Will the discounts ever end ?

Traditionally discount sales used to be given a few times (1-3) every year, Diwali, Year ending and may be one more season. But now we have discounts all through the year. The purpose of a discount sale used to be one of the following (mostly)

• Beating competition during rush hours ! (Diwali, school opening)
• Money generation during dull season - Aadi / Sharad (Bad time to buy new stuff according to Indian mythology)
• Bring in new customers - Opening of a new store

Now-a-days discounts have only one purpose - increase revenue. The revenue increase is mostly at a cost, which is profit ! Most online marketplaces run on a loss so they can achieve increased review, which brings with it a lot of new customers. 

The question is, will this cycle end up with loyal customers or a failed company like Kingfisher...

Necessity is the mother of invention !

I use multiple devices on a daily basis and I own most of them. Most of us are in that boat ! Transferring and synchronizing data between these devices is becoming less of a head ache with Dropbox and Google Contacts. Photographs, contacts, files are easily synchronized between my devices and I have them where I go. But when it comes to sending a short piece of text from my PC to device like a phone number or URL I am stuck. Below are a few scenarios I face

• Send a number via chat on PC. The number is easily accessible on my phone, even though its available on google contacts.
• Open a map route on my phone that I chalked out on google maps on my PC
• Call a merchant who I looked up on JustDial.com 
• Call potential customers/applicants who send their number via email which I read on the PC
• Send an SMS with content available on the internet, which I've looked up on my PC
• Play a video on a tablet that I just saw on my PC to show it to my folks

I used Chrome2Phone but its restrictive in a sense since I have to open up Chrome and press a button to send any data. I wanted a simpler lazy way of achieving this. Some way where I do not have to perform any extra action, and its just available. After much hunting for an already available solution, I decided to build an app that would take care of most of my requirement. 

I had a simple requirement set

1. Synchronize text - URL's, numbers, YouTube video; between the PC and my multiple Android devices
2. Lazy, simple, no brainier way of doing it
3. Simple setup. I didn't want to connect to a peer-to-peer network when I move from office to home
4. Low bandwidth
5. Fire and Forget ! No need to revisit the app once its installed. 

The solution was to synchronize the clipboards of my devices for text data. But the challenge was to make it work fast without draining my already pathetic device battery. The service should use push notification, work over 3G/wifi without the need to setup a local network just like how chat clients work, not interfere with my current task, should not have any major explicit action to do like fire up an app just to send data. 

The end result was ClipboardSync. An android app that has a PC client. No restrictions on number of installs. Low processing and battery usage on the device and PC. Minimum bandwidth usage. And yes - Fire and forget. You install it once and then forget it ever existed. It does the required work without the necessity of you manually starting or verifying that its running. I've been using it for quite a while now and decided its time to let others save a few nerves and easy their lives. 

The application is available to purchase on the android market - Link. Other details can be found on the website ClipboardSync.in

Usability of Kaspersky support site

I had to visit the Kaspersky support and I was totally lost. I dint know where to go from there cos I was using one of those midget laptops (I now hate those things) but its equally bad on a normal 15" wide screen. Here's a screenshot of the page.



Guess where the links to the next page(s) are! Give it a though, there is no mouse over animation except for the pointer indicating its a link.

The link is actually the "Home Products" and "Corporate Products" text. Yes, only the text, not the image, not even the dark band behind the text, ONLY THE TEXT. Go check it out urself -> http://support.kaspersky.com/. And its this way on Chrome & IE. Didnt check FF or the others. The text look more like a header than a link.

This is a classic example of bad usability as its on the support page which leaves the customer totally lost. I was (and I'm a paying customer). Were you??? Let me know.

Americanised Ramayan

From a forward I got. Really hilarious :)

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" So, like this dude had, like, a big cool kingdom and people liked him. But, like, his step-mom, or something, was kind of a bitch, and she forced her husband to, like, send this cool-dude, he was Ram, to some national forest or something.... Since he was going, for like, something like more than 10 years or so.... he decided to get his wife and his bro along... you know...so that they could all chill out together. But Dude, the forest was reeeeal scary shit... really man...they had monkeys and devil s and shit like that. But this dude, Ram, kicked with darts and bows and arrows... so it was fine.

But then some bad gangsta boys, some jerk called Ravan, picks up his babe (Sita) and lures her away to his hood. And boy, was our man, and also his bro, Laxman, pissed... all the gods were with him... So anyways, you don't mess with gods. So, Ram, and his bro get an army of monkeys... Dude, don't ask me how they trained the damn monkeys... just go along with me, ok...

