Alvarion 4G Whitepapers

Interested in learning about 4G wireless and its usage in Smart City applications. Try our new Alvarion N.America portal with whitepapers and information kits

Specific smart city information can be found here

Must have tool for runners-mapmyrun.com

I was always curious to know distance of my running route. I usually run around my neighbor hood in sunnyvale and try for 20-30 minutes. Other day I was thinking to drive my car around the route to calculate the distance. But now it is not required, found a site that helps and offer much more for runners- road runners best friend mapmyrun.com...so finally with peace of mind, my route about 2 miles!! ( seemed longer while running :-))

Marketing Thirukkural - Tamil Minimalism

What is common between, Tiruvalluvar, Mies van der Rohe and Steve Jobs? Not many people know about Thiruvalluvar as much as the other two personalities. But let me tell you, even though all three are from different generations and fields, they have much in common

• Thiruvalluar (India 500-200BC) poet & philosopher
• Mies Van der Rohe (1866-1969) Pioneer of modern Architecture
• Steve Jobs (1955-current)- technology innovator-Apple computers

I wanted to start a post on mainly on Thiruvalluvar and his impact on Tamil society and Tamilians around the world. When I started thinking about his work Thirukkural ( i will get to that soon), I had to think of the minimalism concept.

Many people know of minimalism as the idea of "Less is more" or doing more with less. The extraordinary mind goes against the popular culture and creates the work of art/literature or products that redefines the way people live & think. The results of these creationists makes simple things simpler & complex things simple


Steve jobs has been called by many names , maverick, visionary, genius, blah, blah, blah. What I really like is the anti main stream minimalistic or simplistic approach he takes in his products.When the popular cell phone devices were filled with buttons and more buttons to offer more functionality, iphone was designed with no buttons


I read an article in the wall street journal that stated, Steve jobs hated buttons and spoils the look of the phone. And now ladies & gentlemen, that is the birth of a minimalistic phone designs and now all the followers are coming to the market with similar look-phones from LG, HTC & Samsung changing their design philosophy to mimic iphone

Many people have written about iphone and my intention was to talk about Thirukkural written by Thiruvalluvar. Ok...how the hell does Thiruvalluar & Steve jobs intersect? what Thiruvalluvar did in the 300BC, is what Steve jobs & Co are doing in the 21th Century and it is exactly what Mies van der rohe did in the 20th century.


When creating epic sagas were in vogue ( Ramayana, Mahabaratha), Thirukkural was created as a couplet with just two lines providing a crisp messages on how to live life.

In a sentence Thirukkural defines a righteous way of life.

In detail, Tirukkural contains 1330 couplets that address a wide range of
topics pertaining to right behavior and the human condition. The text
is divided into three major portions (pal),

• Virtuous conduct (aram)
• Prosperity (porul),
  
• Pleasure (inpam
  or kamam)

The enormity of this creation is that the messages from the couplet are still valid after 2500 years. Sample thirukkural aphorisms below are still powerful and succinct to the reader

புறம்தூய்மை நீரான் அமையும் அகம்தூய்மை
வாய்மையான் காணப் படும்.
"Water makes you pure outward Truth renders you pure inward.


செல்லிடத்துக் காப்பான் சினம்காப்பான் அல்லிடத்துக்
காக்கின்என் காவாக்கால் என்.
Anger against the weak is wrong It is futile against the strong.

There in lies the minimalistic creation. Two simple lines but powerful message to people to live their life. But as a marketer I feel that we have not marketed the Thirukkural properly. Yeah, I agree the poems have been translated in many languages but it never made noise with in mainstream in any other cultures.

I get asked from my fellow Indians who are not from TamilNadu, What is so great about Thirukkuarl anyway?
Most people in Tamil Nadu read Thirukkural as part of their education. Also the essence and the principle of the verses are ingrained in the many facets of the Tamil society (movies, buses, etc). People outside the Tamil culture don't get it...I don't blame them.

Marketing Thirukkural for 21st century

The kurals have been translated in many languages and most of the translations preserve the couplet form. But I would like to package the content in to forms that could be absorbed by the people in the frenzied world. To draw an analogy, I love the branding and the marketing behind Sun Tzu, the Art of War. If you do a Google or Amazon search you can find at least 50 books on different authors translation of Art of war. My favorite one is a book called Art of war @ work for todays business world. Taking the concepts of military strategy created in the 2nd century BC and applying them-reformatting them to apply in today's context is the key reason Sun Tzu is more popular than Thiruvalluvar.

There are many similarities between the work of Sun Tzu & Thiruvalluvare, both doesn't waste words,doesn't summarize, doesn't review. Both make their point and moves on. That is why the content needs to be utilized but expanded for public consumption in the context the people understand- Business,economy, politics, survival.

