This is sensational at the same time scary. As the saying goes "the higher you go, the harder the fall ". India's Stock market index today closed just 150 points short of the 19,000 mark. This is happened within few days of it crossing 18,000 and few weeks after crossing 17,000 mark. Though the fundamentals of the Indian Economy now is doing good, I am not sure it can handle so much money coming in so fast. Now any bad news that can affect the sentiment of the investors either internally like fall of this government or externally, will likely to trigger a huge fall. Such a fall can wipe out few hundred thousand millions in days and push into a burst. This scene is not very different in other Asian markets, everywhere fund is pouring.

On top this, Rupee is appreciating day by day. From Rs.44 a year back it has reached Rs.39.5 and is heading quickly to Rs.38. This is making Indian Products (whether it is Leather, Garment, ITES and to lesser extend Software) unviable in abroad markets. And Central government is merrily encouraging the rise, as it helps them to buy oil with lesser rupee. We can't also blame the government has their Left coalition partner are giving them no room to increase the Petrol Prices, inspite of oil is at an all time high of $85 per barrel.

One thing is certain - for everyone in business and money markets, challenging times are ahead soon.

Microsoft have released for some time now preinstalled and preconfigured Virtual Images (in Virtual PC VHD format) of Exchange Server and SQL Server for evaluation. The list is expanded to cover many more of MS softwares including ISA Server, BizTalk, System Center, Windows Server 2008, Vista Enterprise and Office 2007. There are also candidates that are time consuming to install and configure like MOSS 2007 & VS 2005 Team System. With these images, all you have to do is download them and run the VHD files with Virtual PC or Virtual Server (both are free from Microsoft). It can't get easier than this.

At some point I guess all server software will come in this fashion, even for production environments. Whether it is Windows or Linux, Server software are becoming more and more complex to configure and secure that it is only logical for Product companies to give them precooked and ready to eat.

You can download the images from microsoft.com/vpc

Microsoft demonstrated their Multipoint technology where two people can use one computer at the same time.

I am in Microsoft India's i3 2007 event in Leela, Bangalore. Many eminent speakers are talking today about how India is innovating.

Mr.Ravi Venkatesan talked about "How a World Bank report that says India's GDP can become 5 times of what it is today. As a country we have learned to innovate around constraints. Look in the Mobile phone industry where we have the lowest ARPU but still some of the highest urban teledensity. Take say Tata ACE or other innovative products built on Shoe string budgets when compared with rest of the world. Take for instance a gentleman from Chennai is able to produce solar power heated water. The challenge is to accelerate these sparse and spread innovations. Only 16% of Manufacturing industry in India have forward planning for human resources, in China it is 92%. We have done a bad job of applying IT within the country. Investments in IT in India is only 3.5% GDP same as Bangladesh & Sri Lanka. Today we are talking about Innovation from India, Innovation for India, Innovation with India. India has over 8 Million SMEs and they are the primary employment drivers and only 2 Million of them use computers other than Mobile. In Tirupur we have a model for Software plus Service model for garment industry by paying Rs.5000/2500 per user. Our DPE team is going to work with Startups in enabling them with technology, opening doors, connecting to venture capitalists"

Ramgopal Subramaniam from Aztecsoft did the demo of their Tirupur Garment cluster for SME.

Prof.Sadagopan talked about "I will talk about Innovation East of Bangalore, West of Bangalore and lastly in Bangalore.

1. For example nearly a decade back In Tirupathi, we developed a system where by each pilgrim got a barcode tag which replaced physical queue with a logical queue. It costs 10paise and over 26 Million people have used it so far. Later we found that the pilgrims took bath in the template tank, so we moved to water proof tag. Now we have extended the system to Internet. Initially critics said illiterates will oppose it, but they support it b'cos they don't have the bribing opportunities that literates have. To make it India it got to be Absolutely low cost, reliable  and easy to use.
2. Moving West, in Udipi we have a company called Robosoft serving Marquee Top 5 Japan companies for Device driving with over 2000 people and he calls his place Silicon Beach, this proves innovation can happen anywhere
3. In Bangalore - From JP Nagar few years a 30 people company managed to make USD 6 Million for a gadget that unwired iPod. They are closed now, but the point that innovation can happen from anywhere.

