Sudeep D'Souza

This is a beautiful article about "Money" - What Truly "Wealthy" people know about money . There are some excellent thoughts in this article and one of the aspects in that article which I want to talk about is the formula Wealth = Value Provided by Y * Number of Entities that Directly Value Y (Where Y is the product, employee or subject generating wealth). The key aspect for wealth in this formula is the value that is provided. At an organizational level or a individual level it comes down to the same thing. If you want to make money you need to have something that provides value. At an organizational level it is the value of the intellect the organization holds. If the organization does not innovate and keep ahead of the intellectual curve it will fall away and stop providing value. It is same for the individual - if the individual stops learning and stops innovating and keeps ahead of his peers in his ability to provide value then his wealth disappears.Onc

Yourschool.in is a product that we have conceptualized and developed. The idea is to be able to provide a school a platform to create a fully functional, interactive website in less than 5 minutes. We have achieved this by incorporating the following into the product There is no installation to be done. Just register your institution on the website. You do not need to have any technical personnel to operate the website. All you need to know is basic computer knowledge and you will be able to post content about your institution. You can use the site from anywhere 24 X 7 and update the content as it is completely on the internet. No need of high bandwidth dedicated internet connection from your institute to operate the website. Broadband connections with a minimum of 256 kbps is enough to operate the website. You can change the information published at any time by yourself thus giving you complete control over the website with no dependencies. Some of the features provided by the

A few months ago I wrote this article Social Web does not work for me . Life has changed with regards to my social networking since then for the better. Some examples include Started to tweet a lot more and people have started replying to my tweets. So there is a nice conversation going on. Met some old friends on Facebook who i lost complete touch with over the years. Met business acquaintances on Linked In and have successfully executed business with them. What has caused this change? Initially it was a challenge. My initial challenges were What do i post about ?  Why would  anyone be interested in what I wrote about ? Why is nobody responding to what I posted ? Is anybody reading what I wrote ? How do I get more friends ? But i kept posting and just writing about what I thought people would be interested in reading and slowly I gathered friends, followers and acquaintances. Then the conversations started to happen the connections started to be made and the whole thing sud

We have been on a recruitment drive for the last month or so and its been quite a frustrating experience. Our recruitment process for junior developers involves a written test, technical interview and a HR interview. We have found a lot of candidates have cleared the written test and are able to answer technical questions with regards to definitions and syntax of programming languages. They do this with ease and its a very text book like answer. If you wander into the domain of making them think by twisting a regular problem slightly they are taken completely by surprise. I think this is due to the way we are taught in India. We are very good as long as one does not deviate from the bookish suggested approach of understanding and solving anything. We are taught how to "by-heart" everything even if one does not understand it. For example, my 4 year old daughter is forced to learn Hindi poems each 4 lines long even though she does not know what the words in the poem mean. All

It was almost 12 years ago that I visited Ooty as a student from college staying in rustic run down dormitories for a couple of days and doing the regular sights that had to be seen by every tourists visiting this wonderful hill station. It was so different this time - we stayed in 3 different resorts in different parts of Ooty. It all started with taking the flight from Hyderabad to Coimbatore and then the lovely drive up the hills that took about 3 hours to do with 34 hair pin bends that brought nausea to the strongest of stomachs. But at the end of the drive we arrived at Kingscliff to the most wonderful view of Ooty from high up in the hill. We then had lunch in the award winning restaurant at Kings Cliff called Earl's Secret. A beautiful restaurant serving fine dining that makes everyone feel special. After some trekking around the hotel and some shopping at Charring Cross it was time for drinks and dinner which was served in the Bar Room of this resort with a real crack

We just celebrated Earth Day and Earth Hour . I am for these two concepts to try and save the environment. A lot of organizations are going green and i had an opportunity to see first hand how one organization is going green and the double standards within that organization in implementing this. Let me recount my experience. There were no paper/plastic cups at the coffee/tea/cold drink/water dispensers. When i looked around i found coffee mugs and then realised that we had to use those to drink anything. A very noble idea to save paper and the environment - but what about water. In a city like Hyderabad where water is a problem i was observing that each time someone drank from those mugs they would wash it and then again wash it after it has been drunk from. Now you might wonder why was it washed twice - the reason is the person who used the mug washed it because he used it. The person who was going to drink from that mug washed it because he did not know if the person who last used

It was great to be back at the Indiblogger meet after more than 2 years. The meet was held at the Fortune Select Manohar hotel near the Begumpet Airport and it was great to meet some old friends that i got acquainted with in the last meet and it was nice catching up with them after so long. I also got to meet a lot of new friends and learnt about their interesting blogs that I am sure to be busy reading over the next few days. The meet started off on time with some entertaining videos on a mystery blogger who wanted to come all the way from Germany to attend the blogger meet - the Indiblogger ice breaker spoof is always very entertaining. After that it was the 30 seconds of fame where each participant in the bloggers meet could introduce themselves and their blog. There were a lot of interesting bloggers with a mixture of the young and the old, the quirky funny bloggers to the serious bloggers. There were bloggers who blog about stories, dreams, inner voices and a lot of other varie

