I’m a Social Media Entrepreneur, Professor of Digital Marketing, Author of 7 books, Podcaster and an Organic Farmer.

It’s my third day at the SAP TechEd in Bangalore and there were a few things that caught my eye. The turnout for this event seems to be getting bigger every year. Over 4100 participants turned up from over 135 countries for 3 days of learning from 200 sessions and 360 hours of lectures and hands-on workshops. That’s an impressive scale. I was here last year as well and this time I had anticipated it to be much smaller considering the slowdown. Obviously, I anticipated wrong.

The session that really caught my attention was Mark Yolton’s keynote speech or the ‘appetizer’ as he termed it. Mark Yolton is the Senior Vice-President and Head of the SAP Community Network. His was a crisp talk that put quite a bit of things into perspective. Some interesting tidbits and stats from his presentation that will be of interest to us.

* 470 exabytes of information will be created in 2008 By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006Would fill more than 5.9 billion iPods. (I hadn’t heard of a term called exabytes before. It’s supposed to be 1 followed by 18 zeros. Yikes!)

* The U.S. Patent office receives a patent application every 68 seconds.

* There is $1.9 Billion in Global Trade every 60 minutes. The BRIC countries generate 13% of global trade and represent 42% of the world’s population.

* 50% of the world’s business transactions touch an SAP system 12 million users in 120 countries.

* 75% of SAP customers are SME businesses. 30 new customers join SAP every working day.

* About 1,000 people join an SAP Community Network everyday. If the SAP Community Network were a city, it would rank among the 200 largest in the world and the top 20 in India.

The news is already out and figured that I might as well talk about it. Kamla Bhatt was the first to tweet about the news and AgencyFAQs is working out on a story.

Business Standard newspaper and I are joining hands to launch a new Podcast show. The show, understandably, will deal with CXOs and influential personalities. The show will not be restricted to just Tech and will cover other fields as well. This way I get a much wider canvas to play with.

The new Podcast show will be an excellent and a logical extension to the weekly column that I author. The top management at Business Standard have been very supportive and I’m extremely pumped up at the opportunity.

I’ve already started working on the episodes and we are working towards launching the new show in two week’s time. Expect to hear from me more on this soon.

It’s interesting that Kamla Bhatt, a popular podcaster, had tied up with The Mint newspaper to luanch a new podcast show. I have a lot of respect for Kamla for her dedication and passion she puts in into her shows. We were fellow-podcasters at PodTech and since gotten to know each other well. It’s awesome that established main stream media is realizing the value of joining hands with bloggers and podcasters.

On November 22nd, when the Wikipedia Academy takes place at our new coworking office, I’m planning a collaborative painting effort. It’s simple. We’ll have a 10 feet by 8 feet canvas placed on the ground. We’ll have lots of colours and many paint brushes in different sizes. We then let loose our imagination. There are no rules. There is no brief given. Anyone is free to do what he or she wants to do. The results can be quite impressive.

I’ve been thinking of how to include a physical activity that portrays the collaborative effort of Wikipedia and this one fits the bill like a ‘T’. The idea is inspired by a similar effort that was done at the iCommons Summit in Sapporo, Japan. Over 300 folks participated and I remember all of having such fun working on it. Take a look at the eventual painting below.

I’m a newbie to painting. Need to find out what kind of canvas materias, what type of paints and what sizes of brushes. Also need to figure where to buy these materials in Chennai. If any of you have an idea, we’d be very grateful for your advice and suggestions. You can leave them at the comments below or mail me at kiruba at kiruba.com. Thanks in advance.

The first time I heard about the Information Kiosks scheme in villages many years ago, it caught my attention for two reasons. Reason 1: The scheme was launched in a village in Pondicherry, not far from our village where my family hails from. Reason 2: Dr.M.S.Swaminathan. Yup, the genius behind the scheme. Ever since that eventful meeting I had with him at his office, I have had deep admiration for him and his vision.

What the Information Kiosks did was to help provide information like the existing crop prices and remedies for crop diseases. The experiment created a lot of interest. For many of the villagers, it was their first exposure to Internet and technology, even if it meant on pitifully slow dial-up connections.

Yesterday, when I heard about Nokia’s Life Tools scheme, it reminded me again of Dr.Swaminathan’s Digital Kiosks scheme. The difference is that instead of a PC, its happening on a mobile device. Instead of everyone coming to a room in a village to access, its now available in your palm. More importantly on entry level, inexpensive mobile phones. Now, farmers can get customized information on crop prices, fertilizers and pesticides based on the farmer’s location and his choice of crop.

