Sometimes Gmail becomes an addiction. I myself was a Gmail addict. Gmail, built in feed reader and a lot of feeds can eat up all your time. There were times when I used to wake up in the morning and spend the whole day reading mails, replying to them and then reading feeds. Leaving unread feeds in my reader was a very hard thing to do. Feeds are good, but when they start becoming addictive, then its time to delete some of the...

How does wealth grow, or how does wealth multiply ? This was one question that I had in my mind for quite some time. We all are consuming money for various purposes, then how does an economy grow ?  I found an answer yesterday when thinking about social entrepreneurship. Suppose I have 10 lakhs in my bank account. I build a hotel for that money. I paid 10 lakhs to various vendors contractors, employees etc. My 10 lakhs got distributed...

A visual programming language uses different interconnected blocks to create programs rather than complete text coding.  This is mainly used in robotics. Various movements of the robot are specified in different action blocks and the robot function is achieved by connecting the blocks in the required fashion. The simplest VPL is the one shipped with Lego robots. Its really easy to use. Different code blocks are there which control...

We had windows, Linux and Java platforms to develop applications. We enjoyed writing code upon these platforms. We developed many desktop applications. We learned how to access win32 apis, java packages and linux kernel. Five years from now, programmers will not be speaking about win32 apis of java packages. Their discussion will include google Apis, amazon storage services, Identity management services and yahoo apis. The computing...

  Microsoft and windows are conquering new avenues all the time. What ever they may say against windows and microsoft I am a big fan of both windows and microsoft. Without bill gates the computing scene would have been very very different. If my mom is using a computer that just because windows made it so simple and popular. Now microsoft has its eyes on the mobile domain. Simple mathematics justifies it. There are more mobile...

Once you launch your product, track the usage carefully. Plan for usage tracking while in development itself. Develop modules that can gather usage stats of various features you build into the product. In most cases product development teams gather the requirement from a small set of target markets. In the web domain that is not enough, as we cannot really predict what is going to happen to your product. Many of your pet features...

A very common mistake product development teams make is that, they think of a product as a set of features. But there something more to a product, that makes it a success. Every product that we use must make an emotional attachment with ourselves. This attachment is very much visible in the web world. Think how much you are attached to your gmail inbox. I remember a website that was launched for the youth, when I was in school....