Purpose, Funding and Relevance when considering new projects or startups

Today I was reading this 10 questions to ask an interviewer to checkpoint my own hiring of candidates. Often I talk to candidates about purpose of my projects and how the project may be relevant for a candidate's experience. In some of the startup projects I had done within my BIG company, I had to think about the elevator steps to climb to ship the v1. In the context the funding in terms of number of heads and how the product ships to customers are important. However for a startup the funding is a more important area. I applied the same lens of purpose, funding, and relevance to the 10 questions from Mashable. And here is the list to consider. Mashable does a nice way of collecting the information from many folks in startup to provide more depth. Thanks Mashable!

Purpose

Get to know the why

What is one thing that must be done?

What is the problem you are trying to solve?

What are your founders' goals?

 

Funding

Get to know the feasibility

How funded are you? What is your runway?

When is your next financing round?

What is your exit strategy?

What is the sales strategy?

 

Relevance

Get to know the fit

How does your product apply to my role?

What is the focus for the next three months?

What is the culture and environment like?

What can I learn? What contribution can I make?

CloudBox can improve flight safety with cloud analytics

Over the past two weeks there has been intense search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 (#MH370). Every plane is equipped with the black box that often yields clue about what happened inside the flight. Usually after an accident or crash, the experts retrieve this black box and look for clues on what may have gone wrong. Ever since I learnt about this black box stuff, I had been in awe. However with this recent MH370 loss and long search for it, I wonder why are we not using real-time cloud (service) analytics to keep track of planes in flight?

There are likely several challenges with uplinking flight data and doing timely analytics. Over the past decades the cloud services industry has developed amazing computing, data, and communication infrastructure that can be used to solve problems. Let us assume that each plan can be equipped with a cloud box that can capture and feed diagnostics data and appropriate pilot + officer conversation data from the planes in flight to cloud analytics services. Let us look at the data processing capacity required. For now I will ignore the costs for cloud box and associated services. In the end, any cost can be ascribed to increased safety, reduced insurance rates, and worst case become a premium for flight charges across the board.

According to various Internet posts (one example here), there are about 100,000 flights per day.

Assume each diagnostics + conversational sample collected is compressed to 1MB per uplink.

Assume that each sample is uploaded to at least 3 satellites to ensure redundancy at 30-second intervals.

(And perhaps we may need adaptive algorithms to detect change in course, which can trigger faster uplinks at one sample every second.)

At 30-second samples, there are 2880 to be accurate, resulting in about 10 GB of compressed data per day per plane.

For 100K flights, that is about a peta-byte of data coming in per day.

 

 

Provided we have good distribution of satellites and good processing capabilities, there will be sufficient computing and bandwidth to handle such traffic. The data is very suitable for parallel processing which can be done through a variety of mechanisms. It is achievable, cost and fitting economics aside. On the ground existing and new receiver stations can process such data to provide feeds to the control towers and authorities to take action.

 Perhaps the cloud box is already in action for non-civil purposes. If not, new installations will come up in the coming years. Technology can help us tame problems.

 In the future skies, we can expect air travel to be more safer.

Economics of Free Products, OneNote is free.

In the late 1990s, when the Internet exploded there were many free services and products offered (remember webvan offering free delivery for groceries?). It is 15 years in right now. We are back to the brave world of free. Everyday 1000s of folks offer free products or services online. Just today I learnt that Microsoft OneNote will be available for free. Last weekend I was able to get a source repository up and running on bitbucket.org. It is incredible to see so much value in software + services being offered up for free. How in the world are folks going to sustain this model?

Yesterday we had a quick conversation in our hallway about how the twitter phenom had reshaped customer engagement. We observed that some businesses use high end software to receive tweets about their brands and products, filter them, and respond to customer questions. Companies invest in this effort because there is a belief and strong correlation of such engagement leading to satisfied customers who become loyal advocates and who eventually consumer more of the consumer products. And it is likely that a small % of customers eventually end up paying some sizable amounts of money that keeps running the business of producing new value. It takes guts, cash cushion, and sustained efforts to ensure we win in this game.

Back to the OneNote offer, two interesting things are happening. 1) OneNote opens up APIs for others to build applications atop the software/system. This will create information attach to OneNote and enable more storage to be consumed. Harvesting the information to offer value to customers can drive positive customer engagement. Storage sale can help with revenue as well. 2) OneNote broadens the reach amongst all audiences on all platforms establishing a strong onramp for customers to learn about Office and Microsoft products. This is beneficial for Microsoft (to produce more value for users) and to users (they get more value).

Time will tell. For now, I will eagerly use OneNote :)

 

I loved OneNote; and now One Note is free!

Wow! OneNote is one of my favorite pieces of software. It is now free from Microsoft - see http://www.onenote.com for details. And better yet, there are a lot of apps featured as well at http://www.onenote.com/apps.

A minute of pause here: why do I like OneNote? Why would I want to share more information?

I like OneNote, because it is simple and easy to use. It has powerful search functionality. It connects well on the internet and enables shared notebook access. I can house my notebook on the internet and reconnect to it from any machine. BEST of all, I do not have to keep pressing 'save button' anytime. And of course it rarely crashes. OneNote to me is the best piece of software that tells me more about what a 21st century software can be.

