Profilactic Mashup - abhishekmittal

My Blog: Towers Watson Global Workforce Study 2010

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:56:50 GMT

Towers Watson has released its Global Workforce Study (GWS) results for 2010. It comes in at a time when the relationships between employers and employees are evolving in fundamental ways. The “Deal” is changing. Here are some excerpts from the Global Executive [...]

Flickr Favs: Marina Bay, Singapore

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:40:44 GMT

Souvik_Prometure posted a photo:

Explore on 17th Mar'10

View in Large

This was how Singapore looking on the last evening of 2009. The city was at final moments of preparation before New Year Countdown.

This is a single RAW file with mammoth 180° view SOOC.

Google Reader: 22 Employee Engagement Eclectic Resource Zingers (No. 12)

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:49:05 GMT

22 Employee Engagement Eclectic Resource to Improve Your Work and Your Life.

David Zinger offers you informative links and resources to enhance and improve your work and life engagement. This edition of 22 Eclectic Resource Zingers range from George Ambler on goal setting at Google and Dick Richards on commandments for peace of mind to Eric Klein on why it is important to be tumbled and Bob Sutton on too many star employees.

George Ambler on Goal setting at Google. http://bit.ly/9OgxFx
Pick Your Staples: Choices have Power in Medicine by Kathryn Britton http://bit.ly/d5NNvT
Dick Richards inspiration on 7 Commandments for Peace Of Mind. Succinct and Powerful. Read them. http://bit.ly/9lkCCD
Renegade HR: The brand is the talent with quick video from Tom Peters. http://bit.ly/dd5fRh
Lisa Haneberg. Do you talk beyond the point of contribution. http://bit.ly/b7bz1D
Indexed. Humor. Venn lawn darts and wine come together. http://bit.ly/9yCbt5
Data data everywhere but not a drop to read. Read best of flowing data from February. http://bit.ly/bY8CYp
Email: A Terrible Way to Manage Conflict by Cheri Baker http://bit.ly/9ZuyJy
Putting the “messiness” at the centre of the conversation by Phillip Bonser http://bit.ly/bEwC4z
Chris Bailey. Get some quality into your social media measurement. http://bit.ly/df4TrF
Vic McWaters on killing keynotes and one way speakers. http://bit.ly/abYmIA
Micheal Stelzner offers great tips on writing white papers. http://bit.ly/dcqLGZ
Leo from Zen Habits on the lost habit of resting one day a week. http://bit.ly/bx6DI7
Patti Digh offers a wonderful rant on how to write a book. http://bit.ly/cfFoXd
Eric Klein on why it is important to be tumbled. http://bit.ly/9936R9
Ed Batista Safety Trust Intimacy Pyramid. http://bit.ly/c16Vfw
New Math. Enterprise 2.0 Engagement. Collaboration’s Engine & Heart by Kevin Jones. http://bit.ly/9K4ODR
Bob Sutton. Employee engagement. You can have too many star employees! http://bit.ly/9uVbQQ
John Wooden a great coach. http://bit.ly/doBVp5
Rearranging Chairs as an Act of Leadership by cv harquail. http://bit.ly/bsgUX4
Steve Roesler on collaboration. Playing well with others. http://bit.ly/bPLbLH
Stew Friedman on Tweet or Meet? http://bit.ly/bsICyt

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David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. He offers exceptional contributions on employee engagement for leaders, managers, and employees. David founded and moderates the 2170 member Employee Engagement Network. His website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and strength based leadership. David is involved in the application of Enterprise 2.0 approaches to engagement and the precursor, creating engaging approaches to communication, collaboration, and community within Enterprise 2.0.

Book David for education, speaking, and coaching on engagement today for 2010.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca Phone 204 254 2130 Website: www.davidzinger.com

Google Reader: Google Is Working On Letting Users Link Their Gmail And Google Apps Accounts

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:02:34 GMT

Many people (including myself) have come to the conclusion that Gmail, with its threaded messages, spam filtering, and vast storage space, is one of the web’s best webmail providers. In fact, we like it so much that we use it for both our personal accounts and work accounts using Google Apps. But that also poses a problem: many of us wind up having to maintain two separate Google accounts, which means we have to swap logins whenever our Gmail, Reader, or other data is stored under the other account. Fortunately, there may be an end in sight for this juggling act.

