Happy IPO Facebook.
I was probably one of the first to join the Facebook and one of the first ones to join Google+. Orkut was the close product that came close to social network. But soon the Facebook simplicity made me to move from Orkut to Facebook. The fun part was that I DID find my old school friends, college friends, colleagues, family and neighbors on the Facebook. Probably Facebook was the only product that understood people’s “need to connect”. The more i used Facebook, i got addicted to it. Because all my friends are on Facebook and we shared videos, photos, ideas, reviews and views. I was so addictive on Facebook that I used to wish people on the Facebook for their birthdays and anniversaries instead of calling them. Soon, things changed, Facebook started sharing the likes and my data to companies for the advertisements. Facebook’s CEO started commenting that the “privacy is dead”. I could not close my Facebook account (only deactivate). I could not get all my data back to my local disk. The privacy and sharing controls are getting out of the hand.
At the end of the day, everyone wants to know your preferences and habits so there are more targeted ads. The more you share and spend time on the website the more they can learn more about you and hence more ad revenue. Your likes and dislikes give the companies a direct access to the product #analytics. The only danger with this approach is that you are always being tracked. You would never know what information could lead to what ? If you leave a public share saying that “I am off to a vacation in Hawai”. You house might be targeted by a burglar who is also on Facebook (or for that matter any #socialnetwork). However, it is important for the company and end user to understand where their personal data is going to and the side effects of such data.
#Google came up with Wave and Buzz to enter into social space but failed miserably. I never even considered to use them in anyway. Google+ was the only product from #Google that not only integrated the social elements but also cared about the privacy. It felt more of an extension to my gmail and google groups rather than a separate product. I would rather trust a single company. Yes, Google could turn out to be evil too. But I would rather live with ONE evil and not with multiple ones.
Facebook definitely lead the innovation and birth of several technologies in the space of #artificalIntelligence, #bigdata, #predictiveanalytics, #nosql, #hbase, #hadoop, #apis, #platform, #cassandra, , and many more. It is the great example of keeping the product simple, executing radically quick and getting continuous feedback from users.
Whether Facebook can sustain the competitive advantage in the long run or not. One thing is clear that the technology companies can grow faster than others with real products 
This is a good news for all the people in the technology industry.
Goodluck to all the Facebook employees. This will keep rest of people like myself to be optimistic.
Six essential tasks of a Product Manager
Product Manager vs Product Owner
There seems to be different versions of the responsibilities and accountability that’s floating around in the industry with #ProductManager and #ProductOwner. Especially, these days technology companies are creating several Product Manager positions like, “Tools Product Manager”, “UI Product Manager”, “API Product Manager”, “Technical Product Manager”. In that sense job applicants/employees are highly confused to see what their responsibilities are as a specialized product manager in a niche technology area.
Moreover people associate the #ProductOwner as more of an internal product champion relentlessly working with Engineering and QA to BUILD the product. Whereas #ProductManager works with external stakeholders (markets, customers and eco-system) and may not have time to work with the Engineering directly on a daily basis.
Does your organization view the Product Owner as Inbound Product Manager ? and Product Manager as Outbound Product Manager ? What specific differences do you see ?
Powerpoint Presentation Tips
- Introduce the topic. Why should audience pay attention to this presentation ?
- Provide the facts, context.
- Whenever possible use the 10-20-30 rule. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 as the font size (from Guy Kawasaki)
- Contrast the colors – background and foreground.
- Never use fonts that are hard to read.
- Don’t put too much of text (unless its training slides).
- Don’s use more than one picture in a slide.
- If you use pictures or graphs then provide the credits.
- If there are multiple presenters, make sure that there is a natural transition.
- When starting a presentation or ending it, make sure its done gracefully. Don’t do them abruptly.
- Choose examples wisely. Don’t use too many examples that may lead to more questions
- Spell check the content. It seems silly but many presentations has misspelled words.
- Make sure that the sentences are complete. The presentation slide deck itself should be self-sustaining.
- If you use a graph/statistic make sure that you describe what it is. Don’t just put the graph there.
- Acknowledgement and source of the facts, figures and graphs should be mentioned “somewhere” in presentation.
- Finally, provide takeaways, summary.
Good luck for your next presentation! Remember that everyone wants to present like Steve Jobs. But there is/was only one.
I would be glad to hear other view points.
Goodreads give away : IBM Rational Team Concert Essentials book
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Ibm Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials
by Suresh Krishna
Giveaway ends December 25, 2011.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
Honeymoon with iPhone 4S is over!
From iPhone 3GS it was a natural upgrade for me to 4S. I was so happy to be getting the 4S mainly because of the camera and #Siri. But not anymore.
- Battery drains too quick. I keep it charging the whole night and when i take it to office the next day morning, it lasts only till 3.00pm to 5.00pm. Yeah.. yeah.. i did remove the location based services and all.
- iOS 5 hangs frequently. Unfortunately this is the least I would expect from #Apple’s software.
- When you are on a call and then you open Camera, my phone almost always goes into “dead” mode. The only way it comes back is when all the batter is drained. Till that time I can not even force restart. None of the buttons work.
- At times I see funny scroll of numbers on the event notifications. I attached my company outlook to my 4S and during certain situations, the time on the event notification message just rolls randomly.
- I was very exited about Siri initially but not anymore. Especially, for my Indian-English accent, Siri is not the best voice recognition software that i would rely on. Instead, when i use my wife’s #Samsung #Galaxy S 2, I thought #GoogleVoice has a better capability than Siri.
May be i should have got the Samsung’s Galaxy S 2 ? I am still confused.
