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Latest Updates: hot RSS

  • fritz Says -> bye bye 2007
    1:49 pm on January 1, 2008 | 4 Permalink | Reply
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    Well the passing year has bought its share of good and bad experiences in my life they are as follows lets start with the
    bad things

    • heart break
    • bad health (malaria,heart attack,cold,fever, food poisoning etc etc)
    • killed the company I spent 2 years building it was very hard but had to do it

    good things

    • frizilla
    • good team for frizilla
    • some of my ideas finally took off
    • saw some of the work which brother has a capability to deliver am impressed with it
    • made some new friends
    • friends chipping in to help with my own venture (thank you guys)
    • brother finally found a calling and put his head down and got his first product finally ready the launch of it is next year

    This is my last post for this year so happy new year to everyone :)

     

  • fritz Says -> facebook the 15 billion dollar social network
    4:04 pm on October 29, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Yes facebook is valued at that much when microsoft picked up a 1.6 percent stake in facebook for $240 million it gave facebook the valuation of 15 billion read this for more info.

    Well if this is not a sign of a bubble building then what is as far as investing $240 million in a company goes for Microsoft well it is no big deal for a company who is having close to $6.6 billion in cash reserves but the question remains why would microsoft give out such a huge amount for such a small stake in a company which does not have a solid business model yet the rumors floating around is that facebook is planning to monetize its user base by launching its own ad network. Well yes good that is very good but for how long can a social network claim they have a active user base well the normal trend now is where your friends move you move.

    For example I was on hi5 then moved to orkut and now am very active on facebook and orkut.  I don’t even bother much to login to my hi5 account to check it as my friends are no longer active on that so what does facebook believe will not give another startup an opportunity  to come and swoop  all its users to their network  will facebook be able to maintain its user base after all it is a plain vanilla social network it is no  yahoo or google where there is not just one thing but many things that can be done with one id you get mail, social network,shopping etc etc yes facebook has opened their platform to third party developers but so are other networks.

    I am really struggling to understand why Microsoft would value facebook so much when myspace is termed as the king of social networks and I recently read somewhere that it is valued at $10 billion  now when the market leader is valued at $10 billion and and upcoming star is valued at $15 billion based on factors like opening up the network to outside developers which other competitors can easily copy and are copying and opening to third party developers.

    Well bubble or no it is good news for all tech entrepreneurs as it shows that the market is right for tech ideas and the VC’s are willing to invest in any ideas whether they are built on good business models or no.

    As of now it looks like millions of users is more important then having a good business model

     

  • fritz Says -> a perfect little car for me atleast one of the many out there for me
    1:02 am on October 11, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Yep a car like (this) would be perfect for me down here in Goa even though there are bit of concerns about it just going 125 miles on a charge that is roughly 200 km well for a small place like Goa it would be perfect for me to get around the only thing that will have to change is the color though Wink as it has to have some sort of shade of blue but even this is color is cool enough for a guy whose name is D’souza Fritz D’souza

    Oh if it can come with all the necessary cool gadgets and must haves like a missile launcher, a GPS tracking unit, a beer chiller,a nice music system, a TV with a satellite dish ya ya this is a lot to ask even without this gadgets the car is good to look at and also a technological marvel in a way I guess so a must have anyway once it hits the market and you don’t have to move around a lot on one charge for your vehicle I guess this vehicles would pick up and go mainstream if they could be recharged fast like even if it goes 200 km but if you could recharge the vehicle in say 5 minutes for another 200 km that would be perfect as then instead of gas stations you will see electric charging stations within the radius of 200 km.

    Well this one is by Subaru and Nissan is also coming out with one but I wonder if there is any indian company other then Reva working on something like this as tata’s are too busy working on their 1 lakh Rs wonder car which I am very very anxious too see.

    (image is linked from cnet site see the above linked article for more details about the car)

     

  • fritz Says -> Would Google buy RIM ??
    12:27 am on October 5, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    No No RIM is not Reliance India Mobile but the acronym for the Blackberry makers Research In Motion.

