It was a perfectly organized event with excellent welcome, provided excellent pen to write on a notepad with well captured agenda and participant names, timely snacks and delicious lunch and a great knowledge sharing experience. I could not attend it beyond 4pm for some urgent work at personal front, so only part of the whole event is captured below. Will update it as per inputs received from readers from time to time.

We had an opportunity to hear

• Dr. Som Mittal
• Rajendra Pawaar
• Chandra Shekhar
• KK Natrajan

It was Nassom emergeout forum — 4th edition in NCR, 8th in series as they said it. Focus of this conference was Cloud, Mobile, Social

Apart from that conference started with elements of future growth

• Skills
• SME
• IT for India

Following are few notes on things that were shared in the forum:
Out of 1300 firms registered with NASSCOM, 1000 are less than 50cr. They called upon more people to join as member to the forum. Further breakup to capture SME playground:

• 3 years, <5 cr, 100 of them
• 50 cr, < 10years, 600 of them
• Cost of operations

Key issues today being faced by SMEs are
a. Investment
b. Access to market

STP2.0

It provides spaces at lower cost, funding with easy collateral so that it helps SMEs in market development, Training costs, Group insurance

GDP — $4.24 trillion with PPP for India — 3rd in world
IT direct contribution — $88bn which is 7% of GDP, 2.5 mn people contributing to it.

Till now, we (Indian IT population) have been serving people outside this country into their products, we didn’t generate enough IPs or products. There is a limitation on the electronics/hardware side also and design capabilities in both side SW & HW.

We have a Huge Domestic Market to address, which whole world is looking at to benefit from, so why not Indian entrepreneurs also e.g. Telecom — 850 million subscribers

We missed Internet Broadband. IT and Telecom are hugely successful as compared to other sectors. They have two different stories for their success. They are Indian destiny to become world power. In case of Telecom it has been de-regulation and in case of IT it has been external demand.

Though there has been very good macro economic indicators showing good picture of our country, there are challenges to support that claim — it is not an inclusive growth.

Third area is low skills based vis-a-vis our population, enabling people to make money using it. Key participants to make it happen include all three players viz. Govt. Private, Civil society.

Mobiles are being promoted as next platform for transactions to make accessibility of services to all. We have Electronics service delivery act to enable that. Govt. wants to achieve financial inclusion through mobile. As infrastructure still takes time to come at particular level, mobile driven changes can be expedited.

Government is working on Open data policy. Government currently executes tight control on this information. This may be a big enabler for promoting market and business in India. As it gets open, govt expects private sector pitch in further and build on top of that.

Government is working on
Policy on open standards. This shall further help participation by small players.

If economic level does not increase that much, but broadband penetrates as did mobile phones, then imagine the number of opportunities it creates for Industry. As we think about this opportunity, we need to think in terms of enabling these people to make earnings out of these opportunities. Some figures to capture the landscape

2.5 lacs of panchayat (with fibre access)
+
6 lacs of broadband wireless last mile
=
Rs 30000 cr investment and all villages inclusion — duration of 3 years

It shall be huge opportunity to come in next 3 years.

Government is also planning to support migration to IPv6, Mobiles as Identity card, credit card, bank, eGovernance, Mobile delivery gateway

Other draft policy that is on it’s way out by early september
Mobile governance policy

Government is also working on establishing

• National knowledge network — connecting all libraries
• e-education, e-health, skill development mission
• Community based development, enabling below poverty line to earn. A good example in sight is Airtel.

Four parts of this strategy:

1. Devices (Low cost)
2. Software (security, e-commerce, ERP, mApps)
3. Content
4. Services (cloud, IVR, rural BPO)

Examples of organizations that have done some work in this direction with govt. (amongst many):

• nanon ganesh
• ypay cash
• mob_me
• babajob

We had an opportunity to hear from Ms Ellen Daley from Forrester on her views for the upcoming mobile technologies and Indian environment. She stressed on following areas:

• Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Smaert, Social, Crowd Sourcing

She said, Problem is not dirth of Opportunity but distribution. Today ecosystem with Customer at the center is surrounded by service vendors, device vendors, telecom operators, cloud vendors, ISVs

Crowd Sourcing is becoming increasingly the popular trend of days to come. It is difficult to find talent to work for an organization. Individual developers are becoming important.

