Month: May 2009

This week’s links:

• The Best Entrepreneurs Know How to Fail Fast: by Brad Feld. “Give me the experienced entrepreneur whose last company was a failure 100% of the time.  The cliche ‘you learn more from failure than success holds true’, but more importantly the dude that just came off a failure and is ready to go again is super-extraordinary-amazingly hungry for a success.”
• IBM’s Grand Plan to Save the Planet: from Fortune. “Palmisano is encouraging his employees to think even bigger, to scout out any dumb network that can be made smarter. Because, as any self-respecting capitalist knows, in great pain lies dormant profit.”
• Can Technology Save the Economy? Technology Review writes about the ongoing debate in the US.
• Celebrating Aggregation: by Fred Wilson. “Aggregation is the central element of distributing content on the web. It’s not going to get shut down by calling these services names, suing them, or even worse taking your content out of them. The best and only thing media companies can do is join the aggregation parade, celebrate it, and get good at it.”
• Computing’s Future: A Forbes interview with Lisa Su, chief technology officer at Freescale. “I just got 3G for my laptop six months ago, and it changes the way we do work. People keep talking about a killer app. There isn’t a killer app, per se. When you have that much bandwidth available anywhere and any place it allows you to be much, much more productive.”

One of the comments I got recently was that over the past few months I have changed tracks from discussing about technology to talking more about politics — and that has disappointed some of you. I accept the criticism. The blog is a reflection of what I am thinking and doing. And in the past three months in the run-up to the elections, I have spent a lot of time away from technology and semi-engaged on the political side. For me, it was an opportunity to learn more about a different aspect of India – and it was an opportunity that would not have come again for quite some time. So, I decided to immerse myself into it – and the blog mirrored my changed interests.

Going ahead, I do hope to restore some balance – since election season is coming to a close. At the same time, there is a lot that I have learnt about what we can do to improve things in India that I want to share through this blog. There is no single person capable of coming up with the solutions. But, together, we can. And technology will play a crucial role in all that we do going ahead. India can do a lot better than we are at this point of time – and that has to change. For each of us, there comes a time when we have to commit to spending some time on a greater cause. And for me, that cause is what we can do to create a better India and the time is now.