Sudeep D'Souza

 All managers want reports at varying frequency or even ad hoc. The question is why do they need these reports? I feel it is for anyone of the below reasons  They need them for decision making. This is mostly analysis of the past data or a report predicting the future based on various options.  To give them an understanding on the working of a process. Are the key metrics being tracked, maintained within agreeable limits?  Understanding the overall status of the project, how is it progressing against a timeline are there any risks or bumps ahead that can derail the project.  Most of these reports are expected to be done by subordinates and most subordinates find it hard to build these reports and end up spending hours if not days doing these reports, taking them away from crucial operational issues that might require their attention.  When managers request for reports they need to carefully consider the following  Are the current systems and processes ...

 Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras are cameras that can capture and digitize vehicle number plates. We know them very well for the speed radars and that is how speeding fines are issued instantly. Ive known them to be around for 8-9 years but off late they have become affordable and more widely used with integration into resident portals.  Once ANPR cameras are installed at all the entry gates and exit gates, the most important thing to do is to integrate it into the resident portal, so that tenants and owners can register their vehicles into the system and also they can register their visitors into the system. This way every private vehicle entering into the community can be recognized.  What are the benefits of such a system? There is no recurring cost needed such as issuing RFID cards or tags. This reduces the cost of issuance of the access control.  Improves the safety and security as every vehicle that is entering and leaving the community is rec...

Customer Service is defined as " the assistance provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services. ". In the digital age we live in Customer Service goes much beyond how we greet and serve our customers. It also includes how and where we serve them. 1. Go to your customer No longer do customers have to come to you to buy a product or a service, technology enables us to go to the customer and provide them with the product or service they require. At the very least, its important to have a good technology platform both on the web and mobile where customers can get their service or product at the click of a button.  2. Provide services in a predictable standardized manner  From the colors used on the website/app to the navigation to each service, its important to be standardized and at the same time the company needs to be very predictable in how the service is delivered. This is where automation plays a big part, reducing human intervention in the pr...

In an orchestra there are many individual great and very accomplished players of various instruments. Yet when they all play to the same composition together they bring out something special that they could never bring out when they play individually. And if they all play their own tune it never sounds great. Sounds more like noise. Its the same with any team or a startup, there are many accomplished members of the staff but unless they all play to the same composition they will not produce the music of success. And if they all play their own music it never sounds good and it feels like the team is pulling in different directions. That's where a composer plays a very crucial role, to write the music the way they envision it and then get everyone on the team to play to that composition. This needs to be fine tuned everyday so that the orchestra plays in tune and is able to adjust to the everyday changes that are bound to occur. Who is the composer in your team? Who writes...

The IT industry is a very fast changing environment and there are new languages being invented, new technologies being uncovered and new methodologies being proposed. At the same time there are better equipped smarter and more enthusiastic youngsters that are passing out of university all excited to be part of the world building the next exciting thing to hit the technology market. Given this situation its quite a challenge for someone who has already been working in the industry for sometime to continue to stay relevant and know and understand all the time what is happening and at the same time being acquainted with the technology and the tools that the people are using and the customers are demanding. But it is important that one does stay acquainted and relevant to the changing times. If you don't then there is every chance that one can get rolled over by either the technology or by the super smart young kids coming out of university. Learning never ceases and if you stop ...

Over the last few months I have seen a lot of business ideas that base their revenue generation through advertising. In my experience this is a very dangerous strategy for a startup. Let me narrate my experience about implementing this strategy on a website that Inforica had developed called mindqjobs.com . We launched this website in the last week of december 2012 with much fanfare with the assumption that we will get the traffic to monetize through advertising. The assumption was made on the fact that the website was to be used by the students of a software training institute Mindq Systems  which number in the 1000s every month. We started off by putting Adsense and the pennies started to flow in almost immediately. Thats right, all we got were pennies which added up to a few dollars every day, an amount barely enough to pay for hosting the site on a shared server. One of the reasons is because the traffic was from India and not the west, so you end up making very l...

This is the certificate I got for successfully completing the Technology Entrepreneurship course on Venture Lab. The courses here are really good and I would advise all those that can do these courses to take them up.

By default the Windows 8 operating system does not come with the hibernate option. When you close the lid the computer sleeps by default. This is how I left my system for the first couple of days but what I quickly realized that even though I was doing nothing - my computer was just sleeping and so was I, my battery would be drained by morning. There would be absolutely no charge left by the time I put on the laptop in the morning.  Thankfully Microsoft has not removed the hibernate option in Windows 8 - you just have to search for it under the many menus and you will find it or just follow the steps in this article and you will be there in a minute - http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-enable-windows-8-hibernate-option/ The option to find the menu to hibernate is quite hidden and a pain to do each time so what I have done is configured the sleep button to hibernate. Now I have no issues with my battery and my laptop does not feel like a heater each time I put it...

