June 05, 2008

Anil Kumble at a Tech Conference!



When I first looked at the schedule of the 3 day SAP Summit, one session clearly stood out for its uniqueness. It was a keynote speech on the 2nd day by Anil Kumble and my first thought was, "What is he doing with SAP?" I know other cricketers like Sachin and Sreesanth have diversified into restaurant business and figured maybe Anil Kumble was getting into Enterprise IT consulting. Even if he did, I probably wouldn't be surprised because I read somewhere that his brother is already into some sort of IT business.

I thought wrong. He was there to speak on the topic of "Winning in a Competitive Scenario". At the conference hall ways, there were plenty of jabs at the choice of his title, given his team's dismal scenario at the IPL. One guy said, a better topic would have been, "How to Tide Over Difficult Times".

But Anil silenced everyone with his talk. He spoke about team spirit and a captain motivates a team. He did touch upon and how they should be used to fire up your competitive spirit. He spoke about how the Indian team gives an alternative "Man of the match" decided by the players. I'm trying to get the video of Anil's talk and will have it uploaded soon.

When Anil finished his talk, he had a standing ovation. The crowd was clearly bowled over.

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December 21, 2007

Job Clinic on Online Marketing at Delhi



An exclusive event focusing on Online Marketing as a career option is being planned at Delhi on Jan 12th. It's a sort of Job Clinic that aims to connect prospective candidates along with online marketing companies.

I met up with Vivek Bhargava, CEO of Communicate2, at the Web Innovation event at Bangalore and he says that getting good, qualified talent is a major challenge. It's the same point that many other CEOs, whom I met up during SerchCamp, echoed as well.

This event is the brainchild of Pradeep Chopra, cofounder of OMlogic, an online marketing consulting company. He has helped setup OMcareers, a non-profit community initiative to get interested candidates and companies together.

Interested? Add your name here in the participant's list. If you want to collaborate or join hands with the event, get in touch with Pradeep Chopra at 9810762902 or email him at pradeep.chopra[@]omlogic.com.

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December 16, 2007

Speaking at Infovision and Web Innovation Summit

On Dec 17th, I'll be in Mumbai speaking at Infovision: The Knowledge Summit. It's probably the most prestigious event focusing on Knowledge Management featuring such stalwarts as F.C.Kohli, father of Indian Software Industry, Prabhakar Ragahavan, Head of Yahoo! R&D, Dr.Pandu Nayak of Google.



I'm on the panel discussing 'Web 2.0 & Mashups' and my fellow panelists include Arun Ramanujapuram (Director of Advanced Technology Group, Yahoo! Bangalore), Ashok Krish (TCS Innovation Labs), Rohit Agarwal (Founder & CEO, TechTribe Networks) and Jayanta Chatterjee (Professor, IME Department, IIT Kanpur). Coincidentally, Rohit of Techtribe and I were in the same panel at the Knowledge Summit in Delhi last month and we are speaking at the Web Innovation summit on Dec 18th.

I wish the organizers of this event had taken a little more care while putting my profile up on their website. Not only do I have a new title, I'm also working in a new company!!



The very next day, I head out to Bangalore to speak at the Web Innovation Summit. It's quite a major event focusing on latest web technologies and close to a 1000 members are expected to attend. The event is put together by TFCI (Trade Fairs Conferences International) headed by Bal Tarkad, its CEO.

I've put together events and know a thing or two about event management. I've been involved in the backstage of the preparations and should say that Bal is the most creative and aggresive guy I've seen to push the event to greater heights. Lots to learn from him.

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December 13, 2007

Can Managers Truly be Entrepreneurial?

That will be the crux of the discussion during the CEO Conclave that I will be moderating tomorrow at Great Lakes Institutes's annual big show. The topic for the conclave is "Entrepreneurial Managers ? Making Managers Entrepreneurial".

The students at Great Lakes have convinced an impressive line up of CEOs for the event.

N.Srinivasan, CEO, India Cements
A.Mahendran, CEO, Godrej Sara Lee
N.K.Ranganathan, CEO, Grundfos Pumps
Abhay Kumar, CEO, Shasun Chemicals
G.R.K.Reddy, CEO, Marg Constructions

If you notice, none of them are from the IT industry and that's a welcome change. The last few CEO conclaves that I have been moderating have been too IT and specifically Internet centric and I could do with a change. It'll be interesting to see how traditional companies deal with the aspect of encouraging managers to be entrepreneurial. To me, it sounds like an oxymoron. I'll make sure to ask some tough sticky questions.



Here's what their invitation card to the event looks like. I checked with the organizers and I'm told that anyone interested enough to attend the event can come. The venue is Image auditorium, MRC Nagar, R A Puram. The CEO conclave starts at 1:30 PM.

However, you may not want to miss the morning sessions. Once again, an impressive lineup.

Thomas Anderson, Associate Dean from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago
Y.V.Reddy, Governor, Reserve Bank of India
Shailesh Rao, Managing Director, Google India
Mahesh Bhupati, Tennis champion
N.R.Narayana Murthy, Infosys

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December 05, 2007

Notes from Nokia World 2007

I'm at the biggest ever event that Nokia has conducted. Over 2700 delegates representing over 100 countries are here at Nokia World 2007 taking place at the RAI Convention centre in the heart of Amsterdam.

