NanoSaka > Saurabh Kaushik

Finally, Motorola also realized the power of open source. Moto MAGX is next generation of platform based on Linux. “Moto MAGX will be part of its 61% of handset in next few years” says Christy Wyatt, Vice President, Software Platforms & Ecosystem, Motorola. All this showdown is to make Motorola a primal choice of mobile content developers and get Motorola in center of the mobile space battle. No wonder, they are heavily invested all variants of Unix based mobile OS development around the world, from Linux Mobile, Symbian to Androide.

May 14th 2008, Motodev Summit, held in Bangalore, was by far a great conference attendance. Sheer glitzy stage, music and Hollywood like launch were certainly the inspiration from Apple’s showcase events.

The summit also offered tutorials on everything a developer aspire to know on design, develop, debug, deploy and distribute compelling enterprise, vertical business or consumer applications with Motorola. This summit was seeking to generate new ideas and enthusiasm for their main audience, Indian Content Developers.

I personally felt that the business model shake-down and open community adoption would really assist Motorola, being a viable option for global entrepreneurs in Mobile space. Certainly, their cheering support for Java was a sweetspot in this bustling era of Mobile OS vendors.

During the panel discussions, two major challenges were highlighted namely fragmentation and discovery. Fragmentation of choice amongst platforms and discovery of new and useful applications. Motorola attempted to give both the answers, one by declaring support for Open OS like Linux and second by providing the a Catalog service for mobile applications.

Motorola has introduced Motorola Solutions Catalog to provide a launch vehicle for content developers. Moto Catalog will help users to choose among applications as well as developers to market their products. Motorola is also offering preloading feature for winner applications for their future mobiles. This step certainly encourages small budget team to innovate and compete on world wide mobile. All this for one “E + I” formula, “Encouraging Innovation”. As Cristy rightly puts, “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity not as a threat”.

They also attempted to tune with techno entrepreneur to focus on business and end users first, followed by choice of application development platforms. Also pointed out, the simple and sound success factor could be just user interface of “Three clicks to Glory”. Mobile market is on crossroad with three major components (Device, Network and Application) of ecosystem fighting out for dominance. But all have to work together to get it going.

During entire summit, Motorola was very much attempting to get on to another missed band wagon, GPS mobile. Early impactful entry of Nokia in GPS market has once again thrown Moto to chase another one. It is for all of us to see, how last known innovation MOTO RAZR will stimulate next big bang “Geo + Media + Socials” in Moto world. God bless, Moto.

At end, welcoming the Linux on Motorola devices is a greeted step for all. It provides enough reasoning to call upon open world and play in their backyard.

It was one of the finest conference held in Bangalore.

I have started to think on what my wish list for Location Based Service well before I could buy my first GPS enabled mobile phone. Here, I go… please add on if you wish….

LBS Follow Me:

• Tracking my footsteps and of my friends.
• Tracking my friends in near by location.
• Tracking my POI near my location.
• According to user route, you can send special offer. Frequent Local Visitor.
  

LBS Advisements:

• Send advertisement according to my location.
• Filtering the advertisement based on my preference.
• Spam guard against advertisement

News:

• Local Area News

Here, I have big technical question.

• Will the browser be changed to add Location info sent to server as a part of every HTTP request?

Yes, “knol project” is Wikipedia by Google. But it has better features for author to monetize on written page, related search box and Peer review widget.

Knol, according to Google, means ‘a unit of knowledge’. I think it is great to have a better version of wikipedia and I am sure Google will do greater job in this area.

I am firm admirer for Google way of doing business. But I would certainly not advocate the monopoly. To overpower Google or Microsoft, you got to be smarter and quicker to kill the beast, otherwise the story repeats itself.

Yes, I have heard that Chief of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales was talking about creating Search Engine to beat GooG and see … what Google has replied with!!! A beta and running service of Knol.

I think in business, you got to stay ahead, not just by talking and letting your opponent know your thinking patterns rather strike them when they least expect you and materialize on the gain from their on. Google did same to Yahoo and Microsoft. Wikipedia just lost it.

I have been browsing Firefox plugin site for last two years…. for one very important solution to my Bookmarks Sync Up from Mozilla. All this while, I have tried Google Browser Sync and Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. But I am never satisfied.

I think it is very late move from Mozilla to venture into this project called Weave, which will centralized my data ( all type of bookmarks, RSS feeds and preferences) to one authetic place called Mozilla planet and provide me a uniform browsing experience with my data available on all my computing devices. This should have been an integrated browser solution from day one as both people and their computing devices are not singleton anymore.

I always thought that this kind of user data management can be a big potential for building new services around and we have already numbers of Social bookmarking solutions (del.icio.us, technocrati, stumble upon) out there which makes me happy but confused (which one to use?) At this point of time, Web King, Google has already taken consolidated lead into this area with Browser Syn and Toolbar, it will be a hard to catch run for Mozilla. Reason, why would I change if experience with Google is increasingly satisfying!!!

Mozilla could have bigger advantage in Social Web phenomena than Google who interestingly taken the responsibility of browser to share data in cloud and keep it available not only for users but for themself also.

