work-life imbalance between 2 cities (and everything in between)
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Healthcare Speech Notes for Obama
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Healthcare Debate Explained on Back of a Napkin
Friday, July 31, 2009
Another New Beginning
Friday, June 19, 2009
OpenI 2.0 RC1 is Released
For those of you who dabble with software that involves reporting and analytics, it is worth a look -- there is a demo at http://demo.openi.org/openi (login: openi2/openi2) -- and it's always great to hear your feedback.
Please pass the word around.
Yours Truly @ Nepali Business Forum @ ANA 2009 - Oakland Convention Center - July 4 11:30 am
It has been a fun process - soliciting speakers, refining the theme, and also collaborating with Bineet Sharma, Pukar Malla, Kumar Pandey, and friends at CAN-USA - we had a last minute change in speakers rosters where yours truly had to jump in from the bench -- and here is the formal announcement:
Namaste!
- What does entrepreneurship mean in a world where ideas are boundless, seamless and traversing at the speed of light, commercial borders are interconnecting and expanding, virtualization is growing and for real and collaborative communications continues to be a click-of-the-mouse away?
- Why do local and global perspectives matter in entrepreneurship and how do they support / influence innovation, marketing and delivery of new products and services?
- In what ways can entrepreneurial vision help explore and harness business opportunities, whether they are in financial investments or in the setup, nurturing or management of businesses?
- How is being a Nepali entrepreneur advantageous in today’s business landscape?
The Forum offers an informative and exciting session with networking opportunities during lunch. It will be held in the Oakland Convention Center. You can attend the Forum with the ANA convention registration card.
We look forward to seeing you soon!!
The Organizing Team,
Nepali Business Network (http://www.nepalibiz.net/)
CAN-USA (http://www.can-usa.org)
Note: The Professional Networking Luncheon is at 1230–1330 hours, immediately following this forum. Seehttp://www.eticketbazaar.com/event/99 for details.
Monday, June 01, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
Architecture is mostly an art of building emotions
Frank Gehry:
Renzo Piano:
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Data Visualization is about Telling a Story
BI Features Used by Hans Rosling:
- The most prominent is the use of Time as a special type of "dimension". The tool knows that Time will support the concept of a Play button. This is still very novel -- most BI tool, OpenI included, treat Time as any other dimension -- you can drill up, drill down, set date filters, or date ranges -- but that's about it. Taking a lesson from here, what we should do instead is that the moment there is a Time dimension, user should have the option to "superimpose" Time in "Play" mode within a given analysis -- this should result in a Video Player like slider widget appear at the bottom of the analysis with a big old Play/Pause button next to it
- Notice how he first presents the data bubbles in dual-axis graph and then transitions it over to a map view. This makes the concept of "background canvas" a dynamic entity for presenting data. How many other choices a user can have (in addition to dual-axis and map overlay) to use as the context in which the data should be presented
- He keeps only 1 attribute per axis - country in X-axis, and % of population with HIV on Y-axis, and everything else (gender, per capital income, etc.) is treated as a filter (in OLAP speak). This keeps the visual very clear on its message. I have often struggled with OLAP based analyses, which have multiple dimensions on each axis, which makes sense sometimes in the table view, but the chart-view is completely horrid. Single data attribute per axis is a way to address that
- When it comes to drilling further into data, he basically clicks on a country bubble -- and it can either split by income groups, or only the specific country goes on a time play motion while others stay the some, etc. -- the key for me here is that drilling down is best done at the visual level -- somewhere on the chart/graph itself the user should be able to isolate a data group (in this case a country bubble), and have a choice on drilling down or move it back and forth in time
- Emotion, emotion, emotion... he is so far away from the stereotype of a statistician making a presentation. He cares about what he's presenting. The numbers are real people -- they get sick, and they can either get better or they can die.. you can feel that empathy as he presents.
