How long does it take to establish a new business?

It takes a lot of time. I dont say it takes a long time. But quite a lot of time. It might take a few thousand hours at least. And to get it done quickly, you need to divide that time among many individuals.
It is not easy.

Back to basics

Now I am contemplating getting into the SaaS market as a provider. Need to build an infrastructure, get a engineer or two, a designer, an SME who can sell, a marketing guy, lawyer, accountant, VC etc. Check out http://www.johnvarghese.com/ for the details.

Location Based Services with the Cloud behind it is the future

I think in the very near future there is going to be an expansion of cloud based services and location based services. I have personally had such great experiences with location based services using my iPhone. The possiblities are endless.

There are many examples of situations where people are forced into a situation where they need to access information that is very related to their current location. And although most of the time the information proabably comes from google, there will me more players in the market who will provide this information. And more often that not, these service providers will just use Amazon's EC2 or S3 or Google's App Engine instead of building their own data centers and maintaining them.

With the advent of the cloud, entrepreneurs can focus on their core competencies and not worry about maintaining the infrastructure to support their core competency - that will be someone else's core competency.

Vertical industy integration will be a hot market where open standards will rule. That's my prediction for the day :)

How to get products manufactured in China

The average person does not know anyone or any company in China where one would be able to buy products from to sell in other countries. The is a reliable marketplace, though. It is called Alibaba. http://www.alibaba.com/

Use your talents

If only the birds who sang the best were to sing, the forest would be a quiet place. The forest is teeming with life and energy. All kinds of plants and animals coexist interdependently to make the forest a great place for them to all live.

So when it comes to using your talents, do the best you can. You don't have to be the best, just make sure you do what you are capable of. You will be rewarded.

Big difference between walking and talking

I am trying to get a few people who are unfamiliar with typing in Malayalam to type in Malayalam. They say it is very difficult and time consuming. I gave it a try. I am not very familiar with reading the language itself. But _it is hard_. Takes time.

I'm optimistic though. :)

Scare when using Malayalam keyboard

Yeserday I had installed a foreign language keyboard on my Windows Vista laptop. It was very exciting to see it work. I am so glad Microsoft has made it easy, and I congratulate all the people who have worked toward a Unicode format for the Malayalam and other languages.

 

This morning I had to urgently send an email to a client before a meeting. I took out my computer and tried to login, but the computer said I got the password wrong. It happend four times. Then I rebooted, and fortunately it worked.

 

I figured out what I was doing wrong. I had inadvertantly set the default keyboard to Malayalam. I don't know why the reboot helped, because the default is the default - rebooted or not! I am glad it got fixed automatically. I immediately changed the default keyboard back to English. I guess I need to make sure I always set it back to English before I lock the laptop.