The Death Valley!

A business idea born in an individual's mind crosses several stages to become a successful product. Assume our guy conceives a business idea, he needs a round of initial investment called seed investments. In order not to liquidate his ownership over the company for want of funds, he goes to an Angel investor. After making a prototype of the dream product with seed investment as R&D product, he need to scale up to meet the stringent quality requirements/market requirements. Then Venture capitalists jumps in for his help. The main difference betweenVC's and AI's is VC's take part substantially in business development. VC's share calculated risks among their communities, you could have seen a consortium of VC's bail in start ups . Break. Assume our guy caught the market attention with a disruptive product. If product is compelling, the market expands like a nuclear fission reaction.

That's entry of Death Valley for the start ups. The death valley is a huge desert in California that finished off many pioneers who ventured towards west coast in horse clad wagons. The company moves from R&D paradigm to manufacturing paradigm. The company need to scale up to produce a prototype that can be manufactured in large scale. The ballpark numbers of the death valley in high techstart up business is around US $ 300-500 Million. For a successful chip company with market disruptive product, getting the initial 100's of million $ revenue is easy.

The company loses it sheen as R&D house in death valley. The typical problems associated with death valley are management issues like scaling up production, distribution of the manufactured goods, change the manufacturing process to increase the form factor, improve the efficiency of manufacturing and supply chain problems. The engineering community that had been attracted by the R&D nature of thestart up start leaving this mighty ship. The attrition increases. Most of the start ups merges or get acquired by big sharks in industry at the death valley.

The big sharks had seen this valley, had crosses this quagmire successfully. They will have sufficient management bandwidth set already to solve the issues associated with scaling and manufacturing. The big sharks need innovative products. Thestart ups with innovative products need management power of big sharks. That's the reason for big merger and acquisition going on in the industry.

This is one of my discussion topic with my mentor the other day. I am confident that setting up a start up is no more a-mere-dream. I am concentrating on learning to innovate with the knowledge that went inside bits and pieces. I am more interested in learning up the issues faced by the corporation while scaling up. After all this, establishing a successful business conglomerate is not under one individual's purview, it has to be a perfect team event. A perfect team is mix of people with right attitude with big visions and dreams.

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Cheers!

CONGRATS DEAR

& CHEERS!

WISH YOU A LOVELY MARRIED LIFE!

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Met my mentor!

One Zen adage that I believe religiously is:
“When student is ready, teacher will appear”

I was longing to meet my teacher for life/mentor for my career. All through the years, my internal search is predominantly on evaluating my decisions and behavior and set the bio compass towards proper direction: to lead a life with right attitude and to leave a legacy behind my death. I hope I am developing the right attitude behavior over the years. And felt this stand is vindicated when my Team Leader gave a recommendation for me. Here are his words as in my LinkedIn profile:

“Other than sound technical ability and rich experience in embedded systems, Nirek’s biggest strength is his excellent attitude, because of his enthusiasm to take additional responsibilities and commitment to see the end results, managing Nirek becomes easier. He is an excellent team player and knows very clearly what exactly he wants to achieve. Because of his great attitude I see him as a colleague and involve him in technical decision making. On his leadership ability he leads by setting example and is straight forward.”

A quick note on what I am going through now. I am working with a company which is under financial crunches. They are winding up Indian operations. I am one of retained team members in India. I had been offered a role in advanced technology team in my company’s global operation. The catch is the team is going to work from our china center. That means I should relocate to China. There are certain risks associated with relocating to china. The financial crunches surrounding the company are still not broken down. The motivation of the team in startup in the group is not guaranteed. I like to bet on my manager as he is very capable person who can turn a good product in no time. His management capabilities are above par. He is very genuine to me till now.

As per my manager’s advice, I started looking for other job offers in Bangalore. I spoke to few companies and got confirmation for job offer from them. There is only one company which I consider as my prospective future employer. I met my mentor in that company. He is the managing director of the company’s division in Bangalore. He is Gung Ho about his product. His vision and knowledge of the industry is a big library to learn. His enthusiasm caught up with me the moment I met him. He has two successful startups experience in his career history. He had invited me for a friendly chat. It was more like a class room experience on startups, business technologies, Public versus private investments and I was listening to him. After the lengthy chat, I was trying to recollect the discussion to details and could jot down most of it. I will share that discussion with my views in future posts.

