Europe, wake up to technology!

I just did a ten day trip to Europe and visited three great cities – Berlin, Amsterdam, and Rome. But let me tell you one thing. Europe seems to be in the past century when it comes to technology. One can clearly see where the priorities are – its history, have-a-good-time and don’t work hard, who cares about the customer?, and pay through your nose for everything.

I certainly enjoyed the architecture and history. But it’s almost impossible to get to the Internet. The hotels that let you do so, charge a lot. Try to use your iPhone from there and they do charge a hefty amount for roaming. Every time, I looked up my email, I was reminded that data rates are excessive while roaming internationally. It seems you hit technology roadblocks everywhere. Europe certainly does not want you to communicate.

While Berlin and Amsterdam were tolerable, Rome was another story. After paying $300 a night for the hotel, there was no Internet availability in the rooms. It reminded me of Bangalore where I paid $60 a night and had free Internet plus an elaborate breakfast. It tells you where the technology progress is happening. And if the hotel runs out of hot water, the receptionist shrugs his shoulder and smilingly answers, “What can I do?” That speaks a lot about customer service.

Then you travel to Asia like Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc. Broadband is everywhere and free internet access is the norm. While I love traveling in Europe, I was frustrated for lack of easy access to Internet. It is so good to be back in Silicon Valley. You don’t realize how good it is until you travel elsewhere.

Technology to manage a wedding

Away from working on software, I got busy last month (and months before) with a different kind of project – the wedding of my son.  Such a project is no less complex than any software project. Too many moving parts. Early planning. A road-map with details including milestones, closure, as well as quality control. The scale was a challenge. A six day event with a peak load of 500 guests coming from all over the world. There were at least 3 locations for various evening programs to handle 160, 360 and 500 guests in succession. Each location had its own unique attributes to deal with.

Since several individuals were involved, collaborative software became key to timely decision and smooth flow of information. Google Documents, spreadsheets were used heavily. Means of communication included both synchronous and asynchronous – real-time phone calls, emails, sms, etc. The biggest challenge was to keep track of multiple events. The brain is a natural processor of multiple events, although at any time, it focuses on one event. No different than how message Q’s work. Brain memory was fully utilized augmented by digital forms of event lists and progress status.

Some items can not be replaced by the computer, like tasting food items or picking flower colors. One always checks the websites to get prepared for a meaningful discussion with the vendors. But I felt we are in the information age when invitation cards were printed eight thousand miles away and editing and design were managed via email and pdf files. Location transparency was in full practice here.  Handouts, name cards, address labels were all done via software and dispatched to appropriate parties. We resorted to good old Microsoft Spreadsheet for guest lists, seating charts, and various number crunching exercises. When nothing worked, we resorted to the age-old software called “handwrite”.

We had the usual confusion when multiple copies were created and I was reminded of the file-era problems of duplication and redundancy before databases came along.  We managed to stick to “single-copy” in the cloud via Google documents and spreadsheets, even though it was functionally deficient.

Overall, things went as smoothly as one can expect. We all had fun.

You can check this blog and some pictures to get an idea of the end product.

http://weddingdocumentaryblog.com/?p=1862

Paying homage to the late Rajeev Motwani

It was a sombre afternoon yesterday as we silently walked into the Motwani residence in Atherton. There were many faces, all silent, grieving the untimely death of professor Rajeev Motwani.

Shailesh Mehta, Kanwal Rekhi, Vivek Ranadive, Ron Conway, Vish Misra, M.R.Rangaswami, Naren Gupta, Vinita Gupta, Manish Chandra, Vas Bhandarkar, Prashant Shah, Prabhakar Raghavan, and hundreds more kept coming by. All shaken up with the realization of how fleeting this life can be. Now here, gone the next minute. Ron Conway was whispering that he had just arranged a meeting of Rajeev with Mark Andreessan as they have never met.

