BlogDay 2007: Serendipity is the new Geography

In the good old days, geography was the biggest factor that controlled what you can ‘find’ and access. Even with the advent of faster, cheaper, easier communication methods, the tight coupling between serendipity and geography remained. Mainly due to the the view that communication merely shrinks distances and enlarges the geographic scope as evident from the cliche Location!, Location!, Location! Add faster and cheaper computing to the equation, the game changes drastically. First, the distances are sufficiently shrunk leading to the rhetoric: Geography is History.
Though the distances are shrunk, the vastness remains unconquered. Just like how motorized transportation helped conquer the distance, computing power(with vast persistence i.e., memory) in increasingly employed to conquer the vastness. Google is a good example of a service that combines communication and computing to make geography history and also attempt conquer the vastness simultaneously. Increased reliance on such services has once again starting to control what you can ‘find’ and access. Thus the serendipity offered Google like services becoming the new Geography. Indeed, when Geography is History, Serendipity is the New Geography.

Now if you are a business, especially a small business, you must be curious on how to improve your Location in the new Geography. In other words how to improve your small business serendipity? Simple, Live Your Business Aloud! Embrace Social media. Just record the Zeitgeist of your (small)business in a social medium convenient/suitable for you/your biz. Engage in the conversation. The rest is natural and automatic. Spreading link love is a good way to engage in a conversation.

Today being blogday, let me spread some link love and enrich the geography – serendipity I mean! From my Zeitgeist (mostly)from Blogline subscription.

Angela Thomas aka Anya Ixchel I teach English Education and my research interests include digital cultures, new media literacies, multimodal semiotics and digital narratives. In Second Life, where I teach and conduct auto-ethnographic research, I am known as Anya Ixchel.

Sudha Jamthe I am a Tech Enterprenuer. Love trying all new technologies, especially digital media and hosted play of all sorts. I love the speed of innovation by entreprenuers and the energy of building great teams. I had great advisors and am trying to give it back as a starup advisor.

Rand Leeb-du Toit – Rand is the Chief Executive Officer of Yoick. Prior to that he was most recently an Entrepreneur in Residence and Director, Business Development at NICTA, an Australian ICT research institute. He was the CEO of an early stage venture capital company, Australian head of the first social networking phenomenon, First Tuesday and Executive Chairman of Tribalweave Capital.In addition to his board level experience with numerous high tech companies around the world he has a background in publishing and law.

Srini G – I’m a Linux user.I give at least one hour every morning to conscious yogic excercises and I get the rest of the day for myself.I love Mother Earth.I believe spirituality is the one thing that will save the world.“Zero expectancy, 100% acceptancy” — that’s what I’m upto. Let go the past. Have no expectations about the future, know that right things fall in right places at the right time. And joyfully accept the present, everything is just as perfect as it is .

Sig Seattle, Washington, United States: I am a foodie at heart, stuck in the techie world in Seattle, WA with my darling husband Siv where we, along with some dear friends spend a lot of time around food -eating it, talking about it, cooking it etc… I got inspired by some foodie blogs and started my own to share with you some recipes (own and borrowed) and reviews about the restaurants I visit. [This one I got by googling 'Eggplant Now' ]

In conclusion, when Geography is History, Serendipity is the New Geography. Your Zeitgeist is your Location.

Proto.in Second Edition: New Frontiers

This is the concluding post covering the Proto.in startup showcasing event held recently at IIT Chennai organized by The Knowledge Foundation.
The last category of startups to occupy the stage was New Frontiers showcasing companies that defy the regular categorization of Enterprise/Internet/Web2.0/Mobile etc.

First to go on stage was Hariharan of Thinxworks. Much of the presentation was a video show highlighting the cartoon making opportunities and challenges. In the digital age with all digital production based on high-end computing based production, ThinxWorks’s strategy of making movies with Clay animation was counter intuitive – just as the relevance of my Paper File Tracking System in rapid computerization era. There is a lot of opportunity in judicious mix of old methods along with automation using technology. More than the movie making itself I’m excited about the rapid prototyping support ecosystem that will get created by the success of ThinxWorks. I recommend they engage a CandyFab like community in Chennai as a talent pool brew. There were very pertinent IP/execution related questions from the VC sitting in the front row. Given my SecondLife.com involvement, I see a lot of interesting potential for ThinxWorks.

Next on stage was Lucid Software presented by C P Madhusudan. Lucid’s software makes the life easy for Non Destructive Testing professionals to gather and use data from different NDT data sources. Given the highly specialized nature of the domain, the NDT system vendors have created software that are tightly coupled to their hardware systems. For the NDT professional, working with multiple systems is a huge messy Kludge. Companies like Lucid will have build very good marketing competency on top of their top-class engineering geekyness and position themselves as De-Kludging providers. De-Kludging can translate into huge cost savings and productivity gains for the user industries. I wish Lucid Software fast success so that it inspires many more such De-Kludge ventures – that will restore the glory of Non-IT/Computer Science engineering domains.

Next on stage was Praveen from Hyper Analytix. Though the EDA industry has powered much of the growth of Hi-Tech thus far, as Sramana Mitra puts it – (snip)EDA industry, seemingly caught in a spin cycle of same ol’ same ol’, fierce price competition, high cost of sales, and an overall unattractive future . The apparent stagnation in the industry is making startups like Hyper Analytix to look at niches like functional verification and attempt ‘quantum leap in productivity, reduce cost by a factor of 10‘. As more things gets packed in ever smaller silicon wafer, functional verification becomes more and more complex and time consuming. Hyper Analytix is leveraging open source platforms and other evolutions in technology to deliver on their mission. May be they can leverage technology like Amazon EC2 make things cheaper/faster. As they say Disruption is Good! Hi Five to Hyper Analytix!