Hit by the procrastination bug

Last few months I had been severely hit by the procrastination bug. A lot of important personal things have been put to the back burner.  I wanted to write a hundred and one things on the blog, but didn't even post a single post for the last four months, wanted to start something never started it, wanted to learn something never learnt it, wanted to go to a certain place never went, wanted to do a certain thing never did and the list keeps on growing.

I felt it was the bug, but as usual the mind lived in denial. It took so long to realize, but I am at least happy that I realized, at least late is better than never. Given myself ten days to make a recovery. Hopefully after month or two, I will be in a position to come up with a post on how to cure this bug, assuming I recover :D. Since I realized a lot of others are also infected by it.

MongoDB for a MySQL user

Over the past few years NO SQL has become very popular, specially with a capability to boast about an illustrious reference list like twitter, facebook and foursquare.

Being a MySQL user I was curious to explore into this and see what it has and what it offers. Certainly there are plenty of NO SQL implementations, first wanted to check casandra but the first few lines of its documentation sounded like a no go zone, hence decided to try Mongo DB. Going through it I realized that there were alot of similarities. So listed them here for quick reference.

Criteria	MySQL	MongoDB
Type of database	Relational	Document
Installation	On Linux you need to go through a certain amount of steps like user creation, permission setting, creating the data directory	Pretty stright forward create the the data directory at the default location /data/db. It was pretty simpler than MySQL
Starting Up	starting up using safe_mysqld (techincally it invokes mysqld)	pretty straight forward run mongod for a basic start up
Queries	Using SQL	No SQL
	Need to execute create statements ex. When you wanted to create a table with columns x, y you need to do the following. 1. Create database mine; 2. create table a(x int, name varchar(50))engine = MyISAM; 3. Then seperately do an insert insert into a values(10, "hiii");	No create statements for DBs, collections, etc Updated and created as and when needed(lazy loading), so to do the same we need to, db.mine.insert({x: 10, y: "hiii"}) similarly you have functions for update, save, remove, find
	if you want to select data; we can select * from a;	On MongoDB its, db.mine.find()
Storage Engines	A lot of Storage Engines to choose from	Upto now a single storage engine implementation
Operations/ Transactions	When you fire a query to the MySQL server the client needs to wait till the MySQL server returns the result.	In contrast Mongo DB uses 'Fire and forget'. So technically speaking client is not aware whether the query executed successfully or not. It doesn’t return OK. For system where you need safe operations immediately following the query getLastError command is issued and the exception handled. For Requirements like analytics , status message updates, pics comments this fire and forget is perfect. Anyhow for Financial type of system we need to use the work around.
	storage engine like INNODB supprts transactions and has ACID compliance	Not typically made for transactional systems
Indexing	Supports mutiple types of indexes. For optimzation EXPLAIN is used with the select statements	Very similar to MySQL indexing. For optimzation similar to MySQL this has the EXPLAIN statement and another statement called as hint Main difference is that you can define the order of indexing for composite indexes. Which gives more control to the query definition Eg. db.mine.ensureIndex({"x" : 1}) 1 indicates the direction
Geo Spatial Indexing	MyISAM storage engine supports geo spatial indexing.	Is created by passing "2d" instead of passing 1 or -1 to the ensureIndex  function. Pretty handy stuff with  straight forward support for querying nerarest locations, find entries within a shape and find distances. Compound geo spatial indexing also supported, this will be handy for finding nearest ATM etc. I think this is a must check for people developing location based systems
Back Up	MySQL back up is more complex, specific to the storage engines. Snapshot based back ups on LVM2 volumes is similar to the fsync command in mongo	supports fsync command which is a warm back up with point of time support. Supports mongodump - which does a hot back up but without point of time support
Replication
Mode of Replication	asynchorouns	asynchronous
	Replication is based on Binary log - which has all the writes	Replication is based on OpLog, similar to the binary log but has idompotent operations. Which basically means if the same statement is executed mutiple times it will not make the date inconsistant . Anyhow the statements shoule be executed in order
	set up is straight forward after having a master and slave in place	quiet similar - at start up itself the server can be specified as slave in the start up line, ./mongod --dbpath ~/data/slave --port 10001 --slave --source localhost:10000
	supports complex replication set ups, like two way replication, circular replication, etc	does not support replication from the slave
Replica Set	MySQL cluster supports Replica sets- anyhow MySQL cluster replica sets has synchrous replication	Similarly for HA support MondoDB supports replica sets - which is a master slave cluster with automatic failover. Similar to MySQL cluster in the replica sets. There are arbiter nodes which decide on the primary and secondary node election in case of failures
Sharding	MySQL doesn’t have inbuilt sharding support. Sharding is usually handled at application or ORM level for MySQL	sharding support is given - mongos is a process that will interface multiple mongods which will have the data distributed. Very good feature for scalability

For those who want to try out mongodb check this book, http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920001096

Next up I want to try Couch DB, which is another No SQL database and implemented on Erlang!

