Thought Garage

Quite an interesting innovation and very promising for all of us. Whiteboards right on the refrigerator.  No more stick-its and post-its on the regrigerator. Go head scribble your thoughts on the refrigerator itself.

When GE launched “Imagination at Work” as its new slogan to replace “We Bring Good Things To Life”, the most eye-catching part of its online campaign was a virtual whiteboard that visitors could sketch and scribble on. Apparently, someone at GE had the smarts to transfer the ad’s essence to the gleaming white surfaces of GE’s appliances. White goods + whiteboard…? Witness the birth of the sketch-a-fridge.

Currently only available in Brazil, where it is sold as Risque Rabisque (roughly: Scrawl & Scribble), the refrigerator is covered in a special coating similar to dry erase whiteboards. Replacing the age-old practice of sticking grocery lists and children’s drawings on the fridge, missives can now be written directly on the appliance and easily wiped off. It’s a simple innovation that cleverly integrates existing human behaviour, and turns a mundane product into something playful and appealing. Opportunities? When rethinking a product or service, don’t just focus on features or haute design. An element of fun can be just as much of a sales magnet, at a fraction of the cost.

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Excerpt from Bill Gates commencement speech at Harvard:

Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort.

You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

Knowing what you know, how could you not?

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities… on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Good luck.

Source: Bill Gates – Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Frustrated with multiple web silo services (about 20 different websites I regularly use and ofcourse I hate to manage 20 different logins and bookmarks), I have started moving to ‘All Google’ services. With a single sign-on, I can access most services and the most interesting benefit is an excellent integration between different services.

And, I really did not know until today that Google has acquired Feedburner. That makes my moving to ‘Everything Google’ camp little closer than I thought.  

Google has acquired FeedBurner  More »

• We are happy to announce that Google has acquired FeedBurner. For more information related to the acquisition, read our FAQ.

   

Source: FeedBurner

With feedburner moving to Google camp, all web services I use(except wordpress and central desktop)  are now Google services. 

1. Search Engine: I rarely used any other search engine so far. (except for proving my point ocassionally)
2. Google Reader : This is the second mostly used Google application on any given day after search engine. I also dumped my desktop RSS reader in favour of Google Reader. Keyboard navigation is my favorite.
3. Gmail: This is the harder part to leave Yahoo. But Gmail is a lot better than Yahoo Mail. I love the pop access and Gmail on Mobile.
4. Google Notebook (Zoho notebook is a fierce competitor for this, and quite a wonderful application. But for time being, I will stick to Google Notebook for most though I might use Zoho notebook aswell)
5. Google talk
6. Google Bookmarks
7. Google Web Search History
8. Google Desktop (Even at office I use Google Desktop search to look through Emails and documents)
9. Google Calendar ( Not as good as Yahoo in some aspects, but does all I need)
10. Google Maps 
11. Google Docs (Docs & Spreadsheets)
12. Google Analytics
13. Google Photos: Picasa
14. Google Videos + YouTube
15. iGoogle is lot better that myYahoo.
16. Google News
17. Google Groups
18. Google Finance (not as good as Yahoo but again, does what I need) and ofcourse
19. My own search engine powered by Google to search all sites I am interested in.
20. Feed Burner

There are still some services I can not get rid of at this point, but pretty soon I will find a replacement. Not sure what happened with Jotspot (acquired by Google). When it is integrated with other Google services, I bet Google will have almost all I want to have on web. 

Its quite unusual to see a book like this in India.  In US, if some one is successful in one venture, then their second venture is to sell that (so called) success formula. He/she spends the rest of their lives in selling that success through books, seminars, merchandise.. any thing that can be sold. I don’t believe that  if you read those and probably follow them you will succeed. But it is good to see what their success made them to believe in.

It is quite unusual to see similar books in India. Don’t know why, I don’t find (m)any books where Entrepreneurs and successful Indians wanted to share their stories. There are so many untold stories and unsung heroes. One of my friends, who share a similar mysterious belief, sent me a link to this book to prove the point that times are changing. It also has its own website to promote (http://www.ithappened.in/).