Technologies are moving to “Context aware applications”
Contact details that she shared: edale@forrester.com (9818632652)

As part of discussion on bootstrapping versus venture capital, we got an opportunity to hear from young entrepreneurs:

• Saumya Meattle, founder and ceo at Module One India Ltd.)
• Uppal Basu started somewhere first time in 1998 – 2000), M.D. of Nokia Growth partners
• Ankur Sharma, CEO TaxSpanner.com

Few notes from there:

• it is challenging to get iniital team in place
• there is no need to compulsorily bootstrap today, as there is an eco system and people there to do angel funding
• don’t start when everyone is doing it. Probably at that time you are already late.
• make sure you have done homework for financial support before plunging into it. for example: one of the persons in panel said that he was working in C-Dot when he decided to venture. He made a plan and executed over 5 years period, where he went to US, did job and make 1cr of money/capital, came back and started his own firm
• you can capital from his customers, primarily to have their skin in the game.
• you may see partners quitting the game and left alone
• be clear about exit strategy

As part of discussion on selling business we heard it from

• Sanjay Kamlani: who said that he started his business with exit in mind, kept transparency with his team, trusted management and found a buyer who would take care of my team
• Vishwas Mahajan: Compulink — who compared business like his own daughter
• Harish Behl: he was very simple to understand and straight
• Pavan Vaish: Co-founder Daksh, sold his business to IBM, continued as part of management team

Notes from this panel discussion:

• ensure there is sustainable management team that has no dependence on founders.
• checkout — products vversus service play
• check — if there are people calling on you to sell your organization…That’s good enough to evaluate yourself…There is no need to sell till you don’t need to.
• focus on core competence, someone will find you and teach you how to do business.
• business i like your daughter who may have to move to next house when it outgrows you
• make business respectable, take care off y our employees
• don’t focus on money, focus on making something great
• wealth for stakeholders and respect (respect being more important)
• Venture Capitalists can’t be trusted for long as they owe the money to someone else and have to ensure liquidity at some point in time. On the other hand, angel investors don’t have that liability. They also work with you to provide necessary guidance to make your business successful.
• entrepreneurship is guided by two things — Belief and Need

We had a useful discussion on Marketing as would be required to sell products and services in SMEs. Discussion panel was of

• Varun – cofounder of wirkle technologies
• Sameer Jain – founder of .Net Solutions
• Jay Pullur – FOunder and CEO, Qontext
• Maninder Singh Grewal from Religare Technologies

Notes from this panel discussion:

• We should share with customer the plan in which if they spend Rs X today on your product, than they save Rs 2X over a year or a timeframe. Give them a perspective, reason to buy in financial terms. Technical reasons would be embedded already into it.
• For marketing of your product, find something that catches attention, creates star on your product, creates news.
  Question to address is “Why someone would look at us?”
• Be ahead of the curve, getting attention of customer.
• How to write remarkable content? Having a good customer site helps to get customer calls.
• Match your perception of yourself with what customer perceives about you and your business. As that is what is most important to make sales.
• First order may come on its own by way of news, friends, network. But that does not continue and also will lead to complacency.
• Never compromize on core elements quality for your business

Your comments on adding to it or corrections are most welcome. Hope it will serve us as a good anchor point to connect to this event. Thanks to all the organizers of Nasscom who make it happen.

"The right of children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act 2009, wants every child to be in school, but if somebody decides not to send his/her children to school, we are not going to interfere. The compulsion is on the state and not on parent. Parents are free not to send their children to school, but teach them at home. We can not be micromanaging"

This seems to me an open ended statement without answering questions and concerns as listed below:
How does one certify home educated students when they have to enter into college or for formal education. Is there any system to grade them? Is there any system to ensure schools themselves don’t differentiate? Is there any system that ensures well laid out common curriculum for different classes across the country? Is there any bar on age, if no, then why there is so much fuss about minimum age admission?
Does it mean, govt. want to absolve themselves of responsibility of even rendering primary education to all kids in the country?

