open sourcing imagination #2

It's been a while since I penned down my last blog. This is typical me. Gain interest, lose interest, all at a rapid pace. But hey, it's a rapid world out there. Startups form and die, before you even know they were formed. Kickstarter gives us a live, streaming insight into the future, previously folks used to track patents to peep into the future. Nanotechnology is converting the paradigm of humanity from dealing with scarcity to dealing with abundance. My kids do 5 things at the same time using 3 devices and 4 channels. Robots are using evolution algorithms to learn to talk to each other. evolution Algorithm!  You must be kidding me, no one taught me that when I did my double master degrees....

so hey, with all this evolution around me, I am entitled to my own sand dunes of interests....

I was having a kadak chai with a business partner today and I saw his eyes gleaning whilst reflecting on the times we live in. I saw a reflection of my soul in that glean. I feel totally inspired everyday, just with the mere fact that i live in these times. There is entrepreneurship blossoming at every corner of the world, there are people from all walks of life giving wings to their dreams. And technology underpins most of those dreams.  My daughter follows this YouTube superwomen. She is a producer n director of a great show, which is a satire on Indian families dealing with contemporary times. Superwomen has over 1.7 million subscribers. She also does all three roles in her production. The father, the mother and the daughter. A celebrity, an actor, a director of this age.

An idea, a camera, an Internet connection and off you go....

Imagination is now open sourced. You can download thoughts from the stream of information flowing in front of you, convert these thoughts into ideas and start something big.

Here are some of my thoughts,  open sourced, creative commons licenced to build...

Startup cafe

Cities such as dubai could do with startup cafes where people from the innovation ecosystem come to intersect, discuss and build ideas, over a chai n a muffin. Folks with ideas, folks with money, folks with resources and folks with a good appetite. The menu card should not only tweet the trending chai flavours but also hot ideas being liked and under formation in the cafe.  A physical space for human beings to invent, share and eat.  A startup cafe.

Appstores blossoming at a garden near you

A godzillion apps are being built. But hey the big players such as Google and Apple seem to have a monopoly over app stores. Have the times arrived for verticalized app stores? Maybe one for retail, one for travel, one for banking et al. Sharpens the focus and removes latency and friction for someone looking for an app. Best to register those domain names,  just in case the idea picks up..www.ideas.appstore.com!

One second advantage

" I go where the puck is going to be"  the one second advantage of prediction. An art a science .. a game changer. Perhaps the next ecosystem for India and Indian companies to nurture. Ingredients : math, science, computing, art all mixed together and then delivered at scale. I would start with data science courses in the schools n universities to build capabilities ground up, just like we did with computer engineering all those years back...perhaps pilani can be the next bangalore. Companies should then form vertical cognitive and prediction hubs, as each vertical needs the models to be calibrated and fine tuned.  Generic data science and machine learning competence centres will not cut it. Go deep, go vertical, go forth...

Around

Humanity only looks down nowadays. Just walk around and watch. People are walking heads down, deep in love with their mobile devices. Chatting, posting, reading or just staring at their devices, praying for a notification to arrive. Something, an email,  a ping, something........

someone create a simple app for them please. An "around" app. It runs on all those devices, all those wearables, on everything that makes humanity gaze down. And all it does is to remind human beings to look around them,  smell those roses a few centimetres away, gaze at the tallest building in the world, admire the eyes of another fellow human passing by and around, look beyond at the horizon at the unique cloud formation. Link into the real world.
look back, look left, look right...look around.

That's it for now.

Theodore Roosevelt on what really counts

It is not the critic who counts;
not those who point out where our strong people stumbled
or when the doer of deeds could have done better.

The credit belongs to those who are actually in the arena.
Whose faces are marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strive valiantly
who err and come short again and again;
who know great enthusiasms;
who at best know the triumph of of high achievement;
and who at worst if they fall, at least fall while daring greatly.

So that their place will never be with those cold and timid souls,
who know neither victory nor defeat.