As today’s SXSW panel on Gmail came to a close, the panelists revealed one last juicy tidbit: they’re working to resolve the problems with multiple namespaces that users have to deal with. The team didn’t get specific — they simply repeated that they have to deal with the same problems, as they have “@google.com” accounts for work and standard Gmail accounts for personal use. And they know it’s a pain.

There’s no time frame, and we have no idea what form the feature will take. But at least we know Google is working on it.

Image by Helico

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Gmail

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Google Reader: India’s Rural Cell Movement: Can You Hear Me Now?

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 07:04:25 GMT

Last time I was in India I wrote about the amazing business model innovation that had allowed telecom operators to make money on a paltry $6 a month per average user. That compares to a desired average monthly payment of $50 or more in the U.S.

The results have been phenomenal—550 million people in India have phones, and it has transformed the poorer service economy by giving them an affordable way to be reached and arrange jobs. Just last month, nearly 20 million new mobile accounts were opened. That’s more than double the people than have high speed Internet in the entire country. Even in slums where people live on less than $2 a day, everyone has a phone. If “Slumdog Millionaire” was more accurate, Jamal wouldn’t have had to go on TV to find Latika. He could have just called her, or worst case, called a few friends until he found her number.

It’s unequivocally India’s most successful infrastructure achievement —despite some mounting concerns about the effects of all those towers dotting nearly any urban rooftop that can hold one. And a host of exciting applications are being built on top of this invisible thread that connects a disparate country with a vast terrain and even bigger gulfs in language, literacy, income, religion, language and living standards

But amazingly, when Rajiv Mehrotra (pictured below) looked at the existing telecom penetration in India, he saw failure. What about the people who can’t afford $6 a month or live too far to get service? Don’t they deserve to be connected as well? The result was VNL, a company that’s already gotten a good deal of press and acclaim for its dead-cheap, low-maintenance, Ikea-like easy-to-assemble, solar-powered base stations that extend existing mobile footprints into rural villages for a fraction of the price, allowing the remotest, poorest villages to have mobile phones in every household at drop-dead low prices. “We are the bottom of the bottom,” boasts Mehrotra, practically daring competitors to try to play his low-cost, super-durability game.

The World Economic Forum named it one of 26 Technology Pioneers, and just last month VNL won the Mobile World Congress’s Green Mobile Award. Time called it a “Tech Pioneer that Will Change your Life” and Fast Company named it one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world.

I met with Mehrotra at the company’s headquarters in Gurgoan during my November trip to India. This time I wanted to see its technology live in villages and hear first hand what the impact had been. I traveled to a village that had now had phones for about seven months to see how the technology had changed their lives. Of the 500 families spread across this area, almost all of them had a phone—and most for the first time.

The majority of the people I spoke with said the first calls they made were to family members, and that the biggest impact was the ability to stay in touch with family, to know when there was an emergency and be able to respond quickly.

But there have been business effects too. One man (pictured here) has a business operating several trucks traveling between this village and Delhi and before he’d have to ride on a bike between back-and-forth to coordinate them. Now he can sit at home and just call the drivers. He installed one of VNL’s small base stations on his roof, and he said it had increased his standing among his peers—he is frequently the one called on to settle disputes. And now they can just call him. Similarly wives will call husbands out in the fields when its time to come in and eat, rather than trudging out to get them, allowing them to focus on kids and the housework.

Another woman (pictured below) I spoke with was a widow with six kids and 21 grandchildren. (So many, she actually had to ask someone else how many she had.) As grandkids clambered in and out of her lap, she explained that she gets pension checks from the government, but the delivery used to be spotty. Before her phone she had no recourse but to travel to Delhi to inquire about it. Not exactly something she relishes, having lived her whole life in this village and only been to the big city twice. Now she can call the office and gives them an earful. Not surprisingly, the checks have started to come more regularly.

Another man (pictured to the right) told me he felt more connected to the rest of India as a result of having a phone. This village is surrounded by mountains, and he said that he felt “imprisoned” and cut off, despite being just a few hours drive from Delhi. Now he has a renewed interest in politics and what’s happening in other villages and the country at large. This man had only had his phone for six months, but he expected it would change his life in ways he couldn’t articulate or imagine. “Since the day I got this, my life has already changed,” he said through an interpreter.