Then at later point in the same news, when parents insisted to make a provision in the act for homeschooling he said:
"He didn’t feel that govt should enact or provide any specific needs of “gifted and talented” children…"

Lets look at the positive side, sometimes given the state of education in schools in metros and the competition, I believe we ourselves can do a better teaching than schools at much lower the costs, if there is a framework and clearly laid out path for such scenarios. OR take our kids through tutions only which cater to smaller group and near to our home with more rigour and flexibility of timings..

I guess these changes are to come, given the cost of education and dirth of teachers. When state can’t do things for their citizens, masses have to do it on their own or private institutes run these services. I wonder how services like education and hospitals are getting commercialized which should have been state sponsored. Gurgaon is a live example of this. Checkout the article printed in Newyork Times Checkout following extract from there

more than half of urban Indian families pay to send their children to private schools rather than the free government schools, where teachers often do not show up for work

Recently, 100% cut-off related news for college admissions made headlines. I happen to meet a parent whose daughter got 73%. It seems for him all doors are closed, or the system is in denial mode? It feels very sad, when students/children who are productive hands for our poor country are not guided for their appropriate career or are denied of becoming capable to serve the nation. Where would such people go…Obviously they will remain unemployed not because of dirth of jobs but dirth of education opportunities.

I believe people in govt. positions don’t do their job or are overloaded or don’t even think about common man…That’s when civil disobedience, frustration slowly brews up…(it is just education, there are so many things..)

I am currently pursuing MBA part-time. In one of the family discussions, when someone asked me about the fees of the course and value attached to it. I told 6lacs and increase in knowledge as the value for pursuing future initiatives. The spontaneous reaction from them was that education is now restricted to people who can pay. I had never thought like that before for so many years. Being in job for 17 years, I started evaluating everything as a market of demand and supply and hence costs are justified. Someone charges as much as there are people to pay for it. It is this logic that seeds corruption and “might is right” culture. Not everything can be subject to market economy. Today, unfortunately, institutes like schools and hospitals are operating officially in market based constraints.

Quite some-time back, we used to think, higher education is only for people who are brilliant and is limited to few. I used to even say, it is denial of education to many in a country where you don’t have sufficient doctors, engineers, finance people, leaders, marketers, scientists. On top of that, infrastructure that grows at snail pace, relative to the growth of population. CAT, IIT-JEE used to be very tough not only because of question paper setting but the number of seats versus the population. Surely, lower income class like that of our family, could afford it, if we get through. Parents never used to worry about supporting the studies for the reason of fees, but for the reason of accommodation, travel and distance.

In today’s scenario, money seems to work everywhere and worst is that it is working in education in uncontrolled manner. For people like us education forms second biggest expense in monthly budget. If you remember, 20 years back, Government schools used to be the best as compared to convent, teachers used to take extra classes to help students prepare for board, tuitions were considered as something meant for students lagging in studies. There is complete reversal, at least in metros. Our professor put it sarcastically as a “great transformation of business”. True. It is a myth. Everyone feels that by going through a institute he/she will succeed. Take statistics, nowhere >50% get through in competitive exam. Students have lost faith in their teachers, and more importantly in them. Money has eclipsed the search within for true talent and hence pursuing it in life. Who is there to guide? Who cares? Where there is maximum money and opportunities (not happiness, satisfaction and lesser hassles), everyone wants to pursue that.

Students have become demanding customer where they can say “You can’t punish. I am not paying you so heavily to get punished.” OR “I am not paying to stand outside the class” OR “What is your problem” OR “Please mind your language” OR “Mind your language” OR class behavior like “Using phone, opening laptops and walking in and out of the classroom, while teacher is teaching.” You might see teacher who are behaving in more traditional manner saying “Shutup”, “You don’t know how to talk to teacher”, “Who you are?” What do we call this, if it happens? But are we expecting this? Look at it from teacher’s and institute perspective. It is difficult to get good, professional teachers in our country. Reason is that this is not well paid profession and gap has increased significantly between other jobs and this.