This is an inspirational piece by Theodore Roosevelt.
It is indeed only those who are in the arena who really count.
Loads of folks today have the tendency to ride the waves, skim the surface and never really dare take a position. It must be quite lonely to neither experience victory nor failure.

 A key leadership mantra - take a position, be counted, enjoy the outcome, learn from it.

At the Intersection

It is a perfect 32 degrees.  A light and cool breeze flirts with the sands of the desert.  The windows roll down, the sunroof rolls up. The spirit soars to the beats of some classic, soul wrenching music. The fog of a routine existence dissipates.  An orgasmic euphoria erupts within. It is great to be alive again.

It is the same car. It is definitely the same life. However the concoction served through the intersection of the perfect 32 degrees, perhaps the sudden blast of a favorite song or even the breeze waving through the hair, results in a completely different connection in our brain and suddenly euphoria sets in.

Life lives and thrives at the intersection.

Ants and other life forms have discovered a unique form of collective intelligence. Leaderless, extremely federated, super-efficient.  Ever wonder how ants form such a uniform pattern to/from their home and their source of food? Or how huge swarms of locust, millions of them, move in such harmony, without the long-haired conductor doing his/her bit in the center? It is quite amazing that such basic life forms in nature are able to achieve such colossal, coordinated feats.

A few folks from the homo sapiens cadre got quite intrigued by these advanced accomplishments of smaller, fellow inhabitants of mother earth. So they broke the shackles of linear learning and went and studied ants, bees, fireflies, locusts and even water droplets at a level of detail. Besides a number of PhDs, this research also resulted in some critical insights and the birth of a new term viz. ‘swarm intelligence’.

The agents (ants or locusts) apparently operate completely on their own, in their local context. However they are connected to each other and their environment through a set of very simple rules. There is no central co-ordination or leadership and also no grand goals which the community sets for itself. However federated, local actions based on a simple set of rules result in global achievements which many a team would aspire to achieve.

An ant for instance emits a substance called pheromone as it moves out of its home to look for food. The pheromone evaporates over a period of time – this is where the environment comes into play. The simple rule that ants follow is “go on the way where your little nose smells the most pheromone”. So as multiple ants move from their home looking out for food, soon some of them will go on the shortest route and on this route the smell of pheromone will be the strongest. Subsequent ants will use the simple rule and follow this route and this will further intensify the pheromone smell on the route. As a result, globally the majority of the ants will follow the shortest path to the food!

The discovery of this highly effective pattern in nature has been intersected with a number of our day to day optimization problems such as finding the shortest route from source to destination for a set of packets over a telecom network. This kind of intersection has already spurred a whole lot of innovation in multiple fields of life. An Airline ran an experiment in 2008 to see if airplane allocation to gates worked better if it were based on swarm intelligence i.e. each pilot is like an ant acting in his/her local context to get to the gate, while overall guided by a set of basic rules. Apparently, the net allocation of planes to gates on the day was much more efficient when based on swarm methods as opposed to the normal optimization algorithms.

(http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2008/0406-planes_trains_and_ant_hills.htm)

I wonder if we have seen the full potential of this intersection yet. Imagine how we could apply this highly decentralized, leaderless pattern to other walks of life. The implicitly federated Internet environment comes to mind. Imagine the internet as the “environment” and all things connected to it as agents. If these agents could all have some basic rules under which they can operate, can their local actions tie up into a connected whole, a whole much greater in intelligence and capability than its parts? I guess the challenge will be to write and then execute the thin layer of software on each agent which will ensure that the agent follows a set of pre-defined basic rules. However if we could somehow manage to get the software installed and executed each time an agent connects to the Internet, then there is a possibility of morphing the Internet into a collective intelligence unit (brain) which is able to solve our problems based on the rules currently  configured on its agents. Perhaps the next big evolution of the www after the internet of things!

The key point however is that the next wave of innovations and successes will emanate from the intersection. Linear learning in various fields has perhaps reached its zenith or will result only in incremental advancement in our thoughts. Those bright sparks of fresh thinking and innovation will only be found at the intersection.