Viyapari Moolai as seen by the outsider

veera pathirar kovil in viyaaparimoolai

Viyapari moolai is small village close to point pedro in the Jaffna Peninsula. Incidentally its also my paternal ancestral village. Anyhow I don't think that I can claim that as my village, for that matter I cannot call any place as my village, so usually when people ask me where are you from ... My answer has always been, born in Jaffna and living in Kandy :)  So probably you can look at this as an outsiders view of Viyaparimoolai.

erincha amman kovil, viyapari moolai - let me confirm the name

If I am not mistaken the place got its name due to the fact that alot of people from the village were businessmen and had established their businesses right through out the country.Even my grand father and alot of relatives were into business in someway or the other. I'm told that there was a time where people from viyaparimoolai laid claim to atleast 50% of the business establishments in the upper part of Colombo Street in Kandy. Believe me the people from there are very passionate about the village and its heritage. In an era where they believe that half the viyaaparimoolai is outside the country they have taken the initiative to establish the connections on the cyberspace, they do have http://www.viyaparimoolai.org/mainpage.php . Plus a facebook group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=81291907500#!/group.php?gid=81291907500&v=wall

The old thoola kinaru (well) in front of pillayar kovil

Yours truly made a return to this village after 20 years. Yes 20 years! The circumstances never gave me a chance, my last visit was when I was 7 years old. Before that we used to go there every school holiday and spend time with our grand parents and relatives. All this time I could remember the place only in patches, I could remember the grand parents house in parts, the living room, the varendah, the small water tank ( as kids we referred that as the swimming pool), the mango tree, the wedding of my aunt, the wall over which Indian Army would peep to check the people at home,  the house of my aunt and then of course the kannae kalai mannae song.

village children fishing in the sea with a polythene bag 

When I walked into the house this time, it just stuck to me that I can remember more than this, the house, which in all my memories was a place filled with joy, people and life, suddenly looked so quiet, worn out and uninhabited. The places looked as if it has shrinked in size, the walkway that took 20 steps of mine earlier now took about 5 steps. Then I realized that the time has rolled. I am no longer the child who visited the place 20 years back and cannot expect things to be as it was at that time.

an exit of an old house

Later in the evening while taking stroll in the village it just clicked to me that this place should have once been a very prosperous village. Looking at the architecture of the houses I could not just stop thinking the fact that these houses were built atleast 40 years back and what sort of prosperity the place would have had at that time. Walking through it also the occurred to me the clear absence of a generation in the village. The scars the war has left on the livelihood of the people was so obvious.

view from the cremation place in village

The best part is the fact that, even in the current state, the village has a sense of tranquility,  being far away from the pollution, the noise and the life styles of industrialization. It gave me alot of fresh air allowed me to be in a zen state.

The attachment the people have on religion is very obviously apparent, while all the houses are in shambles they had made sure that the temples were all polished and maintained in top state.

Finally I liked the place, for that matter the whole of Jaffna, for one more reason, the bata slipper is considered decent enough even to be worn even to weddings and  its perfectly natural to go around in vetti or sarong even without a shirt. :D

Interesting Applications

Among all the activities at the mBillionth  the 1st Ever  South Asian Mobile Content conference, hSenid launched its cloud enabled developer platform with Etisalat. It was a very important thing for us, as we had been doing this outside and not at the place where we call it home. I find that alot of people cannot still figure out how and why the apps we are talking about are different. Unlike other mobile application stores which rely entirely on the device capabilities this application developer platform that we launched focuses on utlizing the operator network capabilities like SMS, MMS, LBS, etc. Let me come back to a description of this on a separate blog on a later date( hopefully). 

On the day of the mBillionth I was actually living in parallel worlds, where I had to attend the Developer event and also the Jury of the mBillionth. Thanks to the good hearted people at the mBillionth they gave me an hour time to attend the developer event and play whatever little part I could. So I attended the appzone launch for an hour and then I did the vanishing act from the event to make it in time for the Jury Proceedings.

Then commenced the Jury proceedings which was a battle in its own right. 14 Members of the grand jury from four countries, putting all their heads together and going into the wee hours at Taj Samudra category by category debating, discussing, voting and of course selecting winners.

There were some non - commercial mobile applications that caught my attention and of course at most times, the attention of the other Jurors too.

Suruk http://suruk.com/

Its a J2ME application for a cause. Its an innovation which is capable of converting the mobile into a Simple yet effective instrument to fight auto driver scams. The idea itself of boldly using the mobile to fight a common mans daily war is commendable. The icing on the cake of the solution is that it provides a feature to lodge a police compliant via an SMS.

SMS Based Automated Registration of Admission Test http://www.sust.edu/~admission/

Shahjalal University of Science & Technology Bangladesh has launched its SMS based registration for admission test. It is a solution which takes out the entire hassle of the admission test registration flow and includes the following steps.

1. Registration for the admission test
2. Verification of the SMS request with the exam board
3. Confirmation of eligibility
4. The payment for the admission test deducted from the mobile account
5. Confirmation of the registration process

Who wouldn't want their universities to also take out the entire hassle of the registration process and of  if possible the hassle of the exams too ;) What next? Mobile SMS exams?

Nepal Wireless http://www.nepalwireless.net/

Started as a project to provide wireless access to the remote Nepal and now seems to be converting it into a project for building a broadband information highway across Nepal . A project I guess started about 8 to 10 years back and today has covered and connected many villages, communities and schools, which otherwise would have been totally disconnected from the rest of the world.