In such situation, whoever wants to teach for a noble cause of knowledge sharing, he is worthy of respect and he may not tolerate indiscipline in class. It is his personal capacity to tolerate or manage it. For those, who are not good teachers, their teaching standard will further fall. They will say “If they are not interested in learning but just degree is what they look forward to, who cares to teach them. Be one of them”. Also, such will be teachers, who will be scared of losing their job as well. I believe, even other good teachers can come in this bracket of job-fearing people, as they start to get very good salary in colleges where fees is also very high. As that happens, it is not more a “Guru-Shishya” relationship, it is more of “Customer – Vendor” relationship.
In a country, where right from childhood, we have been taught the status of teacher equivalent to God. “Guru, Gobind dono khade, kis ke lagoo paon, Bali hari guru aap ke, jo gobind diye milaaye”. It is Guru/teacher who helps us to get enlightened, who introduces us to God. He is live, we can see him. So, he is most respected being even before God.

I wonder where this respect is gone. Education has become a market, where student has become customer and teacher a mere employee. Customer comes and rank teachers. He says – “He is a good teacher”. “He didn’t know his subject”. “Kitnee der aur chaatega”. “Bahut pakaoo hai”. “There are no good teachers”. “Padhna toh book se hi padhegaa”.

I believe, we must introspect the system which we are promoting and see what needs to be changed, to get the status of education as it used to be ages back, in the form of Nalanda. It is not worth copying western culture even in everything mindlessly ignoring our value system or even killing that value system. Fortunately, new generation, seemingly have choice of opportunities to pursue. Not everyone wants to be become engineer, MBA or doctor.

Internet revolution has already done corrections in different areas of bureaucracy and market dynamics, I hope it will do the same in education, when it won’t be difficult to find good teachers for those who want to study, without paying heavily. I am sure that era will come back, when teacher and student both search for true match in terms of knowledge exchange and not in terms of money. It should bring an era where boundaries, distance disappear. There shall be more number of teachers with willingness to share their expertise with others without worrying about financial gains.

Even in current scenario, both students and teachers can understand the ultimate objective of the transaction they are into in a market scenario. Ultimately, the exchange of knowledge is what matters to place you at higher ranks. To make that happen, student and teachers must understand and respect each other.

This is typically followed up with a meeting, which is mostly inconclusive, as people debate on something that does not exist or some of them take extreme viewpoints. Except for that half-cooked document there is nothing on the ground level. This is further followed with minutes of meeting, document update by author. After updates, optionally reviewed with moderator, it is again floated for review. Many times at this, document is complete in its contents. However, it may have lots of errors or gaps. Again reviewers have a look at it. Lots of comments pour in. Meeting that follows this is typically of a marathon nature.

Limited by bandwidth of all participants, this never 100% done. After this second review, author capture minutes, updates the document based on conclusions from meeting and his own understanding and floats it for final check. Many of the reviewers at this third stage are already in don’t care state. And typically document gets through approval as one of the versions and subject to further evolution under change management.

Above is typical of the organizations where culture is dominated by 15-20 years of experience guys. This is the generation which has started from 1990s and is used to bureaucratic setup. They are also in their 40s where typically people resist to change.

Today people spend more time on social networks than before. They are more comfortable being offline rather than meeting up. People don’t believe in delegation but doing things on their own and sharing with the world. Time is expensive, unpredictable and so many things to do. Hope it does not reach to the state where you ignore home front. Thankfully, things get complex only when there are alternatives to take care of that complexity. Having said, we must re-look at how deliverables can evolve and probably many organizations already pursue better than the model I am trying to present here.

Let’s talk about a module being written by a group of developers (e.g. 4 in number). They are working on different files and are supposed to review. How they should go about? Also, assume their organization does not spend on real-state and hardware to work on software. So they work out of their homes from distant geographies. In such scenarios, they will establish some basic collaboration discipline, have few calls. Agree on things like – when they will commit the code into repository, naming convention, the area where they will operate/make changes, communication medium, availability period and exchange on their status of work completed and share thoughts / ideas related to implementation. Now, all this they keep a record on their network either through bug management tool, Google docs or discussion forums. Even dumb tools like emails, files and flat directories can be used for this purpose, though may not be as efficient. It is like doors of limousine open for you to travel, but you insist to take auto.

