Happy New Year 2010

Dear Pixovation Readers,

We wish all of you and your families a very happy and prosperous new year 2010 and good times ahead!

Copyright: Dilbert

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PC to PCC – Is it Inevitable?

Transition from Personal Computer (PC) to Personal Cloud Computing (PCC)- Is the change on its way?  It’s my opinion that personal computing is destined for the cloud in coming decades inspite of the fact that there is lot of debate surrounding cloud security and privacy. Here are few reasons for this belief

Storing information on traditional PCs / notebooks is secure as long as you do not connect them to internet. In this age of collaboration and social networking, we connect these personal devices all the time to internet. More often than not, the documents, photos, spreadsheets, emails, bookmarks, etc we create on our local PC is shared in some form or another with our social or professional colleagues, and managed somewhere in the cloud. Are we giving ourselves a mere erroneous perception of security by keeping these artifacts locally?

In my work career of 10 years, I have purchased 4 desktops/ laptops so far. Talk to a computer hardware maintenance division head of your IT company and you will be surprised to find the investment they make every year just to maintain/upgrade the currently running PCs in the company. Now envision a cloud based service provider there who offers one of thousands of virtualized, metered, capacity-on-demand PCC services. Your PCC never needs to be replaced or upgraded, and you can switch provider at your will.

How many times in a highly demanding workday have you felt the need of modifying the same presentation from your office laptops, home PCs, handheld mobile devices and other internet enabled devices. Would it have made work easier if this presentation lived in the personal cloud? You wouldn’t have worried about maintaining a persistent logical ‘session state’ across the array of digital devices you own.

Watch this video on Pogoplug- A device you can use to create your own personal cloud for your connected life.


So what do you think? Is this seamless, anytime, anywhere access to a personalized virtual computing instance is in our future. Leave me a note if you think there are that will stop its adoption in coming decade.

image credit:Ted Haeger

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Dilbert's view on Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is where you can’t get your work done because a service you never heard of has failed somewhere half-way around the world.

Now read what Dilbert has to say about it :)



Comic Strip Copyright:Dilbert

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Holiday Cheer: Google's New Venture

How many times have you heard - Google in race for world's domination, Google is reaching a way too far into our lives, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are grabbing a slice of pie in our everyday life be it voice, mail, search, health, maps, finance etc.

What do you think? Watch this scary video from current before voicing your opinion

This fun video in any way is not a reflection of author's views and is shared here just to get cheer on your face.

Courtesy: Current

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Is traditional Manager a history?

Today, I happened to pull out historical records of the IT program I am managing for last 3 years at my company. While doing some data churning, a unique observation stuck my mind – Till date over 62 people from different units of my company have directly or indirectly reported to me in this program in multiple capacities and at various intervals of time. About 70% of this workforce was out of sight as a result of globalization or virtualization of workspace. I know all of them by name, did work with them for months, have talked to some of them over phone at least 5 times a week and very well know the competencies for few of them but have never got a face to face opportunity to say ‘hello’ to most of them.

This makes me wonder how little line of sight and direct control I have over the work these team members do today. I still remember my early days when organizations were following military developed hierarchical practices where managing people and work was based on command and control. I had my superiors sitting next door to me and I learnt my management style and leadership on job from them. They use to correct every single mistake of mine at work. There was a personal touch and direct oversight. We use to see every single person in office, greet them with smile on the face every morning and use to go for morning and evening tea together as a group.

Gone are the days when I use to stand up in my cube to see my teams sitting all around the floor churning code. The work is still getting completed and several flawless deliveries go to my overseas client round the year. Teams have become way bigger, global and virtual. Most projects and initiatives have become cross units to take advantage of diverse expertise and skills needed to handle multi technology programs. Does this essentially mean, team members are self managing themselves and time has come when we don’t need managers or need fewer managers?

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Xobni is Inbox - spelled backwards

As a project manager, communications makes up a huge portion of my work and like it or not the bulk of that communications happens through emails.

Considering I am spending quantifiable hours every day working with Microsoft Outlook, I was always looking for optimizing my time spent with MS Outlook and about six months back I came across Xobni. Xobni is email add-in for outlook and one of the latest additions in my project management toolkit. This small plug-in has made Outlook much faster and more useful.

This add-in makes Outlook inbox fun to use, adds instant news ways to how you view people, lets you extract phone numbers, pictures and tells you upfront at what time of day, your mail buddies are more responsive to emails. And guess what? It’s free.