I personally has had a fascination for the geographies of Nepal and hearing about the project has just added fuel to my curiosity. Don't be surprised if I decide to get lost in the wilderness of Nepal for a few days any time soon. :D

I wrote this post a few weeks back and it has been in my drafts for a long time. I didn't want to let the cat out of the bag about the winners of the mBillionth. Anyhow I guess its safe to publish it now since the award ceremony was during the course of this week and I hear that it was a resounding success.

A leaf from the Software Engineering text Book for the country

The software Engineering best practices prescribes that even when a small bug is deemed to be resolved by a developer,  the resolution should not be accepted at face value, specially without a a root cause analysis and appropriate test cases implemented to make sure that such scenarios are captured. The main concern is that they don't want the bug to be re-opened. Re-opened bugs are supposed to be frowned upon and any PM will usually make a big fuss of a re-opened bug.

When such care is taken in the software world for a bug, which is not life threatening at most times. I was wondering whether anyone is doing that to our own local issue.

Its been an year since the war has ended.  On the positive side we no longer shed blood in mass scale. Bombs(at times even human bombs) doesn't any longer go off in Colombo, fighter jets no longer does carpet bombings in its own country, people no longer die without knowing which sides bullet they were killed by. Its indeed a very positive change in that sense.I honestly wish the current status quo continues forever.More than that wish that just wishing could make sure that this will continue.

I see that as a nation we had become lethargic about the larger issue at hand and almost concluded that the absence of war as the end of all the problems. During the course of the year we were pre occupied with election tamashas, political soap operas and then of course all the cricket, pushing actions of national reconciliation out of limelight.  We have forgot that this is a conflict that has been going on for decades and thousands of Sri Lankan youth thought that it was a cause, noble enough, to pay the ultimate price for whichever side they believed in. Most importantly end of war I dont think has solved the underlying concerns.

I know some of you out there should be wondering that this guy is trying to create an issue out of no where. Just let me take a simple case to show that the divide is still there.

Usually news papers try to position the stories to please their reader base. The bottom line is that the news paper is a business entity and in order for it to be successful it should supply to the demand. So in a sense the pulse of the society is usually reflected in how the newspapers position the stories. On any typical day take Sri Lankan news papers of all three languages and just by checking the first page itself the completely contradicting voices between the Tamil and the other two language papers would become clearly evident.

I will take the most recent Sunday news papers and show you how divided we are,

 Sunday Times [English Weekly] - Headline item 

Sunday Observer [State run English Weekly] - Head line Item

Virakesari [Tamil Daily] - Headline Item

Uthayan [ Tamil Daily - A regional newspaper for North and East ] - I think this was the headline


Just Check how varied the perspectives are and funnily what appears as headlines in the English newspaper is not even in the foot note of the Tamil papers and vice versa. Just imagine how the difference will be if we take into consideration the Sinhala news papers too.

Now this doesn't mean that we need to impose restrictions and bring back censor, instead we should do a root cause analysis and fix the issues. So that these issues are never re-opened again.

Reversing the market

I have this strange feeling that web has missed the trick on creating a different type of business model. I think probably it is appropriate to call this as “reversing the market”.

When someone wants to sell stuff they probably start a shop and sell whatever they want. So in that case the buyer had to approach the seller and do the buying.   I know that what I’ve said there is not rocket science , that’s what  has been happening for years, that’s the very reason we have millions or billions I don’t know what ever number of shops after doing the marketing of their goods and services playing the waiting game for the buyers to come.       

Then with the advent of internet we have seen that people building a web front to enable their sales, it has gone a bit more and we also see the existence of portals like ebay , where many sellers who list their items and play the waiting game.

When I try to compare these web portals with the traditional way of doing business, the usual ecommerce site selling items of a single merchant is similar to the shops/store fronts and then a place like ebay is similar to a traditional market place, where multiple sellers get together and sell stuff.  All in all, as i see it, by the introduction of the web, we have achieved an innovation in introducing another channel for sales, however we have not changed the status quo of the fundamental model, where the seller lists/keeps the items, does the marketing and waits for the seller.  

Customer is the King

Very often I am told that the customer is the king, but in reality with this business model I see the customer to be more like the prey. When thinking about this waiting game, I cannot stop imagining a big crocodile keeping is mouth open for the pray to come and sit inside it.

Just imagine a world in which, when you wanted to buy a camera you go and write a note and hang it on your own door and wait for the sales people to come and present the options and the customer like a real king looks at the options and picks the best one. I know probably you have already started to wonder, is this guy out of his mind? Can the sales people just go around checking each house? You would think that whats the amount of land to be covered, and how long can a buyer wait, blaa blaa

Now because of these arguments, it true that this model is not practical in the traditional way of sales. Quite understandably the model is not practiced in the sales of usual commodities unless the buyer is buying things of great value.

But in the world of web it’s quite a practical thing, imagine a site where you go and publish whatever you want to buy and then the sales people come and give the offers and you make the decision to buy based on that.

It is very handy for stuff like buying a SIM; getting a bank loan, getting an insurance package …you name it.  Obviously for the SIM agent or bank loan executive or the insurance agent, the place where people are listing their need for the service is a heaven and they will automatically come to the site and make the offer to get their sales commissions, so these stuff can be the starting point for this “reversed model” and I am pretty sure later on others will follow suit and come to the party.

