Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Innovation from India

Rahul has been pointing to some studies that Indians are not leading in innovation etc. Here's my response to the posts on his blog: There's no reason to think that India is behind in technology innovation or anything.

For one thing, Indians are not un-innovative, and yes, we're not trained to think out-of-the-box, but by that standard, the German education system isn't that much better, for example. Students from India come to US universities regularly and start winning innovation/business plan competitions within their first couple of years here.

Tech companies in India are also innovating - big time. Infosys and TCS's business models are not based on innovative technology but innovative processes, and therefore Narayan Murthy does not have to worry about tech innovation just yet. Infosys's processes, for example, are a lot smarter than IBM's, for example, when it comes to offshoring/outsourcing tech work. You can't look down on that.

Tata Elxsi, the lesser-known high-tech services shop in the Tata stable, is doing $80M worth of extremely innovative technologies in partnership with inventors large and small every year. Dozens of Silicon Valley startups owe the real smart innovative firmware/hardware to Tata Elxsi.

I'd further say that there's nothing like "Indian innovation" or "American innovation." All innovation happens in context and the best innovation is that which touches and helps all human beings. Grameen Bank is an interesting and successful idea, but cell phones have had a much bigger impact on everyone's life - rich or poor - than Grameen Bank, for example. If Infosys continues with its process innovation, it will have a pretty major effect on everyone's lives too.

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Sunita Pandya ready to take off

Sunita Williams' maiden name is Sunita Pandya - her family is originally from Gujarat.

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Monday, December 04, 2006

Ashes - Australia opens a can of...

The game was meandering to a draw and then all of a sudden, England find themselves staring down the barrel. Oh My God, oh Australia!

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Day 1

First full day as an entrepreneur. I thought it wouldn't be all that different, but it was. The day started as usual - rolling out of bed followed by a couple of conference calls.

But things started improving immediately. I didn't need to go anywhere - didn't need to show up to work just for the heck of it, for example. So I could take my time with stuff. I tidied up the living room a bit, read a few pages of "Maximum City", then went ahead and fixed myself some brunch too. Sure it was almost noon, but so what. I had to actually drive down to the Post Office instead of just dumping the mail in the "Outgoing mail" bucket, but I like going to the Post Office ever since they put those new self-service kiosks in - very efficient things those kiosks.

I started working after 1pm, but boy was I productive. Was only answering emails, but get this - every email was relevant! There were no silly "finsh your time sheet by Friday" business, for example. I spoke to customers, answered their emails, wrote to potential investors and they responded too. Very energizing.

After I finished work, fear did creep in a bit. Is this going anywhere, I wondered.

Well, we'll see...


Sunday, December 03, 2006

Our new stars: the tech heroes

Scott Adams started the Bill Gates for President campaign and now there's even a website called billgatesforpresident.net. It seems Infosys founder Narayan Murthy is also considered a dark horse candidate for President of India.

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