I could easily accept this offer and quit my company. But then I don't want to do that now, I want to give my current company as first preference. I am evaluating the risks associated with me moving to china for my career now.

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Love for mother land!

We have more than 180 countries in the world;
India has 28 states and 7 union territories;
Tamilnadu has more than 39 districts and numerous sub districts, towns and villages.
If we assign a probability for a child to be born in a particular town in a particular district in a country in this world, it will be a miniscule fraction 0.000005085… I am quoting these numbers to stress on the randomness associated with our place of birth.

Have you ever wondered?
Why did we born in this country with myriad language and mighty culture?
How could we express our complex emotional attachments towards our mother land?
How could we repay to the country which nurtured our dreams?
Can we live forever happily in some foreign land?
How could we express the psychic excitement when we go back to our home town?

Love for mother land is an inherent character. The patriotic feeling can’t be pushed into an individual’s mind. I was seeing the movie ‘Kannathil Muthamittal’ today. It is a legendary Tamil movie by director Mani Ratnam. The movie’s plot revolves around a kid’s search for her identity & her birth-mother, a mother’s love for her country & her patriotism. The background of the story is Tamil Elam fights in Srilanka.

Few thoughts on Tamil Elam fights:
The chaos prevalent in Srilanka is because of miscalculated political moves by yesteryear’s Sinhalese racists
The war can’t be the final solution to Tamil Elam. Wars offer an intermediate passage towards the amicable solution.
Any racist oppression on minorities will have huge repercussions on mainland.

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Few multimedia centric business models

Disclaimer: This article is written based on my understanding of the companies and their product lines. Please check the web about the accuracy of the statistics, if you are referring to them. And these are my personal opinions.

Historically media centric product requirements had driven the DSP business. The DSP industry came into existence because of the marketing push from TI. TI spuns the new market now and then with their unique innovation. "I would also say that TI has had a positive impact on our business, in that they are stimulating the market. They have a lot of great technologies as well as excellent management and vision, and they are innovating and opening or at least stimulating new markets" says VP-sales of their competitor. Along with DSP silicon businesses, many techonological startups has seen their genesis, growth and success also. These companies business is based on developing and selling intellectual properties(IP) on multimedia codecs on particular DSPs.

Here are few success stories and few stories waiting to be etched in business history.

This company has often been featured while discussing IP based business model in DSP world. It was started in 2001 and had weathered almost all ups and downs in the industry till today. Now has more than 200 employees in India. With the close network of this company, he could garner a good name in high-value quality driven markets based on IPs on different multimedia codecs. Their major product idealogy was to sell hi-quality codecs till 2004, then slowly shifted the focus towards bigger system developments like IP video phone, Pesonal media players, streaming media devices, VoIP devices, essentially media centric consumer electronics devices. The revenue were around 4M US$ for 2005.

"Multimedia codecs IP business is profitable, but not a high revenue generating one" are the words of a young startup's co-founder. I spoke to this team last week. Their business model is again similar to the earlier company, but from a different origin. The team is right now very small, only five people working in small office,a 'garage-based-startup'. Their business model is debatable 'you still have enough room for startups to play around in IP based codecs business'. But their last year's revenue does the marketing. A big silicon vendor has licensed their codecs. Wow! isn't it enough to shut up the critics!

Before looking any further, let see few products offerings from these kind of companies:

Internet based streaming devices for entertainment (sling box, streaming servers, IPTV...)
Digital video broadcast (DTV)
Mobile multimedia devices (video players, PMPs, DVB-H...)

And the big daddy of all this business is this . It was started in mid 90's and went to IPO in early 2000. Now it is a huge company with lot of revenues coming from services work. They started as high value research based product development company, eventually stepped into services based on the customer requirements. Service business indeed found to be the best business model for any Indian IT company! You could find any business products and services in embedded and networking domain business in their offerings. Any startup eyeing for IPO route can't avoid these guys business lines. Well proven and viable, scalable and perfect fit for Indian IT climate.