It’s actually reversing the market, in a traditional world it’s like going to a market place and you put up a board with your shopping list and expect the sellers to come and sell you the stuff. In the old school of thought its stupid, but in modern times its practical. It will be absolute buyer power and the customer becomes the real king!

So the need is to have a portal where the requirement listings are done and get the sales agent to join the party. I am just fascinated by this model and I can see an unbelievable potential in it. Anyone interested in a start up? This is one for you! Let me know your thoughts on it. Would love to hear!

Holy Noise

I live in a country which is very ‘religious’ to the core. People are pretty confused about the difference between religion and culture/customs. There is always a lot of comparison between religions; naturally this has led to competition too. The people who assume that that they are practicing different religions have drawn up some funny competition parameters. These people have assumed that placing statues at all the corners and increasing the volume of the loud speakers from the places of worship to be a way of showing the power of religion.

Loud speaker volume game gets even more ‘interesting’ when you have two rival religious places next to each other. You can observe the noise being increased to unbearable levels from both ends at the same time. Best part of it is when some of this actually continues throughout the day. Funnily as a kid I used to think that the preaching’s being done live and the clergy doing it should be very tired. Later I got to know that I was wrong, even those who have put up the noise find some cotton wool and stick it into their ears and happily asleep, while the people in the neighborhood suffer.

This is one of the logics very hard for me to understand, has any of these religions in their scriptures asked people to use loudspeakers and boom this noise? Why cannot the followers just tell others that this is nuisance? Is it a religious treachery if you talk about this in public?

I for one being a Hindu, with whatever little knowledge that I have about Hinduism is sure that getting into this trap of competition with other religions is actually causing more harm than any good. I see it as a deep disrespect that we can do to the religion of ours. For god sake, if you have a personal score to settle with the others use something else and leave out the name of the religion!

Kasurina Beach

Kasurina beach at Karainagar in the Jaffna peninsula is arguably the best beach in Sri Lanka. Its on of those places naturally gifted and luckily left untouched and unspoilt upto now.

Its white sand beach surrounded by palm trees. The water is very shallow for around 100 meters from the shore making it ideal for a safe dip or two in the ocean
Last few months as a team we have been caught in the obesssion of blue ocean strategy and our set of guys ended up trying to make out different tag lines for the beach, some wanted to call it the ideal blue ocean, others wanted to call it the uncontested beach, few more wanted to call it the untouched beach, then we had a smart cookie who wanted to call it the virgin beach!
Those who want to visit it make sure that you take care to make sure that you dont behave in such way that it spoils the beauty of the gift of mother nature!

The day I choose to walk alone!

Then people used to call me urulai (equivalent in English is barrel), I was supposed to be bit of a stout kid, very strange, but supposed to be true. People used to always ask my mother where she picked me up from, ok, I accept that they still ask that!

Coming back to the story, I was about four years old. That’s the age at which parents used ( I think they still) to put their children into a Montessori, on one fine day I woke up to be told that I am supposed to go to a Montessori and was advised to be a good boy at this place! I got a bit of attention on that particular day and also few days before the lead up to this day from my parents and people around. I didn’t know why, but I think I enjoyed it!

Then I was taken to this place and handed over to a teacher (at that time she was the second most beautiful person I had seen, of course my mother was the benchmark). It was the first day not only for me, but I think for the other kids too, I couldn’t understand why all of them were crying. Father told me to stay with the teacher till mother comes to pick me up, so I didn’t mind hanging around at this place till mother came. I didn’t have much to do, the teacher was too busy trying to handle the cry babies and I was their seated all by my self looking around. Then I noticed that there were people near the gate and the other kids were allowed to leave the place. I went near the gate to look for my mother, I was too short to see through the crowd and identify my mother. So I opted to just casually get out of the gate and search for my mother in the crowd. Later I got to know that parents were supposed to point their finger at the child and the security uncle was supposed to allow each child to go out of the premises. But I didn’t know any of this, when one of the other children went out I too opted to go out and look for my mother.

I couldn’t find my mother in the crowd. So I had a simple option of walking back home. I came out and walked along the Odeon lane then walking around the mara tree junction, and then took the short cut behind syberia to enter the school premises; from that point I knew the place very well, so didn’t have any problems in reaching the school quarters which we lived in. Only the walk upto mara tree was new. I think the distance between the Montessori and home was obviously less than 2 KMs, so no big deal!

I walked in to the house and saw that my mother was just getting ready to go somewhere, from behind I called her amma and expected her be very proud of me for making her work cut out, instead rather to my utter surprise all hell broke loose. She was surprised, stunned and now gave me an earful for coming alone. She knew that I was scared of this character called as nona(nona was the name they used to refer to a mentally retarded lady who used to to beg around that place, and when ever she sees a lady she called them “nona” to make her plea, I was told that she used to catch little children and take them away) and bereted me asking me “what would have happened if nona had caught you?”. Then my dad was informed about this episode, he had his set of questions to ask and then lot of advice, I think they informed to my Montessori teacher the next day. People around made it around to make it look as if I had given a slip to the Montessori on the first day itself and got home. Now this became one of the points that people at home used to introduce me to others, so that they can be better aware of me L

Later on when I grow older I got to know the “seriousness” of the my actions, the Odeon lane was supposed to be a very isolated place and worse than that the mara tree junction was notoriously known by people to be a place where after beheading human skulls were placed on display during that insurgency era. But how am I expected to know all this??? (probably If I was fed with this data in my decision making process, it might have been a different decision)

But it’s me, what I can do; I had all the logically innocent reasons to carry out those actions, but just like today even then, people never accepted that I was innocent. Lesson leant for life; all though I am innocent people will never accept it! ;)

Why not an open source application store!