So, Ram, Lax and their monkeys whip this gangsta's ass in his own hood... Anyways, by this time, their time's up in the forest... and anyways... it gets kinda boring, you know... no TV or malls or shit like that. So,they decided to hitch a ride back home.... and when the people realize that our dude, his bro and the wife are back home...they thought, well, you know, at least they deserve something nice...and they didn't have any bars or clubs in those days... so they couldn't take them out for a drink, so they, like, decided to smoke and shit... and since they also had some lamps, they lit the lamps
also....so it was pretty cooool... you know with all those fireworks.... Really, they even had some local band play along with the fireworks... and you know, what, dude, that was the very first, no kidding.., that was the very first music-synchronized fireworks... you know, like the 4th of July stuff, but just, more cooler and stuff, you know. And, so dude, that was how, like, this festival started."


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4. Position of a number in a sorted array

4. How many comparisons are required to find the position of a number in a sorted array.

Answer: Using binary search it would require O(log n) comparisons.

find the k largest or smallest numbers from a set of n numbers

3. How do you find the k largest or smallest numbers from a set of n numbers

Solution:

Build a min/max heap of size K from the available set.

Time complexity: n Log K

Reverse a string

This is one of my favourite and has several correct solutions.

2. Reverse a string.

The best way would be to loop through half of the sting and swap the characters at either end (without using an extra variable!)

A data-structure brain teaser for the day.

Hey guys,

Well I intend to put up a data structure related puzzle, problem, brain-teaser; whatever you wish to call it everyday from today. This is to keep my dedicated at keeping my skills sharp as I recently discovered that I'm faltering big time. So I shall shart off with a few basic old timer problems and then move on to more tricky problems. I shall provide a solution along with the problem and you can better it and enlighten me. So here goes.

1. How do you find loops in a single link list.

Tortise and Hair solution:
Use two pointers and move the first pointer at double the speed of the seconnd, ie, jump the first pointer by two two nodes while the second pointer moves one node at a time. If at any time the two point at the same node, there's a loop in the link list. If you reach the end of the list, there are no loops in the list.

I'm happy that I started this and hope to stick to my plan for a very long time.

Images from shotgun & proto.in

Well for those who dont follow me on twitter (www.twitter.com/gsunil), I along with a couple of friends from work took part in a competition called shotgun startups. The challenge was to come up with a winning idea and build a working prototype all under 48 hours. We came 2nd and I really do think the team that came 1st deserved it. Here are the pics and links from both shotgun startup and the talks at proto.in.

Just a few points I wanted to mention rather than write a big post
1. Great experience participating, even greater experience winning, but I do believe everyone deserved to win for their work. Marketing/Presentation is where we won I guess.
2. Organization could have been quite a lot better for the shotgun item.
3. Met amazing pple and worth all the effort.


Working our asses off, I'm not kidding, our asses were all tired n asleep quite soon.


The bean bags that could have saved our asses.


Me presenting, with Rohan & Pradeep hiding (hidden) behind the podium.


Rohan and Pradeep doing their part, the actual demo which got us the 2nd place.


Tool to compute the cloud computing cost based on your requirements.


The winning team explaining their design of this really innovative lamp. Deserved to be on top.


Blackberry like service for a normal mobile. Alerts you when you get a mail.


Audience vote.


View from stage.


Leaving our foot print behind.

Fog blankets bangalore

Early to bed, very early to rise and caught a wonderful sight




Above: View from my balcony
Below: Caught while walking my dog











The view really makes me miss ooty & kodai, places I used to visit very often as a kid. A visit is overdue I guess.

This is a treat after 2 hard days spent working on shotgun.proto.in where team phoenix (my team) were 2nd. Slept quite early (before 11, don remember when I last did that.......high school may be) as we havent been sleeping much during the event.

These pics were taken around 6:30 AM on 25th, January 09

Marketing, the smart way

Marketing & Brand buildiing is always a challenge for new firms for two reasons
1. They are inexperienced in it
2. Its quite expensive

But there many cheap innovative marketing strategies I have come across so far. One of them is how the plastic company Cello built its brand in Chennai years ago. They ran advertisements in the morning paper that random calls will be made to residence in the city and if the call was answered by saying "Cello" instead of "Hello", they would win something. The entire city got grip of it and by eod, every household knew the word Cello and the company made its brand well known overnight.

