Thought Garage

The essence of Marketing is "how best you can translate your idea or product to your target customers".  The goal is to make every effort until your customer clearly understand "what your product can do for them". Web being the pervasive communications medium and the default Front Face of any organization, it is extremely important to design it to translate and adapt continually. "Designs Apart" is a profile of such wonderful and creative web and product designs.

Magento Template Tips

Many software products offer personalization through templates. For example, "WordPress",  one of the best blogging platforms (Thought Garage is also powered by WordPress) offers customization of your blog using Themes/templates. WordPress offers excellent documentation of how a blogger can customize the look and feel of a WordPress powered blog.

Magento, an open source E-commerce software  goes the extra mile in its documentation of ‘Customization’, providing a visual layout of various parts of the web site and corresponding theme files you need to modify to change the look and feel of a Magento powered online store. (click on image to view larger image)

While a Picture is worth of 1000 words, a video demonstration is worth million words of documentation. Magento even created a video demonstration of Template Tips so you know where to look and how to use template file path tips.

Very impressive. Indeed, a web design apart.

Drupal TechTalk at Google, if you are interested in learning more about Drupal.

IT Outsourcing, a couple of years back, literally meant  shifting Product Development, Software Implementation and most of  back office management to India (from US and major European countries). But when Nandan Nilekani of Infosys said ‘The World is Flat’, he did not mean moving work to Bangalore alone or India in general.  In fact he was hinting about  the future of Outsourcing, the out sourcing 2.0.

"Any thing can be outsourced to anywhere in the world." (Following  the same tenets of outsourcing : price, time and knowledge)

Facing serious problems of attrition and salary increases and increasing competition all over, Indian IT companies are fast expanding to rest of the cheaper and better world: Mexico, China and a few other third world countries. Time is fast approaching for Indian IT engineers to start discussing about  loosing their jobs to their cheaper counterparts in the rest of the world. 

While expansion to Mexico, China and few other third world countries seems to be a rational choice, I am little confused with the rationale of American graduates in choosing outsourcing firms. Having spent most of my time in one of the top three IT firms in India, I have no clue why American College graduates turn down Google and join Infosys. The following story in NY Times says that it is happening.

Many of them are recent American college graduates, and some have even turned down job offers from coveted employers like Google. Instead, they accepted a novel assignment from Infosys, the Indian technology giant: fly here for six months of training, then return home to work in the company’s American back offices.

India is outsourcing outsourcing.

Outsourcing Works, So India Is Exporting Jobs – New York Times

Times are fast changing. Businesses and markets world wide have tasted outsourcing and its price advantage. It will never stop. Weak Dollar and alarming attrition rates have started forcing Indian IT firms to go for job cuts and expand further into new cheaper destinations. This, I believe,  will increase exponentially in the next few months.  The saga of outsourcing continues. For businesses, it doesn’t matter. Infosys may not care whether they do it from India or any part of the world. They also need outsourcing to rest of the world for the same exact price advantage.

That would,  in general change a lots of things for the Indian economy, that has been riding on the high tides for a while. And  these are definitely quite an Interesting and very tough times for typical Indian IT engineer, who have already deeply in debt trying to reach out booming and mostly hyped up real estate and western lifestyles. Can they afford to loose their jobs at this juncture to rest of the world? 

The Sun Startup Essentials program was launched the U.S. on November 2, 2006 on an experimental basis, and was launched in India on  August 8, 2007.  Sun Startup Essentials offers startup companies groundbreaking Sun technologies and software at breathtaking prices or free.

For more program specifics, take a look at the Sun Startup Essentials Datasheet.

• Free Software : Get popular open source software, such as Apache, MySQL, Perl, etc. — all optimized for the Solaris operating system, free for the asking.
• Discounted Systems : Get rock-bottom prices on industry-leading Sun systems and run the OS of your choice.
• Discounted Partner Hosting : Get top-notch web hosting from Sun partners at great discounts.
• Startups Ask Sun : Our professional engineers will talk with you through emails and will try to answer your questions.

After going all Google do I need to give another reason why I love Google so much? Well, if you are still wondering, here is a special announcement from Google, a little treat to Indians on 60th of birthday of India after independence.

Keeping up with the spirit and celebrations of India’s 60th year of Independence, we present to you a new platform that showcases our favourite ideas for Indian users: Google India Labs.

Though 60 years young, India has a history dating back to the dawn of civilization. The incredible diversity of this great nation is the kind of challenge Google loves. And in line with our mission of making information universally accessible, we’re now offering an easier way to search in 14 Indian and South Asian languages. You don’t need a special keyboard or software; all you need is a web browser, a mouse, and a Unicode font for your language. So whether you speak ??????? (Assamese), ????? (Bengali), ??????? (Gujarati), ????? (Hindi), ????? (Kannada), ?????? (Malayalam), ????? (Marathi), ?????? (Nepali), ????? (Oriya), ?????? (Punjabi), ????????? (Sanskrit), ????? (Sinhala), ????? (Tamil), or ?????? (Telugu), we can help you find content on the web in your language. To get started, add one or more of these iGoogle gadgets to your personalized iGoogle home page. You can use these gadgets to compose queries, and ask Google to search the vast Internet in your very own language.

If you’re interested in writing in Hindi, we have brought out the transliteration feature from Blogger into an independent product of its own: Google Indic Transliteration. This tool will let you type in Hindi, using an English keyboard. Type out words phonetically, and let Google convert them into the correct Hindi word. For example, type “Bharat” to see “????”. You’ll soon discover that our sophisticated transliteration technology makes it really easy to compose in Hindi. Our algorithm might get the occasional word wrong, but it is always willing to learn. You can teach it by clicking on the wrong word and correcting it. This is also available as an iGoogle Gadget.