I personally witnessed how rural folks cleverly use mobile. And almost invariably, it has to do with maximizing their income. During December 2004, as part of the Tsunami relief work, me and a bunch of friends traveled to MGR Thittu near Chidambaram in Tamilnadu. We noticed that the fishermen would venture out into the ocean and before they returned back with their overnight catch, they would call from their mobile phones and find out which markets have more demand and thus willing to pay the highest for their catch. They would accordingly steer their boats to that place. Simple phone calls helped them get better returns. The lesson is that folks will embrace technology if they see a direct monetary benefit.

Will Nokia Life Tools be a success? Yes, if it can help directly benefit like how the fishermen got benefited. While passive benefits like learning English better are good, it ultimately boils down to how can it help get better income. If that happens, the acceptance would be swift. Think of how the lassi wallahs in Chandigarh helped boost washing machine sales.

Any new initiative will take time to be accepted and it needs to be educated, especially when it comes to rural audience. That’s the mantle that Nokia seems to have taken.

One thing I have to agree outright is that the best way for technology to reach out to rural India will not be through PCs. It *has* to be through mobile phones. The amount of massive usuage of mobile phones in villages is staggering. I only have to look at my own village to see this. From that angle, there’s no doubting the reasoning and the strategies behind the Nokia Life Tools. This project is right now in a pilot stage and is expected to roll out during first half of 2009.

Ever since I heard about the coworking concept, I’d been fascinated with it. It’s been one of my dreams to start one in Chennai and to see that day come is extremely satisfying.  For those who don’t know, coworking is a friendly concept of entrepreneurs joins hands and sharing an office space. Here are a few quick snaps of the office.

We made 12 comic posters.  Dilbert, Peanuts, TinTin, Asterix, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes. You only see a couple of them here in these pics. Will show the pics of the rest later.  Under production are Simpsons and Beetle Bailey. Each of these were recreated from scratch in photoshop, vectorized, printed and framed.

A nice quiet room. I love the yellow color. Makes the room halcyonic.  I bought that big pot two years ago when I attempted a terrace garden.  Now, it will adorn a nice big indoor plant soon.

That’s the place that I work out of.

Love the game and the focus it brings to it!

What you don’t see right below the basketball hoop is a dust bin. A fun way to dispose that crumpled piece of paper!

My plan is to make the coworking office space a Free Culture House. A place where artists and creative folks get together to collaborate.  And yeah, hoping someone will make better use of the guitar that I bought ages ago. Well, they can start with buying the strings!

Books that, honestly, no one ever reads. It just makes the office seem geeky.

Love this one.

I’m a big Dilbert fan.. incase you haven’t guessed yet!

Folks at my office discussing over a project.

Another table to work out of.  If any of your are travelling into Chennai and want a place to work out of, feel free to ping me. If you are an entrepreneur and tired of working along in your home, try coworking a shot. It’s lot more fun working together with like-minded folks.

What you see in my hand isn’t a packet of washing powder or cooking oil, though you’ll easily be forgiven if you thought so. What you see is utter commercializaton and sheer disregard for sensibilities.

The packet in my hand contains “Theertam” or holy water from the river Ganga, if you were to believe what they tell you.

The packet is a freebie for those who buy a spiritual magazine called Bhakti. How soon before someone decides to put a price tag and begins to sell the ‘theertams’.

It’s all such a sham.

Every time I ask a room full of students, how many of them have used Wikipedia, everyone raises their hands. But to my next question, the response is disappointing. When I asked how many have edited and contributed back to Wikipedia, typically I find only a couple of hands or worse, none. This is the case I have seen in the best of engineering colleges and in some of India’s biggest IT companies where I have had the chance to lecture and interact.

It’s suspected that less than 0.1% of the Wikipedia readers contribute back. It’s only a handful of dedicated Wikipedia volunteers who take on the responsibility of editing. But the real power of Wikipedia lies in the strength of numbers. The more the people who contribute, the more robust the system becomes.

If Wikipedia can be such a treasure trove of knowledge with less than 0.1% of the readers contributing it, imagine how powerful it will be if the percentage increase multi-fold. That’s exactly the motive behind Wikipedia Academy. It’s a simple, honest effort to change Wikipedia usage from ‘Read Only’ to ‘Read Write’. It’s an effort to educate people about wiki editing and to give the confidence that anyone can edit and add information to the site.

The idea fructified when a group of about 20 people huddled together at the first session of BarCamp Chennai and ideated on it. Some very interesting ideas flowed that resulted in the formation of the Chennai edition.