- Al Gore did this first (that I can recall) in The Inconvenient Truth when he brought a crane ladder to hoist him up so he can point to the tallest bar in the chart that he is showing. Maybe a bit too melodramatic -- but it drives the point, and also makes a more visceral connection with the data. Hans Rosling stands on top of a table at the beginning of the presentation to explain the different numbers he is presenting, and the audience is at once connected and engaged
- His bringing of the long metal pole to point to the numbers instead of your generic laser pointer ("I have solidified the laser beam") is another way to get more personal and physical to show how involved he is
- Ultimately he has leverages the BI tool to make a presentation, to tell a compelling story. Earlier in my career, we worked on a feature with another BI tool that automatically generated powerpoints from its charts. Yes, it was pretty crude, and didn't really work that well usabilitywise -- but the point is, this was definitely a feature aimed at helping users build a story off the various charts and grahps and analyses. People want to tell a story -- the BI tool should help them do that.
Vote for OpenI in sf.net Community Choice Awards
Please support OpenI by voting for OpenI as the "best enterprise project" in the SourceForge.Net Community Choice Awards.
I promise you we won't forget you once we become famous :-)
Thanks!
Friday, May 08, 2009
San Francisco Approves Nation's Largest Municipal Solar Project
Solar project is a go, but still has criticsDespite concerns that the city is getting a raw deal, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a controversial 25-year deal with a private company to build a photovoltaic solar plant on top of a city-owned reservoir.
The San Francisco Sunset Reservoir Solar ProjectThe City of San Francisco is currently planning a five megawatt solar photovoltaic system on the roof of the City’s largest reservoir, located at 24th and Ortega Streets in the Sunset district. Upon completion, the project will consist of nearly 25,000 solar panels that span nearly twelve football fields — becoming California’s largest photovoltaic system and the nation’s largest municipal solar project. This project will more than triple the municipal solar generation in San Francisco and reduce carbon emissions by over 100,000 metric tons, furthering the City's leadership in clean energy implementation.
- This is a great example of a city taking leadership in reducing carbon emissions, producing energy not reliant on foreign oil, and more importantly, right smack middle of the city you have the largest "billboard" you can imagine for public awareness on environmental responsibility
- Financially, the city did a smart thing by doing a power purchase agreement (PPA) with the private builder. This way, the city only pays for the energy produced by the plant at a fixed rate of $235/MWH (about 23 cents per KWH, which is approximately similar to buying power from PG&E directly at A-6 commercial rates), escalated at 3% per year over the next 25 years. This may seem high compared to what you'd normally pay -- but what this cost doesn't reflect is the hidden price of carbon emission if the city bought that energy from fossil fuel-based sources.
- I as a citizen of this great city, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, feel a great deal of pride that our city has the courage to take this bold step, and also to offer new programs to promote residential solar (pioneered by the city of Berkeley); and a city thrives when its citizens are proud of it, a sentiment that magnifies all the way up to the county, state, nation, and the entire planent
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Starter Rental Place in San Francisco
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
OpenI 2.0 Beta Released
With this, I feel I have reached a milestone with this blog. I originally titled this blog "Business Intelligence Adventures", thinking there isn't much difference in my private versus professional life, and as such, I could pretty much blog everything under BI, since that is what I ate, slept, and breathed.
Now as I look at my posts for the last year, they seem to be all over the place, and so I questioned if this is the right blog to post everything under the sun. I think that it is probably better if I blog all BI specific rants over at the OpenI site since that is a much more relevant forum. I really need to free this blog from any topical constraints (probably at the expense of alienating some of the BI-oriented readers) to let this blog evolve through its natural course.
What does that mean? Well, you can probably guess if you look at the last few posts :-) So it will be more about life's offbeat adventures than just BI.
You be the judge.
Friday, May 01, 2009
Indians give a Middle Finger to their General Election
So when the four of us are asked by paparazzi, to show our fingers in acknowledgment of us having punched our votes, we show it to them. It is another matter that, the Government marks our middle finger with an indelible ink, to avoid duplication and therefore unfair electoral procedures. Showing of the middle finger in the Western world apparently has different connotations. So I guess, in usual fashion, that is all that the press shall flash tomorrow !! And for those that may miss it here is the photo..!!
