In 2006, folks at the company Odeo were brainstorming ideas for a new software product that they wanted to develop. They came up with the idea for “Twtr” for sending SMS-like messages to groups of people who may be interested in receiving it. Then they hit upon the word “Twitter” that stood for chirps from birds that also stood for “spreading inconsequential...
These are the times, when every third person that you meet in Technology world has an idea for an App. It could be every alternate person if you’re hanging out in geeky groups or among heavy Smartphone users. The Industry trends suggest a phenomenal surge as well. According to Gartner, Mobile Apps Store downloads worldwide for the year 2012 will surpass 45.6 billion. Out of these, nearly 90% are...
Piyush Singh is the Chief Information Office (CIO) and Senior Vice President at the Great American Insurance Company—a property and casualty insurance company, and Vice President of it’s parent company, American Financial Group [NYSE:AFG]. Under his direction and vision, Great American’s IT department has transitioned from supporting a legacy IT environment to become a trusted player in the...
Guess what’s the #1 Business Intelligence Tool in the world is? Oracle BI? Microsoft BI? Informatica? Cognos? None of the above! The ugly and the real truth is that the #1 Business Intelligence tool in the world today is….. …… The Spreadsheet! Yes! The lowly spreadsheet is the most used BI tool in the world, including every Indian IT company that we have come in contact...
When we think of Software Product Innovation, we imagine getting “Eureka!” moments 3 am in the morning, getting up and writing down inspired thoughts and coding them the next morning! Reality is much more mundane and is more of evolution rather than sudden insprirations from the sky! Yahoo started because Jerry Yang and Filo just wanted to create a searchable directory of information...
NASSCOM Product Conclave (NPC) 2012 is an exclusive forum for product entrepreneurs looking to get actionable takeaways and learn from experts, peers and practitioners on their Go-to-market strategy. NPC 2012 promises to motivate, inspire and educate. An all star cast of product entrepreneurs, including Ram Shriram (Sherpalo Ventures), Sajiv Sidhu (i2 technologies) will share their proven...
On the outside looking in, its extremely frustrating to hear of product teams shipping product multiple times a day. I tend to often question: “What in devil’s name am I doing wrong”? Is it that I have not defined the product requirements right? Have we hired the wrong people? Does our team not have enough experience? Is our culture not supportive of mistakes? Are we not focusing on the right...
Its a well known fact that the infrastructure costs of building a software / Internet startup have dramatically reduced. Although the costs of developers have dramatically gone up by the same percentage, the productivity per employee hired has also gone up dramatically. Given that a developer can now manage instances, push to production etc., the need for DevOps is moved to a much later day...
I read the cover story in Forbes on the success of Dropbox, which is set to do about $240 million in sales in 2011, with only 70 employees. As Forbes points out, that is about 3x the revenue per employee of Google, which is no slouch in the revenue per employee department itself. First, congratulations, Dropbox! This is the type of breathtaking number that makes the ordinarily successful...
Today was the second time I am hearing that the future of applications in enterprises are thousands of small apps instead a hundred or two applications! I was listening to the CTO of Computer Associates who forecasts the future of applications in enterprises as stringing together lots of small apps that do something very well rather than developing something from scratch fully! Here is the...