The Chennai Wikipedia Academy is NOT a brick and mortar entity. It’s a concept that embodies the spirit of sharing. It’s a simple initiative that anyone can start in their office, homes, community halls, schools or colleges. It’s simple. Arrange for a place where people who are knowledgeable about Wikipedia will help people who want to learn about Wikipedia.

That’s exactly what I’m doing. I run a small office in Chennai. On weekends, I’m using the space as a venue for people to learn and train to use Wikipedia. The first academy takes place on 22nd November 2008 between 3 PM and 5 PM. You can find more information about it here.

Feel free to spread the word around. We need help from Wikipedians in Chennai who can come volunteer to teach about Wikipedia and how it functions. We’d like to learn more about how Wikipedia keeps itself remarkably clean with relevant information. How does it ward away spam and edit conflicts? How can one start a new topic and what are the do’s and dont’s that one should know before starting off? It’ll be a good way to learn and share.

This post is part of the Binsar Travelogue. A group of six travel bloggers headed out on a 4 day trip to this beautiful Uttaranchal region.

On the 3rd day of our trip, we decided to rough it out. After getting pampered at the comfy rooms at the Club Mahindra resort, the call of the wild was too strong to resist. We asked Amarnath Bakshi, the resort manager, for suggestions and he told us exactly what we wanted to hear. An overnight camping in the woods. It got all of us quite excited.

And so, we headed up the hill towards dusk to a nice cleaning in the woods. When the manager said, “everthing will be taken care of”, he really meant *everything*. The tents were already pitched, the bonfire logs were stacked up, dinner packed and three enthusiastic guys to help out. A little too good for our liking. Personally, I would’ve preferred to lug the stuff, pitch our own tent, collect our firewood and cook our own food. But I guess its understandable. Most folks who come on vacation here are family type would like it easy and not many really want to sweat it out.

I’ve done quite a bit of overnight stays in the woods but never once in my life have I really stayed in a tent. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time and glad that time had come. The remember seeing the tent bag at the ‘activity centre’, not any bigger than a small stuffed bag. To see that expand into a biggish tent that can comfortbaly have four people, surprised me.

Thankfully, it didn’t rain that night. Heck, it didn’t rain the entire week we were there. People said we were lucky. Apparently, it does pour. Rather heavily.

The hills can get quite chilly at night and the dew was heavy. If you stood long enough, you’ll find your head wet with dew. We huddled close to the bonfire, soaking in the warmth. While we had big logs for firewood, its the dry pine leaves that was used to rekindly the fire. Every time we put a handful of the dried leaves into the burning embers, it would burn rather instantly as if you poured a cup full of petrol. Now, I know how those forest fires that I had seen in TV rage with such ferocity.

There’s something about the hilly air that makes you ravenously hungry. We gorged on the food. The resort manager said that they won’t provide any non-vegetarian food because the smell of meat would attract unwanted visitors. I don’t think there were any dangerous animals around but realized that its the basic respect for the wild, just the same way we don’t play loud music or wear heavy perfume while trekking.

We spoke about our many trekking experiences. Then started antakshari, a favorite amongst the bollywood smitten locals. I knew as much about hindi songs as a fish knows about bicycles. So, played the background hummer for most part.

We retired around midnight. Each of us snucked inside warm sleeping bags. BTW, its my first ever experience in them. It was slightly claustrophobic but I had no choice with the cold.

We woke up early at day break and quickly started the bonfire for warmth. It did turn quite cold that night and I remember sleeping fitfully.

The morning air was amazingly refreshing and make you realize how much you miss this in the city.

Way beyond the mountains, were the himalayan peaks (not seen in this picture) that absolutely mesmerised us.

We helped ourselves to some hot tea and the firewood smoke gave it a special taste.

Before we decamped, we took a group photo for memory’s sake. From left to right, Prashanth, Arun Nair, Me, Shrinidhi and Arun Bhat. The overnigt camping was a memorable experience for me and the memories will stay with me for a very long time.

It’s these small things that really make up an experience. When we entered our room at the Club Mahindra resort at Binsar, the first thing that caught my eye was this White Swan on the bed.  When was the last time a simple bath towel that really caught your attention at any hotel or resort?

We now have a venue for FailCamp. Arul Mani, cofounder of TenthPlanet.in has volunteered to host the event at his office. The venue is located conveniently on Mount Road, opposite to LIC. You can look at the office pics here. Few pics of the venue can be seen here. (scroll down)

The event will take place on Sunday, 16th November. Please mark your calendars. (checked to make sure no festivals or cricket matches happens on the day. The 2nd ODI Ind vs Eng takes place the next day).