Most of the innovation can happen from most unusual place. So India innovating should be India innovating from anywhere in the country.

There is a social dilemma, because in India everyone wants to be developing software, but the bigger opportunity/large number of jobs are in maintenance of software/business. The message should somehow reach the youngsters and that Maintenance is cool. Even in Microsoft, people will like to first go to MS Research, then to MS Labs finally to Sales or Support. But most of the challenging work happens in Support.

Automotive and Retail are the next booming industry and both are IT intensive"

Srikanth Rao of Affordable Business Solutions says the "biggest gap of man power exists for SME players. They can't train people because if they train the trained resources will quit. If you can do a solution at less than 10% of the overall cost to company and produce 20 to 30% cost saving, you got it"

One of my good friend and well wisher is Mr.Siva Pillai, Computer Officer of Goldsmiths College, UK. It is interesting on how we got acquainted. That was way back in 1996/97 when we were both members of a Tamil IT Interest email group. Then in 1998 when I visited London I was treated to be a guest in Siva's house. From there over the years our two families have become good friends.

Coming back to this post, I am happy to learn last week that Siva has won a well-deserved award - it is a European Award for Languages for this year. This was for his work on the Tamil Primary Language and Family Learning Project which has made a significant impact on parental involvement in education and learning of the Tamil language in the Downham (UK) area.

You can read full article here published this month in the CiLT UK Magazine where Siva Pillai describes the project's development and continuing success. The full list of 2007 winners can be found here.

People who know Siva including me are certainly not surprised for this well deserved award for him. Even at the age where he has grandkids, his energy levels have to be seen to be believed. Above all his passion to help children (குறிப்பாக புலன் பெயர்ந்த தமிழ் குழந்தைகள்) to learn Tamil language is infectious. He has several works to his credit on this topic, including the recent project for Learn Tamil - through English (Primary) were he helped the founders.

I just finished reading Richard Branson's book "Screw It, Let's Do It", for the ignorant Richard Branson is the Founder and Chairman of Virgin group of companies. The first thing that strikes when you pick the book is the title, especially the first part that is unconventional and bold. Just to see how people are feeling about the first part, I tried saying to few people that I read Branson's book  "Let's Do It" and I didn't say the first part; immediately all of them corrected me saying isn't it "Screw It, Let's Do It". So I guess Branson has proved even by the name that he is a master of branding and publicity.

We all know Branson to be a flamboyant publicity freak. The book tries to portray a related side of him that his daring, scientific and caring. His earlier book "Losing my Virginity" was his biography so this book is about the lessons he learned from life and business. The book starts with how his mother braved the odds against Women in workforce in 1950s Britain, then moves on to his business moves from a magazine "Student" he started as a drop-out, then on the launching and selling Virgin Music, Virgin Airlines and BA's tactics to kill it and finally on his new space travel venture Virgin Galactic. In between he talks about his daring balloon trips, going to prison for customs violation, buying an island in Virgin island, his affair with his principal's daughter and finally ends the book by his call to save the environment.

I will not classify the book as a  business or a management title, but certainly I will encourage it for Self-Help light reading.

As I posted in the past if you need to do screen shots then you can use the free Zabgrab or if you are using Windows Vista the Snipping tool. But what if you want to capture a web page that scrolls for multiple pages. The hands-on winner to do is the award winning Snag-It!. The other day on a Windows Server 2003, I wanted to do a screen capture and for some reasons Snag-It, refused to launch and kept crashing. So I looked for an alternative and found this article on another tool (free) called WebShot that also allows programmatic API to do the same. Tried it and my problem was solved.