Indeed, Mehrotra says it’s already having a ripple effect on the politics of Rajasthan—the state between Pakistan and India where VNL did its first installations. Politicians come through and make promises and villagers demand their cell phone numbers and call to check up on whether those promises are kept. “They have to be accountable,” Mehrotra says. “They can’t wriggle out.”

These phones are not just a nice-to-have, they’ve quickly become a must have for these villages, deeply tied to the way they make money, participate in their government and retain closely important family relationships. And these ripple effects are only now beginning. Think of what the impact will be when there are better programs for marketing crops, saving money and even learning and game playing rolled out on these very basic phones. Life will always be different in a village or a city, but India can at least gain some basic common denominators between the two.

Mehrotra is a big believer in the Gandhian mantra: Change the villages and you change India. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has already built businesses rolling out satellite TV and landlines to rural areas, but he thinks this company will have a bigger impact than anything else he’s done and is the one with the real potential to go global. It bears noting that he’s invested all of his own money in the project—and it’s taken far more than he expected.

This is not a cheap venture—Mehrotra has invested more than $100 million in the last five years and is still investing more. But I’m not sure it could be built any other way. I don’t think there’s the venture capital appetite or risk profile in India to fund something like this and most of the mobile equipment companies Mehrotra talked to back when he started thinking about this insisted it couldn’t be done. Once he built it he’d take equipment and operator executives out to see it and they still couldn’t believe it. They were making calls to test the quality from different areas of the village trying to find pockets without a signal. “They were climbing on the antenna and shaking it like monkeys trying to break it and they couldn’t,” Mehrotra says.

From a business point of view, the operators love VNL because it cheaply expands their existing footprint. The equipment operators aren’t so sure. In theory, VNL isn’t competing with them because they’re not going into the cities. Now that VNL has proved this model works, could a larger established vendor steal the market? The best chance of that would likely come from a Chinese powerhouse like Huawei. That said, any vendor that builds such a low cost solution that’s too good will risk eroding his higher priced systems designed for urban areas. “They’ll say ‘Give it to me in the city too.’ ” Mehrotra says.

All these awards aside, this is the year for VNL to prove it’s really a viable business. And Mehrotra says there are some surprises in store. In terms of market, VNL is already rolling the technology out in other countries and in terms of product they’re not done with just simple mobile access. The countries are likely in Africa and perhaps Latin America, and my guess is the new functionality will entail turning on some kind of Internet access through the existing base stations. Expect much more on this newly minted international do-gooding darling in 2010.

Flickr Favs: The Window ... (Explored)

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:13:01 GMT

Mr. dEvEn posted a photo:

The old window in Lien Ha, that was a small village, the main occupation of the local people is carpentry

Lien Ha Village - Lo Khe - Dong Anh

Hanoi - Vietnam

Explored on Mar 13, 2010 #287

Explored Front Page on March 13, 2010

This photo is one of My 20 Favs +++

This photo is one of My 50 Favs +++

Flickr Favs: Glorious sunset at Baladrar Cove (II)

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:19:27 GMT

Salva del Saz posted a photo:

This is the last one of the images taken at Baladrar cove this year. I won't visit it until next winter. It was a nice moment spent with my good friends Paco P. Font and SebaS.

Baladrar cove, is located at Benissa, Alicante (Spain).

Thanks for stopping by and have a nice weekend.

All my images can be licensed. If you are interested in any of them, do not hesitate to contact with me.

Flickr Favs: Free Tibet Rally-3

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:24:49 GMT

Tattooed JJ posted a photo:

Flickr Favs: tahoe sunrise

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:31:27 GMT

pstarr posted a photo:

pretty much sums up the weekend

My Blog: Earth Hour 2010

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:15:31 GMT

Earth Hour is here. And let’s make it successful. Let’s make our voices & concerns on climate change be heard. Let’s turn out the lights on polluted air, over-dependence on fossil fuels and the costly impacts of global warming. Participation is as simple as it can get. Just switch off the lights on 27th March, 8:30pm [...]

Flickr Favs: Flower Shot after a long time

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:53:29 GMT

swarnendu posted a photo:

Google Reader: PwC launches HR service Saratoga in India

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:13:58 GMT

Global audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has announced the launch of its human resources service 'Saratoga' in India.

Google Reader: The riddle of experience vs. memory: Daniel Kahneman on TED.com

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:20:31 GMT

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 20:07)

Watch Daniel Kahneman's talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 600+ TEDTalks.