The latest feature addition in social networking space is Xobni’s integration with Yahoo Mail – Now you can search your personal emails in Yahoo mail. If the person has a profile on the business-oriented LinkedIn social-networking service, the Xobni panel can display his or her job title, employer, and a photo from LinkedIn.

Xobni plugin sidebar in Microsoft Outlook has three sections - The first one shows the person's email "network" -- a list of everyone that person has placed in the "To" or "Cc" fields of emails you've exchanged. The next section is called "Conversations" and displays the entire threads of all the email exchanges you've had with the profiled person. Finally, there's a section listing all the files you have exchanged as attachments with the profiled person.

Folks, believe me this program has made managing my emails faster, smoother and simpler.  Check the demo below or go to http://www.xobni.com/ to download the add-in.



If you know more such tools/programs that can make life easy for project management professionals, drop me a note or leave me a comments below.

image courtesy: xobni

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Traits of Servant Leadership

"Top down" leadership is the most common, easiest and traditional. I work for a company where it is most prevalent and I always thought it to be the most efficient form of leadership. Lately, I started realizing that there is even more effective form of leadership that can produce the best environment for everyone - The Servant Leadership. A leadership that emphasizes trust, empathy, collaboration and the ethical use of power. Till date, I am searching for a true servant leader in my organization. Here are some of the traits that I personally feel are absolutely required in a true Servant Leader:

1/ Authenticity - Always be your real self in every circumstance. Hold the same values in whatever role you have. A true servant leader is not only visionary but also an honest, authentic human being. The one who is willing to admit his mistakes, who doesn't let's his ego prevent him from apologizing to someone lower in hierarchy. Being authentic is first knowing yourself and then being yourself.

2/ Vulnerable - Being honest with your feeling in the context of your work. Being open with your doubts, fears and concerns about an idea, an employee's performance, your own performance and being able to admit mistakes openly particularly with your employees. Being vulnerable takes a great deal of courage because it is contrary to traditional leadership where most people are told to believe that power comes from our ability to maintain control. A true servant leader always believe that power comes from realizing that we can't be in control and we must depend on others.

3/ Accepting - Acceptance is more important than approval. Most of the conflicts in workplace originate because of personality rather than product or process. The art of acceptance does not imply that you accept everyone's ideas without critical analysis, discussion and judgment - only that you accept ideas as valid for discussion and review, and that you focus on the ideas themselves, not on the person who presented them.

4/ Be Present - Having your whole self available at all times - available to yourself as you try to bring all your values to bear on the work at hand, and available to others as you respond to the problems and issues and challenges of the team members, colleagues, managers, employees, vendors and customers.

5/ Be useful - Be a resource for your people. One of the primary functions of the manager/ leader is to assure that people get the resources they need to do the job. To be a leader who serves, you must think of yourself as their principal resource.

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Is Twitter Ready for Buy Out?

San Francisco’s hot startup - Twitter just celebrated its third B'day and people have started discussing if it is ready for buyout? Well the answer probably depends on whom you go and ask. I am a firm believer that everything has a price and has a buyer. So Twitter shouldn’t be an exception. Even though the company has not started generating meaningful revenue but it is extremely popular with roughly 8 million unique US users monthly. Though number of unique hits is not the only criteria for popularity but here is a comparison of increasing popularity of Twitter. This real-time short messaging service company raised $35 million this February to fuel its growth.

Ever wonder why should Twitter investors sell it now? Twitter is pegged at 250 million today and if a buyer offers 3-4 times its current worth, I am sure investors will be smart enough to take that money unlike Digg that failed to sell itself at peak.

Who can buy Twitter? Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc are few names that click my mind. While these companies may have different rationale to buy Twitter’s messaging infrastructure. I would peg my bet on Eric Schmidt for multiple reasons:

• To continue the growth momentum, Google needs a growth engine and Twitter may be steal deal for Eric before it becomes lot more expensive

• Google main search technology and Twitter’s messaging infrastructure can marry and result in “real time search”. Think it the other way round, Twitter hasn't figured out how to make money from real time search but it has potential to threaten Google’s cash - Search

• Eric can go for twitter just to keep it out of Microsoft or facebook hands. After all $750 M – $1B is not hell lot of money today compared to what Google paid for YouTube in 2006 ($1.65 B in 2006)

So Twitter is worth buying for Google after 3 years even though it is not generating any money today.

