Wednesday, February 22, 2006

 

Investment in India

Seems, software related investment in India is picking up very high in the last 6-7 months, check the below news,

May 2005
BMC Software is planning to invest $5.5 million by the beginning of next year in India to increase its offshore R&D activities

August 2005
"By increasing our investment in India, we are well positioned to help drive Linux and open-source adoption not just in India, but in other emerging Asian markets as well," said Rhonda O'Donnell, president of Novell Asia-Pacific.

December 2005
Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft Corp, the world's largest software company, said that the company will invest $1.7 billion in India over the next four years to expand its operations.

January 2006
The world's biggest computer maker, Dell, will be increasing its workforce in India by 50% in the next two years. It will take the total number of Dell employees in India up to 15,000.

February 2006
Hyderabad will house India's first semiconductor fabrication facility - FAB City - with a $3 billion investment to make silicon chips, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy said here Thursday.

Monday, February 20, 2006

 

Soft Skills - Part 2

This is a follow-up for Soft Skills - Part 1

The very important skill one should know about is “Searching”.

The search skills are not to do with any physical search or search for any missing things/objects; it’s all about searching for things which is already available in the World Wide Web. Almost everybody know google and it’s the leader in the search business, the search industry itself has evolved a lot, now we have all kind of searches like

a) text searches
b) picture searches
c) news searches
d) video searches

The picture search is catching up these days and many new companies are venturing into this, popular examples are Riya, or truveo (this is acquired by AOL recently)

If anybody is still not convinced why “Searching” is a skill, check http://answers.google.com , for almost, most of the questions answered, the researches answering the questions get the answers from google search itself, and many a times I wonder why somebody can’t help themselves doing the same.

If you had come till this point, and wondering what I am really conveying here, forgive me. I started with something in mind and could not actually get it presented properly. But the bottom line is, searching is a skill and with experience one can master it.

Friday, February 17, 2006

 

Google Video – Work around

When Google Video was launched I was kind of excited as I could see/download all the funny commercials and SNL stand-ups directly, anyways I was doing it before aswell (mostly from Office and very little from Home) through different sites and download software’s, but I knew Google Vide could be “one source” for all videos.

Unfortunately, what I got was this

“Thanks for your interest in Google Video.

Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn't available in your country.

We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience. “

Then I hit upon this site , this is a very cool site about Google videos and latest updates, I found a workaround for the above problem, and it was just to add the http://translate.google.com/translate?u=

And guess what, it really works, I could now see the videos without any issues at all, though it gets translated I don’t have any issues with that as I dont see much of a difference with the actual page and the translated page except for a small top frame which has some info like "This page has been automatically translated blah blah blah"

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

 

Soft Skills - Part 1

Having worked for some time in software industry now I can say you need to have good soft skills to survive in the industry and to move up. BTW, if you wonder what they are,

a) Writing Emails
b) Search

In the first place you might think writing emails looks very easy but one need to remember that everything and anything happens over emails in software world, my colleague might be sitting next to my cube, but still I would be mailing him. And most customers and users interaction with the development unit happens through emails, you name it and we do it through emails. When I got my first job and during the initial training/deputation period I asked my mentor on how will I get work, he told me it would be through emails, at that time I laughed and thought, then I won’t have much work to do, but realized it was wrong with experience.

Also the number of emails you get is really proportionate to the number of years you are in service with that company, if you get more than 30 mails everyday then you must be serving that company roughly for 2-4 years, more years leads to more mails. Coming back to writing emails, first you must spend a lot of time in reading the mails you receive, you can take for granted that 15% of time everyday would be spent on reading them and almost same or more would be on writing replies to them. In my previous company (which was a very big MNC in US/India) reading mails and replying them were part of my and everybody`s productivity time, then you can really imagine what all of us were actually doing there.

Writing mails is more like art; of course we get lots and lots of tips/inputs on how to write a better email, 90% of the email population reads it not to follow it, so you get all types of emails and need to reply in all possible ways, but still your manager will never be satisfied with your communication skills. If you are working for some multinational company where you need to exchange mails with counterparts in other countries then all the more burden, its possible that you need to digest anything from the other end, but need to make sure you write the best and perfect reply as the odds are at stake at our end according to management.

The best mails are always written short and simple, sometimes people get it wrong that writing very long emails means showing their smartness and knowledge, but the truth is the reader presses the delete even before crossing the 3rd line.

All this had made me to realize how important the “writing a letter” classes at the elementary school level I missed, after all everything works fine if you have a perfect foundation.

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