In my last post I talked about the Mobile Long Tail and the need to eliminate the incremental cost of per new application. Anyhow eliminating the variable cost per application doesn’t completely enable a long tail. It solves only half the puzzle.

A golden rule for long tail is that when you have unlimited selection makes sure it can be easily searched. This is what Amazon, Netflix and others had done. Made sure that they provide a mechanism in which products can be easily searched and shared by the customers. After the unprecedented success of the app stores, most of the mobile client application providers had started to build their own application store.

Some interesting mobile client application stores
Apple App Store , Android Market , Nokia Ovi Store , Sumsung App Store,

JK ,pointed me that google wave is supposed to join the bandwagon very soon!

Now all these long tail models both telco and other industries need provide some common features like, searching, filtering, rating, sharing of products. Isn’t it a waste for each of these people to be developing all these common features over and over again? hSenid Mobile has decided to release the full code base of the application store under GPL.

mChoice Vishma

We have commenced the requirement discussions of the mChoice Vishma, which is the project name of the open source application store. Now we have the high level idea on where we need to get to and the team is getting ready with some proposed UI interfaces, so that it will be used as the basis for community discussions.

Face to Face Meet Up

The Vishma face to face meet up will happen on the 17th of February 2010 at GMT 1.00 PM to 2.00 PM.
That is,
Barcelona Time - 2.00 PM to 3.00 PM
Singapore and Malaysian Time - 9.00 PM to 10.00 PM
Sri Lankan and Indian Time - 6.30 PM to 7.30 PM
Follow the http://soltura.hsenidmobile.com to find the online login details to the session.

Bringing the Long Tail to the Telco Applications

OK, let me start by defining the following terms for people to understand my post/s better.

Telco application – This is not the usual mobile application which is installed on the mobile phone. Instead what I refer to as a telco application is the program which resides somewhere in the operators network. One popular kind of the telco application is the voting application, which is the application that receives the text messages when you send an SMS to vote for your favorite star in the American Idol or its local variant like Super Star and summarizes the results and shows it to the relevant people.

Value Added Service (VAS) providers – They are the people who come up with the concept of the application and give it as a service to the subscriber base. For example in the case of American idol or its local variant the media house is the VAS provider.

Killer Application – In this context it’s the Killer Telco Application, which give a lot of $$$$ to the VAS provider and of course the operator.

Understanding long tail

The concept of Long tail[1] has revolutionized the way we think about business. In the good old days traditional sellers had a constraint in the form of shelf space\storage space. Further they had to incur a distribution cost with respect to each product they wanted to sell. Let’s take a simple example, just look at the book store around the corner, they have a constraint in the form of shelf space, hence when a book was to be placed on display they have to consider the opportunity cost of it. So they usually make the most rational decision of filling up the shelf space with the best sellers. This was and is considered the accept business wisdom when dealing with traditional stores.

With the introduction of the digital economy the market boundaries and constraints started to change, for players like Amazon who started with the concept of online web store, did not have the shelf space constraint, for them shelves were replaced by a database entries, hence shelf space had been reduced to a few kilobytes of storage in a machine lying at some corner of the world. So they no longer worry about finding out whether if a book will be a best seller or not. They just store up information about all books, which included books which were deemed to have been termed either “commercially failed” or books which had a geographically distributed small reader bases. The result of the digital economy has been staggering they are finding their revenue to be dominated by the non-best sellers! This prompted a publication “GoodBye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail!”[2].

Telco applications - current situation

Telco applications are currently pushed by the operator. Operators due to the incremental cost per new application [includes the development cost of the application, marketing cost of the application, testing, configurations and of course the maintenance cost] consider the introduction of each new application to be a business risk! So they need to do a feasibility analysis and justify the business case, develop the application and then bring it to the market. So as a consequence of this cost they are on the lookout for killer applications. Ideally they want to each new application to be a massive hit among the subscriber base.

As a side effect of this existing process we find that the telco applications of today are either provided by the operator, a corporate house or an IT vendor. Although it’s hard to digest for some people, to be honest the amount of people who are available to innovate and bring new application concepts within the current space are very much limited. Even if a new idea comes up justifying it as a business case might not be the easiest. So the chances are that we might be killing some of the hit applications while it’s just a concept.

Let me try to compare the telco application to the book store example, in a traditional market space the book shelf was a constraint, with respect to telco applications having an incremental cost per application is a constraint. In the same way book stores were earlier trying to guess which are the best sellers and offering those to customers. In the same way on the telco network currently telco’s as per their available market intelligence decides on picking telco application concepts which they expect to be the next killer application.