I am firm follower of Mozilla and Google products, I would still look for synergistic solutions like:

• To integrate my live bookmark of browser to get synchronized with Google Reader.
• To integrate my bookmark of browser to get synchronized with Google Bookmark.
• Browser controlled central place for all my public bookmark management.

Here, I am not advocating to make my browser super-powerful desktop application. But an browsing application which

1. Make me mobile (on all computers and mobile devices)
2. Maintain my identity (cookies, form data, history and passwords)
3. Maintain my preferences (static, social and live bookmarks)
4. Lesser number of plugin on my browser from competing vendors.
5. Also able to sync my dictionary (my added words).

Where is Minimo?? Mozilla should have also got into a mobile browser market much earlier where Opera, IE and Safari are solidly gaining ground.

Mozilla should also develop a Firefox variant which can be installed directly on hardware. Beat the Google OS before it rises. Mozilla can become the force to reckon and they can capture very center of Cyber space.

This article seems like a preaching and beating to Mozilla. But these are just thoughts and passionate desires from my experience with their products.

Taking ref from GigaOm articles, Dash Navigation has got it right and done a great job of bring two fantastic services together, namely GPS and Web 2.0. For me, Dash Express is an Internet enabled GPS (Global Positing System). As in past, we all gone heard from major like Google, Yahoo, etc tried to show us the dream but could not get it in reality. Dash Express is loaded to fascinate us with on the go telling us;

• Better routes to get destination considering the traffic flow.
• Better ways to get destination by giving us specific options to shop, eat and drink.
• Better options to explore locality of route.

Features which I admire most,

• MyDash: Allows me to create button and upload to Dash device through Internet.
• Send2Car: Allows me to talk to car from my laptop to updates like addresses.

I am a dreamer and dream of “Total Recall” for features like,

• Dash Express could interface the Robotic steering wheel and guide car on the road using traffic/motion sensors and live satellite images. Also it could also feel me for all my mood and just take me preferred beer bar or my type of restaurant (spicy Indian) while I am sleeping in backseat of my car.

What do you think?? I am sure, it is not very far fetched dreams and surely an inspiration for Dash and Delphi to come together.

“Entrepreneurship” remains a fascinating word for many MBA graduates and working folks (non MBA yet, including me. But there are few who could “Just do it”. Here I like to highlight my take on it.

I think there are more ‘born’ entrepreneurs than ‘made’. Considering, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Dell and many more. Some suggest that entrepreneurship can be thought, my vote to this statement is somewhat to limited degree.
I think college can

• Get you in a lab.
• Get domain knowledge on historical data basis.
• Teach you unique way of logical thinking.
• Teach you problem solving and analytical skills.
• Teach you set of belief about humans.

But it fails to recognize and educate about sightings the future, which is a core attribute to an entrepreneur personality.

Even, MBA program for entrepreneurs, can teaches you, only.

1. How to evaluate an idea or an opportunity?
2. How to make business plan?
3. How to recognize and mitigate risks?

Inversely, Entrepreneurship has three core aspects.

1. Exploiting and defining opportunity, careful.
2. Understanding and marshallings the required resources.
3. Negotiating and harvesting these resources, effectively.

College can teach you “science of entrepreneurship”. But the art, “application of principals of science”, is very much individual attitude. This is where the difference lies between management graduate and street smart entrepreneur. Why?? In decision making, the graduate will heavily rely on historical events, index patterns, market data or future predications, but later one will just rely beats of the street, people day-to-day problem and his vision to tap it.

Education teaches us to plan for uncertainty. But often, this education can be disabler and can hamper our ability:

• To be adventures against stated risk.
• To tolerate the risks and event due to over-analysis.
• To pursue the unknown.
• To dream!!!

But what I see a down side of education is that you heavily rely on data and skills. MBA education does not mean that you get the job of entrepreneur or guarantees the taste the success for any startup you dip in. I think formal business education can be a liability to an entrepreneur. Why? How?

This can damage a potential entrepreneur success prospect. If a potential entrepreneurs goes to MBA collage, he will be made to think and make decisions just like professionals sitting in big corporates. These graduate professionals are supposed to depend data sheets and computer generated project report to make decision. And certainly, he will not be allowed to take any decision on any a potential prospects without databased projections. Entrepreneurship is doing just the opposite. It is about

• Beating the rich and fat corporate guns where they cant think and shoot.
• Making gut feeling a reality.
• Beating the elephant with rabbit like speed.

I am not advocating against MBA grads, instead stating, entrepreneurship is not for just for those graduates ‘unicorns’ but for any body who can dream and chase those desires to douse the fire in belly.

Spider Logic Session: April 19th 2007, PMI

· Believe in people.

· Opportunities are plenty on horizon. Brace yourself

· Knowledge sharing is power.

· Ask questions, don’t just sit.

· Great opportunity for Global delivery model expert Project Manager.

· Play role: Jack of all, master of none.

· Think out side the box.

· Deal with the people with open and positive mind. Start with full marks on sheet.

Enteprise 2.0 platforms can provide highly general purpose, freeform, do-it-yourself (DIY) tools that have the potential to solve an entire group of related and overlapping problems in collaboration, knowledge management, SOA adoption, self-service IT, and even overall worker productivity that have been plaguing IT and business for years.