If you are from India (or Asia) and you happen to visit USA, in the first few days itself you are likely to notice the amount of food (and other stuffs) that is wasted here in this country. For example, today I was in a nearby Safeway (Grocery store) and I couldn't find a small (100 Grams) pack of Potato Chips. Most of the time, it is because it is cheaper to buy in bulk, much more than what you need and throw the rest. This is encouraged by sellers, you only get everything in really big packs - whether it is socks, handkerchiefs, envelopes, pens or Coffee or Popcorn. In my many visits over last one decade to this nice country this is one thing I wish they can do without. The good thing is that in recent years there is a very slow but sure awareness growing about this, especially due to environmental concerns.

Having said the above, it is also in this country that you see many grass root movements to encourage reuse, donations, etc. It does exist, but it has to expand to general population in large. I was impressed to see few years back Used Clothes Donation Bins (like the ones you see below) in many apartment complexes and malls. They normally place these strategically near to garbage dumps so that even at the last minute before throwing people are reminded to donate and make a difference to the life of a poor. If you are India - you can donate to a near by orphanage like Udhavum Karangal and the likes, all of them accept wholeheartedly any donations.

When posting this, I remembered my grandfather's saying "Don't buy anything just because it is being sold cheap" (or) in other words "buy only what you need when you need it"

I was telling someone yesterday on why I love the new messenger control. This is the control that you see on left hand side of this page titled "Chat with me" that allows any anonymous visitor to the page to chat with me in real time when I am logged in to Live Messenger.

I love the opportunity this simple control gives me to interact with visitors around the world. I am sure they are finding this easy to use this, rather than writing a comment and it also gives them instant gratification. Today I was having an interesting conversation with an Facility Manager from Saudi Arabia on how he came across my blog (actual chat snippet below)

What I like most is the convenience of using and the control I get with this service. I don't need to sign in to yet another site or install a client application for being available for chatting. The only thing I need to do is to be signed in to my regular Live Messenger. And including this in the blog page couldn't be more easier - other than the Microsoft style of plethora of different sites you need to go before you understand it.

To include this control in your page, there are three steps.

Step 1: Enable Permission in Messenger settings page to "Show your Messenger Status on the  Web"

Step 2: Click on the "Create HTML" on the left hand navigation on the same page. In the page select the style of the control you want to display in your page

Step 3: Copy the HTML at the bottom of the page and paste it in an appropriate area in your blog page.

For more details refer to dev.live.com/messenger. But please spare yourself by not starting with this page, it takes you to a complex looking MSDN page which finally redirects you to these 3 simple steps I have said above.

In the recent months there has been good improvements in Virtual Earth's Birds eye view. One of the reasons this was possible was due to new camera used for these excellent high resolution images - Ultracamx. UltracamX is from a company (Vexcel) Microsoft acquired some time back. It supports very large image format available (216 megapixels: 14,430 pixels across track; 9,420 pixels along track) which means they do fewer flights to capture images. It has something like 13 CCD Arrays, each of them controlled by a dedicated CPU and instance of Windows CE Embedded and a 14th CPU for overall control.

I just now saw this movie on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Seattle - where I am going for MVP/RD Summit. The movie is about August Rush (played by Freddie Highmore) an orphan who loves Music more than food and runs out in search of his parents. His parents (played by Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys) are a sheltered cellist and a charismatic guitarist who get separated by accident after a single night of love and living in search of each other for 11 years. The mother herself never knew she had a boy born alive. The story is about how this boy becomes a child music prodigy performing his own composition in New York Central Park music festival and gets united with his parents at the end. The movie has some Bollywood/Kollywood like elements like the boy running into bad guys (played by Robin Williams) and always falling back into good guys. A nice to see Movie with fine background music.  

Yesterday in JAX India 2008 event at Bangalore I presented the Keynote on behalf of Microsoft India. The topic I choosed was "Living with Heterogeneity: Bridging the Worlds", covering on need for Interoperability and what is new now on this in the Microsoft world. It will cover four main areas of interoperability with Microsoft technologies – MS Office Interoperability, Web Services Interoperability, Rich Internet Applications & Dynamic Language Runtime.

Download the PPT from here: keynote for Jax 2008 - April 2008.pdf (740.24 KB)

Today Tamilnadu CM was inaugurating at 5PM the Phase 1 of the mega bridge in Chennai Katipara junction on the way to Chennai Airport.

I went to Bangalore for a Morning-Evening trip today by flight and landed in Chennai around 6:30PM. My father gave me an idea to avoid the traffic jam at Katipara due to the event on my way from Airport to my house in West Mambalam - it was to take the local electric train. I did just that just, walked across the road from Airport to Tirusulam Station (I didn't know the under-pass was already opened today) bought a ticket for Rs.4 (unbelievable) and got down in West Mambalam. Took an Auto from there to my house paying Rs.25. The whole trip from Airport to my house took less than 25 minutes and I saved myself the hassle of waiting in Traffic Jams. The last time I travelled in Chennai electric train (though I more frequently travelled by train than now during my school/college days) was few weeks back when I came back from Bangalore by train, landed in Chennai Central and then taking the electric train from Park station to Mambalam.