The next company is a big success story in recent times. It was co-founded by 10-15 project leads from earlier one in 2001. Their growth was linked with ARM processors penetration to embedded market. For dummies, ARM is a micro processor similar to Intel processors, but for easy programmability, signal processing capabilites and soft RTLs. This company has proved the capabilities of ARM in video processing for the first time. It's a wonderful idea to piggyback with ARM's growth in embedded market. Their codecs become popular as more silicon companies started using ARM. Their clientele is very impressive before the selloff. It was sold at around US$ 33M.

Another company from same origin is this. The top architects from the earlier company came out after its acquisition and started this company. Here the business concentration is little different- media centred but in different domains like IPTV, surveillance, biomedical equipments, automotive safety equipments and other consumer electronic devices. I had spoken to their top managers today. Their past success is their visiting card. They could scale up their team to 20+ people in hardly 5 months of existence. That's impressive. Yet to strike any business deals, hope to see them in action soon.

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Budday!

Not mine....
but janurary 23rd is birthday of someone dear to me :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR!

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Nandhi Hills!

Me and my friend ventured into exploring Nandhi Hills early morning today. We left Bangalore by five in morning. When we started in bike, the climate was normal and an absolute clear sky above us. Barely thirty minutes on the road, we were covered by dense fog with minimum visibility. Wow, thats amazing part of the trip! We were in bike for two hours in that dense fog, strolling very slowly and taking 'chai' break a couple of times. Nandhi hills is a weekend outing spot near Bangalore. I had been to this place earlier also, but this trip was amazing and the best. Nandhi hills has some fort, guest house, bull temple and few restaurants on the top. The place has many trails and the walkpath is designed like a maze. The maze is best explored in your own creative way. Just walk on whatever way you feel like and believe me, Nandhi Hills trails will give you a very different impressions on your different visits.

I have uploaded few selected snaps from the trip on my flickr. Here is the slideshow.

Yesterday, we were having dinner in a north indian restaurant (Queen's) in church street near MG Road. The restaurant has a great ambience, designed like those old mud houses with terracota symbols. Our serving of paneer tikka had this decorated lamp made out of tomato skin. It looked very cute and was resembling those halloween symbols!

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A Vagabond Strolls on - 7

It does gonna be a year since I landed in this exotic city - Bangalore. Here climate is rocking, and I had seen one full climate season now. The winter cold is abated now and these days, we are witnessing lovely and adorable early morning fogs. Fogs give a special fresh look to the lovely mornings in this city. Few 'foggy' moments as seen by my cam are here.

I was going through two articles from different parts of world, which has a hilarious correlation. With all due respect, I am paraphrasing one of my friend's wishes. He got bugged up being addicted to emails, phones, orkut and all latest software developments, he wants to break free and be natural. Later I found another article about a girl who had broken free from world and started living in animal world from her childhood. Now people had found her in a deep forest and trying to rehabilitate her. May be this friend of mine should consider this girl's way of life to run away from this new-world-computer-menaces ;)

The emergence and threat from chinese economy is often quoted and discussed in Indian business forums. I was looking for the reversal of topic in chinese newspapers and found this interesting article "India's economy is unlikely to continue growing at over 9 percent due to its hefty fiscal deficit and creaky infrastructure, global credit rating agency Moody's Investors Service said." as reported by a chinese national newspaper. The words usage in this critique on Indian economy is harsh, based on the facts are stated by some foreign investor services firm.

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Thalaivaa!

'Pokiri' film is a great treat for all vijay fans! I watched it on first day itself.
Thalaivaa! Pokiri padam kalakkals!

The story plot is perfect fit for vijay. All song sequences has some similarities with the old hit songs of vijay. We could sense Prabhu deva's unique dance style in choreography. Vadivelu had left an indelible comedy touch in the movie; in one sequence, he mocks at actor surya by enacting Surya-Asin fame dance 'Suttum vizhi sudarey'. It is a masala movie; don't expect a big logical story sequence in it. It is very much for light hearted, not much senti'mental' scenes. This movie is in par with Ghilli, the previous block buster from Vijay.

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iPhone!

Wow! I love this!

Apple's Steve Jobs has unveiled the most awaited gizmo today. This ultimate digital device is the convergence of various multimedia applications with iPod. iPhone is the name of the new avatar from Apple family. I am not a gizmo freak, but even then I love to own this.