As we stared at his picture and listening to the chanting of Taittriya Upanishad and Shiva Manas Puja, the air was filled with melancholy of a departed soul. A brilliant scientist suddenly gone at the prime of his career. We silently hugged Asha (Rajeev’s wife) trying to fathom her grief.

As our scriptures say, each one’s life is pre-ordained for a set number of years. Each one of us has a deadline, highly unpredictable, but sure to come. So let us live this life with love, compassion, and care.

Good Bye, dear Rajeev Motwani

I am just shocked to hear of the sad and untimely demise of Rajeev Motwani, well-known angel investor and professor of Computer Science at Stanford.  He was an adviser to the Google founders from the start and invested in several start-ups. After graduating from IIT, Kanpur in 1983, Rajeev joined EECS at UC Berkeley and got his Ph.D. Then he joined the faculty at Stanford and has been teaching/researching for last 20 years. His special interest was in data mining, computational theory, and algorithms.

Back in 2003, at the suggestion of a few friends, Rajeev and I started a technology think-tank group to share new ideas. It did not last very long due to our hectic schedules. But the first meeting was held in San Jose, where Rajeev spoke of his work in “data streams” and Eric Brewer of Berkely talked about his CAP theorem and BASE theory. We had several very smart folks who enjoyed listening to Rajeev’s passion for new technology. I was fortunate to have been invited to a few of Rajeev’s investment companies as an informal adviser. I always enjoyed talking to him and was impressed with his inquisitiveness to ask many real-world questions about new technology.

He will be missed in the silicon valley technology circles. I pray for his wife Asha to have the courage to sustain this terrible loss.

I feel extremely humbled at this moment on the ephemeral nature of life.

Rest in peace my friend.

To Blog or to Tweet?

Lately it seems like writing blogs is getting out of fashion, what with the rise of microblogging star Twitter. Something about Twitter is intriguing. I guess the simplicity of writing your thoughts within 140 characters is a force larger that anyone expected. Reminds me of the early days of Google, a sparse screen of white space with ten words. The sheer excitement of entering any word and hitting the enter key and seeing pages of results was a trip, whether the result set was of any use or not.

My first reaction to Twitter was like that of many – who wants to know if you are about to take a shower? But I underestimated the power of human connections. Now I read that Oprah has 30,000 followers even if she has yet to write one tweet. Demi Moore has a ton of followers and recently she helped someone claiming to commit suicide, dissuading him via Twitters. Passengers of the plane that landed on the Hudson river communicated via Twitter to friends and relatives.

Fred Wilson, an early investor  and a board member of Twitter, said, “All the people you’ve heard of and more are coming to Twitter saying, “We want to do something with you.”"”

My problem is keeping up with all the tweets from the ones I am following. They flood with such force, it’s hard to keep up. One has to continuously stare at the tweets, and that can be a distraction from real work one has to do. Now, I get tons of emails from titles like “internetmarketing”, “dominopizza” as my followers. As I said before, easy of use is equal to ease of abuse. I already see that in twitter.

IBM to buy Sun?

According to this morning’s WSJ article IBM is considering to acquire Sun for $6.5B.  To some people this will make sense and to others this is of little value. I think the benefit is more for Sun. IBM would gain Sun’s customer base plus $3B in cash reserve. But it will also face some product overlaps such as MySQL vs. EnterpriseDB. Sun Solaris proprietary systems will need to be migrated over to Linux.

Sun has been looking for a suitor for last few weeks. It continues to flounder in the market. The mighty “dot” in the dot-com business, or the creator of the slogan “network is the computer” has seen its glory days. It is a great company that starts good stuff, but somehow unable to monetize  them. Java started there, but IBM has more Java developers than Sun. Sun has been struggling to find its DNA and lately it has been focusing on being an open source (monetization?) company. Its acquisition of MySQL for a billion dollars has not resulted on any significant market leadership. It might have alienated older partners such as Oracle.