These two trips set me thinking into the usefulness of several new bridges coming in Chennai including the recently opened Kodambakkam/Mahalingapuram bridge.  I am seeing the fact that over bridges don't help much other than employment to hundreds of bridge workers in short term - they simply move the traffic bottleneck from place to another. It is an established finding now around the world that the real solution is to build more of mass transport systems including Trains in more routes, Buses and to educate people on the advantages of using them. The next step will be to make it convenient for people to convert to these public transport by providing Air Conditioned Trains, Buses & Terminals, easy access to the terminals including underpasses & escalators, common smart card based ticketing systems for an integrated system (bus, train, metro) in the city. If you are not convinced travel to Singapore (or) London and use their public transport for few days.

Hope our policy makers are thinking on the same lines.

I have travelled in Chennai ECR road several times, but not even once I have stopped to go inside the Crocodile Park which is there. Today being a Sunday I was thinking of a place to take my son out and came up with this place. Though I have seen Crocodile parks in many zoos around the world, my only recollection of seeing them in Chennai are in my school days at Guindy National Park. So it was exciting for me as well to see them in Chennai

Madras Crocodile Bank (as it is called) is located 40 km from Chennai city (or 10 Km from Mamallapuram) along east coast road with the Bay of Bengal as a backdrop. We started off from my home around 3:30PM, reached 15 minutes to 5:00PM. The park is open till 6PM, so we spend nearly an hour going around the park. I was expecting a small collection of Crocs, but was surprised to find they have hundreds of them and of many species. The place is also quite spread out and neatly maintained. The Entry fee for Indians - Adults (Rs.30), Children (Rs.20), Still Camera (Rs.20). The place is worth going with your kids.

Dakshina Chitra

Last year or so, again one of the Sundays I went with my family to Dakshina Chitra. This is also in ECR Road about 21Km from Chennai. This is a cultural village that have replicas of South Indian Houses, heritage items, etc. replicating the cultural settings. All 4 southern states have presence here. I found it to be interesting for the first visit. If you want to learn about South India this is a must see place.

One of the concerns for everyone in the Indian IT Industry - for both the insiders and the (abroad) customers are the rising cost of man power. In the last 3 to 4 years (Indian Financial Years Apr-Mar) the industry has grown tremendously. All the 3 Indian IT majors have joined the billion dollar club, continued to double there revenue every year and are now multi-billion corporations. All of them are close to having over 100,000 employees. They have been joined closely by Tier 2 IT companies as well in the multi-billion dollar club and many of them have over 50,000 employees with them. This is formidable human resource capital but they don't come cheap, this unprecedented growth has been pushing the salary further to unsustainable levels.

Further more, for Indian IT services firms nearly 50% (it ranges from 40%-60% depending on the size and offshore/onshore mix) of their revenue is spent in salary and related expenses. Only in few other industries, a single raw material* costs nearly 50% of the revenue. Certainly no other industry (may be Oil and Steel in recent years) have seen its raw materials* cost increase over 30% year on year. So far the Industry have been able to cope with this in several ways - productivity gains, fresh resource augmentations, training, process/tool improvements and more but this certainly gives sleepless nights to CEOs including myself. I strongly believe whether it is stock market, economy in general or salaries, all of them cannot defy gravity for long and keep growing upwards. Indian Stock market which sky rocketed with its BSE Sensex hitting 21,000+ few months back is now trading at 15,000 levels. All goes through cycles of ups and downs; bearish days are also good for the economy in the long run. In Australia conservationist welcome forest fires because they burn the outer layers of the trees which fall down and add nutrients to the soil. In the long run this helps the soil to remain fertile and nurture new life. This is nothing new, it has been happening this way there for millions of years.

Am I forecasting doom days here? - Certainly No. Tough days - Definitely Yes. There are several indicators for this trend. First is the obvious US Slowdown (and a short recession), second is the Indian Rupee to Dollar appreciation, Third is the increasing cost of raw materials and the lower margins - gone are the days of hefty profit margins in IT industry. All these have started to show their impact - news are trickling in of delayed joining dates for campus hires by the IT Majors (at this time this sounds more as rumours to me) and if slowing down in the rate of lateral hires/job market. The best indication I follow for sensing Chennai's Job market is "The Hindu" newspapers Wednesday Opportunities supplement - this week I hardly saw 1 or 2 IT related openings. Normally you see here several full page and half-a-page advertisements by all popular IT brands.

What are the consequences of this:

• First, it will separate boys from men (girls from ladies). The "me too" players will get killed and consolidation will happen in the industry, which is good for any industry to mature
• For the 3 Indian Majors this will mean little, it is likely to be business as usual. The senior teams there would have easily seen this coming for several quarters and they certainly had time to fine tune there strategies
• It will be difficult for Tier 2 companies who are aspiring to get into the elite league as their growth rates will slow down
• For small and emerging companies tough days are certainly ahead. There will be churn but the blood-bath may be limited and short
• Niche players depending on their offerings and geographies have better chances of surviving this and also growing a little due to easier talent access and lesser competition.<Shameless plug begin> This includes companies like mine "Vishwak". We are focused on Media Industry and have been investing heavily on the Indian domestic market for last few years. We are witnessing good growth on both these areas and our investments in Indian market are starting to paying off . Here first mover advantage give us significant head start along with our better understanding of the market<end>

I know this can start a lively debate here and I welcome it, please start posting your comments, observations and thoughts.

*I prefer calling them as Human Assets but that will give a different financial meaning in this context, so let us have them as raw materials here