All blogs from Jun 12th 2007 onwards are posted at www.kaujalgi.net

At the Interop conference in Las Vegas, Cisco CEO John Chambers talks about the need for businesses to increase productivity by implementing Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, mashups, and virtual conferencing. He also explains how Cisco used Web 2.0 principles in its $7 billion acquisition of Scientific Atlanta.

We use a lot of opensource/"free" software and services at Collabor - not just because they are free (which is cool in itself), but also because they are pretty good. Opensource has classically been associated with Linux and the famous LAMP platform - and a lot of people still think of it as a developer's toolset. Well the developers have.....well.... developed quite a few products which merit serious consideration.

At Collabor and our group companies this is what we use in addition to the development platform/ Here is our list:


Feel free to add or share your list

At Collabor, the company I founded and am Chairman & CEO of, we have refreshed our web presence for the Corporate website at www.collabor.com; a new blog at www.collabor.com/blog and for www.gizmorank.com - our gizmos and gadgets ranking site.

Also launched for public beta is our site www.birbal.in - our social community wrapped around comparison shopping focused on the Indian Market.

Have a look, and let us know what you think

There was a blog entry about a Firefox bus about an year ago, but that site (kalyan.livejournal.com/204212.html) is always down. So I decided to upload some here.



I am not sure if these are from the site mentioned above - these are not mine. Also enclosed is a link to a Flickr Album with other photos of firefox buses in India. Apparently, this is way popular in India.

Hmmn, Never heard of an IE bus

NY Times report here

The dabbawalas have been well known in Mumbai and around India and have been case studies in MBA schools across India. They really got noticed a couple of years ago when their business model was discussed as a case study at the Harvard Business School. Last December, students at Stanford GSB met them as part of their India Study trip. Forbes magazine, in 1998, gave this service the highest quality rating of Six Sigma.

Check out a video report here -


and here is their site - My Dabbawala.com

Prof Wesch and his class at Kansas State University have created a fascinating video called "The Machine is Us/ing Us" . Absolutely Awesome and not to be missed. Start your speakers

Auto Industry Innovation is an oxy moron.

I have the pleasure of being in a role which merges 2 phenomena which have transformed life in their respective countries - Offshore services in India and the Web 2.0 revolution in the US.

With one leg in Boston and the other in Hyderabad this is what a day in my life looks like.....
- 6 AM wake up to the radio going off on NPR Morning edition. cannot belive these folks are on from 4 AM. that sucks. snooze
- 6.07 AM second alarm. snooze. now can hear a little more of NPR as it pokes through my sleepy haze
- 6.14 AM wife wakes up. be generous and let her use the bathroom first. go off to sleep
- 6.30 AM wake up. seriously
- 6.45 AM downstairs watching the news and having the only real cup of tea that I will have in the day. Brooke Bond Natural Care, brewed and with milk and sugar like back home in India
- 7.00 AM tired of the news people going on and on about some trivial nonesense like Imus or Anna Nicole or American Idol and other innane things, while people die in darfur and iraq, the temp of the world rises and new orleans still a mess. run and get ready, check blackberry and reply to emails and delete yesterday's junk mail. My god so many companies with FDA approvals in my email. good for them.
- 7.30 AM India calls. Juggle blackberry under the ear (can't find my bluetooth headset for the past 2 weeks), bag on the other shoulder, keys, lunch, and get into car and head for work
- 8.00 AM At the desk, still talking to India
- 8.30 AM still talking to India
- 9.00 AM read nyt and start NPR on the PC.
- 9.30 AM finish to do list from yesterday night
- 11.30 AM second call with India. When do they sleep
- 12.30 PM finish call, lunch. Coke Zero is pretty good
- 2.00 PM meetings, calls, check the birbal.in beta, review and feedback
- 4.00 PM ready with to do list for myself and India
- 6.00 PM home. hope there are no events in the evening
- 6.30 PM cycling or squash
- 8.00 PM dinner with wife. wife's cooking awesome. tv junk. Wife 1, TV 0 - again
- 8.01 PM fire up the laptop, fire up the home PC - why am i not able to load Ubuntu, Oh check sums don't match. will have to download again. will do it tomorrow
- 10.30 PM first call from wife. shutoff the laptop
- 11.00 PM second call
- 11.30 PM maybe I should call India - its 9 AM there.