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Talent Grooming

A successful leader is the one who believes in his people and makes every attempt to groom them so that they can reach their potential. Here are some of the guru mantras that have helped me groom my team:

Believe in your folks before they succeed: If you want your team to reach their potential, you need to believe in them before they become successful and sometimes before you can persuade them to believe in themselves. Though it is much tougher to believe in people before they have proved themselves but as a leader, you need to carry this trait.

Emphasize their strengths: The best way to show people your faith in them and motivate them is to focus your attention on their strengths. By emphasizing people's strength's, you are helping them believe they possess what they need to succeed. Praise them for what they do well both privately and publicly. Tell them how much you appreciate their positive qualities and their skills. Any time you get an opportunity to compliment them in front of their family and close friends, do it.

List their past success: There may be times when you need to encourage an individual beyond emphasizing his strengths to motivate him/her. An easy way to do this is to make the individual feel important. Help people remember their past success and they will have confidence in their future actions. Not everyone has natural ability to recognize their past successes and draw confidence from them. If you can show them that they have done well in the past and help them see that their past victories have paved the way for future success, they will be better able to move into action.

Instill confidence when they fail: Some people are resilient and willing to keep trying in order to succeed, even when they don't see immediate progress. But others aren't that determined. Some will collapse at the first sign of trouble. To give them a push and to inspire them going you need to keep showing your confidence in them, even when they are making mistakes.

One of the ways to do that is to tell about your past troubles. Sometimes people think that if you are currently successful, you have always been that way. They don't realize that you had your own failures and flops. Show them that success is a journey, a process and not a destination. When they realize that you have failed and yet you are successful, they will realize that it is okay to fail. And their confidence will remain intact.

Experience some wins together: It is not enough just knowing failure is a part of moving forward in life. To really become motivated to succeed, people need to believe they can win. Coming alongside others to help them experience some wins with you give them reasons to believe they will succeed. And in the process, they sense victory. That is when incredible things begin to happen to them in their lives.

To help people believe they can achieve victory, put them in a position to experience small success. Encourage them to perform tasks or take on responsibilities you know they can handle and do well. And give them the assistance they need to succeed. In time as their confidence grows, they will take on more difficult challenges, but they will be able to face them with confidence and competence because of the positive track record they are developing.

Visualize their success: Each time you cast a vision for others and paint a picture of their future success, you build them up, motivate them and give them reasons to keep going.

If you can practice the above mantras with your direct reports you will not only be able to successfully groom talent but you will be their hero. We all live under the same sky but we don't have the same horizon. Make people see beyond today and dream big. When you put your faith in people, you help them expand their horizon and motivate them to move to a whole new level of living.

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The product - YOU!

In most situations in life you need to sell yourself (a.k.a employ your talent). If you are one of those who will raise eyebrows hearing the word 'sell' then you will have tough time going-ahead in life. Marketing yourself is not a luxury, it's has become a necessity now and you better learn this art. Have you ever noticed that experienced salesman always sells himself and the company first. Then he will discuss the product and finally you will hear him say "Now, lets talk about how little this product will cost considering everything that you will get".

Your brand is the truth about YOU!
Make sure you always have a very well thought brief introduction about yourself. A story that reveals your talent. Like every company, every person has dozen of good stories that reveal their talent. Discover these stories and tell them well. What is your story? How can you tell it best? If you need help, ask for it. Go to a person who knows you well and can give you a perspective.

A brief summary about what you do?
Write down your answer to above question. Show them to people you trust and ask them is it clear? Is it simple? Does it inspire their confidence that you are focused enough to sell yourself? If it sounds like you do many things or too many unrelated things then your buyer may assume you may not be able to do any of them well. Always find a niche. Even if you do range of things well, find out what your inquirer needs and focus your message on that need only.

What difference do you make?
When it comes to why you be a valueable employee? Make sure you do not answer what makes you different but how what you do makes difference for the employer. You may want to read about the marketer before you pen down this answer. It needs to be a personalized one to make an impact.

Are you enviable?
Always ask yourelf - Are you a person or a company that your competitors envy? Apply this to youreslf. Ask, "If not, why not? and what can I do to change that?"

People don't think, they stereotype
If you have been to America, you may have noticed that Americans on meeting a new acquaintance will always ask " So what do you do for a living?" The answer let them categorize the person. Accountant? Stiff. Lawyer? Arrogant. Engineer? Analytical. Our mind paints a quick picture - paint that obscures our view of the unique person behind it. Everyone sterotypes, its because it is convenient and makes it easy to remember. So before you try to make a pitch/ sale, ask yourself how this person likely to stereotype me?