So what will IBM gain, other than reducing the “server” competitors by one? Let us see how it turns out.

Midsummer Musings – Yahoo

We are in mid-july of 2008. As the Silicon valley sun gets unusually hot, the temperature at Yahoo is rising fast with Carl Icahn and Microsoft renewing their attacks and new acquistion-plans. The August 1 board meeting is fast approaching and Icahn would like shareholders to vote for a full replacement of the  Yahoo board. With a brand new board under Icahn’s chairmanship, future negotiations with Microsoft would become easier. That’s the theory.

Over the weekend, I met couple of Yahoo employees in a social context and its hard not to bring up what’s going on. The remarks from inside is to really see that Yahoo stays as an independent company with its great community and brand undiluted. Yahoo pioneered the notion of a community, way before Google (which does not have a community like Yahoo, but lots of adsense-paying clients) or Microsoft. To fight Google’s rapid progress to the cloud computing world, Microsoft is desperate to find a way and it thinks Yahoo brand can help it.

I think if Yahoo can have a leader such as Mark Hurd at HP ( no nonsense, heads down, operationally savvy) to steer its future, it can still become a greater company with its talents and core technologies.

We will watch how this soap opera ends up at the August 1 board meeting.

Few words from Japan – June2008

Writing this from Tokyo. I remember my first trip to Japan was 25 years ago, back in 1983 when I worked for IBM. I had come out to make several presentations on the then new technology of Relational Databases. I was part of the DB2 development team at IBM.

Now after many visits, I am here again. Always its amazing to me to see how simple things are so perfect here. Trains run on perfect time (so much so that you can adjust your watch per train departure times), taxi drivers wear white gloves and keep their taxis clean. There is no tipping anywhere. The politeness of the people is very visible and most of all, the work ethics amazes me the most. Everyone, be him a janitor or a construction worker or a systems programmer;  perform with utmost sincerity and efficiency. Everyone stays at the office for at least 10-12 hours a day.

As I met many customers and colleagues, I notice how efficient they are in the mobile technology. Of course my iPhone does not work here  (feel like coming from a third-world country these days). The Japanese use their mobile phone for credit card payment, checking maps and directions, full-function GPS, and much more. The taxi driver politely tells us the traffic ahead is going to be bad and suggests we take the subway instead, sacrificing his taxi fare.

There is much more use of Web 2.0 when it comes to RIA (Rich Internet Application). One customer is replacing all spreadsheet usage via a Curl-implemented web front-end simulatig the spreadsheet UI. Another client built a building security system using Curl, fully deployed on the web. They seem ahead in Enterprise adoption of RIA.

ISV’s embracing RIA

More than Enterprise IT,  it’s the ISV’s that are actively seeking to deploy Rich Internet Application in their new versions. Any user interface must be rendered on the Web platform and it better have the latest Web 2.0 technologies. While wikis, blogs are fine, the application-level interface is using mashups, tags, links, and podcasts wherever appropriate, for  a pleasant user interface.

But using technology for the sake of technology is the wrong approach. For example, the travel sector is branding Travel 2.0 as the next wave, implying the use of Web 2.0 technologies in travel sites. That makes sense, as travel sites offering airline tickets, cars, and hotels need to provide linked information of hotel and location details. Some clever mashups of maps and weather would make a lot of sense. The measure should be the total number of clicks required for the user to complete a transaction. The less clicks, the better for the user.

But applications also need complex two-way interactions with the user and rich graphics presented in a user-friendly way. The current crop of Web 2.0 technologies does not address the RIA aspects very well. Creation of complex graphics, animation, and handling large volumes of data still requires development tools beyond what is available from the scripting landscape.  Providing online-offline facilities for the road warriors is also a key feature. Developers should check Curl (origin from MIT research) which provides a very rich “content language” that spans from text, graphics to computation. It provides significant programmer economy compared to other products such as Apollo or Silverlight or Ajax.

Jnan Dash