This month (Sep '07) has been double lucky for Indian Sports. Last week Indian Cricket team won the world cup for Twenty:20 championship in South Africa. Today Viswanathan Anand has become the new World Chess Champion. The authorities should use this opportunity to give a sustained improvement to Indian Sports.

After the debacle of Indian team in ODI world cup, the media wanted desperately some win, they have got this big bonanza and making the best use of it. Too much hype is going around, which has the risk of making the team over confidence in subsequent matches.

Windows has been having a Disk Cleanup utility from Windows 95/98 days, but I haven't considered it of any use till today. I found today in my Windows Vista Laptop C:\ Drive hardly 2GB of space free out of 31GB. So I decided to delete some unwanted files to get some space; so I gave the Disk Cleanup utility a try and it did result in cleaning up few GB of space for me.

Landmark bookstores in Chennai is running a super sale of selective books with discounts up to 60% till October 2nd 2007. I was there shopping yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to see few good books worth buying offered in the sale. (Disclaimer: I don't work for Landmark or getting paid to post this)

Here are the books I bought (with the original price in brackets):

1. The Seven-Day Weeknd by Ricardo Semler at Rs.199 (987)
2. Bad boy Ballmer by Fredric Alan Maxwell at Rs.299 (1159)
3. Men of Steel by Vir Sanghvi at Rs.199 (295)
4. The HP Way by David Packard at Rs.199 (643)
5. Dilbert: Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies by Scott Adams at Rs.99 (509)
6. Dilbert: Thriving on vague objectives by Scott Adams at Rs.199 (471)
7. Dilbert: Random acts of management by Scott Adams at Rs.249 (471)
8. Dilbert: Dilbert and the way of the weasel Audio book by Scott Adams at Rs.225 (944)
9. Free Prize Inside /Purple Cow Audio book by Seth Godin at Rs.250 (1589)
10. Tough Choices Audio book by Carly Fiorina at Rs.350 (1503)
11. Who says Elephants can't Dance Audio book by Louis Gerstner Jr. at Rs.399 (1288)

In the next few months as I finish reading (or listening) to them, I will post my reviews here. Stay tuned!

Update 2/Oct/2007: Not being satisfied with the above, I went again today and bought the following titles.

1. Blue Streak by Barbara S.Peterson at Rs.225 (1073)
2. The Dragon and The Elephant by David Smith at Rs.250
3. Buddha by Deepak Chopra at Rs.395
4. The Romance of Tata Steel at Rs.495
5. Profitable Growth by Ram Charan at Rs.249 (946)
6. The new imperialists by Mark Leibovich at Rs.149 (1075)
7. Managing a time of great change by Peter F.Drucker at Rs.299 (1073)
8. Blog! by David Kline at Rs.299 (1073)
9. The story of My Experiments with Truth by M.K.Gandhi - Audio book read by Shekhar Kapur and Nandita Das at Rs.200 (250)

Yesterday I finished reading the book "The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid" by Bill Bryson who is a popular writer of travel books which are very hilarious. In this latest title, Bryson writes about his childhood days in IOWA, USA. Don't be fooled or put off, this is certainly not his biography - obviously who will pay money to read about a writer. Like other books of Bryson, he doesn't attempt to make the events and stories told factual and accurate. Instead he takes a jovial approach and makes fun of him and the 1950's America in his classic style. The sections on US obsession in the 50s over Nuclear Bombs are very hilarious. 

In page 208, Bryson writes "Two deep drafts of a freshly run-off mimeograph worksheet and I would be the education system’s willing slave for up to seven hours". I didn't know what was mimeograph so I searched in wikipedia for it. To my surprise the wikipedia article on mimeograph quotes the same line from the Bryson's book . By the way, Mimeograph is nothing but what we call Stencil in India.

Footnote: One thing I don't seem to get is why the titles from US or UK most of the time have a different cover design in India (where I buy the books) than the one you see at stores in US or in Amazon. Are these publishers customizing the colours and designs to cultural / national preferences?. Even this title has a different cover design shown in Amazon (see right) than in the book I own (see left)