Certainly OneNote is not a panacea for all problems I have :) There are many features I desire that it makes it easy for me
a) Scan documents - coming soon. I need to try the Office Lens with OneNote.
b) Write blogs - I have not find the magic connector for me to use OneNote and have a copy of the messages posted as blog to my favorite blog site
c) Auto-compressor - often I get OneNote notebooks from others that are big and long. I would like to see a compressor that do its magic to show me the relevant parts, to reduce the time it takes to wade thru all details
d) Separate note creation from note walk through. Again to consume other's post it is useful to separate what is the input detail from the output detail.
e) Heatmap of the content in OneNote, so I can manage out old notes. Often it is easy to accumulate turds and I do not go back and clean up old notes. Having a heat map can help me to weed thru the old stuff that is not relevant
f) An integrated change log that can show me changes to various Notebooks that I am connected with (one can turn this into a form of feed engine)
etc.

There are plenty of app opportunities atop OneNote. For now it is great that this is free that more users can enjoy. Nice!

Universal Wish List Button (on Amazon)

Wow, today I learnt about this Universal Wish List button for hte browsers. Amazon has always been great at engaging users to purchase products. A few years back when i discovered that i can add items to the wish list, I was surprised about why they would allow me to add items to the wish list. Subsequently over the years, I learnt that the wish list became the hook for me to go back and purchase more.

Today I discovered this Universal Wish List button. I need to see how this works out. Perhaps my wish list will get flooded more. and I have to wait for the universal funding agency to help me get the wish list items. Nonetheless, the button is simple and cool. Nice work.
 

Making Stuff - Wilder, Colder, Faster, Safer .. David Pogue rocks!

A few days back we accidentally stumbled on some exciting videos with David Pogue as the narrator. We watched David Pogue's "Making stuff wilder", which is part of a NOVA series.
See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/making-more-stuff.html. David is a great narrator. He also does a fantastic job of traveling to various places and stitching together an excellent video series.

I got to learn about swarms of robots, incredibly big bull like robots, sensitive and strong clothing materials, etc. It is incredible to see how the world has evolved significantly and how science plays a key role in advancing the civilization. Definitely a great watching experience.
 

Low noise high cleaning Vacuum Cleaner

Today I read about Samsung's new vacuum cleaner. This looks great and from what I read it seems to incorporate better sensors and noise cancellation. I wonder how they do the air flow control to reduce the noise?

http://gizmodo.com/5973500/the-messier-you-are-the-harder-this-dust+detecting-samsung-vacuum-sucks?tag=gadgets

Wow! all these interesting questions

Ever wonder how tall is the empire state building or how useful it may be to tap dance while writing. Check out the intrguing quesitons that some interviewers may ask http://www.businessinsider.com/tough-interview-questions-glassdoor-2013-1#

I would rather say that the best prodcut for the $1M enterpreneurial price is to give me peace time - meaning a time that is a break from advertisements in my browing experience for a day. I would not mind paying, say 10 cents per day to keep the ADs off my back. Can someone please give me scuh an 'peace product'?

Nevertheless, the questions are intriguing and should be attempted. One of my often asked questions is also included in this list.

Need great phones at affordable prices and great quality

There is a hunger in the market for great quality phones with great quality services. And of course it better come with affordable price. Precisely that is what Republic wireless is attempting. see http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/19/republic-wireless-open-to-all/.

Will there be great phones? Will there be great quality coverage? Will there be good customer satisfaction past the initial lower price appeal? Time will tell.

OLED lighting

Over the past month I am using an LED powered reading lamp. It is simple, cute, and powerful. Use of LED also means the lamp is 'cool', really I mean it. The entire lamp is powered by 3 AAA batteries. Wow!

I wondered how we can get bigger lights using the same technology. The first thought is to get an array of LEDs strung together to bring the effect. However such an array looks ugly. They would look like a corn with little bulbs projecting out. Instead what we need is a nice flat surface.

There is all this rage about LED TVs in the market. See
1080p 120 Hz LED LCD VA Panel HDTV, Black for an example. These LED TVs are supposed to offer high quality display at smallest TV size. Indeed they do. The display is cool. I am writing this blog using a computer that uses one such LED screen. The screen offers dynamic control of colors and images to provide better lighting. It is late night. And I also had turned off all lights in the home relying mostly on the LED Screen's backlight to help me use the computer. It is powerful and bright. Voila, we should use this.

Imagine having LED lights for our entire home. In theory these should reduce energy consumption while offering rich ability to project light - colors, patterns, intensity, etc. Imagine if we can have programmable lighting inside the house. Imagine the lights dancing to the moods, music, and people in the house. That will add a living personality to these lights. What may be required for the same. Need to think about this further.

A quick search through the internet revealed that there are nice panels on the way making to the US market. OLED Light Guide Panels are bright ideas that provide rich way for us to add brightness to our lives. I am committing to buy more LED based lighting products. And of course that means there is more delight waiting for me.

Music from India - Nice site and great quality music

I love music - particularly the instrumentals. In the 1990s when I used to return back from my India trips with boxes of cassette tapes. Then it was bringing music on CDs. Later these CDs became MP3 CDs packed with lots of music. It was amazing to see how the music was becoming compact to carry while quality was going up all the time.

I love the wonders of technology. 1000s of innovations by countless number of individuals in the music, technology, retail, manufacturing and other industries has paved way for such an amazing transformation for users like me. What used to be only for the rich is now available and accessible for everyone in the world.

One such latest innovation is the cloud based delivery of music. Over the past few months I am listening to music from Music India Online that features a LARGE number of music from India in the streaming format. Now I need to hardly carry anything around the world. The music quality is awesome. And I can almost access this from any PC or MAC. It is still hard to access this music from my car or my portable music player. I eagerly await the day when that next transformation happens.

Enjoy the Music while it lasts.