It's a circle, boy!

I stumbled upon this video article today.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYkw7Jx6Xnw?wmode=transparent]

This talks about eliminating packaging waste which accounts for 40% of the total US annual waste. Now, as innovative and novel as the idea sounds, it actually leaves me confused. I have seen this almost all my life. Funnily enough, most of the world has hardly seen the phase where you have fancy packaging for every product you buy.

The age-old convention that I have witnessed:
Milk- measured at your doorstep, poured in to your container.(Pasteurization- is your trouble:) )
Vegetables- Carry your bag and fill it with all the vegetables you wish. No pre-weighed/packaging business here.
Spices- the tradition has been usage of small paper packets (made of old newspapers)
This has been the case for almost everything else.

When you complete a full cycle, you really are back to the starting point.

Cleaner to Millionaire

“I am sorry Bob. A new rule requires all school staff to have at least a diploma. You have done a great job for 20 years but I am afraid, you have to go” said the Principal.

Jobless, Bob started his own cleaning company. He offered his services to local businesses. To his surprise, citing the great job he did at the school, many businesses hired him willingly. Bob’s business soared. One day, a very rich Bob was called by his bank to sign a document.

“I don't know how to write. Thumbprint okay?” asked Bob.

“Really! Imagine how rich you would have been if you had an education” said the Bank Manager.

“Heck!” said Bob. “If I had an education, I’d still be a cleaner!”

 

Courtesy- Ankur Malik

 

 

Instant Company

Instant Company

Starting a company in 2011 is great. Back in 1999, when we started Ximian, the only tools a small startup could afford for their internal infrastructure were mailman and perl. It was ugly.

In 2011, the best tools on the planet cost $25/month, billed to your credit card. In just a few minutes you can have better infrastructure than most fortune 500 companies. It???s incredible.

So part of my first three weeks as CEO of Xamarin has felt like a trip to a toy store. Everyone loves window shopping, so here is a list of some of the tools we???re using to run our startup:

Google Apps. Mail, calendar, internal wiki, and shared document editing. Cost: $5/user/month.

Github Bronze. All of our code is stored in github???s private repositories. We love github. $25/month.

Asana. This is our task management tool and it???s fantastic. It???s the only distributed task system I???ve ever used that???s as fast as typing into a text editor. Asana is a new startup from Dustin Moskovitz, the founder of Facebook, and their product is in Beta. Our team loves using it and we predict great things for Asana as it rolls into launch.

Stripe. Stripe is a payment system designed for programmers. They have a beautiful API that???s so simple you can integrate it into your site in less than ten minutes. If you???ve ever had to use Paypal Payments Pro, you will have a deep appreciation for stripe. They don???t require a merchant account and their JavaScript API allows you to transmit credit card information directly from the customer???s browser to stripe???s servers without redirecting the user to a stripe.com page. This reduces your PCI compliance burden without hobbling your payment workflow. Stripe will power our online store and future transaction systems. These guys are in beta too. They???re going to take over the world.

Themeforest. When I first discovered themeforest I thought it would be a wasteland of machine-generated CSS and generic templates. But the site is full of hand-coded, cross-browser gems for $15-30 a pop. There???s no substitute for high-end design, but if you need to get a decent-looking site up quickly, it???s your best bet, and far cheaper than it should be.

IRC + bip. We???re a distributed team, and having a place we can all hang out together online is very important to us. We wanted to find a for-pay, hosted group chat system that we loved, but campfire was too laggy, HipChat didn???t allow you to signin multiple places, and we didn???t feel we could trust a free solution like Convore. In the end we setup ngircd on a low-end, dedicated linode, configured to force SSL. A lot of us use bip as a proxy to maintain a persistent connection and show a backlog when you reconnect.

UnlimitedConferencing. For phone conferencing, we setup a $49/month account with unlimitedconferencing.com. We don???t pay a per-minute fee and international people can dial-in over skype to save money on long distance. It works fine.

Assistly. To handle incoming support requests from our future customers, we???ve looked at TenderApp, ZenDesk, and Assistly. We settled on Assistly after a support tech who???s worked with all three told us she prefers Assistly because it???s faster and easier to use. $69/support agent/month.

Linode and Rackspace. We use linode to setup quick Linux servers, and Rackspace for Windows servers. They???re cheap, reliable, and fast. If you need more power, a dedicated server from somewhere like 1and1 will do the trick. It???s surprising how far you can go on a $30/month linode. I???ve been using Linode for years and love them.

EFax, Scanner Pro for iPhone, and PDFPen. It???s a dwindling fact of life that you need to send and receive faxes to do business. These three items have eliminated fax machines for us. We use EFax to forward incoming faxes to an email address. You can also use it to send faxes online. PDFPen is a mac app that blew me away when I took a JPEG and converted it to an OCR???d PDF in just a few seconds. You can also use it to mark up and to edit PDFs. And you can use Scanner Pro to convert a phonecam photo into a PDF that looks like it came off a scanner. You can even fax it directly from the phone (for a fee). It???s been a lifesaver.

BizSpark. BizSpark is Microsoft???s program to give startups free licenses to basically any piece of Microsoft software, including access to MSDN. If you plan to use any piece of Microsoft software, it???s a great program.

Ravix Group. One of the things we learned from Ximian is the value of signing on a part-time CFO from day one. At the very least you want a controller to keep your books in order and setup payroll and insurance, or you???ll have a big cleanup process later on. A higher-level finance person can also be very useful in helping you think through cap tables and convertibles notes and online billing and taxes and so on. We interviewed a bunch of individuals doing part-time CFO consulting for various startups. Their fees varied from a $6,000 monthly retainer plus 0.25% of post-series A equity, to $125/hour flat. In the end, we got some great references from Ravix Group, a firm that do outsourcing of financial and HR tasks for startups. They have a deep team and can assign various individuals to your tasks as appropriate. We???ve only just started working with them but it looks great so far.