Do we see a similarity between the current telco application model and the non – long tail business model?

In the current market context if my old boys union/alumni association wants to create a SMS digest messaging application which sends a message with the weekly update of activities, we might not be allowed to create this application. In the current context it’s almost obvious that it would not be considered a killer application.

But isn’t the non introduction of this sort of an application a revenue opportunity denied for the telco?

Mobile Long Tail

So the bottom line is that if the long tail is to be brought to the mobile network, we need to have a business process coupled with the required technology to eliminate the incremental cost per application. When cost per new application is zero, you don’t have to do an analysis to see whether if it’s going to be a hit or not. Instead of trying to play a guessing game on deciding if an application will turn out to be a killer or not. It would provide the operator with an opportunity to just bring the application to the market and see how it performs. Further if the application has zero incremental cost, even if it generates a few messages per year it can still be considered to be profitable. So now even my little Old boys’ association application might be worth for the operator to try out.

This is the business model we are looking at in mChoice Soltura! But for some readers the big question might be “how can the operator achieve zero incremental cost per application?” Keep following us on soltura.hsenidmobile.com as we unveil how we achieve it!

References
[1] The Long Tail by Christian Anderson
[2] "Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail" by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Duncan Simester
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail

Train Ride from Kandy to Colombo

	I have traveled by train to different places, but for some reason or the other the train journeys I have had between Colombo and Kandy are almost always memorable.
Foreigners are usually surprised to find this sort of trains in operation still.They might have seen these machines either in vintage films or portraits. Usually the condition of the train is not the best. The seats are not too bad, but very often the train is over packed by more than double its capacity and seats made for two people for two will have around three to four people and you might find another few people almost about to climb unto your back. Don’t expect the windows to have automatic controls, you need to put your mechanical thinking hat on to make out how to lift the lever and open the windows.
	It can be funny if you try to compare this with the facilities in other countries. Singapore MRT usually keeps on replaying the message “be aware of the gap between the train and the platform” when ever a train is ready to load passengers. Plenty of safety announcements are being made there while having less than a half an inch of gap, but ironically here you would find that there will be a foot gap further people should climb down a fragile ladder, but still no safety announcement or for that matter even not a single notice to educate about safety, but still life goes on and more than that people still have wide smiles and travel around happily!
Given all these circumstances still I will assure you one thing – taking a ride in one of these trains is worth it. The sceneries are just breathtaking; especially from kadigamuwa to kadugannawa it’s simply amazing! The train line, which is a British architecture carves through the rocks and makes a steep rise within a short distance! You just get seduced by nature and the shades of green on display. Its one of the pleasing sights you can come across. The bible rock stands at the center of the attraction and it makes you feel if you are taking a ride around it. The train rides on the edge of a rock while a collection of mountain ranges are far at display. I for one don’t have that vocabulary to put the beauty of it in words. So instead I present it in pictures! Below you can find an aerial view of a train winding its way through one of the tunnels in the route	Bible Rock

Unlocking an uncontested market space for the Telcos

Today throughout the globe Telcos are locked in a fierce battle in a “Red Ocean”. Typical as in any “Red Ocean” they face a great challenge in ensuring a profitable growth. Fighting a price war by differentiation and somehow retaining existing customers had become the mantra of the decision makers. At the same time Telcos are faced with a huge challenge of keeping up with cutting edge technological innovations while keeping the capital and operational expenditures under control. Adding to the Telco’s woos is the complexity in differentiating white elephant technological innovations from the ones which the market is ready to buy.

It might look as if I had made it to sound scary but when you listen to the Telco decision makers when they are in total pouring the heart out mode, you get to know that they all face a similar dilemma.

hSenid being a vendor for Telco grade service delivery platforms wanted to break out of the Red Ocean and unlock an uncontested market space for the Telcos. Hours and hours of brain storming by the hSenid team have yielded Soltura, which is a bundled solution encompassing both technological and business process innovation.

Inspired by the work of W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, hSenid team crafted the product strategy for formulation and execution of Soltura using some of the tools and techniques prescribed in their book Blue Ocean Strategy.

Soltura’s New Value Curve

Using the four actions framework hSenid decided to focus on creating a new value curve and set the priorities clear for the product.

As shown in the four actions framework above, Soltura creates a new value curve for the Telco by providing the following features.

a. Cost Perspective

· Irrespective of the sophistication of the Service Delivery Platform the incremental cost occurred for each new application in the form of both development cost and the operational cost from the Telco side in the form of NCS configurations, testing and management has traditionally been taken as an inevitable cost. Soltura differs from this currently accepted wisdom.

· By making each architectural decision in a cost conscious manner hSenid has managed to come up with a Service Delivery Platform which can be deployed at a Telco without any initially outflow of capital expenditure. One of the important features that are presented by Soltura is the raise of a new industry standard of providing SDP as a hosted solution on the cloud and thereby greatly reducing the Total Cost of Ownership of the platform.

b. New Market Segment and thought leadership Perspective

· By eliminating the incremental cost per application, Soltura creates an opportunity to house thousands of applications and discover a totally new market segment which was not reachable with the existing set of tools and platforms.

· The concept of giving an opportunity of allowing everyone to become a content provider and giving a paradise of choice to the subscribers gives rise to a totally new way of looking at Telco applications – this is what we call as “Socializing the Mobile Network.”

