Today at 3PM, we will have the privilege of having Rajan Anandan, Managing Director of Microsoft India, as the guest at ‘The Kiruba Show’.

‘The Kiruba Show’ is a podcast interview series with CEOs and top brass of Indian and international companies. The show follows a friendly conversational tone. You can find the old podcasts here and the new site will soon be launched with the fresh set of podcasts, which includes interviews with SAP MD, Jeffrey Archer and many.

I’m a firm believer that the collective knowledge of the audience is far higher than just any one individual. The show extensively uses Social Media to have the readers actively be part of the program. You have the chance to ask questions and we will pass it on to the CEO on your behalf. Due credit will be given. While asking the questions, your name and your profile will be mentioned. When the interview eventually gets published, your blog, twitter and LinkedIn profiles will be linked to.

Quite honestly, I’ve been meaning to give due credit to people who contributed with your questions and I plead guilty for not giving enough credit. That’s one area that I really will be working on correcting it.

If you had the chance to meet the MD of Microsoft India, what is the one question you would like to ask him? Here is how you can pass on your questions.

Twitter: Please send in your questions as Tweets with @Kiruba.

Comment on this blog post: Just drop your question to Rajan in the comment section below this blog post.

Facebook: Here is my facebook profile. Just write your question on my wall or send a private message to me.

Email : The simplest and most effective method. Send your question to Kiruba @ Kiruba.com.

SMS: Another effective method. Send your question to +91 98415 97744.

Look forward to your questions.

I’m passionate about Social Media and even more interested in knowing how Companies leverage the Net effectively. I’ve been closely following how some of the leading companies globally use social media. One company in the list is SAP,the World’s biggest business application software company. I’ve been impressed with them specifically with the way they have built their communities both amongst developers and business professional.

There are over 1 million members in SAP community and they have used both online Enterprise 2.0 strategies and real world events to actively engage them.

When I was invited to attend SAP TechEd, it was just the opportunity I needed to meet Mark Yolton, the key person behind SAP communities. Mark comes with over 20 years of experiece and has held senior management profiles at Oracle, PeopleSoft and Sun Microsystems. Watch the interview.

Kiruba Interviews Mark Yolton, Head, SAP Community Network from kiruba on Vimeo.

After ages, its good to be podcasting again. The news of the tie up with Business Standard was the boost I needed to get back into play.

This morning I got to have a converation with Benjamin Wegg Prosser, who is Director of Corporate Development of SUP, (”pronounced as Soup, as in Tomato Soup”), better known as the owners of LiveJournal. You can listen to the podcast here.

Live Journal, for those who don’t know, is one of the earliest blogging services started way back in 1999 and still continues to be a significant player. The intro was done by Rajesh Lalwani, founder of BlogWorks and who handles LiveJournal’s account in India.

Ben has an intereting profile. In his earier job, Ben served as director of strategic communications at Tony Blair’s cabinet, Yup, the ex-prime minister of UK. Here, he oversaw a series of innovations including the launch of e-petitions service and the first YouTube channel for any head of government in 2007. Take that Obama!

Prior to Downing Street, Benjamin worked at The Guardian where he held positions as publisher and General Manager of The Guardian’s website, handling diferent sections.

Go ahead and listen to the interview. You can also download the interview and load it onto your iPod, mobile phone or your music player and listen to it on the go.

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.

Sometimes you don’t realize some of the good tools you have with you and you always aspire to get stuff that you almost never usually get. Take for example video blogging. I’ve been planning to get one of those Flip video recorders ever since I read good reviews about them and been scouting around for it in Chennai with no luck. And all this time, I’ve been sitting around with my N82 which has pretty decent video feature.

So, instead of waiting for the perfect solution, decided to play around with what I’ve got. And the right opportunity came by. I received the SanDisk 8GB SDHC card and decided to do a video review of it. If I had a little bit more presence of mind (and more patience), I could have done an unboxing video which would’ve been kinda cool.
Anyways, I took the product out for a walk around my apartment and here’s what I felt about the card.

For smooth viewing, hit play and then hit pause. Give the video a minute and then play again.

For you bums too lazy to see the video , here’s my impression of the product.

1) Wow! This tiny thing can hold 8GB?? I still remember the computer exhibition that I went to where I bought a 4GB hard drive. We’ve come a long way.

2) Love the fact that there’s a tiny card reader that comes with the card. Plug it in and it turns into a thumb drive. The thing that I didn’t like is that the card doesn’t fit into the reader smoothly. You’ll have to kinda shove it in and parts of it juts out. Many who don’t take the effort to read the manual, would force it in deeper damaging the card.

3) Apparently, the card is quite strong I’m told, though I didn’t get around to testing it. It would survive a 10 foot fall. I’ll just take their word for it, thank you.

3) In addition to photos and videos, you can store word files, pdf and just about any file.

4) 2000 songs, 20,000 photos, Hours of video. There sure is a lot of space. Again, it just blows me how they could have so much space in such a tiny thing!

5) The card can be used in mobile phones from Motorola, Sony Ericcson, Nokia. Just make sure they are SDHC compatible. You could even use it in video games, GPS devices and DSLR cameras. Didn’t know that bit.

6) The transfer rate from the card reader to PC is 4MB per second. That’s one song a second. Not bad.

7) Add to the fact that there’s no additional software required to install, and this one get a thumbs up from me.

Now, the only grouse is that it’s so bloody tiny and for a guy like me who has the ability to lose a laptop, I don’t see this thing last with me too long!

Now for my experience and lessons from doing the video.

1) I put on a very strange accent, especially at the beginning of the video. That’s not how I usually talk. And I hate it.

2) I wrote down the key points I wanted to talk, on a Post-it note and stuck it to the side of the phone. That greatly helped me in the flow.

3) I shot this video at noon when the sunlight was directly over me. That created dark shadow and hence had to find a shadowy place. Even then, the buildings around were very bright from the sunshine and that caused the object in front (my mug) to darken. Early mornings or evenings would be a better time.

4) I had to hold the camera horizontally to get the video and that’s not a comfortable position to hold the camera. We are so used to handling the phone in a vertical position. Besides, holding the camera in an outreached position for a whole 4 minutes can get a bit painful. I overdid on my pushups exercise and that made it even worse!

5) The surroundings were fairly noisy, yet, quite happy with the sound clarity.

6) Realized that I should never move between a bright sun-lit area and the shadow area. The camera takes a little time to adjust and by that time, all you see is a black silhouette.

7) Realized that video is a powerful tool that helps you communicate certain things that you would never be able to do so in words. Like how the card fits into the tiny card reader to become a thumbdrive.

I hate the fact that the video sounded pitchy. Must remember to get more critical!

9) I should remember to hold the phone a bit higher. The view up my nose usually isn’t quite flattering.

9) And yeah, I should stop that f***ing accent and just be myself.