RIP Mr.Jobs
My family remembers Steve Jobs in many ways…
- Connecting the dots. Highly inspirational (and philosophical) beyond religions and beliefs : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
- When rest of the world is still on Sony walkman, Apple/Steve introduced iPod.
- Touch sensitivity, cool factor, utility, usability in one device – iPhone. Unfortunately even after 5 years, no one could introduce a similar phone.
- The inspiration and motivation to achieve excellence through design.
- How can a business do the best possible through design, technology, innovation and sexiness to demand higher margins.
- The design effectiveness gets validated when my daughter at 1.5 started playing games on iPhone effortlessly.
- Introduction of iPad made it even more difficult for the desktop and laptop manufacturers. How do they catch up with the Apple’s futuristic designs and usability.
- How else our kids have watched great moves from Pixar and taken them to dream world.
- Beyond any religious beliefs, i remember what he said… “You can only connect dots in the past and not in the future. If you do what you love, they somehow get connected”.
Steve is definitely larger than life! He has showed us that we could change the world with design and technology. Lets take it forward!
A new chapter in life (Aug 2011)
My exciting journey with Oracle has come to an end yesterday. I am glad to have so much fun helping customers adopting the Oracle Technologies and Applications. I am taking my passion on building platforms, SDKs and working with Agile teams a step further to the cloud. Starting tomorrow (Aug 15th 2011) is going to be a chapter in my life and I am joining Skire in Menlo Park, CA. Incidentally, India’s independence day falls on Aug 15th too
This move will bring me more closer to the customers, product strategy and cloud. I will be helping the Skire to move forward and accelerate the next generation platform in cloud. I will post more updates on the company and how i am doing there in a while. But for now, i am very excited to see the new team and especially with the great Product Management Team at Skire.
For those who is interested about the company…
Skire Home : www.skire.com
Skire Platform : http://www.skire.com/index.php/platform/
About Skire : http://www.skire.com/index.php/company/about/
Good Boss & Bad Boss (mindmap)
A quick mindmap on the good boss and bad boss. Do you guys feel the same too ? Please leave me your feedback if i missed something.
My take on Android phone (Samsung Infuse) vs. iOS (iPhone 3gs)
I have been using iPhone since 2007 and thought of moving to Android. Unfortunately, this did not happen. After 2 days of playing with the Samsung Infuse with Android, I returned this device in favor of iPhone 4.
Background : In the past 4 years many called me Google and Apple fan boy. In general, I am passionate about how technology changes our lives and Google and Apple definitely had their share in this world. With Google, I am a daily user of the GMail, Calendar, Docs, Chrome, Google TV, Sites, Picasa, Blogs, Youtube, Reader and especially in the past few days the Google+. As a user, i get much more out of Google for “free” (?). Yes, people might argue on this “free” stuff from Google, but that’s a separate discussion. The first time I bought an Apple product is in 2007 ( I know, i was introduced to Apple pretty late) with iPhone (EDGE). Then I moved from EDGE -> 3G -> 3GS, in spite of expensive upgrades from AT&T and Apple.
All these years, I used products from Apple and Google enough to form some opinions and evangelize my thoughts. The fact that Google was my “window” to Internet world and Apple was the inventor of “cool” gadgets, I never had them as competitors. Until the introduction of the Android mobile platform from Google. With Apple’s iPhone – “Software and Hardware engineered to work together” and with Google’s Android – “Mobile OS became a commodity”. With Android, technically any mobile phone manufacturer can come forward and start using the Android OS with their hardware.
I hated iPhone : Yes, right from 2007, so many people around me have this iPhone thingy that i slowly started getting “sick” of iPhone. Every year, there is a new release and if you don’t upgrade, you look like an old 70′s guy these days. As a user, I would like to have unique phone (at least in thoughts) or at least a phone that’s popular and not many people have. With iPhone, this sense of “premium” is lost. I live in Bay Area and when you walk in the streets of San Francisco/San Jose, you will know what i am talking about. However, in the mean while, i never realized how i got used to the iPhone UX. Its not just the user interface, but the elements of hardware in iPhone is what i think is the novelty.
I loved Android : For many doing businesses, it is a intuitive part to think about “giving choices” to users. Yes, Android did that. You could choose from LG, Samsung, HTC and others as mobile vendors and any mobile carrier at least in US. The Android applications are raising in numbers fast enough to touch or surpass the iOS applications and of course many are *free*. Many phones that had Android OS had better features “on paper” compared to a iPhone 3GS or 4G. e.g. Camera resolution quality, front/back camera, video quality, integration with Google Apps and others. And then, I love technology and I am a java programmer. So, i thought that going to Android would give me the “virtual” power of choice, software upgrades, and play with the applications as and when i want.
Something Changed : Last week (06/30/2011), i got my Samsung Infuse and played with it for few days. Its a great phone with 4.5″ Super AMOLED Plus screen looked great with emails, pictures and in general the screen looks very bright and lovable. Its very light and thin that i can carry it in my jeans. Believe me, for the screen size of the phone, I expected a lot of weight. The 8MP still camera and 720p HD video camera are very usable as if i don’t need any camcorder or digital camera (which i love that idea). But it was not the same when i used it for the most what i do – email and phone calls. The biggest WIN for the iPhone is that i got used to it unconsciously to the “simplistic” approach of the UX.
Rest is a history and please see the below video to see why i say “UX of iPhone is a lot better than Samsung Infuse phone”. Again, these are my views. Not many people may use the phone as i use and not many may see UX differences. When i used Samsung Infuse, i realized what i love about iPhone and what i got used to with Apple’s UX design. Its not just the software but the hardware too (a single button interaction for all the 4 generations of phone).
I love both the companies Apple and Google for their novel products and the ability to bring in a lot of innovation. I love Android technology and iPhone for my personal use.