Let’s say developer A finished working on module A – feature x, he notifies others about it. All will start looking at it and make changes to it as they feel like is a better alternative. This is now their version of Developer A – Module A – feature x. Now it is left to the developer to evaluate and take in these changes. Clearly, the reviews this way is not in the air. The person who says I am competent to do review and can add value, is actually adding value by making those changes.

Also, note that in this scenario, the reviewers may use the updated information to integrate with their piece of implementation to justify the changes needed.
Now, in case the change is not acceptable by author, it can be discussed directly between the two in the forum, over the phone and recorded minutes seen by all. As it stands rejected, the content is always logged in reference to Module A and can later be picked or referenced by author/reviewers in some other context. This was never a possibility when meetings used to happen over some suggestions which are few lines of text.

In nutshell, some time spent on putting relevant tools to support this type of collaboration can help cut down waste time in meetings and increase productivity and quality manifold. As IT industry has come of 20 years of evolution, it is important for old organizations and people to look at things in reference to evolving tools and with it the evolving tool savvy smart generations.

Mr Som Mittal opened the session with excellent coverage to the indian landscape and pointed to what is expected to happen in coming years. Education, Health care, Banking were pointed as key areas of interest. Basis of this is primarily the increased interest of government in use of internet to solve many governance issues. Another area that he pointed out was eGovernance. In fact it was pointed out that NASSCOM shall be launching another platform to facilitate the serious players in that area under the name of http://egovreach.in/.

All the sessions that I could attend were inspiring, motivating and educational. Google country head “Vinay Goel” had put their organization vision in 5 points extremely well. I remember few like “Web is impossible” “Web is mobile” etc..He applied Moore’s law to capture the speed of internet by 2020 and hence the data that would be floating around. He did a test of how many of the audience is engineers, it was probably >80%.

Deepak Kalra from makemytrip was impressive. He made so relevant remark for new startups
~ if you want funding or support, ensure that you guys have team, something working on the ground, have operating leverage.

One interesting implementation put out by Mr. Vinay was about Delhi police being on facebook and are able to book around 650 challans through that. People can post the photographs of crimes on road and they will use that as input to issue challans. It was there in my mind whenever I see something on the road. It just tells that ideas are plenty as problems are also plenty. What really makes a difference to take the guts to take the lead, interact, solve and make money.

I got an opportunity to ask question to the top 10 pick of NASSCOM for entrepreneurs. My question was on the approach to marketing for startups. There were few really good inputs came out:
a) Use google analytics (not sure how, but i think this pointer is good)
b) Don’t get into a situation where you have a solution and are looking for problem
c) Create marketing material before even writing first line of code or investing serious money (e.g. be on facebook, create brochures, use twitter, engage with communities who are facing problem). In short, understand your customer and then design product.

My understanding of software being first and key enabler was really busted by looking at this array of entrepreneurs, who used internet to solve some of the problems by understanding customers better.

I think many of us, as software engineers, over a period of time, have lost touch to real world out there, who need there problems to be solved. We have been more used to solving problems of companies in US and UK. Reading books or internet will not help solve the issues, unless we interact with the people who need it. As we interact, problem definition should become clear, a relationship gets established and better product can be designed as per need.

Dr. Som Mittal pointed out very clearly, that India is now loosing on services based on cost arbitrage and we must take a next step in making products and promote entrepreneurs

Mr Divyank Turakhia impressed a lot the audience and also made them laugh for his blunt answers. I think that was his confidence and hard work with which he had risen to where he is. Few answers from him were worth remembering:
a) Ask for capital if you really need it
b) Put your skin in the game
c) Do what you are competent at
d) In every business, there is always an opportunity where you can operate with whatever you have. It is just a matter of picking up the lowest in this ladder and put in your hard work.
e) Doing business, requires good understanding on finance

It was amazing confidence with this USD 500m young looking enterpreneur, who started his business when he was 16.