Stay around to see the strategy canvas of Soltura!!!!

Looking away but why?

A picture from my amma's garden

For some strange reason I like this picture! I am just trying to find the reason...

is it because it opted to look away?

or

is it because I am impressed about reverse perspectives?

or

is it because its seriously a nice picture? ;)

எனக்கு பிடித்த ஏழு பாடல்கள்

தமிழில் பதிவு எழுத வேண்டும் என்று அடியெனுக்கு நீண்ட நாள் ஆசை. எனுக்கு மிகவும் பிடித்த ஏழு பாடல்களை வருசை படுத்தும் ஒரு முயற்சி இது. உண்மையில் இவற்றை பிடித்த பாடல் என்று சொல்வதிலும் பார்க்க என்னை பாதித்த பாடல்கள் என்று சொல்வது பொருந்தும்.

1. பெம்மானே - ஆயிரத்தில் ஒருவன் பட பாடல்.
எலும்பு உருகி எம் மக்கள் விழிந்து கொண்டு இருக்கும் பொழுது வெளியானது. நூறு முறையாவது என் மனதுக்குள் கண்ணீர் விட வைத்த பாடல்.

2. கண்ணே கலை மானே - மூன்றாம் பிறை பட பாடல்.
ஒரு நாலு அல்லது ஐந்து வயது இருக்கும் போது மாமாவின் நெஞ்சில் தலையை புதைத்த எனக்கு, நடை பெற்ற தனிப்பட்ட கச்சேரியில் பல முறை "once more " கேட்ட பாடல் இது. அருமயான குரலில் அவர் பாட அவரது இதய துடிப்பு பக்கவாத்தியம் வாசிக்க நிலா முற்றத்தில் முழுமயாக ரசித்த பாடல்.

3. நினைத்து நினைத்து - 7g rainbow colony
இந்த பாடலில் எதோ ஒரு மயக்கம் சரியான காரணம் சத்தியமாய் தெரியாது, அனால் ஒரு காலத்தில் தினமும் winamp இல முதலாவதாக இந்த பட பாடல்களை தெரிவு செய்து கேட்டது உண்டு.

4. நறுமுகயே நறுமுகயே - இருவர்
தொடக்கத்தில் வரும் மிருதங்க ஒலியும் தொடந்து வரும் சலங்கை ஒலியும் ரகுமானின் கைவண்ணம். எனினும் இந்த பாடலின் நாயகன் கவிபேரரசு தான். சங்க தமிழில் ஒரு பாடல், காலம் கடந்து என்னை அழைத்து செல்வது போன்று ஒரு வியப்பு இந்த பாடல் கேட்கும் ஒவ்வொரு முறையும் வரும்.

5. என்னவளே
உன்னி கிருஷ்ணன் குரலும் AR ரஹ்மான் இசையும் என்னை கட்டி போட்ட ஒரு பாடல்.

6. நிலா காய்கிறது - இந்திரா பட பாடல்
ஹரிணி இன் பிஞ்சு குரலில் கேட்ட்கும் போது பாடசாலை காலத்தில் காமிலோ மற்றும் ஜெகவந்தன் கலை விழாவில் பாடியது ஞாபகாம் வருவது உண்டு.

7. ஆராரிரோ நான் இங்கே பாட - ராம் பட பாடல்
தாய் பற்றி வந்த பாடல்களில், இந்த பாடலும் தீயில் விழுந்த தேனா (வரலாறு பட) பாடலும் வித்தியாசமான பாடல்கள்.

Why do I write here?

During the past few weeks it has been totally uncharacteristic of me to keep away from all sorts of writing which includes blogs, diary….. I was trying to analyze my self to find out the reasons for this. Some probable excuses which came to my mind included,

Tied to work? Still caught in the obsession that I have with the new camera? Postponing the day to writings, so that I write something “monumental” than the usual grumbling like this post? Desperately wanted to write my first Tamil blog entry?

Whatever the excuses I tried to find deep inside I knew one thing for sure – something was wrong somewhere. Usually when I skip writing my diary note for too long I know that “sayanthan is out of his mind” (some may say that usually that’s the case always).

Being an introvert, I had always looked for energy in doing my scribbling. It’s not actually written for any audience. It’s more a way of pouring off some thing in the mind. It lets me think in a more systematic way and gives me some good time to question my own self, often the writing produce is controversial hence the majority of them end up in the dustbin/recycle bin after I had read it for a few times, only a few which doesn’t make little or no controversy end up here.

In any case if you have read this blog you would have realized that it’s a sense less post without anything interesting, that is because my posts are not written for an audience other than myself. ;)

Discrimination of women – Who’s responsible?

Whether we like it or not discrimination of women still exits wildly. It ranges from occasional banter at the work place to the more criminal offenses involving the ultimate crimes. I honestly think and believe that women should not to be discriminated on any grounds. Woman like man should be given the opportunity and freedom as they wish to have.

