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

Meeting Micorsoft’s COO, Kevin Turner

When I got a call from Microsoft to inform me about their global COO’s visit to India, it all sounded familiar. Last year, I got a call informing me of their CEO, Steve Ballmer’s visit. It was for an event called IndiMix and they had wanted to shoot a video of me pitching for the event . The video never got published. They invited me for the event but when I got to know I’d be part of at least 5000 other people, I let it pass. You achieve nothing in such big crowds. As you can guess, I had good reason to brush off the recent call.

But I was wrong. The call came from D’Souza, a passionate web evangelist at Microsoft. Evangelists are good people, way better than sales folks. I have known D’souza earlier when he had invited me to speak at a few Microsoft events. He wanted to meet up with me in person.

When we met up, he handed out a personally written invitation (in calligraphy) signed by the General Manger of Microsoft India, inviting me for a round table discussion with Kevin Turner at Mumbai. And I quote a line from the invitation…”We are trying to bring together the key web influencers in the country to enrich our understanding of the space – thereby adding value to the offerings that we bring to the market in the future”.

As if I wasn’t impressed enough, he said it was a round table discussion with ten other invited folks. Good. So, it is NOT going to be 5000 folks. Just 10 of us with Kevin. Makes for a better chance for a meaningful conversation and hopefully I get to add value to the discussion.

I’m looking forward to meeting up with Kevin Turner and I won’t hide the awe. The awe is understandable when you get to read his profile. As the COO, he is responsible for all sales & marketing initiatives. He heads deptartments that has 35,000 employees (that’s half of MS’ 70,000 employees) and responsible for generating revenues of $44 Billion.

And he is just 40. His photograph lies about his age. Damn! He is just 7 years older than me. Sigh!

In addition to Kevin, I’m looking forward to connecting up with the other invited members. I heard a few names and I was impressed. I should get to know the entire list by today.

Should be fun.

Nice Networking Idea

As seen at PodCampNYC that took place in New York City two days ago. Nice way to get to know who’s attending the event and go meet people who you want to meet. I like. Must remember to use this idea at the forthcoming events.

An Actor and a Politician

At the Trichy airport, I noticed a few interesting incidents. There was a large crowd gathered just outside the airport. I knew it must either be an actor or a politician out there. And I was right. It was actor Vijay. The craziness of the star stuck fans had to be seen to be believed.

The vehicle in which Vijay was travelling was mobbed. The driver throttled the accelerator full blast to part the crowd and get out of the airport. It was crazy to see fans running behind the vehicle.

Now compare that with a politician who was there at the same time. Veeramani is the head of a party called the ‘Dravida Kazhagam‘ or DK in short. No one bothered about him and he was sitting by himself. The wait was longer because of the delay in Air Deccan’s departure. We stuck up a conversation and amongst many topics were about low cost airlines. He surprised me with his in dept knowledge about SouthWest Airlines and its successful low cost model.

For sometime I was wondering why he wasn’t mobbed like other politicians or actors. Two folks discussing nearby answered that question. He is an ideologist and does not contest election. In other words, he doesn’t have power. And when you don’t have power, you hardly have any supporters. So, there you go!

The NIT Trichy Visit – An Overview

I was at NIT Trichy to talk on ‘The Business Side of Blogging’ to the MBA students. Here’s a quick recount of the trip and the talk.

I’ve heard a lot about NIT Trichy (previously REC Trichy) over many years but got to visit for the first time. The hospitality of the students was fantastic. They had taken full care of my transportation and accommodation. Satadal Payeng was at the railway station at the wee hours of the morning to pick me up. Satadal, btw, has a nice 2 wheeler blog and within a month, has started earning $100 a month.

We made the 20 kms journey to the campus where I was put up at their guest house.

There were about a 100 students in the seminar hall. Considering it was a four day holiday weekend, I was surprised so many chose to stay back in the campus.

The MBA dept has been in existence for 29 years and is only the second engineering college in Tamil Nadu, after Anna University, to start a management course. It’s reputation can be gauged by the fact that every single student has got jobs in campus placement.