Mr. Hemant of IAN (Indian Angels Network) shared a presentation from IAN capturing what is “Angel fund”, what they look forward to before funding ? On a question about ratio of approved cases versus reject cases ratio being too high, he stated two reasons for that
a) Probably less number of angel funds
b) Poor quality of business proposals/plans ( i was just thinking while we graduate from skilled courses like Engineering, we never had a subject on Finance, Business Proposals. This was cut out for MBAs only. Is that the right approach ? )

Then I came across few entrepreneurs in the area of using photography passion to deliver solutions on top of the photographic results, other person was on personalising gifts, yet another one was on making bus tickets online for the market where tickets are bought before boarding the bus.
During the panel discussion a very interesting point came up, in case of redbus, most of the audience using bus belongs to the community that does not use internet. So how did he carve out business there ? He said patience, belief, passion and most important taking pain to educate your customers. He kept two options a) Internet/online b) Call centeres/phones. And kept the objective to migrate all customers from phones to online, as the latter one gives much better user experience and consumes less time of consumer for transacting (I think we can relate this to ICICI consumer base growth versus anybody else)

In short, time in India has come where lot of people are testing their capabilities and entrepreneur skills. Governement and private sector are coming together to support SMEs to come up.

I hope our education system also gets an addressal to inculcate entrepreneur spirit as students get their education and be proud of working in our own country’s economic setup.

What’s the fun, if education can’t help to generate money or share knowledge ?

Target Cost (TC) = This is the target cost that supplier tries to achieve on which there is zero incentive

Target Profit (TP) = This is the profit value that supplier is deemed to get if supplier delivers it at target cost

Ceiling price (CLP) = This is the limit imposed by buyer for maximum payout. Post this value, supplier has to fund the project

Profit Share = 75:25
25% (Shr) is the percentage supplier shall have over and above target profit if supplier delivers project below target cost

Actual Price (AP) = This is the price that customer shall end up paying based on the various limits imposed in contract

Actual Cost (AC) = This is the cost incurred by supplier in actually delivering the services. This may be above or below the target cost and hence the (profit + incentive) value shall vary.

This implies the cost paid by customer shall be:
AP = AC + TP + Shr x (TC – AC)
For example:
AC = INR 120, TC = INR 100, TP = INR 20, Shr = .25 or 25%

Customer shall pay. AP(Actual Price) =
120 + 20 + .25 x (100 – 120) 135

Point of Total Assumption (PTA) = This is the cost level of supplier, where AP(Actual Price) = CLP(Ceiling Price). It has nothing to do with maximum profit of the seller. It is to limit the losses in subcontracting by buyer.

So if we replace AP with CLP and AC with PTA. CLP being fixed, PTA can be calculated as:
CLP = PTA + TP + Shr x (TC – PTA)
PTA = ( CLP – TP – Shr x TC ) / (1 – Shr)
PTA = (CLP – TP + (1 -1 -shr)x TC) / (1 – Shr)
PTA = (CLP – (TP + TC)) / (1 – Shr) + TC

Thanks for the few questions and their answers at http://pmp.groupsite.com/ and study towards PMP that triggered and helped me to get to this derivation.

There might be simpler way to understand whole thing.

At the onset, i must say that business and efficient users must stay away from Nokia, they are no longer do good things…add few and drop more..is what they practice. Stable and sturdy phones…true. they continue to hold that reputation.

Okay i decided on E72 because of following primary reasons:
a) Budget constraint of 20k
b) Qwerty and handy phone
c) Ability to browse multiple applications with sufficient memory (8GB, 256MB ram)

My first choice was N900 from Nokia, but it was not there in India and it might have been a bad experiment.

Than it was Blackberry Bold2 which was 30k INR, which again was not worth it at that cost. Though, i must say, when you hold that phone and you talk to the users of this phone, you see the satisfaction there much higher..I still decided against it as they had security feature more implemented than needed in indian conditions and it is not worth paying for that.