At the intersection of different fields and disciplines.

At the intersection of different cultures.

At the intersection of different religions and belief systems.

At the intersection of Eastern myths and Western science.

At the intersection of ying and yang.

 So when your angel, your daughter walks up to you and says she has decided to take up ‘nanofractalmedicine’ taught in 6 semesters across India, Europe and America be prepared to say yes, foot the bill and proudly walk her to the intersection!

The anatomy of a CEO

It was another one of those blazing afternoons.

I guess we were all used to the resplendence of all three seasons – hot, hotter, and blazing hot. But nobody complained. Hot had become a way of life. I and two other of my rather leisurely friends made our way to a coffee shop. The bright idea for the afternoon was to gulp down our parched throats some hot coffee, amidst the mist of aromatic shishas. Men don’t analyze too much, I guess. They just do what they got to do. Hot coffee on a hot day seemed like a perfectly harmonious thing to do.

The conversation flowed in confluence with the smoke waving through the room. Floating here and there, going nowhere. The aroma of exotic Turkish coffee mixing fluently with the mist emanating from the Shishas. Pretty much like a scene out of that old Bollywood movie ‘dam maro dam’ sans of course the lovely women floating around. 

Anyways, you perhaps are starting to ponder where or when does the CEO enter in this scene. So before I lose the skeleton of that CEO in the mist of those aromatic shishas….J

Let me cut to the chase.

The free flowing conversation received a rather sharp incision when someone asked the poignant question - “I wonder which discipline has the bigger chance of making it to CEO – Sales or Finance?” This filled me with sadness as IT did not even find a mention in the question! Anyways I ignored my hurt emotions and jumped into the conversation by offering a firm view anchored fully on empirical evidence and facts – “I believe it’s the Finance field which dominates the corner office”. Of course all three of us had firm and fully informed opinions but no one really knew what the true facts were.  So I offered to do some research…..

I picked up the top 50 brands of the World.  First of all that list itself is quite interesting. You have in it the expected McDonalds, Coca Cola et al. However increasingly the Chinese brands are breaking in as well – ever heard of ICBC (Asia), the 11^th most known brand in the World! 

Then of course there are geek firms which feature prominently on the list – Apple, Google, IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP, BB – not bad for IT. It has made it to the crème de le crème. No doubt by weaving a .net over the stock market’s eyes, whilst its brokers sipped Java!

Anyways, next I started looking at the top honchos who head up these fine companies and observed the following:

Game, Set, Match MBA: These coveted three letters M.B.A; they still dominate the Top. That too only from premier institutes such as Harvard, Wharton. So if Nicholas Carr publishes another HBR article, this time titled “MBA does not matter”, ignore him as much as you did his first one

Back to School: CEO resume are peppered with academic glories. Quite a few of them have more than one degree and that too from Ivy League institutions. Yes, there are indeed a few, high profile ones who jumped college to pursue their passion and made it to the corner office. However that is exactly what they are – a few!

The equal opportunity movement! : The corner office is quite like the Sahara desert if you were looking for women. When I came to Louis Vuitton in the list, I thought maybe, just maybe. But alas, thou too Brutus? Of course Pepsi was the pleasant variant, for reasons more than one

A kaleidoscope of experience: These guys have a rich tapestry of experience. They have ‘been there and done it’ at a number of places, in different roles and across different disciplines. The path to the top has many curves and top honchos seem to embrace each curve with a passion

Putting in the Years: Contrary to popular belief, the majority of top honchos careers are not characterized by the shifting sands of frequent job changes. In and out of companies, weaving their magic wands? Not really. Most have toiled their way in and around the bylanes of the same organization, putting in the hours, then days, then years, gaining deep experience, earning deeper credibility, building a strong foundation of trust and then claiming their right to the corner office. Old is indeed gold - at least when it comes to the top jobs @ top brands

Someone witty I met recently would say - “two turkeys don’t make an eagle, Neetan”. Perhaps a more diligent collation of empirical evidence across Fortune 500 companies may yield a different set of conclusions.