    Just stumbled across (this) found it very very fascinating but would Google make such a purchase who knows but In my opinion don’t think so my reasons being the price tag is too big even for a company like Google with huge pile of cash and they can easily raise a bit more if needed to fund such a acquisition but will they be able to digest and integrate this into their offerings is what would be interesting to see if this does go through with the $54.13B price tag it can go more then that too.

    Well with such an acquisition they would not just get a ready made hardware platform the blackberry but they also get a very important chunk of the corp clients who are users of the RIM platform so the only thing left for them would be integrating the hardware with their hosted applications for corporate domains and viola an enterprise class mobile collaboration suite and I guess that Google is bound to announce something huge since they have already taken their cash cow Adsense mobile so the Gphone is definitely on its way whether blackberry turns into a Gphone or there is another route Google will take only time will tell and their recent acquisition of zingku also shows their interest in the mobile space this is important for them in countries like India and China where the mobile penetration is more then PC penetration and they are definitely lagging in both this countries but so far Google’s mobile strategy has been a bit shaky am still wondering why they bought dodgeball some time back and their founders quit and left on an unhappy note with lot of media attention at their claims of how Google was not providing them with no resources to take the product further.

     

  • fritz Says -> Inspired by J. P. Morgan
    10:51 pm on October 4, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Normally at night when I channel surf when from one network to another till I settle on VH1 or something else which I find interesting the other night I was channel surfing and I landed up on the History channel and the one show that I love there is the Biographies well that night they were showing the biography of one Mr John Pierpont Morgan the only reason I stuck to watching the entire show was the fact that I had heard about Morgan Stanley and I knew that the Morgan in J. P. Morgan was somehow connected to that and since it is financial I thought I will find something interesting and interesting indeed it was.

    The fascinating part was how he built the 1st ever billion dollar company in the world by acquiring small steel companies and some big ones like Carnegie steel and then combining them to form the United States Steel Corporation In this deal what I found fascinating was the fact that when Mr Morgan went to meet the owner of Carnegie steel Mr Andrew Carnegie he was given on a piece of paper the sum that Mr Carnegie wanted for his firm on the piece of paper was the written the sum $480 Million and to this Mr Morgan said Done and that was it no due diligence, no evaluation, no lawyers, no power brokers that is plain old you tell me the price and I say yes or no the risk taking and the appetite of the Wild Wild West is not there in biz anymore just see the media circus around the Tata-Corrus deal and the arcelor-mittal deal the evaluations, market speculations etc etc where as the the biz deal between Mr Morgan and Mr Carnegie was between a buyer and a seller but in the modern world I guess this old fashion ways wont probably work. But then again Mr Morgan had another famous saying "If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it" with this attitude I guess he tackled the biz world too.

    For anyone who wants to someday build a billion dollar enterprise Mr Morgan is the perfect role model during the rough days the sort of person who could twist the govt to their benefit and also predict the movement of the markets and also place wise bets over what will be successful.

    To know a bit about this amazing biz figure check out (this) but this has just the minimum the other details which were shown in the history channels episode of biography are not there like what is corsair pact etc

    The people who inspire me from the biz world are Bill Gates, Steve Job, Richard Branson and now Mr J. P. Morgan there will surely be more and more people added to this list as I explore the vast jungle of corporate biographies of people who build empires with vision and hard work and how it all began with a small dream and a small startup.

     

  • fritz Says -> online collaboration heating up
    12:08 am on October 4, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Online collaboration space is all heating up with now the big players in this space being Zoho, Google with its hosted apps for your domain and now Microsoft with its latest announcements (this) of Office going Live. Well the others are not far behind even companies like AT&T (see this) and Cisco (see this) are trying to get into this space and not to forget even Intel is making a huge push into consumer internet with its investment arm Intel Capital providing funding to many consumer internet companies.

    But out of all this players there is one player which is doing this with killer technology by its side and that is Adobe yes the new owners of the Flash platform now with all the pieces falling in place it looks like Macromedia was a killer deal for Adobe to inject new DNA into itself to become part of the innovation wave that is hitting the web now and Flash is paying a key part of it. With (this) announcement they have made it clear that they are taking part in the race and they do have the technology and the resources to win the race but will they be able to do it is the multi billion dollar question.