Than It was Samsung — Omnia Pro2…which was not yet launched…which is a step motherly treatment to a world’s largest market for cellphones (i.e. India)..as also is true for iPhone ( i hate that kind of marketing..)
I am sure, some indian, soon, will surely beat these guys. Salute to growing entrepreneurship in India. The other day, i read the story on 4 guys doing Micromax, started 2 years back.

And then was N97 (slow processor – 400MHz — no way), and finally E72 which is what I bought finally..

Someone may wonder why budget of 20k..it is because i decided to justify all expenses in gadget world post recession and I could not get rid of comparison of mobile at 30k with cute netbook with better capacity at 13k INR. Given that, i actually could have gone with Corby pro.

Okay, now my experiences on E72, once i have bought it..

The touch pad given for movement is good and better than their joystick kinda before..

i can now open at least 4 applications and after that many a times it goes for reboot..definitely, Ovi MAPs don’t work with more applications. Learnt to monitor active applications and clean them up from time to time.

I remember in K-Jam which i had 2 years back, there was feature called “category” in todo and calendar, these guys don’t have that even in this latest model…Calling it a business phone is mistake if you can’t facilitate your users with organizing information..

I learnt the backup thing in Nokia phones and I could do that very easily from E61i to E72..Again, they didn’t restore the timestamp while doing that…Kills !!…all the notes were in alphabetical order and had to go through everything to make sense and prioritise.
Same with ToDo notes…there is no sorting option available to see priority wise or date wise..listing
I am not sure if this is a problem with Lotus notes user.

Browser is very fast as compared to E61i though the vodafone connection is the same.

Music — i copied some to memory card and created folder. Than i was disappointed to see that you can’t browse the folders from within Media player to create playlists conveniently..I had philips MP3 player…even that has got that simple feature..

The best part for my choice and I am satisfied with is
~ Good speaker phone and voice quality ( I used to crib about Vodafone, but it turned out to be bad phone E61i instead)
~ Same user interface but with much better speed and faster browsing through phone. No learning curve and better productivity
~ Reliability of Nokia phones is no doubt better..but I guess other phones are giving tough competition also on that..
~ USB based charging..it’s blessing..I had that in K-Jam 2 years back
~ Active notes..that would be surely great..as I wanted something similar for quite sometime..Hope that would meet expectations
~ Ovi –> excellent though they are not original thinkers..but a useful step to promote apps development. On day 1 I got enabled with few useful applications like Fring
~ Online dictionary — excellent
~ Editing capability in Quick office (not sure why they didn’t give it in N97..)
~ GPS and Ovi Maps — very good, but search didn’t work for me effectively..as good as google maps.
~ Auto Profiler ..an excellent application
~ More than 1 alarm setting is now possible (why did they restrict it in E61i to 1…i could never understand..)

As you read this, you may think, why they are so choosy about features which are so basic in so competitive and fast running mobile world…but then why ppl continue to choose Nokia…I guess, it’s more stable OS than Windows, inertia…but now it does not continue to be the same…because of iPhone, Blackberry, android.. who seem to be ages ahead and claim premium for quite sometime now.

I just heard that android claims 3 sec boot time … that’s big plus..
just had look through their ADC (development challenge) that gets them so many applications..and the prizes of 100,000 USD.

In nutshell, things are changing fast, time to market is reducing and also making difficult for consumers to make choices as difficult as it is for manufacturers to pick up feature sets and price their models..

Good luck for your new purchase !! Hope this critic will help Nokia to tune new products and new buyers to make choices..

Since I have bought it…I will stick to it and make best use of it for another 2 years by that time, i hope to see 3G or 4G coming up allowing to do more with media, IPTV etc.

Little bit about macro that is embedded in this
This is a quick work done to help someone and as I said to him also, using macros is damn easy if you know little bit of programming and it comes for free without any need of additional tools. Lets get started

Following assumptions are made in this macro:

Functions that are written in this macros:

Excel sheet
that you can use for further study.
Presentation

Great !!…they are known for that enjoy and beware !