However for concluding a shisha powered, coffee triggered, light conversation amongst three deep friends, the above observations provide an adequate picture of the internals of our beloved CEO’s anatomy.

A tribute

it must have been somewhat similar

decades ago

when an inner voice would have screamed

a chord would have stuck

and millions paraded

to the melody of freedom

being part of a generation born free

i have often pondered

what drove those wonderful people

born with love in their hearts

and humility in their souls

to part with the tranquility of their homes

the loving hugs of their daughters

the protective shield of their parents

the harmony of their routines

and jump into the burning flames of protest and conflict

what drove those wonderful people

to offer those heads so fondly stroked

by the supple hands of their little ones

to the bludgeons of blood soaked batons

what drove those wonderful people

to kiss their mother’s feet

in the stillleness of the night

then disappear into oblivion

to partake in the fight

what drove those wonderful people

to dawn pristine white robes

so lovingly creased and caressed

by their doting spouses

and jump into bottomless pits

of death or endless pain

it has always felt surreal

that era gone by

those wonderful people, no more

it has always felt surreal

those uprisings for a cause

that deeper sense of purpose

that irrepressible societal core

today the streets are brimming again

with endless hearts in full bloom

a rare glimpse of an era gone by

a surreal upsurge of sentiment

where the eyes see no reason

the mind sees no loss or gain

the soul rejoices in celebrations

while the body suffers in pain

at the helm an aged, selfless being

in pristine white

full of energy and passion

awakening the collective consciousness

of a declining nation


a senseless crusade

or perhaps a true tribute

to THE Mahatma

Open Sourcing Imagination

So, sometimes my brain tweets out what I call ideas and you may call gibberish. After all there is nothing like absolute reality. Reality depends upon who is looking, upon the observer. This inderminent nature of reality itself, now proven by the science of quantum physics. So, I guess it would be quite alright for you and me to have these somewhat opposing perspectives on what I am about to share with you.

And then if my brainwaves were not warped enough, a noble soul handed me a book called ‘The Medici Effect”. I consumed it with a vengeance. It broke some of the associative barriers in my brain and got those brainwaves riding over this interesting concept of ‘innovation at the intersection’.

The net result was a further explosion of these gibberish ideas! (GIs)

With the pipeline in my brain bursting at the seams, I had another brainwave about how to manage these brainwaves! What if I open sourced them all? Shove them down the Internet pipe and choke that pipe up, instead of my brain.

Extrapolate this thought to all ideas and you will have a place for ideas to roam about, with the kind of euphoria which typically comes with along with a sense of complete freedom. To break away from the shackles of patents, IPR and lawsuits. A creative commons license for ideas.  Available to be adopted by any entrepreneur with a passion for converting ideas into innovations, which change the world or at-least a part of it.

So this blog is an attempt at this thought. Sparking an internet of ideas. Open sourcing imagination.

OSGI #1: EduVille

Every parent closely knows this particular problem statement. It is getting increasingly difficult to get kids interested in studying. There are just too many digital distractions around. On the other hand, in countries such as India, the amount of studies children have to undertake has grown exponentially. It’s a competitive country in a competitive world and the education system is geared towards exposing children to that spirit of extreme competitiveness from an early age! So how to deal with these opposing forces – decreasing mindshare on studies and an increasing load of studies to stay competitive.

This idea is about resolving the above problem in the intersection of three disparate fields - education, gaming and social networking. Start with rote subjects such as history and geography and create interesting, engaging online games which are based around these subjects – use characters from history and places from geography in the games. When the games go viral on Facebook or other social sites, children will be spending a fair amount of time on them and in their sub-conscious learning the subjects which underpin the game. Parents too will encourage children to buy and play these games! Schools will adopt them as well and install them on their library computers.

So anyone out there with the venture cap to launch EduVille on Facebook?