Photos Link; More photos
News Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com

Why I like iPhone?

It is very sleek and stylish
It has 2MP camera
It runs on Mac OS X. We have an apple OS fans club here in my office.
It has 'magical' multi-touch interface. Apple's rockin in user interfaces dude.

Waiting to see it hit the market soon! Isn't it tempting? How do you like this?

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I am a Green Lantern!

Dunno who the hecks are Green Lanterns? But I am a Green Lantern :)

Here are the results of SuperHero Quiz for me.

You are Green Lantern

Green Lantern 85% Superman 80% Iron Man 70% Hulk 70% Robin 62% Wonder Woman 60% Supergirl 60% Spider-Man 50% The Flash 45% Batman 45% Catwoman 25%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Inspiration: Superman is here

[+] Last week, I had been to a house party. It was given by my friend for his marriage. Few photos from the party are here

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Safe bloggin!

We all love our blogs. While publishing a blogpost, we take few things for granted. Those can potentially fall under prevention of copyright infringement laws. I was embedding lot of images/ youtube videos from internet to fit the theme of the post. But my sole intention while doing so is not to infringe those artist's or creator's copyright and it is purely for non-commerical purposes. Few brickbats I had received now and then made me realise these mistakes.

Here are few do's and dont's for safe blogging.

Don't embed an image available in internet into your post. If you want to do so, please read that site's copyright notice. Usually web admins allow embedding their images with conditions to give them a link and a note of credit for images. If you want to use those images in your homepage, you got to download them, upload to your image server and use it in your post.

Youtube is becoming the most popular entertainment option for netizens. But youtube videos are big copyright infringement violations bomb waiting to explode anytime. When you embed a youtube video into your blog, you are indirectly broadcasting the original video without the content owner's prior information/permission. Do you know, if someone use film songs as background music in their youtube videos, then the music company which has copyright for those audios can sue them.

Don't give links to business corporate houses unnecessarily. And better don't mention their names explicitly when you want to write about them. It is good manners not to write about their business models explicitly. Don't mention any names in your posts, unless you want them to be indexed by google. We got to respect the views of lot of people who don't like to see critiques about them.

Don't publish your or your friends photos on your blog. There are lot of unethical hackers in this world who can use the images for wrong purposes. You can even see morphed version of your photos floating in web mocking at you.

Better have a separate online identity. It is not going to cost you anything more. And don't give out your contact details. Even incase you commit few mistakes, it can save your soul!

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Rock your life!

The relationship between a guy and a girl is complex to be framed in few rules. Love is not guy's ultimate aim in life; Having a caring lover is greatest achievement or rather dream for a girl. The difference in both perspective is more than usually expected. Few funny quotes from guys who got frustrated with their girls:

"All girls are cute chicks as long as they are in distance"
"You can face a problem, but you can't live with a problem, right?"

Even though guys crib a lot about their girls, ultimately we need that girl's love. We need someone to grow with, grow old with, share our visions with and share the love with. I am getting a perception that girls will never accept to their mistakes. Ultimately at some point of time, the guy has to adjust to that character of girls and keep the life boat rocking.

As often quoted, ogden nash words on love and life:
“To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up”

Few of my observations about life. You are most welcome to argue/comment on this.

Don't take your life partner for granted. Just because he/she accepts your proposal, don't take them for granted.

Ego fights can't be avoided. But someone should be matured enough to break the ice and smile after the fights.

Don't go with expectation for love from your partner. When you tie a nuptial knot, say onto yourself, that you will love your partner all the time, irrespecive of what mistake he/she does.

For guys, step into your girl's shoes to see the problem from their view point. And most important, don't expect her to step into your shoes to see your view point. Afterall if your girl win in the argument, you win in your life.

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New Year 2007!

Happy New Year dear folks!

Hope you guys had a rocking start on this new year! We went to Hogenakkal yesterday. It was a nice, relaxing and memorable trip. And then we were hanging out till midnight to welcome the new year. Sad that all bars and restaurants in Bangalore were ordered to close at 10.30 PM, well before midnight. Cafe coffee day outlets were open till midnight. And as I heard MG road and brigade roads were flooded with people yesterday night. Yo, Bangalore rocks on new year!

Few photos here

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