I was quite impressed with the course fee. It’s Rs.1.2 lakhs fees includes the full two years course fee, hostel and even mess bill. All inclusive. Compare that with Rs.5 lakhs that a few MBA colleges charge for a year.

BIZZDOM is their first intra-departmental fest and it looks like its going to turn into an annual event.

After the customary talk by the Director, HoD, the lighting of the lamp and a premature coffee break, my two hour talk began. As expected, the students were a bit rusty but soon opened up. My usual empty promise of cadburys for the first few questions never fails to work!

I was particularly impressed with a bunch of no-nonsense questions that the students asked. I liked their attitude to challenge the basics. There were some very good questions that were raised and that helped in making the session a lot interactive.

See that big audio speakers in the picture above? Those are some of the best I’ve seen. Very good audio clarity. The mic had a small problem and I used the opportunity to chuck it and mingle with the crowd. I’ve learnt the trick that if you want the crowd to participate in the discussion, its important to have a level playing field. I guess, that helped. Not so for my throat though. Two hours of speaking aloud kinda drained me out but the session was fun.

The students have done a good job in organizing the event but coming from a bunch of soon-to-be MBA graduates and that too from a premier institute like NIT, I had expected more. The event started half-hour late and when you land there early, the wait seems much longer. Punctuality is a direct indicator of professionalism.

The biggest irritant was when my speech was interrupted by the organizers to read out the bio of the second guest speaker who had just walked in. And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I was mid way narrating a passionate story to illustrate a point and the interruption punctured the poignancy of the moment. I’m sure the organizers didn’t mean harm but these are subtleties you would expect them to know.

The second session was on ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’, yes, based on the bestselling book by Steven Covey. Mr.Srikant, a professional trainer and a seven habits evangelist was the speaker. I have always wanted to read this book ever since it started topping the New York Times bestseller list many years ago but never got to finish it. ( in spite of it sitting on my book shelf). Srikanth spiced up his talks with examples from his own life and how it influenced him. He gave a nice overview and it motivated me to start reading the book again, hopefully finish it this time and apply the learning in life.

It reminded me of the Business Book Readers Meet that we used to have. We were four friends and each one of us would choose a business book to read. Once a month, we would meet at the Loyola college grounds to give a brief synopsis and key learning from the book. This way, it gave a satisfaction of having kinda read four books and actually gives you the motivation to finish reading some of those book. Gotto restart that nice business book meets.

Satyam Theatre Continues to Raise The Bar

Satyam Theatre never ceases to impress me with its improvements. The latest is the tickets that one can print and use it to directly enter the movie hall. No more going to a special counter to exchange a long number for the tickets.

I like the way how each ticket has a scannable code. This way, if there are many people, each can be given their own ticket and they can come in directly.

My parents were meaning to catch the hit movie ‘Mozhi’ for over two weeks. My Dad made several visits to the local theatre only to find tickets sold out. Even though Satyam theatre is quite far from our house, it was able to get hold of our money. Now, that’s using technology to your advantage.

Speaking at NIT Trichy

The students of Dept of Management Studies at National Institute of Technology, Trichy (NITT) are organizing an inter-departmental management meet called BIZZDOM’07. An event that aims to inculcate management thinking amongst enthusiastic engineers. Nice to see an initiative that gets the MBAs and engineers together.

The meet is scheduled for the 6th and 7th of April with the management games scheduled on the first day followed by the guest lectures on day 2. The organizers have invited me to talk to the students about how being passionate about an area of interest can actually turn into a paying business proposition. They’re particularly interested in the business side of blogging and podcasting.

There’s definitely something about me and NITs off late. This is the second NIT I’m speaking at in as many months. Last month was NIT Calicut. Trichy should be fun.

Video Podcast with CTO of TCS

After doing almost 40 audio podcasts, it was time to evolve. And video is the way to go. I shot my first video podcast today for KirubaShow.com with Mr.Ananth Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer of Tata Consultancy Services. He was named a top 100 IT leader in the world by the computerworld magazine a few weeks back and then also awarded the leader amongst the 100.