    But The runner that will win in this might not be the one who owns the technology but the one that builds on top of it see this the company called communigate systems have built a flash client for collaborative groupware and the interface in the screenshots look killer and since Google is in the acquisition spree and so are many others this might be the perfect target for anyone who is looking at a very innovative way to get into this race with one acquisition and their management team looks good with loads of experience behind them so they will fit well in the bigger picture.

    Out of all the big guns the one that I am very interested in is Adobe with the glimpses of what they have shown of what they are cooking in their labs it looks like a good place for lots of fun work going on now. For a very long time I have not seen anything fun reported or leaked from sources from Google labs.

    The new adobe service share looks pretty impressive but the best review has been for the media player as that would be a perfect replacement for information devices on the go.
    This is the holy grail of consumer and biz tech now finding the perfect online collaboration suite so that people people can work in a decentralized environment from multiple locations in the web 2.0 world. only time will tell who will become the winner but till the time comes niche players who are solving small problems in a innovative way of the bigger collaborative pie are good targets for acquisition. So If you are working on any nifty little project in the collaboration space or you come across something nice leave a comment.

     

  • fritz Says -> navigating the social networking jungle
    2:17 am on September 28, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    The social networks that I am currently part of are hi5,orkut,zebo and now facebook and I get invites for more and more like bigadda etc etc but am quite fedup and joined facebook recently after joining all I can say is well just another social networking site with a slight difference.

    I was introduced to the world of social networking with the hi5 network and it was fun at that time to keep in touch with your friends then it started getting very very slow and then you saw the banner ads coming in and then constant server outage and at that point was fed up of it and then moved onto orkut and has been happy on that since joined on the zebo network since it belonged to a friend and was trying to promote it a bit (kinda like doing my part in helping a buddy) but recently with all the noise in the blogosphere and media about facebook and its wild wild 10 billion dollar evaluation finally i joined it to see what is it all about.

    In short what I can say about facebook is too many attention grabbing elements on your profile which keep you distracted from one purpose that a social networking site serves and that is too connect with friends and like minded people. Am still happy with orkut and plan to stick to that and also be a bit active on facebook and see where it goes the rumors floating are that orkut will also be opening up their platform to third party developers well I guess at that point of time they will also become like facebook but till that time comes they will offer a much cleaner and better utility to connect to your peers.

    Out of all I would say orkut is the one that is good and once they open up the api to outside world I guess they will grow a bit faster but what would really be good is if somehow google were able to convert gmail into a social networking app they have done it with integration of gtalk in the email client but in my opinion if gmail or yahoo or hotmail can offer the added layers ontop of the basic communication layer that an email app provides without hampering the communication layer then that has the potential to be the biggest social network ever.

    Don’t forget you can go by for a few days without logging into a social network but you cant let a day go by without logging into your email account and till now that has been the primary source along with IM to stay in touch with your friends. Well if someone is listening then this is a million dollar idea Wink

     

  • fritz Says -> weather forecast for the evening Caribbean Gayle creates havoc in south Africa
    11:18 pm on September 11, 2007 | 3 Permalink | Reply
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    wow what a match is going on right now it is wonderful to see such blistering batting from one of the players of my favorite cricketing team.
    It’s a shame he didn’t bat through entire innings
    well there are more matches for him in this tournament to try and break and create more
    records

    Go Gayle Go
    Go Windies Go Make Me Proud

    ok South africa’s reply has started hmm bad move I think Gayle should have opened the bowling that would have played into the minds of the South African batsmen and make them loose their cool this Sarwan is not good at mind games :(

    well thats all for now me getting back to the match :)

     

  • fritz Says -> updating my blog on star date 15 july 2007
    1:17 am on July 16, 2007 | 2 Permalink | Reply
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    Well the last couple of weeks have been hectic. Have had no time to relax and put my feet up well today was a day with less tasks to complete and just plain lazy around and I just did that got some spare time off and checked out some of my friends blogs and commented on their posts.