Call India - Sleep at 1 AM
Don't Call India - Sleep at 11.31 PM

Seriously 24x5.5, but when can I get some work done

TiECON East will be held in Boston from Jun 14-16th and you should attend. Use my name and code CMTC07 and save $50 from the registration fees. If you are or wish to be an entrepreneur you should know this:

1) TiE is the world’s largest non-profit for innovation
2) TiE members raise 5% of US venture capital;
3) TiE members have created over $250 Billion in value;
4) You can hear Ram Shriram (Board Member, Google); Deval Patrick (Governor of MA.); Reed Hundt (Board Member, Intel) and others talk/network for a fee thousands less than other conferences.

Register here: www.tieconeast.org

Google announced that their Unique Visitor traffic to all their sites combined in March 2007 was 528 Million. 1 Million more than Microsoft.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/25/GOOGLE.TMP&feed=rss.news

In Its Match With China, India Penalizes Its Own Team
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 24, 2007, NYT

Until India’s economic boom becomes much more broadly based, the country won’t achieve a fraction of what it should.

You can watch the video at this link: http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=111c852f7c4c8dfef62dca3a791df9a4aa9ba49d

To read the column or post a comment, you need to be a NYT TimesSelect subscriber http://select.nytimes.com/pages/timesselect/index.html?mkt=tstdytb

As a Web 2.0 (huh?) company, I am frequently asked by people what Web 2.0 is all about. The people in India ask me in Hindi (as in the title of this post).

Web 2.0 is many things - the second coming of "the web" after the fascinating "no revenue, lot of funding" bust of 2001, a platform , a connected network of applications that on their own and collectively transform how we do what we do - and none of these things.

Perhaps the most comprehensive and satisfying (ahh) explanation is Tim O'Reilly's from his Web 2.0 conference in 2004.

Here is a Link - http://www.oreilly.com/lpt/a/6228

TiE Boston is creating a new Special Interest Group (SIG) to focus on Outsourcing, Offshoring, IT Services and BPO. The official announcement will be made in a week.

Yours truly will chair the SIG, and we hope to create some interesting networking, education and thought sharing forums under this SIG. Watch this space

by Anand Giridharadas, in The International Herald Tribune of April 3, 2007

An Absolute Must Read for everybody who wants to see where ITO/BPO and the Offshore movement is headed

BANGALORE, India: Outsourcing is breaking out of the back office. Until recently, the migration of service industry jobs from the West to places like India seemed to obey an unwritten law: Low-skill clerical and programming tasks would leave the developed economies, while high-end careers requiring graduate degrees and commanding six-figure salaries would stay behind.

While call centers and software houses closed in the West, often leaving their workers scrounging for employment, professionals in fields like aeronautical engineering, investment banking and drug research likely believed they had nothing to worry about.

Quietly, but steadily, that is changing. High-skilled jobs in those very fields, which once epitomized the competitiveness of Western economies, are flowing to India. The pool of jobs once thought to be impossible to outsource is gradually evaporating.

Boeing and Airbus now employ hundreds of Indians on critical tasks, including the design of next-generation cockpits and systems to prevent airborne collisions. For about one-fifth the cost, investment banks like Morgan Stanley are hiring Indians to analyze U.S. stocks, a job that can pay $200,000 a year or more on Wall Street

Eli Lilly, the U.S. drug maker, recently handed over a promising molecule it discovered to an Indian company, Nicholas Piramal, which will be paid $500,000 to $1.5 million a year per scientist for at least two years of work readying the drug for commercial use.

And with multinationals employing tens of thousands of Indians, some are beginning to treat the country like a second headquarters, sending senior executives with global responsibilities to work from India.

Cisco Systems, a maker of communications equipment, has mandated that 20 percent of its top talent be in India within five years. The company recently moved one of its five highest-ranking executives, Wim Elfrink, to Bangalore as its chief globalization officer.

"There is no job that is done in Cisco that a guy in India can't do," said Samu Devarajan, a Cisco managing director in Bangalore. "If this theater becomes successful and grows the way we want it to grow, I see no reason why the CEO of Cisco couldn't sit in India."

Accenture, the global consulting giant, has its worldwide head of business-process outsourcing in Bangalore. By December, it will have more employees in India than in the United States.

.... continue to read the rest of the article here

A must read for people travelling abroad from the US and want to use their cellphones. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/technology/15basics.html?em&ex=1174190400&en=9913a4480bfb4ce1&ei=5087%0A

In India, the cellular phone system used is GSM. You can get a temporary (for the duration of your stay) SIM card which will work with your unlocked GSM cellphone - of course, you will get a new Indian phone number with the card, which you will need to communicate back home. To arrange for this SIM card, you can get one at most India international airports in the arrival area, or ask for your hotel or host in India to arrange for one.