictures. Check them out and even download them as wallpaper, but don’t stop wondering how magical the universe is and how fortunate we are to be able to observe it.

Hi from Seoul’s Incheon international airport. Just a couple of hours lay over in transit from San Francisco to Mumbai.

This is pretty cool. Find a seat, open up the laptop, and you are connected and ready to do business.

At SFO, the Homeland Security code was “Orange.” Which, it appears to me, means that special attention was to be given to frail old ladies in wheelchairs. It boggles my mind — what are these guys smoking. When was the last time wheelchair bound old ladies went ballistic and blew up a commercial jetliner? Someone should clue in the Transportation Safety Authority that there is a definite profile that fits potential suicide bombers and little old ladies don’t fit that, and nor do young mothers with babies in their arms. I saw one such mother made to give up feeding bottles.

It makes me feel very secure (not!). Confiscating toothpaste tubes from the general public can achieve little other than harrassing people who mean no harm. Clue to TSA: start profiling.

The pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right according to that famous document signed on July 4th of 1776. Preamble to the Declaration of Independence reads —

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The right to the pursuit of happiness follows after the rights to life and liberty in the document, as it should be. You have to be, and be free, to have a shot at happiness. But that right to the pursuit of happiness is like buying a parking permit for parking on the UC Berkeley campus. You are not guaranteed a parking spot. You pays your money and you takes your chances. If you drive around for a while and are lucky enough to find an empty spot, you may park.
Continue reading “Happiness”

Re-inventing wheels is silly enough but re-inventing square wheels is whacky beyond belief. The smart way is to take what others have figured out and improve on it. Adopting the existing smart solution is the first step to successful innovation. The great thing about the world today is that the total number of human brains is huge — 6 billion plus — and if they are normally distributed, the number of brains at the extreme high end of the distribution, though vanishingly small in percentage, is pretty large in absolute numbers. So these tons of smart innovative brains have been coming up with all sorts of ingenious wheels. All we have to do is to check them out, understand how they work, and use our own smarts to figure out how to make those wheels better. One can be too stupid to smartly ape the smart.
Continue reading “Aping for fun and profit”

Some news just give me the warm and fuzzies. Like this one about Google philanthropy as reported by the NYTimes. It is starting off with a billion dollars and (like the winner of a beauty pageant), aims to tackle poverty, disease, and global warming. Continue reading “Google.org is Brilliant”

I attempted to access the site http://www.hinduunity.org/ and could not do so from India. I then used a proxy script found here http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php and could access the site.

Land of the freedom of speech, eh? Land of secularism? Now, we cannot have Hindus uniting, can we? We owe our allegiance to the Pope, thank you very much.

Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died in a freak accident.

Australian naturalist and television personality Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray during a diving expedition off the Australian coast.

Mr Irwin, 44, died after being struck in the chest by the stingray’s barb while he was filming a documentary in Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.

. . . The stingray is a flat, triangular-shaped fish, commonly found in tropical waters.

It gets its name from the razor-sharp barb at the end of its tail, coated in toxic venom, which the animal uses to defend itself with when it feels threatened.

Attacks on humans are a rarity – only one other person is known to have died in Australia from a stingray attack, at St Kilda, Melbourne in 1945.

I enjoyed watching his show on TV and admired his commitment to the preservation of wildlife and his opposition to any kind of hunting.

It is one of those things that I am going to remember for a long while. My month long stay in Sydney is almost over. I had just finished dinner and switched on the TV and the channel that the TV was tuned on to was just getting started with the news headlines. I could hardly believe it. Life is a random draw and you never know when your number is up.

Steve will remain a great Australian hero.