Lets look at the first stage of evolution

1. Start using excel for basic capabilities
2. Standardize on few things (minimum thing stated below)
a. Treat excel rows and columns as grid for creating your user input forms
b. as much as possible take data in table format, so that migration to new templates easier
c. label the sections of data being asked for and decide on colours to be used to highlight various parts e.g.
i) Where the logo will go ? don’t keep it locked to the cells
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ii) Gray cells are the ones which will remain locked, rest of the cells will by default be unlocked. This shall be useful when you protect the sheets
iii) Section 1 shall use dark color background with white font, Section 1.1 shall use less dar background color with white font and so on
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d. Always watch out for the printability of the sheets/templates being created
e. Always leave a remark at the last row to ask user for copy and insert rows before that point
f. Name the ranges on which you would apply data e.g. in case of vlookup.
g. Always create data sheet for the data validation inputs in your database and also for use of indirect formulas, if any. May this sheet be hidden

next stage of evolution is adding forms and macros
1. Give user interface to the forms and sheets that you had created and transform your sheets into pure tables capturing various user inputs. This user interface helps to structure the presentation, which can keep evolving over time. However, the data tables behind the scene can keep getting updated or even migrate to newer tools with ease. Even it would then be possible to use DAO objects in macros to fetch data from external databases and present it to user.
2. Here again keep it simple, create forms that can display data of a particular row in a full blown form layout, thereby eliminating the irritating word wrap and poor formatting issues in plain excel sheet.
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3. At this stage you may like to migrate to MS Access also, if you want for some of the organization databases, but that may complicate things for you and require MS Access skills also.

next stage of data analysis and moving to online versions
1. Create separate sheets for graphs, picking up data from tables
2. Create trends by keep a separate row to capture latest and taking snapshot of that row as per dates in table below the same. Better would be to write a macro that helps do this for you at a click of a button
3. Use Dxxx formulas to get data from the table e.g. DCOUNTA, DGET, DAVERAGE, DSUM etc.
4. Use Pivot in some cases

Some tips for look and feel
1. Keep the background same as is used in your corporate presentations
2. Keep the legend in tentatively empty space of your graph, rather than at the standard place
3. Keep the chart borderless
4. Keep %age values on secondary axis where you want to plot actual values versus the %age contribution in overall score
5. Prefer to have cummulative views like cricker score in trend analysis
6. In capturing the status graphs, use “No Colour with solid colour border” bars to show what is yet to get done
7. Follow color codes consistently, e.g. Red captures something that you want audience to pay attention for further action, Yell something that can go read, Green — achievements, Blue or other colours for general information
8. When you pick up this data for presentation, always paste as “Device independent Map” and also keep the date of snapshot below that to ensure

Now as you move to online (i assume this article would help you to keep this objective in mind right from begining),
1. the tables created so far shall get uploaded to mysql or relevant centralised databases
2. forms will provide quick start to the forms creation for online data handling
3. a quick user login support and you are all set
What additionally, one can get by being online is to implement work flows, integrate with mailing and also create organization level cummulative dashboards of information !!…That’s ultimate.
However, here also, it is recommended to go step wise, first keep it simple, than pick up php based frameworks and than if things really get more demanding — migrate to the Java frameworks like glassfish etc.!!
You may wonder, why not from day one the last step !!.. I think and firmly believe that no one has patience in the begining to consider this as project and have people generate this refined set of processes. Focus in the begining is always get the work done that generates revenue..And nor management wants to spend money !!…
If your answer to my answer is that “I don’t have such reluctance from my management”, than use that opportunity to pick up the best project management tools like Digite and get going !!.
Okay…that’s some details of my learnings and thought process I carry and use when I do my management and project tasks. Hope this benefits you.

There are other things that organization benefits from are use of frameworks like Joomla, Drupal to come up quickly with sites that promote knowledge sharing and recorded discussions. Some may not value. But my belief is that they are the veihcles of faster deliveries and innovation and reducing lots of process overheads. A simple example i take that probably pains every organization is to know at any point of time, how many of my people are billable or non-billable for next N weeks. As this data helps to generate required urgency for pushing sales activity or hiring activity. But this data won’t come just like that and it is not worth calling meetings or shooting emails everytime you face this question from management..It’s not worth it, when you can get that done through available technologies. Will write on this some other day as I get through some such experiments.