I

The book is sold online through futurebazaar.com. But, the website shipping options only allow me to choose an address in India. Wondering how to get a copy of it to US. Searched in Amazon.com but couldn’t find it. Sent an email to a contact address on the website and waiting for the reply.

Update: Received a reply from Sankarson Banerjee, CEO of futurebazaar.com. If you are interested in getting a copy of the book and you are currently in US, then hurry up. The book will be shipped to your door for Free. He has offered to send a free copy to the first 10 people that request the book from US. Read his comment for more details.

A recent report by  Kauffman Foundation infers that there is a strong correlation between educational attainment and entrepreneurship.

A report released by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation that tracked the educational backgrounds of immigrant entrepreneurs who were key founders of technology and engineering companies from 1995 to 2005 shows a strong correlation between educational attainment (particularly in science, technology, engineering and math) and entrepreneurship.

Click image, above, to read Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part II.

Click image, above, to read America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (part 1 of the study).

But before jumping to ‘any’ conclusions about  role of Educational Attainment to Entrepreneurship, (which I believe is construed and a misquoted wisdom), consider the following points from the report itself:

• The report  studied only Technology and Engineering companies.  It would have given a much better picture of Entrepreneurship if it had included all kinds of Entrepreneurship activity by these immigrants.  If the report had shown that educational attainment is a key factor in every Entrepreneurial activity, I would have bought it flat.
• Most of these Tech-Entrepreneurs (as per report about 93%) came to US for work or study. As everybody already know, this is the primary reason for Indians to come to US.  US Immigration is not that easy to tackle, if not impossible,  for a highschool dropout to come to US and start a business. If we see Indian immigrant population per se, these numbers will stay the same.  Almost all came for either study or work. So I would rule out their educational background in high tech as a factor for their entrepreneurial ventures in US. If they had come to US for ‘any other damn reason’ , they would have started their own companies.
• If education attainment is such a key factor for Entrepreneurship, why don’t we find similar Entrepreneurship activity in India where the rest (a majority) of the High Tech Indians still work or study.
• It is the same case with most other Immigrants (from china etc). They all came to US for either work in high tech or study in US. Whatever they do, you will find a strong correlation to their High educational attainment. For example, barring a small portion of these Entrepreneurs, rest of these high tech Immigrants work throughout their lives as employees of some firm. That is a strong correlation between High Educational attainment and mind blowing lifestyle.
• The % of these Indian Immigrant Entrepreneurs that came from IITs is only a 15% as per the report. That number itself tells a lot more than I can argue. IITs only take the brightest of students. But they represent only 15% of the Entrepreneurial activity, despite all the hype, investment and high action networks. It clearly rules out you don’t have to be at IIT to become an entrepreneur.  IIT background helped these guys to come to US and work or to study and provide an easy access to lots of resources for sure. Whether their ‘belong to IIT’ has anything to do with their entrepreneurial spark is still debatable. 

I believe, your engineering excellence has nothing to do with Entrepreneurship. It is altogether a different mindset. A different perspective of looking at an opportunity and the market. If you say, if you can cook a better burger you can become an Entrepreneur at making burgers and probably beat McDonalds, I would try to believe then that your engineering excellence would make you a better Entrepreneur. And, I will learn my lesson.

Isn’t there a strong correlation between starting your company in a ‘Garage’ and its success? 

Isn’t there a strong correlation between ‘living on the streets’ and becoming ‘a rock star’?

Isn’t there a strong correlation between ‘dropping out of high school’ to ‘building an empire’?

And one more final question,

To become a successful entrepreneur and start a Technology or Engineering company, do you want to study an MBA? or MS in Computer Sceience? or …. drop out of high school? or … ??

Correlations are good for reports, books, seminars, yeah, ofcourse blogs and I believe good for nothing. Many Americans tend to assume that every other Indian is a software engineer or a maths graduate or a high tech graduate. And yet 99% of Indian entrepreneurs that actually built India and making a difference  to India as you read have unfortunately never studied any of them. Those who studied are mostly working in IT and many of them in US or working for US based IT companies.