A quick disclaimer before I start with the reporting. I'm here on invitation from Nokia in my capacity as podcast host at The Kiruba Show, as the Editor of blognation India and as a longtime blogger. I'd like to play an unbiased role in reporting about the event here. I can see you go "Yeah, right" with a synical smile and that's totally understandable. Yet, I'm going to try not to suck up and report things as best as I can.

Alright, now on with the show. The first thing that stuck me with the event was that it is billed as "the premier global conference for the mobility and internet industries". Mobility, I can understand. But Internet? Nokia is absolutely serious about its handsets being the primary access point to the Internet.

It's already happening here in Europe. A good sampler can be the delegates at this conference. I saw more people using their mobile phone to access the Internet than for making phone calls or sending SMSes. Agreed the Interent access infrastructure is far better here in Europe, but its definitely the way forward. And I definitely see this happening in India.

The classic example are the cameras in mobile phones. They started off as premium attachment but now they have become a standard feature in most mobile phones. So much so that, Nokia is now the biggest manufacturer of digital cameras in the World.

I only hope that the mobile service providers (and there was solid representation of Bharti, Idea..and almost all major players at the event) start ramping up the infrastructure. Infact, I strongly believe that it should be our Government that should take this up as its agenda in earnest. It's a laughing farce that the Ministry of IT and communications announce 2006 as the Year of Broadband and woefully fall short of their estimated projects. Looking ahead, they have done a downward revision of the target with a modest 20 Million connections by 2010. Bloody hell, we add up around 8 Million new mobile connections per month. Yes, PER MONTH. and we're well on our way to achieve the 600 million connections on the same year. If the govt officials took their head out of unmentional place, they'd realize that Internet thru mobile is a fantastic opportunity and THE way to go.

Shiv (the Nokia India head) tells me that we have even overtaken China in terms of Nett additions per month. Beating China!! Can you imagine? That's some serious s#%t.


I guess this is how they say 'Hello' in Dutch. The main entrance to the massive rai congrescentrum, the venue for the event. It may look unimpressive here but its a bloody large convention centre.


Here's Nokia's VP Anssi Vanjoki, speaking during the first day's keynote. The photo doesn't do justice to the massiveness of the hall but its one helluva large hall. Imagine 2700 folks in one hall and more space available for few more.

Anyways, when Nokia's CEO gave the main keynote, I can't help but compare it with Apple's CEO, Steve Job's keynote. The audience were very uptight and stiff and I could hardly see the kind of passion from the crowd that'd you'd expect from such a landmark event. I expected prolonged 5 minute long standing ovation, crowd growing crazily beserk from some really important announcements. Something that you'd seen either in a Steve Job's keynote or heck, Steve Ballmer's speech. Instead, it was a tipid simple clapping.

And boy, those suits. I felt under-dressed in my tshirts and jeans. I probably must be the only guy in causals. Everyone were in suits, even members of the Indian media contingent. The European crowd is so unlike what I'd seen both in India and the US.


A big indication from Nokia is their environemnt responsibility progam that came out as big in the keynote. Nokia is researching on using bio-degradable plastic in mobile phones. They are using the 3110 Evolve as the guine pig. It uses 30 percent recycled materials. Judging by the response, it may be applied to all the phones manufactured by Nokia. Might not sound like a big deal, but they make over 500 million phones and you can imagine how much of plastic gets eventually dumped.

I'm a pro-green guy and this came in as a good move. Hopefully, Nokia will take it more than just a one off measure to show they care about environemnt and really get serious with this initiative.


Nokia will also cut the size of the packaging. Almost by 60%. Apparently, this simple move will save Nokia 100 Million Euros every year in transportation cost alone.

Lots more interesting announcements from Nokia's biggest event. Will report them later tonight. Now, heading out to my hotel to get ready for a get-together. It's bone chilling out here with scales dipping to 7 degrees. I'm going to brave the rain and the cold, skip the bus and instead take a long walk to the hotel. More fun roughing it out.

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July 25, 2007

Conference on Online Retailing Today at Chennai



Most of today, I'll be engrossed listening to some of the best minds in India on eCommerce talk about online retailing. 'Click to Buy', a one day conference on online retaining takes place today at Park Sheraton, Chennai. Finally, an IAMAI event comes down south after dominating Mumbai & Delhi.

I'm quite impressed by the lineup of speakers. Gaurav and Kalyan from the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) have done a fabulous work in roping in the speakers.

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March 09, 2007

In Mumbai Next Week.

Next week, I'm off to two conferences. Click on the images to get to their respective websites.





It's a good thing that both these events are happening on two consecutive days. Between these two events, the most successful and the best minds in the Internet and mobile space will be there.

This means good news for 'The Kiruba Show'. For those who don't know about the show, this is where I interview CEOs of Indian IT companies. I have already lined up interview slots with some of the key folks speaking at the event.

And I look forward to meeting up with interesting folks. I attend only very select sessions that catch my fancy and most of the time I prefer meeting up with people in the hallways and coffee breaks. Its going to be two hectic days and I'm looking forward to it.

If you are going to be here, let me know. It'll be good to meet up.

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