Google Reader: Fiscal fundamentalism

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:54:00 GMT

The pundits on TV made a big deal about the stock market going up on budget day- by about two hundred points. The market had gone actually declined in the run-up to the budget and, even otherwise, movements one way or another on budget day are of no great significance when the Indian market is so closely linked to global market trends.

The big item for the market was said to be fiscal consolidation. The pundits said this had compensated for 'big ticket' reform. Other than Manmohan Singh's first budget, there has been hardly any budget that measured up on this count, so you have to wonder what it is that pundits dream about. Leaving that aside, what do we make of the achievement on fiscal consolidation in Mukherjee's latest budget?

He has budgeted a fiscal deficit down of 5.5% in 2010-11, below the 7.9% and 6.9% of the two preceding years. Some of this is automatic- the pay commission arrears don't apply, farm loan waiver has got pruned. Then, there is the disinvestment effect and the sale of 3-G spectrum, some cutting of subsidies. But, the figure of 5.5% is lower than the Thirteenth Finance Commission's recommendation of 5.7%. Besides, nominal growth for 2000-10 will be higher than the budgeted 10.2% because of higher inflation, so the fiscal deficit will be lower than 6.9% and the deficit for 2010-11 will be even lower than 5.5%.

Is this appropriate when government needs to spend a lot more- on railways, roads, education, health care, irrigation, etc? We need to factor in rising government expenditure and we need to push for a higher tax/GDP ratio- we have just edged past 10%, which is lower than even the 12% we had in 2008-09. We need agriculture to grow at 4% if growth is to be truly inclusive.

Alas, there seems to be a sense that if get to growth of 9% and we meet FRBM targets, we have reached heaven. Not at all, we need 9% growth that is sustainable and inclusive- and these conditions will be met only when agricultural growth is boosted and when we spent a lot more on the social sector. Fiscal consolidation should not be confused with fiscal fundamentalism.

Google Reader: The Facebook Imperative

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 06:14:58 GMT

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. In it, he explains why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.

I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” Why couldn’t applications be run from a simple website, without software or hardware to install, and pricy consultants to hire? Why couldn’t we just compute in the Internet, or the cloud, and get away from the data center and all its complexity. Simply put, I wanted to simplify the enterprise. It was a pretty straight-forward idea, but from the confines in which I sat, there wasn’t anything close to a straight-forward solution.

That vision led to the founding of salesforce.com. But the enterprise world wasn’t ready for Amazon.com, or eBay, or Yahoo, or any of the innovative services that were changing the way consumers bought, sold, or communicated. I tell this story in my book Behind the Cloud and can’t help but note that the factors at play 10 years ago—an inspiring service, wide skepticism, and phenomenal potential—mirror where we are today. But it’s no longer Amazon that frames the questions or gives us the answers.

In this decade, I’ve become obsessed with a new simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” As we were focused on bringing enterprise computing into the modern age, Facebook redefined the values of consumer computing and helped ignite the social phenomenon. The compelling aspect of feeds, profiles, and groups, amplify the service’s stickiness. So does its functionality on a mobile device like an iphone—necessary to secure a service’s status as a “killer app.” Facebook is where I start my day to find out what my friends and family are doing. It’s where I go to see the important events in my social life. Everything I care about and need to know is pushed to me—and it requires no work on my part.

What does the social revolution mean for business, though? So far it hasn’t meant much. Currently, our methods of collaboration are defined by Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint, but these tools haven’t kept up with the changing times. They were conceived before anyone knew what a “newsfeed” was. (In fact, Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg was!) Today, realtime information is possible, which has changed everything: How people consume information has changed, how people learn things about each other has changed, and how people stay current has changed. Most of all, our expectations around immediacy have changed.

Now, we need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone’s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet.

New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration. Now in beta, Salesforce Chatter takes the best of Facebook, Twitter, and other social leaders, for instance, and applies it to enterprise collaboration—making people more productive and businesses more competitive. I already see it working: I have an enterprise desktop where without any effort I can learn about what my team is focusing on, how my projects are progressing, and what deals are closing. It is fundamentally changing the way our organization collaborates on product development, customer acquisition, and content creation—making it all easier than ever before.