OSGI #2: From SMS to SGS

Quite often you have this surge of affection for someone you love and your heart wants to express this affection by sending him/her a gift. Or you see something a loved one enjoys, let’s say a type of ice-cream and you wish if you could send your loved one this here and now.

This idea is about taking sms to a new level and not just delivering messages but delivering gifts near abouts the speed of sms or a ‘short gift service’. It is also inspired from the world of microfinance, microloans. No doubt the challenge is much bigger than microfinance as this will involve micro logistics.  However I feel we are getting to that inflection point in the connectivity of the globe that someone with scale could actually deliver your wish within a few hours anywhere in the world. It will need a confluence between retailers, logistic companies and a hub platform on the internet/mobile app which accepts sgs and ties up the various players in the value chain to deliver the gift to the recipient. An initial test for this concept could be setting this up within Dubai and India, where a lot of expats have this feeling of guilt about having their old parents alone in India and time and again feel the urge to share with them something they are enjoying at the moment.

So Fedex are you game for SGS?

OSGI #3: Prada Smog Scarf

In a number of developing countries I see two-wheeler riders and especially their companions wrap a cloth around their face to save them from the traffic smog. It must be quite a challenge to get that thing wrapped around you especially when you are getting ready to go to work.

This idea is about first thinking about the design of a scarf with perforations which can be easily smoothened onto your face as you ‘gear’ up to face those polluted roads. And then of course once that design is done we can always look at making it a fashion statement. After all if mobile phones can be designer, why can’t smog scarfs be!

OSGI #4: Swarm BI Bots

The internet is becoming the world’s biggest brain and memory bank. Joe Bloke’s like you and me use the Internet to lookup almost anything we need. “where can I find an Indian restaurant in Innsbruck”  “what is the meaning of the word epiphany” “how much money do I need to carry to Thailand. What is the conversion rate from AED to Thai Baht”. Just feed your queries into the Google search monster and within a few seconds it spurts out an appropriate answer.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a search engine or a robot on the Internet dedicated to answering my business questions, when I dawn the avatar of my role in my Job. Today not many executives type away at Google to answer some of their searching questions “what has been the pricing trends of my competitors” “is this market in growth or has it reached maturity” “what is the business model of my competitor” “given a set of 10 things which have happened can I predict the competitive actions of my closest foe”

Granted that corporate information is not readily available on the internet and most sensitive information is closely guarded within enterprise firewalls. However I believe that despite these obvious constraints there is still enough corporate information available on the net – due to the pressure of disclosures by stock markets regulators, the fact that a number of the employees are on social networks typing away stuff plus all the freely available industry information.

This idea is about launching a specialized Google for enterprises. This search engine has bots inspired from the swarm technology (which incidentally is inspired from ants) which rummage through the information on the Net and convert them into meaningful intelligence for any enterprise manager. It’s like each executive has his/her very own intelligent pet bot in office. You sensitize it to what you are looking for, make it learn by feeding it some sample data and then unleash it on the Net to revert back with targeted intelligence for your enterprise needs.

If IBM’s Watson can beat humans in a game of Jeopardy with full natural language recognition, I am sure an executive bot pet for the Net can become a significant hit.

OSGI #5: Software Artineering

Something is amiss with the current age software engineering. Something doesn’t feel right about it. Too many projects get botched up and the industry figures on successful large scale IT projects are just appalling. In any other industry this level of a failure rate would have spurred numerous inventions looking to redefine this space.

I feel the issue is with the name itself – software engineering. Is software development or package acquisition and implementation really an engineering task! I am not so sure about it anymore. We might have applied the absolute wrong principles to this discipline and hence confined ourselves to a state of continuous failure.

This idea is about re-imagining the development and implementation of software. Looking at the intersection of art, engineering and software to redefine the way we build software and then deploy software. Art would play a critical role in this re-invention as there is definitely a creative side to imagining and writing software code. The idea is to create an entirely new method and process in the intersection of these fields – let’s call this software artineering.