Ropes and Gray. There???s no substitute for a great lawyer, and we have one of the best firms in the country with Ropes and Gray. Our team there is incredibly responsive, works weekends and late nights, and knows their stuff. Like working with a CFO, having a great lawyer has some benefits you might not expect: in addition to their legal expertise, they see a lot of deals, and can tell you what???s ???market??? and what isn???t. We never would have raised our Series B financing at Ximian without Ropes and Gray, and we???re happy to be working with them again.

I???m sure there are some other great products out there, but this is our list. Hopefully it???s helpful to someone who???s just starting to do the research. It really is a wonderful time to start a company.

17 June 2011

via nat.org

Thanks to Nat for such a great share. Things have definitely changed a lot during the last decade.

Marriages are made in heaven.

A close friend of mine shared a video on Facebook recently. It was one of his many shares and one that grabbed the regular eyeballs. The video was about marriages ...or rather 'benefits of arranged marriage'. This, approximately 12 minute video also showed a statistic at the end of it and the message said- '90% of marriages in India are still arranged and only 5% of them end in a divorce' ...and hence left behind a lot of seemingly important-but-overlooked implications. Let’s go through a few of them.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22309808 w=595&h=336]

1. If you want to have a happy married life, arranged marriage is the way to go.

2. Divorces are common in the world where marriages are not arranged.

While I would hate to question the facts presented, I would definitely want to dig a little deeper here. Does marriages have a different meaning in this part of the world compared to the other parts of the world? Does a divorce presents a different picture here? May be it does.

When we say marriage lasts long here, I am assuming, we mean people choose not to separate for long (or forever). Is this same as the bond strengthened by the intense (or not-so-intense) love between the couple? Could be Yes...could be No.

Now, at the risk of questioning the holy institution of marriage, it isn't far sighted to believe that a unhappy and married couple wouldn't choose to relieve themselves from the burden because they don't even think of divorce as an option or separation would mean a big deal of social embarrassment or they are just not supposed to do so .... Hence the arrangement(marriage) is not only meant to tie the arranged opposites together but to officially lock them together whether, after a certain time, they like it or not. A few (probably most of them) of those 5% probably get away with this.

Am I suggesting that divorces are a good thing? No I am not. I am just trying to say- stay happy if you really are and don't point at someone else and say you are no good because you are not like me.

A good friend of mine once in our regular chit chats about...life in general said- parents generally help out the 'losers' in the family find someone if they are convinced their child will no longer be able to find someone on his own beyond a certain point in time. I just agreed :)

Why I Hate Debates?

Let’s talk.  You love to talk and I love to listen. And when I talk you listen. How sweet would that world be? For all I would want, I often don’t get that scene set up. On the contrary, I do stumble upon souls who are so eager to prove their god-damn point. I pity them and I hope they find something better to attach their pride with rather than their ego-loaded (I-don’t-care-what-you-say-I-AM-BLOODY-RIGHT!) point less statements.

All this is fine. But I feel the pinch when that someone gets into your head and forces you to fight back and agree with his truck load of bs. Here’s what I do to stay away from such situation. I nod my head and give an impression that I completely agree with whatever they have to say. I just can’t get into any debate. I can’t get into deciding what is right and what is wrong. And does that really make sense? What may be right for someone might very well be not-so-right for someone else? It’s all in the context and perspectives, isn’t it? And anyway, you can’t paint everything in black and white. There’s got to be a lot of grey area. And that’s why I just don’t see a point in debating? Just not worth the time.

That said, there’s a fine line between a debate and a discussion. Once we align on a common objective, I am all yours. We can have an endless conversation and more often than not get something out of it.

Who am I?

The question that stumps me the most is 'who really are you?'. And how
many times have we tried hard to be ??the right person...be the victor,
the flag bearer, the champ, the blah and the blah. I thought it's
time to just pen down what i really do...and what i really am.

I try.
I fail.
I try.
I win.
I fear.
I fight.
I make.
I break.
I surrender.
I lead.
I pray.
I show.
I hide.
I like.
I dislike.
I help.
I share.
I suffer.
I enjoy.
I sympathize.
I empathize.
I care.
I trouble.
I envy.
I love.
I am flawed. And I am just another imperfect guy.

The Animal School

Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something decisive to meet the increasing complexity of their society. They held a meeting and finally decided to organize a school. The curriculum consisted of running, swimming and flying. Since these were the basic behaviors of most animals, they decided that all the students should take all of the subjects.??

The duck proved to be excellent at swimming, better in fact than his teacher. He also did well in flying, but he proved to be very poor in running. Since he was poor in this subject he was made to stay after school to practice it and even had to drop swimming in order to get more time in which to practice running. He was kept at this poorest subject until his webbed feet were so badly damaged that he became only average at swimming. But average was acceptable in the school so nobody worried about that - except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of his class in running, but finally had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up time in swimming - a subject he hated.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed psychological blocking in flying class when the teacher insisted he start from the ground instead of from the tops of the trees. He was kept at attempting to fly until he became muscle bound - and received a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was the school???s worst discipline problem, in climbing class he beat all of the others to the top of the tree used for examination purposes in this subject, but he insisted on using his own method of getting there.

The gophers of course, stayed out of the school and fought the tax levied for education because digging was not included in the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the ground hogs and eventually started a private school offering alternative education.

Courtesy: http://www.uoguelph.ca/oaar/animal-school.html