We are on the precipice of a major shift in our industry. It stems from a change we badly needed and the once-in-a-decade question we had to ask. And this time, we are all ready for the answers. Luckily, this time, I don’t have to leave my job to find out what they are.

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Facebook

Salesforce

Marc Benioff

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My Blog: Essential Readings!

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:25:59 GMT

It’s been a long time since I shared interesting stuff that I have been reading. That’s not exactly true though, because I do share a lot on my Twitter account. Meanwhile, here is some very interesting stuff that I stumbled upon: So, what is the purpose of business? To make money, right? And where did that [...]

Flickr Favs: Gwynedd Rocks

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:59:02 GMT

Eggles posted a photo:

View On Black

Google Reader: John Doerr On Bloom Energy Launch: “This Is Like The Google IPO”

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:37:44 GMT

After eight years of operating in quasi-stealth, Bloom Energy came out with a bang today at an event in Silicon Valley attended by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Colin Powell, Larry Page, John Doerr, and executives from eBay, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and FedEx. All of the big-name companies, including Google, are beta customers of Bloom’s distributed energy fuel cell technology (which was the subject of a 60 Minutes profile on Sunday and various other stories since then).

Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins VC who backed both Bloom and Google, said today: “This Is Like The Google IPO.” Except without the IPO part. Doerr was referring to the fact that, like Google, Bloom has kept its business close to its vest until it actually could show some progress in terms of customers and products. Five Bloom energy boxes about the size of a parking space each now provide 15 percent of the power at eBay’s campus. Walmart is testing the boxes in two locations where it is carrying 60 to 80 percent of the energy load of an entire store. Google co-founder Larry Page calls the technology a “very big deal” and looks forward to the day that it can expand the number of Bloom boxes Google uses to the point where it can power one of its data centers.

Bloom founder and CEO KR Sridhar, who got his start designing technologies for NASA that would allow humans to live on Mars, explained how Bloom’s fuel cell technology works. It takes almost any fuel from ethanol to biomass and turns it into electricity. Fuel cells are nothing new, but Bloom has figured out a way to make them cheaply and efficiently. A Sridhar claims that a Bloom box, which he calls an energy server, is twice as efficient as the electricity grid. “For the same amount of electricity, you need half the fuel,” he says. “If you use a renewable fuel you are carbon neutral. Use all the electricity you want and don’t feel guilty about polluting the environment.”

Each fuel cell, which is made from sand essentially (zirconium oxide), is a square wafer about the size of a CD box. Each wafer can produce about 25 watts of energy, enough to power a lightbulb. Stack them together and you get a box that could power a house. Group them into larger units, and you get enough energy to power a building or an entire campus. He calls them energy servers because they are modular like servers in a data center. Need more energy? Add more boxes.

They are like backyard generators. No electricity is lost through distribution, and they can convert a variety of fuels into electricity, allowing customers to use whatever is locally available or cheapest. There are no moving parts, vents, or discharge other than heat.

Right now, only businesses and large facilities can afford these things. They cost about $750,000 for a 100 kilowatt system (Google is using a 400 kilowatt systems to power one building on its campus, and the Walmart stores are also using 400 kilowatt systems). Nevertheless, Bloom says the systems should pay for themselves within three to five years because of lower electricity costs. A typical electricity cost for commercial customers is 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour versus 13 cents for what they might pay a California utility. That 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour in savings adds up if you are running a huge retail store or a data center.

The costs should come down over time to the point where Bloom boxes really can be used in homes. One potentially disruptive feature of the technology is that it works both ways: fuel can produce electricity, but it can also go the other way so that electricity produces fuel. Sridhar foresees the killer app for his technology becoming practical in about a decade: a Bloom home energy server combined with solar panels or some other renewable energy. The electricity from the solar panels could produce fuel, which can be used to produce electricity to power the house or even to gas up your (modified) car.

Dreams like those are the kind that fuel something else: big IPOs. When’s the real one, Doerr?

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Bloom Energy

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Flickr Favs: Visions of Electricity

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:20:43 GMT

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Flickr Favs: Barge and houses of parliment

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:58:37 GMT

Tattooed JJ posted a photo:

While in London I went for a photo walk for a day with a fellow photog and had a great time even though it was so cold, over the next week or so will be posting shots from the photo walk, and also will be posting others on my Animus3 blog if you want to check it out heres the link
jjphotography.aminus3.com/