TCS is India’s largest IT company with 83,000 employees and offices in 47 countries. The podcast will be published sometime next week.

For those who didn’t know, I host a technology podcast show on PodTech called ‘The Kiruba Show’ where I interview CxOs (CEOs, CKOs, CTOs, CFOs…. mostly CEOs) of Indian IT companies. My focus is on Internet, Mobile and Entrepreneurship.

When I landed at TCS’ office, it was nice to see the video guys had already setup the equipment and were ready to roll. Quite a paraphernalia they had got. I must thank Aditya Mishra, Director of Innovation Corporate Development at TCS for connecting me with Ananth. Aditya has been active on the BarCamp circuit and is part of the BangaloreBarCamp organizing team.

I landed up a few minutes early and used the time to fine tune my questions. This was an important interview. It’s not often that I get to interview the CTO of India’s biggest IT company and I wanted to really make this count.

The interview went off rather well. The sufficient time I spent on researching for the questions really helped. Ananth was a very jovial person and quite eloquent. He was evidently very passionate about innovation. One of my friends once joked that bit IT companies and innovation was an oxymoron. Ananth helped break that myth.

The interview was only 25 minutes long but it consumed over 2.5 hours over all. We had to change the camera angles to get in variety to the shoot.

During the shoot though, there were some goofups. Forgot to switch off my mobile and it rang promptly during the interview. I had my voice recorder on to also record the audio in addition to the video and its battery juice drained out. Drat!

Once the interview was over, I had a separate shoot speaking into the camera for the introduction part.

The professional camera guys were quite clinical in their work. They painstakingly calculated the light and adjusted the angle for every shot. Here, the entire team is putting their heads together to get the lighting right for a particular shot.

Overall, it was good fun doing the shoot. Video is clearly the way I’d like to head. However, for CEOs outside the country though, I’ll have to stick to audio interviews until I can figure out how to do video over Skype.

Planning Proto.in Second Edition

Proto.in is clearly India’s biggest entrepreneurship showcase event. The planning for the second edition has already begun in earnest and the team met up today to brainstorm on how to raise the bar even higher. It was one of most productive meeting with a lot of ideas flowing in. It was also one of the most debated meetings with a lot of decisions contested and mulled over. The whole idea is to make the event a lot better than the first edition. The event is scheduled for July 21 & 22 at IIT Madras.

Meter in Autorickshaws in Chennai? What is That?

The Tamil Nadu government recently announced a strict rule that autorickshaws should strictly charge by the meter. Well, they might, *if* they had a meter. From the experience today morning, that rule is clearly non-existent. I checked with nearly half a dozen autos … three of them didn’t have meters. The rest three won’t charge by the meter.

I told them about the new rule, and one auto driver, with a smirk in face said, “Go ask the government and then come back”. Clearly they weren’t afraid of the police either. It’s common knowledge that most autos in Chennai autos are owned by Policemen.

I hate autos. I think they are a curse to Chennai. I know many first time visitors quickly form a wrong impression of the city because of their bitter experience with auto drivers at Central Railway stations and at Airports. I find Bangalore auto drivers to be a better lot.

Announcing ‘SHOOT’ – The Hands-On Photography Workshop

A bunch of photo enthusiasts are teaming up together to organize a hands-on workshop called ‘SHOOT‘. The event is scheduled to be organized either on the 2nd or 3rd Sunday of April. This workshop has a limit of 15 members who are passionate about digital photography.

The workshop starts in the morning with a trip to the Koyambedu Market. This is Asia’s biggest Vegetable, Fruits & Flower market. It’s also wonderfully active and colorful place. It has a spirit of its own. Once the shoot is over, we all meet up at my home for a half day of learning from professional photographers.

There is no charge for the workshop but we do ask everyone to bring in their learning to the table. The only rule is that you must posses a SLR camera. Digital SLR preferred.

Here is a snap of colorful capsicums that I recently shot at Koyambedu Market when we went shopping.