There are a lot of universities that have made their courses online which usually involve a  professor taking a class and the class is recorded and published on the internet. These are usually complex courses that are long and very involving and it takes time and patience to complete them. On the other hand there are courses for school children which are usually custom paid programs that cost quite a bit. These programs are delivered via custom programs for children to watch and learn. I came across The Khan Academy  which has videos for teaching children Math and Science and has a lot of videos related to banking, finance, investing, venture capital funding and so on. All these videos are done by a single person Salman using paint as a whiteboard and with him explaining the concept. The wonderful part is the simplicity of the whole delivery mechanism and the effectiveness in using this delivery mechanism to teach a concept. All the videos are free and are available on you tube.

Over the last few days I have been having interesting discussions with my friends on being passionate in what we do versus having focus on the money aspect while doing things. Here are my thoughts on the same. I belive that one needs to be passionate about what one does. There should be an excitement while thinking about what one is doing. What this does to the person is that it makes them enjoy what they are doing and it also ensures that they feel responsible for what they are doing. This automatically leads to a better product and a more caring service. This all sounds so wonderful but there is a downside to this just having passion and doing things may not result in short term monetary rewards but almost always there are long term monetary rewards if the person sticks to their passion right through the ups and the downs. Also during this time the person is enjoying what they are doing and this keeps them motivated and happy. On the other hand if a person is doing a job only for

I believe learning can never ever stop. Everyday there is something new to learn and there are times when you are forced into a situation that drives you to learn even faster. These situations are crisis situations - during this time you always learn at lightning speed and you feel it is the hardest time in your life but the important thing is to stick in there ride out the crisis, do your best and you end up coming out of it a more knowledgeable individual. No amount of make believe scenarios and training can give you the kind of learning a crisis situation gives. Having significant experience in Software Development and having worked on more than one large project one feels that they have seen pretty much everything. Over the last 15 days I have been through two crisis situations that have made me realise that I have not experienced it all yet. The first situation involved our servers that were on a public IP located at a data center that hosted our website http://yourschool.in/ .

I was reading a very deep and touching post today on Subroto Bagchi's blog which is about a young girls life changing in a momment for no fault of hers. Its a very touching story that can happen to any one of us. There have been 2 devastating earthquakes in the last 1 month one in Peurto Rico and the other in Chile. In just a matter of a minute the lives of millions of people changed. Again something that can happen at any time to anyone. Life can change in a momment for any one of us and it is important that we enjoy and have fun with every momment that we have.There is no point in thinking about the missed opportunities in life or what life could be if only we did something - you are wasting precious time that can be spent just enjoying life.

First there was twitter. Everyone seemed to have had a twitter account. So I created one too. Nothing happened for the longest time and I unknowingly followed a lot of people who kept dumping me with a lot of junk information. So I then went and " unfollowed " many of them. I then configured it on my mobile phone thinking OK at least this will make me tweet. I tweeted the first couple of days - i then felt stupid tweeting because i wondered, do the people that are following me really care about what I tweet. What if I am just creating a whole lot of junk information out there with my tweets. So I stopped tweeting when I realised I gave some stupid advise on tweeting that goes like "just tweet what ever is in your head. I'm sure there are enough people that will put up with your nonsense, like me". This is not really true is what i now realised. Tweet only if you have quality information to share which your followers care about. Then came facebook and orkut -

Always wanting to be a good leader I have tried looking at what made other leaders as "leaders". One of the things that hit me was that most of these leaders that were successful are mild mannered, respected individuals and not tyrants or dictators. Tyrants and dictators become leaders but they always end up falling. Usually a very tragic and painful drop from fame. So what is this quality that truly made up the leader. I think that quality is the leader always commanded the respect of the people that they led. They made their subordinates look up to them rather than be scared of them. They always tended to put the interests of the subordinate first before their own. They were willing to give up the best for their subordinates before thinking of keeping it for themselves. All of this is very hard to achieve as it expects a very selfless way of thinking but I do feel that if one can even get close to doing the things I mentioned above they will surely become powerful and s

Watching the news channels of late got me thinking about the style in which most of them function. They find a conflict or a contentious issue and then they get a panel to perform a drama arguing about that issue and that creates a spicy mixture of entertainment. Or atleast that is what they think. None of these discussions ever result in anything concrete being decided or any commitments made or any meaningful insight into the real problem. There is only mud slinging that goes on and then the moderator runs out of time and closes the discussion leaving you hanging. Very rarely does one find a clear articulation of the pros and cons of a particular decision and reporting news the way it is to be reported - the truth and to the point. There is a lot of dramatization created and this ends up putting ideas into the viewers mind that did not exist in the first place. This can sometimes have serious consequences and unless news channels start acting responsible and are held accountable