Visit this space again for continued series on productizing YOU .......

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Consultative Leadership

Leadership doesn’t always come easily to project managers because they have little clout. The nature of their work, often as temporary engagements, means project managers have limited authority over their team. They often don’t perform formal reviews of the team so they have to figure out a way to lead and guide people to satisfy customer needs.

Consultative leadership can do that. You can help educate others, help guide and direct them, but you must let them have a say in how work will get done. If I told you what to do, would that motivate you or demotivate you? If you are a highly trained, competent person, it can be a de-motivator. Project teams are fed up with the … hierarchical view of management. These people like to be told the goal but not how to do it. While project managers don’t have the authority to make go or no-go decisions, they do reign supreme when dictating how a project is executed. With this distinction in mind, influencing others to act means inspiring ownership or empowerment in a project through strong direction, advice and even education. Allow everyone to have a stake in the project. Team members can thus be more emotionally committed to the project. They’re empowered to execute project tasks, but the project manager can set a strong direction with the vision that they pass along from the sponsor.

until later …… V

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Chinese Stir Fried Mushrooms

Today I had some mushroom in my fridge and was looking for a different mushroom recipe. I usually cook dry mushroom with peas. I found this cool and really easy recipe and the mushrooms were cooked and all ready in just a few minutes ...
So here I am sharing my pictures and the recipe .

This one is a mushroom lover's delight! Tossed with garlic and soya sauce, these mushrooms are sure to tickle anyone's taste buds. Loaded with iron and fibre and low in carbohydrates, this hearty and healthy dish makes a full meal, if the mushrooms are tossed with ½ cup of boiled whole wheat noodles.

Cooking Time : 15 minutes.
Preparation Time :10 minutes
Serves: 2 adults

Ingredients
2 cups mushrooms, cut into halves & Steamed in the cooker for 1 whistle .
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 green chilli, finely chopped
2½ tablespoons soya sauce
2 teaspoon cornflour (cornflour is not finely ground but coarsely ground )
1 cup spring onion greens, finely chopped
a pinch chilli powder
1 teaspoon oil
salt to taste

Preparation

1.Dissolve the corn flour in 2 tablespoons of water and the soya sauce and keep aside.
2.Heat the oil in a non-stick pan, add the garlic and green chilli and sauté for 2 minutes.
3.Add the mushrooms , white portion of spring onions and salt and sauté for 3 to 4 minutes.
4.Add the corn flour mixture and sauté for 2 to 3 minutes till the sauce coats the mushrooms.
5.Add the spring onion greens and mix well.
6.Sprinkle the chilli powder and serve immediately.

Enjoy the dish!

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Wealth accumulation mantras!

Hi there! Have you ever thought how do you build wealth? I am sure this thought must have cropped in your mind many times. Well you are not the only one, who wants to be wealthy. Believe me every other human being thinks the same way. One of my well wishers told me that there are four roads to wealth

You can marry it: Well some do that but I passed this stage 3 years back!!

You can inherit it: Not an option in this life or may be I need to find a rich relatives :(

You can get a windfall: Could be an option if I sit down and wait for my lottery or some other unexpected good fortune or

You can accumulate it: This sounds to be the wisest of all options given my current state of affairs

Accumulate? It is not that easy but it is not that difficult to if you follow the below mantras

• Live within your means: These consumer driven economies push anybody to buy the new gadgets, clothes etc one after the other. Most of us go after the brand names, pay lots at time and forget the principal ‘save first, spend second’. Follow the mantra of living within your means and you will realize growing wealthy is not that difficult.
   
• Save aggressively: Set a goal and go for it. The earlier you start, the upper hand you get in accumulating wealth
   
• Manage your taxes: Have you ever considered how taxes are your biggest expense in life - more than mortgage expense, education expense, or any other expense? So, you must take advantage of all tax breaks available - each and every single one of them.
   
• Be patient: If you have been investing in the market you may have realized by now that time in the market is more important than timing the market. ‘The market has a very efficient way of transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.” - Warren Buffet. So if you are thinking of accumulating wealth, you need to follow Buffet Uncle here J
   
• Periodically re-balance your portfolio: Take gains from the best-performing assets and buy those temporarily out of favor.
   
• Get advice: Never underestimate the value of good advice. Someone who manages investments full time certainly will find things you have overlooked or done wrong. A good financial adviser is like a personal trainer for your finances and can get you on track and keep you there until your goals are met.

