Sunder Iyer

Being a geek and working for a telecom giant is like a match made in heaven. Why? How many other jobs welcome you in the corridor with goodies you would give some piece of your body for? For the non techies, this is like if you were a bank teller , it would be like coming to work and finding bags of dollar bills for free. Anywho, long story short. Our lab routinely throws away “old” stuff and I managed to get some nice rails, some decent servers and even some very nice private VPN servers!!

Wesabe launched today and its very impressive. The site helps you manage your finances in a proactive way rather than looking at your reports at the end of the year. The founders have also added a social aspect to it that lets you view/share tips on saving money. The site is so simple and easy to use. I find sites like Wesabe to be very inspirational from a design perspective. I am hoping to bring some of that simplicity to CampusChai

I saw this cross promoted sign-up form for a fitness club in a fast food joint. They want all of my personal information and want me to fill in a billion fields for a chance to win a 6 month free membership. Now if they replaced all these fields with a single email field, I bet their uptake would be higher.(They could use the rest of the space for maybe a calvin & hobbes joke)

Pizza Schmizza provides kids with sketches of animals to color when they are eating. This is an awesome way to keep families coming back to your restaurant. While junior is busy coloring t-rex, parents can enjoy some of the best pizza in the NW. They go a step further and proudly display their artwork.

Ben Yoskovitz has a great
article on 5 things you shouldnt spend money on when starting a business.Although I do agree with the majority of his article, I dont necessarily agree with his take on publishing materials. I believe that tradional media materials hold their own depending on the circumstances. Sometimes pamphlets, flyers are your only way to get the word out especially depending on the target market segment. Its still a great article and well worth reading.

I love google notebook, its an awesome tool. I have been looking for something similar for a while. Google Notebook was an indispensible tool while building gradswanted. When google notebook was first launched, it was supposed to be a delicious competitor, but I use both all the time. I save bookmarks on delicious and personal notes on google notebook. I love the fact that I can write small notes, ideas and thoughts at the click of a button. I love like the firefox plugin. In fact I probably wouldnt use either that much if not for firefox plugins.

Sorry folks, its been nearly 4 months since I last blogged here and for good reason too. I have been spending every living moment building my new company www.gradswanted.com. Its been such a blast building the site that I pretty much ignored everything else in life. Iam extremely excited and plan on launching it tomorrow. I plan to document some of my experiences either here or on my other blog at http://blog.gradswanted.com. So stay tuned, this channel is going to be hopping very soon.

MindCamp 2.0 is in town and I wasted no time in registering for the event. I missed MindCamp 1.0 due to the fact that I wasnt reading blogs in an RSS reader and it was too late when I actually found out about the event. Not this time, I registered right after reading Dave Winer’s post. MindCamp is basically a BarCamp but with a different name and the event is also 24 hours non-stop. Its going to be a blast – Meeting a ton of cool folks and attending cool product demos. If you are in/around seattle, this is one geek event you shouldn’t miss.

Technorati Tags: mindcamp2.0, seattle, techmeet

Dell makes really bad laptop’s, I have never had a good experience using a dell laptop. The PCMCIA slot in my trusty old X31 IBM was messed up after going on the indian road trip with me. (Yes, the laptop was on my back when I saw the TajMahal) Somebody(wink, wink) must have dropped the laptop sideways when I was at the amsterdam airport which messed up the PCMCIA slot. Anyways, I got a replacement Dell Latitude D610 laptop and boy the thing could be used as an anchor for the Titanic. The Dell build feels flimsy and most of all the keyboard just plain sucks.My fingers get repeatedly stuck between the keys. I spend a considerable amount of time sitting on my couch and working with my laptop, all the latitude has done is given me a bad backache.
                                           
I understand that the size comparisions between a latitude and an X31 may not be fair since they have different screen dimensions. The X31 also does not have a builtin in DVD/CD drive which I rarely use. With external DVD drives all the rage, I dont miss it. Anyway, the IBM support staff is coming in tomorrow to fix my baby and I will leave this briefcase at work. I encourage all readers to give the X41 a shot(The X31 has been phased out and replaced with the X41). You will probably get some shit from people for using a 12” screen but you wont miss it after a couple of days. So go get yourself an X41, your back will thank you. so will your fingers.

Technorati Tags: dell, latitude, d610, x41, ibm, x31

The Times of India(Iam not linking to their pop-up infested website) published an article on traffic density on some of the busy roads in Bangalore. On a scale of one, a lot of the roads were pushing 2.5. The report also claimed that anything about 2.0 meant traffic was at an absolute halt. Maybe so in other countries, but resourceful as they are, indians come up with creative ways like driving on the sidewalk , or driving on lanes against oncoming traffic. But, you can only push it so far before things absolutely break down and bangalore is dangerously close to that.

When I was in India, I tried all modes of transportation - Bus, auto and a motorcycle. I found auto’s to be the worst and generally took the longest and the motorcycle was the quickest. For ex: Travelling 20 kms in an auto during rush hour traffic set me back by 1.5 hours and by bike was  a very respectable 45 mins. I also came across situations of absolute chaos where people driving against traffic caused deadlocks. Incidentally, everyone drives their cars with their left side view mirror folded in relying instead on looking over their shoulder(People drive on the left side in India - think london). I asked my friends about this and was told that this was to ensure that cars passing you dont knock the side view mirrors down. I came back to the US feeling that Indian Infrastructure had a long way to go.

So it was like a breath of fresh air when I read Anand Sridharan’s post on Bessemer Investing 100 crore in an Indian Engineering/Construction services firm. Everyone is always talking up investment’s in technology without realizing that a country can only develop if it has decent infrastructure in place.  For real progress, Investments in Indian infrastructure should exceed  the cumulative sum of investments in every other sector.Lets hope that this is just the beginning and a sign of things to come.

Technorati Tags: bessemer,india,infrastructure,vc