    The last few weeks have been hectic as well as eventful in my life
    why you ask?
    well
    for one I quit my job yes yes I resigned from a nice 9 to 5 job (well it was a job it was not one of those cozy jobs where a person works from 9 to 5 goes home and at the beginning of the next month comes to collect the pay cheque for me the job was a lot more hectic then having my own venture)
    why you ask again?
    Well I suddenly got the bad uncontrollable itch of becoming a entrepreneur and so I did not with one venture but floating three ventures at a time yes yes I thought one would not be challenging enough so went ahead and started three :) yes if you are still in shock I said three ventures and more are in the pipeline but for the first year I just want to build this three up to become leaders in the sectors they are in and then move onto other challenges in other sectors.
    so the three ventures are in nascent stages now and will blog about them once the world is ready to know about them :) at present all I can say is one is local and will affect Goa and the other two ones have a global impact.

    Well what about the current company that I am working at since I did play a significant role in getting it on track (I would say I still have not yet made it reach all its goals and would have loved too continue to build it up but now I have a new challenge and would like to pursue that) so will continue to be on board till the new management takes over.

    Till I am totally out of the present employers company I am operating 4 ventures which is beginning to take its toll on me. I am in a totally f****d up state right now. physically and mentally tired need a vacation to revitalize myself but no time to take one :( and also cant afford one financially with me investing all my money in myself and also trying to raise more capital from friends first and then will try to raise some from the market (raising capital in india is a headache and will write a separate post on that later).

    the other fun thing I did today other then reading friends outstanding blog posts and commenting is did some good old fashion reading of a paperbook the book is Business Miscellany (it is a gem of a book and very informative) also went through the latest issue of business world and will read the latest issue of business today tomorrow as my copy is borrowed by a friend and will be getting it back tomorrow. Well normally also I do read a lot at nights I scour through around 28 sources of tech and biz news with all this information I consume in a day maybe that explains why I get only a few hours of sleep daily. But reading online and reading a physical book is totally different experience and I prefer a book to a computer screen anytime.

    Once I finish with this I have more books which I have bought from pune during my pune trip and have not had time to go through them yet but now will make it a point to read atleast half an hour from one of the books daily.

    Also the other things that I have been doing is putting together all the paperwork necessary for the new ventures and all I can say is it is boring and a total turn off to an entrepreneur it is a troublesome affair but I guess everyone has to go through it and makes the person wiser about the working of the govt departments and how to handle all the different officers whose sole purpose of holding govt jobs is not to do any work and occupy the chairs and get paid from the govt treasury.Well the paperwork is going on and hopefully will soon be complete.

    It will be difficult to get the blog updated frequently now but whenever I get time will write a few words about my journey through life and the new ventures.

     

  • fritz Says -> Two big stories in corp world on this day
    12:33 am on July 5, 2007 | 2 Permalink | Reply
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    Bill Gates one of the few business leaders I admire is no longer the richest man in the world in terms of net worth he has been overtaken by Carlos Slim a telecom tycoon from Mexico. when his firm’s share rose 27 percent over the past 12 months.
    but this is solely based on Carlos Slim’s holding in his firm Telmex and is based on the share price appreciation in the soaring markets of developing countries the price stocks are rising but you never know when they might fall and if they do then Carlos Slim wont be able to keep the mantle of being the richest man in the world
    as for the portfolio of bill gates his holdings are so diversified and somewhere it was once reported that less then half his fortune is now linked to microsofts fortune that is very smart since he is no longer part of the management that runs the company on day to day basis.

    The other news is of Hilton Hotel Corp being acquired by the buyout firm Blackstone Group for a whooping 26 billion dollars wowie Paris Hilton is now even more rich after she got out jail (hahahaha) I wonder if her going to jail got Blackstone Group’s attention to make this deal (hahahaha)
    anyway paris hilton has more pocket change now and maybe she can take a break from partying give her fortune to charity and join a nunnery somewhere who knows it might happen tomorrow and shock the world tomorrow
    Hilton is a prestigious chain of hotels I remember Jay Leno of the Tonight Show saying that Paris should have been made to stay in one of the Hilton’s instead of a jail that would have been more torturing.
    Well personally I have not stayed in a Hilton but been to one of them in a place called Fujairah in UAE nice little small property on the Shores of Fujairah facing the arabian sea. It forms a get away from the corp world for the big guns form the main commercial hub of UAE which is Dubai.

    source for the above statements are source 1 and source 2

     

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