And in his post today, there are gobs of other pictures of everyone from common citizens to police to celebrities showing their pride in the democratic process. See for yourself
.. and we worry about "hanging chads" :-)
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Missing Conversion Metrics and Power
Earlier this month, I was in Nepal for a week doing some training at our offshore software development company Codemandu (and also visited family, old friends, and tried some home cuisine -- business with pleasure indeed :-) -- but back to my main point -- the government there has issued a 16-hour daily load-shedding because of power scarcity. That's right, you only get 8 hours of electricity in a day, and even that in two 4-hour chunks. Trust me, you get a whole different perspective on energy conservation when you have that sort of constraint.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Please Vote for Me - How Election Change Human Behavior
In an elementary school in the city of Wuhan in central China, three eight-year old children compete for the position of Class Monitor. Their parents, devoted to their only child, take part and start to influence the results.Here's a clip - check your local PBS station to see airtime
What's insane is how the candidates' behavior towards their classmates changes. Without any coercing, they start forming alliances, offer bribes for votes, become rude and even demeaning to their opponents -- all in all, pretty disturbing traits for eight-year old's. Then things get worse as their parents get involved in shaping their campaign strategy and speeches.. and we wonder why Karl Rove was (and probably still is) so sought after by candidates.
Election to these children mean their own friends need to make a choice -- who do their friends like the most? And these three candidate go through excruciating emotional torture trying to deal with this, asking their friends to make the choice, and even sell them on it by any means possible.
Maybe it is just wrong to have such young children go through this sort of experience. They just acted out their normal reaction to the situation, probably made worse by their parents' participation. As they mature, they'll be better able to mask their emotions and act more cordially and keep a straight face when they try these questionable tactics to win the election. But I can't help but wonder -- if these children's behavior is any indicator of normal reaction of a human being running in an election -- God help all these candidates we have running for offices deal with their demons.
Business Intelligence for Startups
You can add a lot of value to your product by removing features.
Spending 6 to 12 months with a 4-5 person team to develop the first release of your product is way too long. You can't wait that long to get market feedback.
These were just a few golden nuggets of wisdom in Dave McClure's presentation yesterday at SD Forum's BI SIG meeting. At one point, Dave said -- "I come from an engineering background, I used to write code.. and I can't believe that I'm saying this to you -- but all the architecture, algorithms and engineering behind your product don't matter as much as how strong your marketing is, which starts with user experience.. we all tend to develop a lot of cool features which the user never ends up discovering" -- reminded me of that tree that fell in the middle of a big forest (did it really fall?)
Much of Dave's talk may seem like web analytics 101. He's got a (cleverly named) "Startup Metrics for Pirates" called AARRR (stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue) to measure your overall success. Then as a startup, you focus on improving these metrics one step at a time (here is his detailed presentation):
- Make a Good Product: Activation and Retention
- Market the Product: Acquisition and Referral
- Make Money: Revenue and Profitability
Part of making a great product is to have inspiration, vision, and an intense passion to solve a particular problem -- and then you hope that there are millions of others out in the market who see the problem with the same high priority as you do -- and then also hope that your solution beats the competition by being in a completely different league, either by being the first of its kind, or by introducing a completely superior technology, er, user experience.
So can you do all that in 3 months or less? Seems like you have to, if you want to survive in the web 2.0 world (or whichever version we are on these days)
This clearly does not apply to everything. It only applies to a certain class of products/services where customers can experience the
product on the web, and where the quality of user experience can
be measured (even if it is a model of lead generation online and fulfillment being offline)
So if you are building a new product/service today -- can you fit it into this model? Well, one way to try it out is to strip away all the features until you are left with just one or two that are your core differentiators, and see if you can create a version of it that can be experienced completely online. But the point is, if you can do this, you have a framework to measure success a lot earlier in the game. One key edge that startups generally have over bigger organizations is the speed of their product development iteration. How soon can you release a feature to your customers, get feedback and go through a series of subsequent iterations and releases?
Dave's "Pirate Metrics" are about tracking the effectiveness of these iterations, but first you have to configure your business practice so this model can fit. Not a bad thing if you can.