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Bankless Banking - P2P lending

Person-to-Person (P2P) lending is an innovative solution for credit worthy buyers who need money and lenders who have extra cash at hand. When US economy is in doldrums due to credit-market crisis, P2P lending business model is helping individuals who need small loans. Given the success of this consumer lending model, large financial institutions need to watch carefully the development in this space. One of the leaders in P2P lending is Prosper.

How Prosper works?

Lender registers at Prosper and sets a minimum interest rate they are willing to earn and bid in the increments of $50 to $25K. Lender can use credit scores, histories, borrowers personal stories, endorsement from friends and group affiliations to select borrowers.

Borrower creates a loan listing of up to $25K and set the maximum rate they are willing to pay to lender.

Prosper takes the bids with the lowest rates and combines them into one simple loan to the borrower. The company handles all on-going loan administration tasks including loan repayment and collections on behalf of the matched borrower and lenders. The company generates its revenue by charging borrower 1% to 3% fee on funded loan and 1% per annum loan servicing fee to lender.

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Picture taking made easy - BenQ T850

Looking for a touch screen digital camera that is slim and chic, wait for BenQ DSC T850. It has everything from circle shaped touch screen that fit every finger to well organized UI that provides ever-so-clear functions.

Features include 3x optical zoom lens, ISO 1600, large 3 inch tocuh screen, face recognition technology, anti-shake mechanism and SDHC memory card slot and shutter Speed of 1/2000 ~ 1 sec.

BenQ to check for price tag and availability.

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Geotagging - an emerging trend

Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information. For instance, one can find images taken near a given location by entering latitude and longitude coordinates into a Geotagging enabled image search engine. Geotagging enabled information services can also potentially be used to find location-based news, websites, or other resources. By zooming in on the map, one can not only see a satellite image of the place but also the landscape of where one wants to go. Thus gaining a fresh perspective of the trip one is planning.

 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture with geotagging can add a few hundred more. That is probably the reason more cell phones and digital cameras now have built-in GPS support. Carrying a camera with GPS built in, naturalists can map their bird sightings or chart out seal populations. Archaeologists can mark where they unearth artifacts. Travelers can wow family and friends and bring life to slideshows.

 

Some of the camera phones from Sprint Nextel Corp. and gadget from Pharos Science & Applications Inc already support geotagging. High end Nikon camera can directly connect to external GPS devices and get the positioning coordinates at time of photo shoot. The upcoming PhotoFinder from ATP Electronics Inc. will be writing GPS information directly on a camera's memory card. Finally, photo sharing services like Flickr, picasa, SmugMug, Panoramio lets you manually add the photos to a map.

 

This is an emerging trend in digital photography and is expected to become an integral part of digital imaging going forward. As things stand today, only 5% of the total photographs posted on web carry location information.

 

Like any other emerging trend, this also has hind side viz privacy considerations, the failure of satellite-dependent GPS to work reliably indoors, GPS devices tag the location of the photographer, while the landmark being photographed could be miles away and most importantly, geotagging still typically involves carrying an extra gadget and fiddling with software on a computer back home.

 

Having said, this emerging trend has huge potential and we are very much at the beginning of it.

 

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From behind the (fire)wall to the cloud

Being in an IT services company, I envy product vendor’s sales reps job. Whenever they bring any new product to their customers, the promises they make are just too big to believe and the jargons they use are just too confusing to the customers (like the subject of this discussion). One of my clients who made 6 digit investments in buying all the hardware, security suites and BPM packages to implement one-off BPM programs using SOA principles was given the sales pitch that public cloud computing is the way forward for BPM.

Imagine the state of the client who has not even seen the break-even for her investment is given one hour session on new technology buzzword cloud computing. As soon as she was released by these sales reps, she was aghast and came by my desk …. Is public cloud computing going to replace traditional enterprise IT?

Donning my IT consultant hat, I said I don’t think so. Public cloud computing won’t replace traditional enterprise IT however few years down the line service IT providers may sell business services using the new technology of virtualization. But rest assured your recent investment in BPM tools and hardware will not go waste. You will still need privately hosted hardware, customized services for your key business processes whose security, privacy, performance and availability cannot be compromised.

As this virtualization technology matures and organizations gear for adopting BPM enterprise wide, they may see cost advantage in moving certain BPMS components to public clouds like

• business process modeling and analysis tools, repositories


• collaboration and social networking tools


• test and demo environments


• monitoring and optimization components

But at any point of time, it is not practically possible to move all IT business processes hosted behind the fire(wall) to the cloud.

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