UI quickstart ?

woodstock: Project Woodstock - Preview

Should be useful for folks stitching up UI for their products. I'm hardly even a UI novice, so dunno what the alternatives are, or how good this is.

Project Management Skills ?

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

No futile commentary needed from me I guess :)

Zook Podcast on the Kiruba Show

Had spoken with Kiruba while at BarCamp.

Very impressed he did all of this with no "retakes", zero editing and managed a tightly controlled script in hs targetted 10 minutes.

Map the Mind

Have been using Mind42 for "thinking aloud" and collaborating on ideas. It captures thought processes, and aids iterative, in fact an "continuous design cycle". Very useful for ideating, tracking, and having a bird's eye view of whats up. I'm even using this for todos on the home front, and it works as well. The best part is how easy it is to collaborate on or share the evolving ideas/concepts with others contributors.

You can also export the map to a variety of formats - FreeMind, for instance

Really exciting product after a long time.

Now, Ask (thru) Zook and thou shall receive...

All the answers ? Thats a tall claim for anyone. Things change, priorities change, cities change, needs change, points of view change.

"whats that Indian place next to IndiJoe's called?"
"Where can I get dishwasher detergent?"
"What freq is the all western FM on?"
"Is there a good deal on 40" LCD TVs?"
"discotheques?"
"free concerts this weekend"

Life is so full of questions. "Data" can answer some, but people can answer most. Zook is data, people, and lots of curiosity. And somehow, all this together will work to get you an answer.

From tomorrow 4pm IST - go ahead - ask Zook. If there's no answer in the can, a pal will get back. And Zook's a pal too!

(also "Z ask zook need to repair Canon" to 3030)

[ shouldn't I post all this on the official Zook blog instead ? maybe.....]

Update:

With this, as with so many other things in life, there's been slippage :( May take a day or two to fix...

The Future (of the) Mobile Device

openmoko.com

"Free Phone" - I like the sense it communicates. Makes a lot of sense to separate the platform from the OS, as has been the case in computing devices otherwise. One change it'll surely bring is an opening up of functionality by the regular phone manufacturers.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Bangalore Uploads!

BeleniX | BeleniX

Popularizing Solaris! Well, everyone's got a right to stable desktops/servers :) Very impressed with the effort - especially since its born out of Bangalore.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Tale of 2 Fora : Proto.in, BarCamp Bangalore 4

Last weekend, proto.in at IIT, Madras. Organized in great detail, 22 finalists (Zook amongst them) and a a dozen and some more VCs. Crisp 6 minute presentations, lots of interactions with the investor community and a humid tho not unpleasant by its usual standards Chennai. The meet was more focused towards goals of attracting investors, partners and potential employees, and creating some buzz about one's product or offering. In that order. For me it also turned into a great opportunity to stretch my recently renovated car's legs on an excellent highway - whose primary drawback seems to be the lack of good refuelling stops - for both the car and the occupants - between Krishnagiri and Kancheepuram.

Proto's first day was a little bit of a lost cause from our point of view. We never really got to know (about) the other participants - and the real networking had to be compressed into the few hours after the main presentations on day-2.

And I cannot take Chennai's stuffiness, even though the IIT campus was amazingly pretty; this when the weather very pleasant if the Chennaites protestations are to be believed :)

Yesterday and today : Barcamp Bangalore 4. This was the hugest crowd BCB has ever seen - over 650 registrations on day1 by someone's reckoning. All the usual suspects were around, plus a whole lot of first timers, including non techies. The event was "federated" into collectives, and there were plenty, including an unBand and a cycling collective. The low ratio of rooms:collectives ensured a good amount of confusion, and we missed out on making one of our presentations.

We also "world-premiered" Zook tees at this event :D

Sunday saw better sessions - I loved the enthu of the pakd.net guys, and offered them some advice. The semantics session by the guys from Brainwave was interesting and has many parallels to what we're doing at Ziva - with of course a different dataset and scale focus.

Also met this guy from Swajana.com - this is a video blog capturing India on film. Its a very interesting start - could become a very comprehensive source to "see India". Maybe I could do something while at Jamshedpur - the Durga Puja celebrations will be on in full swing then.

Finally met Kiruba - one of the bigger blogging names in India - and he interviewed Ashwin of Mapunity and then me. Seemed very clear about how to wrap up a podcast in 10 mins flat.

My friend from college, Indus, also did a session on EC2 which a lot many were curious about.

We did our presentation about why Mobile Search needs fresh thinking and a non-incremental effort over "regular" websearch on day 1. However, I was a little dissapointed with the low interest in the mobile collective overall (especially as compared to BCB3) and especially with the level of participation from the audience. Last time around we could hardly stop the questions' flow - and had to nearly "split" the room into two or three parts to engage the 80+ crowd in there. There were less than a third of those this time, and it was mostly a monologue, except for some interesting questions from just 2 guys.
Was it because the session was not about features and usage (we didnt want to plug Zook too much again) but a tech-oriented discussion ?

Anyhow, I'm sure the tees ensured some visibility, and the opportunity to see and understand the numerous new things that are happening in the Indian startup and tech scene was worth a sacrificed weekend. And the lovely weather Bangalore charmed everyone with yet again just highlighted the contrast with the previous Chennai weekend. Proto.in will need to happen in Blore too, soon :)

Growth, Zook, Hiring

There's lots happening at work. Zook's past its infancy, and its new clothes are almost done. Its friendlier, and more useful. Can't say much more :)

But as is wont with the buzz, there's growth. And we're doing 27 exciting things at the same time. So the hunt for like minded souls who're excited by the possibilities of the mobile space, and keen to work on tougher-than-nuts problems. Here's some of what we need with all the buzzwords included :

• Sr Engineering Manager/Architect (design, dev, processes, gyaan)
  
• Marketing, for both Manas as well as Zook (product/mkt/customers related "MBA" work)
  
• Account Managers (We have many customers!)
  
• Build and Support, Performance Engineer
  
• Lead and other Geeks for the Community Platform (scale, distributed, graphs)
  
• Search Engineer for, well, the Search Core!
• IR (not the railways kind) Gurus for extraction stuff
• Java gurus
• Data Mining Experts
• UI/UE/Scripting whizzes. Rber, lotsa new-fangled mobile fundaes. Even on SMS!

Whew. If we crack all of that, we'll be in an awesome place. The market's a little too hot and we just need to get soooo many things out of the door.

See you all at BarCamp over the weekend. Please do drop me a line at get - dot - sameer - AHT - gmail if you think Ziva's interesting enough.

MS Live Shady Search Gains

Technology Review: No dumb clucks: Microsoft boosts search share with chicken game

MS tends to get into such news rather easily. No figures on the chicken-free queries yet.

Powered by ScribeFire.