Today I heard of another smart way a shoe company is marketing its products. Its taking advantage of a very public event. If you didnt get it still, its the Bush shoe throwing incident you can watch here. Apparently, Ramazan Baydan claims the shoe's were a model manafuctured by him, the Ducati Model 271, after which sales have sky rocketed.

I've heard a lot about how startups find marketing quite expensive but if an innovative idea or public event is used the end result can be far more rewarding.

Cheers to Ramazan Baydan.

Google Inline advertisements

Gone are the days where we could read news without having to navigate through advertisements bang in the middle of the text!!

Hard paper never had them, FREE mail from Google doesn't have it, but sites using google adds have them. I'm sure its a decision made by the hosting site and not google but it sucks big time so I decided to do something about them....blog :)

The following image is an example



Well I've seen articles broken into several pages so visitors generate more clicks and see more adds but this is ridiculous. And this wasn't enough. They wanted more, so now they break the articles into several pages and put the advertisement right before the navigation pane, that's right, it actually makes you search for the navigation pane, see the below image.



Now was that to confuse the visitor or make him read the adds, I would love to ask the sites usability "expert".

Here's the link to the article from which I took the screen shots : http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pirates-aden/389328/0

Indian Space Prowess

My friend Vijay sent this article to me and I wanted to share it with all of you :)
I was apparently published in the Qatar Tribune

I think we Indians need to really appreciated (more) the work of our scientist and our government without which this wouldn't be possible.

Always proud to be an Indian and hope to make India proud of me one day.

Wouldn't want anyone to state examples of where we lag behind, but applaud what India has achieved.

Jai Hind

P.S: The image was taken from QatarLiving (http://lmnop36.googlepages.com/Qatar-Tribune-27-10-08.jpg).

Brewhaha

Well I'm blogging after a very long time and I'm going to make this more frequent.

I went to this eat out called Brewhaha with my friends today. Its supposed to be this happening joint setup by B school grads and you got lots of games to play with and I've heard a lot about this place but hadn't visited it till today. And I was totally disappointed at the state of this place. It was appalling. There where these mattresses and pillows that were really really dirty and the joint looked like a very shady place. I was wondering what happened to the place. The last time I heard about this place was that it was the venue for a meet of young entrepreneurs. Plus there was nothing much to eat and most of the items on the menu were not available and the items on display looked stale. Man, it was quite disgusting and I'm never going back to that place. I should have taken pictures but I kinda forgot.

Well, what I took away from the place was that its not enough to set up something good, its more important that you maintain the standard and be consistent, else its of no use at all. You don't set up a business to give you returns for a short term. I may be wrong in this case cos I don't know why it was in a bad state but there's no excuse to keep the place so filthy. I don't see that in any other joints so why this one. With the hype it had, I'm sure they were making a decent amount of money to pay for laundry.

You get a lot of joy in building things, but I sure its gonna wash away all the happiness if it ends up in a bad state a few months later!!!

Xiangqi

Was gifted a Xangqi board by a Chinese colleague at work. Its a chinese board game kinda like chess but actually a lot different. You can read more about it @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi. The pieces for each player have different names. Its gona be tough memorizing the names itself. Dont think Ill ever get to play this mainly cos I wont be able to find someone to play with.

I love the board, it looks antique and I like the wood work. Never been gifted something in a very long time so I guess it felt nice too. Actually I felt great being gifted something so unique.

Here are the pics.

Counter for Physically Challenged

The picture says it all!!

This was taken on 7th July, 2008 at the Yeshwanthpur railway station in Bangalore.

The High Performance Entrepreneur

   I was out wit friends @ oxford yesterday waiting for someone so was looking through books n picked up this book called "The High Performance Entrepreneur" by Subroto Bagchi. I haven't heard of the book but reading a few pages told me I had to get the book so I ended up buying it. Its about the "Golden rules for success in today's world" for a start up by Subroto Bagchi who is one of the founders of Mindtree. Its definitely a "treasure trove of perspective and advice" as C.K. Prahalad claims. But now this is my view of the book:

   Its a must read for anyone who is planning to start up their own enterprise but be warned, its not exactly a guide on how to go about setting up, but first helps you examen if you are ready and if you are doing it for the right reasons. It definitely guides you towards the right path, which may either be to give up your ideas of setting up, delaying the process or going ahead with your plans. I would suggest you read Build to last in addition to this book to get an idea of the big picture !!!


   I am still mid-way though the book so I shall write more about it once I finish but I'm already a fan of Subroto Bagchi and plan to follow up more on him.



Now i gtg give my dog a bath before dad gets wild wit me :)