Being a person who watches a lot of downloaded content I was trying to figure out a way to stream content directly from my laptop to the TV. Since I have an XBox 360 I wanted to do it through that. In the past I have used Boxee but that meant having another computer connected to the TV. Windows 7 + Windows Media Center + XBox 360 When I had Windows 7 on my laptop I installed Windows Media Center and then connected that to the XBox 360 and streamed movies. The connection was a bit convoluted and painful. And I suffered from the following problems It would not reliably connect every time. Sometimes it connected with no issues sometimes it would just not behave. Its not a router issue as both the XBox and the laptop had wired connections into the same router.  Not all kinds of downloads played. The WMC software would play it on the laptop if the codecs were installed but the same would not play on the TV.  Windows 8 + XBox 360 I then went on to install Windows 8 ...

We finally managed to get the Global Startup Battle of Startup Weekend to Hyderabad in 2012. The Global Startup Battle is 138 Startup Weekends happening across the world on two consecutive weekends where the winner from each of the startup weekends gets to upload a video which is open to a global voting. The top 15 teams in the voting get into a semifinal and finally the winner gets a trip to Rio and the Google office in the US along with a lot of other goodies. Since we were time constrained in organizing the event we had less than a month to plan for it and also it happened to be right in the middle of the holiday season and exam season in Hyderabad tickets were hard to sell. We finally managed to sell about 60 tickets with a lot of enthusiastic and excited participants making it down to the Progress office at Madhapur on Friday evening. The event started off with the surprise visit of the Hyderabad Angels who had an open Q and A session with the participants. After that we had ...

Loops and Variables Write a program to swap two numbers without using an additional variable. Solution : vb.net Write a program to find the biggest number in n numbers without using arrays. Solution : vb.net Write a program to find the second biggest number in n numbers without using arrays. Write a program to find the smallest number in n numbers without using arrays. Write a program to find out m * n without using the * operator. Write a program to find out m / n without using the / operator. Write a program to find out m ^ n without using the ^ operator. Write a program to find out m % n without using the % operator. Write a program to find out the average of n numbers. Convert a number in String format to integer - Number entered as "1234" should come as 1234 and "1234a" should come as an error. Write a program to find the factorial of a number. Write a program to find out 1+2+3+4+...+n Write a program that sums up the digits of a number until it i...

It all started on Thursday when I saw a post on one of the blogs announcing that there was going to be a Startup Weekend being hosted at ISB in Hyderabad. Something in that article triggered my imagination that it would be a fun event to attend to understand and feel the start-up ecosystem. With a lot of encouragement from the home front I was all game to go. I went ahead and bought 5 tickets to the event and then started to ask all my friends and colleagues asking them who would like to come for the event and the 5 tickets disappeared fairly quickly. To tell you a bit about Startup Weekend, I copied a paragraph from Annkur 's post, one of the organizers about startup weekend " Startup Weekend is this 54 hours madness that brings together business folks, developers, designers and jack of all trades like me to build a startup over a weekend. Ones with an idea pitch it, voting follows and teams are formed organically. These teams have to come back with a product / prot...

I have been downloading and playing quite a few games lately and I started to wonder what is it that makes these games so addictive where as there are a million other games that just come and go. What I realised is that the key to the successful games such as angry birds, ninjump and so on is to keep it very simple so that it is easy to learn and start playing yet keeping it just hard enough to keep you engaged to try again and again as you always feel that you are just there. I tried to extend this same idea to some of the applications that I use and I found that there is a similar trend. The applications are very easy to learn and become useful in a very short span of time yet they are feature rich to make you want to come back and use them every time. Its the same for the android and apple devices - they are so easy to use they do not even need a user manual but there is so much available on the market place/app store that there is never a boring moment as you can go there and f...

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 ...

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...

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 y...

If you are part of the whole social networking scene then Vanity URLs seems to be the in thing. The latest to do it after Twitter and Google is Facebook. My vanity URLs are Website : http://www.sudeep.me Google : http://google.com/profiles/sudeepdsouza Facebook : http://facebook.com/sudeep.dsouza Twitter : http://twitter.com/sudeepdsouza LinkedIn : What’s this?   http://www.linkedin.com/in/sudeepdsouza Go get your own vanity URL before your name is not available. You might wonder why get a vanity URL? My reasons are listed below. To be able to send people your profile very easily without having to deal with numbers and special characters in the URL. To make your profile search engine friendly. Since your name appears in the URL and also in the content it has a higher probability of appearing higher in the search results.

If you are a programmer and you get stuck trying to code in HTML a special character you should use this website http://www.copypastecharacter.com/ . All you have to do is click on the special character and in the top right hand corner you can ask it for the HTML equivalent for that character.

You can now learn typing online without installing anything and you can pretty much learn from any computer that has an internet connection. The website keeps track of all your lessons and also tracks your typing speed and your problem areas. For all those that want to learn typing I think this website is a must visit website. The website is http://www.typingweb.com/ .