Usually, any discussion about the reasoning for the oppression or discrimination of women with a girl or woman would almost turn out to be animated or emotional. At the very start itself all the blame would be placed fair and square on the men as a whole. But then with second thoughts they would dilute the argument to say that not all man are bad, but still at large they would conclude that men are the very reason for all this discrimination. Its funny at times the striking similarity they have when it comes to the style of arguments to vilify men. My latest discussion was with a fanatic feminist novelholic ( new term patented by yours truly ;)), she for one has been reading too many novels based on the Arab world and quotes all her arguments based on those books, which are all supposed to be real life stories. Unfortunately she always misses the point that some of this involves a certain element of dramatization, when it comes out as fiction. All though I do not deny completely the fact that woman are treated in notoriously bad ways in some of these countries.

Then of course I have had the “privilege” of having the greatest feminist very close to me from the time of my birth itself. She is a vocal critic and an expert exponent when it comes to handling the cause of discrimination to her advantage, all though in recent times, I see a more subdued approach from her especially after managing to prove her wrong at least a few times.

There are always a few points that I try to tell these ladies and usually they are in no mood to listen to this part of the story since they are with a preconceived idea that all men are chauvinist pigs. So I thought of putting it down on this blog and let them read probably they might start to see from the reverse angle too.

The first thing is that actually women are the enemies of women. Whether we like it or not women are at the root of discrimination of woman, in a very high number of cases. For example look at the cases of dowry, women who they themselves who would have suffered because of the problem of dowry when they were young haunt their daughter-in-law with the demand for dowry. Of course there is no denying that the man who is asking for the dowry is mostly acting to be a slave and clearly portraits his own weakness of being a vegetable without any self confidence of leading his life on his own. The main point missed by women in this cases is that discrimination is caused by a fellow woman.

Secondly, if you look at the cause for having so many men with superiority complexes, I would say that at home and at schools women are taught and shown to be inferior by women teachers and mothers. So these girls grow up with the inherent mind set of being inferior and then on the other hand the boys are bought up with the superiority complex. Its simple, "As you sow so shall you reap".

So atleast when you say women are discriminated please do not place all the blame just only on men, remember that women too aid and abet this crime and a larger proportion of the real power of eliminating the discrimination from the society lies in the hands of women.

Most importantly I hope and pray these feminist will not grow older to become the people who would sow the seeds of discrimination or use the word of discrimination to black mail the innocent men who get caught in there hands. Lol

The wake up call

I was just reading the book called as “The Monk who sold the Ferrari”, I was left captivated by the beauty of the flow of it and the easiness with each the author relates the pieces of wisdom.

It starts of with a character portrayal of a litigator, but I am pretty sure some of the IT people like me would see a striking resemblance to our own lives too, although we might have not reached such pinnacles or fame as of that character, we might have already hit the negatives. The book was successful in pulling some of the most sensitive codes in my system. I felt like it was timely reading when I was in a deep personal slumber and complacency!

The good thing about the author Robin Sharma was that he didn’t leave me with questions instead had left me with a lot of instructions and answers. I see it as a much diluted version of the Raja Yoga by Swami Vivekananda; I see this as a better reading for a layman like me to start with. He had made sure that the text is positioned in such way, where the noble pieces of wisdom from the mystic land of east is swallow-able even for a westerner. I loved some of the concepts he talks about starting from Loving ones self, Goal setting, Opposition thinking, enjoying the beauty of small thinking and of course training the mind.

I had read about design patterns – I mean the software ones, but reading this I felt as if the author was talking about the design pattern for once own life. Then again when he was talking about self – governance I felt as he was talking of managing once own life as a project. The good thing is that I didn’t get to read many things I didn’t know about but I was happy to get a swallow able dose of it at a single place. That is what I would suggest as the greatest strength of this book.

For anyone who wishes to read this, I would suggest to find quiet nice place where you will be alone. Ideally find a natural surrounding where your mind will be relaxed and open for exploration and then settle into a nice cozy place and start reading out the book loud. I am pretty sure that you will get caught in the charm of the sages of sivana and would end up reading the book from cover to cover and walk away with a refreshed and focused mind.

Good Luck!

Some of you all might be aware, that Vani is said to be leaving hSenid to find greener pastures elsewhere. Anyhow we are hearing conflicting reports on where she is will be leaving to.

Some say that she will be leaving to "GREEN WITCH"!!!!, I too believe that, since its more suitable name.

Anyhow while at KL our investigator managed to track down a new business venture started by her.

Where ever she is leaving to "I wish her GOOD LUCK!"



PS: To the people there "GOD BLESS" (ROFL), specially to the customers to these places!

TIPS for Vegetarian Travelers to Philippines

Philippines is a place with nice polite people, anyhow its one of the hardest places for a vegetarian traveler. I had a nightmare trying to find veg food. After some patient menu reading I found a few dishes that I can survive with. Most of the restaurants serve plain rice with Japanese Tofu. I survived eating Tofu for 8 days in Philippines! I later found out another option for vegetarians, is to have some vegetables and mushrooms soaked in garlic syrup which is also served with plain rice. Then of course, if you need the odd things to crunch, you do not have to worry as at every corner you will usually find a seven eleven store.

If you want to find out whether if there are vegetarian dishes don’t hesitate to ask them, usually most of them speak English, atleast in Makati, and are really helpful. Anyhow watch out and read the menu item since at times they innocently assume that oyster syrup is vegetarian.