Vijay Basrur

Excellent Reading

My respect for Jason Calacanis has jumped multifold after reading his 2 posts. I am a regular follower of his blog (though he has stopped regular blogging. He posts very rarely these days)

I suggest you stop whatever you are doing and read the following 2 blog posts

-  What to do if your startup is about fail: An excellent albeit long post about how to face failure

- Why I employed a felon: In defense of a “so called mistake” which Jason stuck by. I would have probably done the same.

David vs Goliath?

Rajesh Jain has a interesting problem. His highly successful mobile business MyToday is being arm twisted by Vodafone. MyToday is a highly successful mobile alerts business which is seeing a lot of traction. Vodafone sees this as a potential threat to their VAS solutions (which really beats me).

So what do they go and do? Ban all Vodafone subscribers to sign up for MyToday. Rajesh has more dope on his blog. He is doing a good thing by blogging about the progress.

I’ve been loyal to Orange/Hutch/Vodafone since the past 8 years. It is disappointing to see such a response from Vodafone. I expected much better.

Obama’s Internet Strategy

If over the past few months you didn’t spot Obama on the Internet (nevermind the newspaper or TV) then you probably weren’t surfing at all.

Obama spun a really good web on the web making him probably the first president to have leveraged the Internet successfully in his campaign. I am sure the Internet will become mainstream for all politicians in the year to come. Our own L K Advani has kicked off an online presence but seems to be just buying Google Ads to get the message across.

Some learnings from the Obama Campaign are captured in this slide show

New clothes for my blog

So I decided to get some new clothes for the blog. I love the variety of themes available for Wordpress. Infact the whole Wordpress ecosystem makes blogging a treat.

I bumped into Blog Oh Blog a few weeks back and I returned there yesterday to look around. I spotted the Statement theme and loved it. So I adapted to the theme yesterday. I still have some bells & whistles to go. But those will come over time. I liked the clean layout and the 2 sidebars which allow for a lot of external content.

Till the time I decide to get some more new clothes, Statement it is.

Social Networking Time Drain

I was reading David Pogue’s Twittering Tips for Beginners and was quite amsued by this quote of his

I’ll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, “I’m now having lunch”? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?

And sometimes I feel it is so true..some of these have become time drains, haven’t they? Unless you are disciplined about it you can go through an entire day twittering, facebooking, orkuting and other such (blogging for ex ;-)).

Time to get back to work!

Cool Product SD Card with Wi Fi

I mean this is amazing. A SD card with inbuilt WiFi. How cool is that?

Check Eye-Fi »

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki!

Apple and Jobs

There has been quite some talk everywhere about how Steve Jobs is dying and all such. When spurts of these news come through, the Apple stock gets hammered and for no other plausible reason.

I am not buying that logic at all. Infact Fortune did a cover story on the Apple story with a focus on their COO Tim Cook. I think it was a nice article. The role of Jobs has always been of a leader. Here is a nice perspective on Jobs by Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm.

Whatever said and done, I think Jobs did a great job at re-building Apple and Pixar and I am sure the team at both these places will take the firms to greater heights even if Jobs steps back, which I reckon he has already started to. I feel so about these firms as they are solidly entrenched in the foundations of innovation.