There is line in the movie "you got mail", Tom Hanks says to his girl friend Meg ryan:

"The Godfather is the I Ching. The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom. The Godfather is the answer to any question. 'Go to the mattresses.' You're at war. 'It's not personal, it's business"

Godfather has the cult status in Americana to be the reference for living life and many people quote the lines in thier conversation. How many times we say, keep your friends close and enemies closer (thanks Sun Tzu).

Where is Thirukkural in the day today living? There is enormous potential around Thirukkural making it relevant for people around the world. This article is a humble start to say, Thirukkural can be the India's answer to modern world on Art of living. we need to package it for consumption in blogs, podcasts, the english translations that hits the note. I spent some time reading the english verses of the Thirukkural, in the effort to preserve the couplet form the real meaning is hidden in the obscure words ( like begot, thence, know-not) what the heck is that, i am no expert but this is not the way to main stream. I got to admit there are some good translations like the one below:Life bereft of love is gloom-Can sapless tree in desert bloom?

I am looking to collaborate with interested people to create content based on the Thirukkural on different topics ( happiness, relationships, business, etc) that we can distribute through multiple mediums. Post your thoughts & comments

Product Management Essentials

Every day mantra for product managers- See the big forest and have a feedback-loop system in place for product investment and the drivers to new feature functionality

From goodproductmanager.com: Besides coming up with an idea and implementing it, there are several steps product managers need to go through before engaging in product development:

1. Define the expected impact of the changes. Different products and different changes will have different impacts, though some popular measures are
   • increased usage
   • increased revenue from existing customers
   • new customer acquisition
   • improved customer retention rate
   • improved customer satisfaction
   • increased market share
   • references to change in blogs, media coverage, or analyst reports
2. Establish goals for the changes. Once you have defined the specific measures, the next step is to explicitly state what you hope this change will achieve. Good goals are SMART goals (or MT goals, if you prefer), making it clear whether the goal was met or not.
3. Determine how you will measure the impact. Though you may know the impact you expect or hope to see and have a specific quantitative goal in mind, you must be able to measure it to evaluate its success. For example, if you are considering adding a new feature to your web site, and your goal is to have 10% of your customers using the feature of the website within 30 days of it being released, you need to have web analytics in place to measure whether the goal is met or not. Though this seems obvious, often times work required to measure the impact of a change is not considered until too late in the development process for measurements to be put in place, or, even worse, after the change has already been implemented.
4. Measure the impact and objectively evaluate. After the change is implemented, compare your actual results to your expected results. Were the results achieved? Why or why not? What could have caused the results? Are there additional changes which are needed? What was done well that should be replicated for future product changes? What did you learn which could improve your success in the future?

Technorati Tags: product management, best practices of product management

Jumpstart to my Motorcycle ride

Today learnt the hard way that a Motorcycle battery takes longer to charge. I had to jumpstart my Yamaha V-star twice. First time I jumpstarted the bike and rode for 5 miles and then turnoff the engine thinking that the battery would have charged enough to start again. After meeting my biking buddies when I tried starting it the battery was dead again!!. A good samaritan offered me a hand in "compression start"( also the the good old fashioned push start). Since I didnt have the right technique the bike did not start. Luckily one of my friend had a car and I was able to jump start by motorcycle from the car.

I was always shaky with jumpstarting, the sequence and the connections were always confusing and I used to read the manual before doing a jumpstart. Now with multiple jumpstarts, I can do it in my sleep. For souls who need to learn to jump start, here is the link

P.S: I did finally manage to ride the bike today. Beautiful day in the Saratoga mountains. Rode the popular Skyline Blvd. Had a nice lunch in Pescadaro on hwy 1

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Juggling acts of a Good Product Manager

Read a good blog at goodproductmanager.com, the post discussed the essense of creating new feature functionality for software products .Investments and initiatives into a product needs to create or increase the value proposition and differentiate your product from competition.

Lot of times, the struggle I had to face as a product manager is to make conscious decision to spend more in Innovation rather than on incremental improvements. Existing customers have brought the product and expect small changes, improvement to existing features etc. But doing those as the primary activity does not add to the value creation of the product

The role of a super star product manager is to balance the investment on tactical improvements, short term differentiators and long term strategic development activities

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Google webmaster tools for managing your Blog

Today I was messing with the Google webmaster tools to increase the visibility of my blog and include in the search results. I am very impressed with the amount of diagnostic and tools that the site provides for a neophyte webmaster ( rather Blog master) to understand where their site stands in terms of traffic, search engine coverage, etc.

It took me some thinking and couple of tries to verify to Google that I own the URL wanderingmindofraja.blogspot.com, but once I added some meta tags in the main page it was very easy to run the diagnostics and add my URL to the Google crawler