What exactly will this new world look like, I have no clue. This idea is about having a fresh look, based on a completely new perspective, from a completely different angle and see what pops out. It might be a damp squib or something which re-invents one of the most influential fields of modern times.

That’s all I have in my kitty right now folks and guess what, the brain already feels relieved. The pipeline is now much more relaxed after the unload. There was one other idea which I gave to a couple friends who are serial entrepreneurs, and run an imaginary company called ‘rocket singh’.  If the company and the idea remain imaginary, then I will open source that idea in the sequel to this blog.

If someday any of these ideas transition to an innovation and someone out there makes an enterprise out of them, please remember that charity begins at home and you can start with my home which accepts donations in cash and kind J

With cheers to every Startup out there changing the world, this is Neetan the serial dreamer signing off …..

Honey, i.t just shrunk the world

Once upon a time…

Expressing emotions was linked to being human; today MIT has created a socially intelligent robot Leonardo; go on….. feed the keywords to the Google monster and watch it spurt out a YouTube link to Leonardo.

Powers such as mind control were only bestowed onto the sages who roamed the Himalayan heights and performed their mystical rites. Now we are able control the brain of a fly using Optogenetics. More is yet to come. Check out Gero Miesenboeck  @ Ted for a fascinating talk on this subject.

Mules used to carry our load up the slopes and along many a tricky terrain. Today Boston Dynamic’s ‘Big Dog’ is able to do so with as much dexterity as a real mule. It is completely in control despite a good old kick on its side and just goes about its job unemotionally as an ass would do.

Biology used to be defined as the study of living organisms; today biologyistechnology.com; the human genome project took over 12 years and upwards of 3 billion dollars to sequence the human genome. Today there are startup companies such as Complete Genomics envisioning sequencing your genome for $5000 within a year and maybe $100 within 5 years.  Check out their web site. It could be that of any technology company selling BI solutions, except of course this one is analyzing the dynamics of life itself.

It started with the innocuous printing of greeting cards. Today they are talking about 3D printing human organs!  A whole assortment of innovation is being sparked with 3D printing technology.  It is reaching an inflexion point, all set to take off.

Companies used to protect their IP by filing patents galore; today breakthrough ideas roam freely on Startup web sites, right under the noses of uninterested competitors

We used to prefix sustainable to competitive advantage; today we prefix ephemeral to it.

And there is one factor underpinning all these changes. Technology. THE common denominator.  Powering a wide array of game changing innovations across a spectrum of disciplines.

Now, you may wonder what has genetics got to do with my business or indeed how does an emotional robot threaten my competitive advantage. And for all you know you might be spot on and all this might not impact your business at all. Or maybe, just maybe the creative thoughts these technologies spawn or the branches of mini-innovations they unleash might already be causing small tremors under the foundations of your competitive advantage. Shaking its roots, in preparation for the big one which will uproot your business.

I often wonder about Barnes and Noble’s executive teams having a discussion on Jeff’s innovation on the web, when it was not written about in business books. I can see them saying “Jeff, who?”!  As irony has it, a few years later some of the hot selling, fast moving books on Barnes and Noble’s depleting brick and mortar shelves are about Jeff and his disruptive business model.

The story of course doesn’t stop there. In the next round Amazon again caught the large incumbents napping.  Amazon swept the ground under the feet of big players in IT infrastructure by venturing into and then conquering the world of cloud computing. Who in their wildest dream would have thought about competition in infrastructure provision from a book seller!

So I guess executive teams, irrespective of the business they lead, need to pause, and think deeply about these shifting sands underpinned by exponential movements in technology.

Competitive advantage has indeed gotten ephemeral in the shadow of this continuous barrage of technology innovation.

i.t is indeed shrinking our world.

It is shrinking the distance between you and your competitors.

It is shrinking the distance between you and your customers.

It is shrinking the distance between you and a completely unexpected new entrant.

It is shrinking the distance between imagination and reality.

Are you ready for it?

Are you ready to reimagine your business?

Are you ready to broaden your thinking and perspectives while i.t shrinks the world around you?