It is said that there is no escape from death and taxes. While we reel under tax burden, there is inflation eroding what ever is left in hand. Badri at Mind Your Money Blog offers a sensible approach to combat inflation: Become mindful about your expenses. Simple - easier said than done. But help is around!

In yoga they say, if you can watch(observe) something keenly, you can gain mastery over it. Much of yoga is about gaining mastery over death itself! Or fear of death to be precise. Similarly, if you watch your expenses and review them systematically often, you can gain mastery over your personal finance. And money worries vanish in the process. With some money mindfulness, you will find that your overall quality of life improving.

To make it easy to Mind your Money, NrichSoft released the version 2 of Enrich personal finance software. Enrich is easy to use, targeted towards common folks who are not accounting savvy.

Full Disclosure: Nrichsoft featured in this post is my consulting customer.

[Aside: In the age of web2.0 and widespread broadband, should a personal finance software be a hosted free service? Well, going by Enrich's experience, it seems there is a huge market for shrink-wrap offline software in India. Non-techie folks are paying hot cash( Rs 995) and lapping Enrich up! I'm surprised, I'm sure you will be too.

Aside2: Google Ad based impulse buyers accounted for the most number of Enrich VPP returns. VPP is a Cash-On-Delivery method of posting a package. Not surprising on hindsight!]

One thing that differentiates AWS is how money is figured out neatly. Recently I was getting my hands dirty with AWS DevPay to learn how the premium EC2 AMIs really work. Before that, if you wish to use DevPay, you need an invitation to the limited beta. You also need a US bank account to make use of the service.

Once you have signed up for DevPay, You will be able to register your offering( Called Product) through the ‘Your Web Services Account’ drop down at aws.amazon.com.

After collecting basic details about the Product, you will be allowed to set pricing. Once you confirm all the details, the product will be given a Product Code( 9E6D5AB5 in my Product’s case) and a purchase URL( https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/user/subscription/index.html?offeringCode=0B3B6745) It takes 2-3 biz days to get the manual approval of the product. If there are DevPay signup issues like Bank account and such, it will get delayed further.

Now this product code is to be incorporated into the EC2 AMI to make it a premium AMI. Just build your AMI with your offering the usual way you build an ordinary AMI. Incorporate the Product Code from DevPay product registration using

ec2-describe-image-attribute <ami-id> -p <product-code>

Now verify the product code associated with the AMI using:

ec2-describe-images <ami-id>

Now if the product code is set, the AMI has become premium AMI. It can be run only by EC2 account holders that has signed up for the product code.

In the next blog post, I’ll describe the small app I cooked up using opensource software. The pain point I’m solving is keeping up with rapidly changing opensource project. Opensim being the case in point.

If you need to travel, do you buy a ticket for a plane/train ride or do you start building the rail road/airline infrastructure? But when it comes to computing infrastructure, until recently there were no ‘buy the ticket’ kind of option - you have to build the infrastructure all by yourself. With the advent of fast and cheap bandwidth, trends like on demand utility computing/compute infrastructure on the cloud looks promising. With reputed players like Amazon Web Services, Google( App Engine), Microsoft, and Sun betting heavily on the trend, the utility computing model is reaching the tipping point threshold. Want to know more about the trend and know how you can save money/make money riding the trend?
If you are in Chennai on 26th May, you are in luck: The next edition of Amazon Web Services Chennai Enthusiasts group meeting is scheduled to take place on at 5:30, Mon 26th May 08 at IC&SR, IIT Madras, Adayar Chennai 36. The theme of the event is ‘Getting Started with Amazon Web Services‘ with focus on peer-to-peer showcasing. Jinesh Varia, tech evangalist, Amazon Web Services will be making an interactive presentation on ‘Cloud computing for Startups and Enterprises‘. The presentation will serve as an intro to AWS, and the peer-to-peer showcasing illustrate how people are putting the platform to good use. The showcasing is an excellent opportunity to exchange and share tips, tricks and cool hacks one came across while developing AWS based web applications.

Be there!

Close to the heels of Indo-Japanese Nanotech initiative and Nano Technology Conclave 2008, the Iran India Joint Conference on Nanotechnology(IIJCN) is all set for Apr 27 - 29 2008. The conference is to be held in Tehran, Iran and is organized by Tehran University of Medical Science, and is co-sponsored by Iran Nano-Technology Initiative.
I came to know about the conference during the Nanotech Conclave 2008 presentation by Prof Ali Beitollahi heading the Iran Nano Technology Infrastructure Development Committee. Prof Beitollahi says there are more than 57 companies in Iran involved in nano tech activities of which 20 have successful
products till date. Iran Nano tech business network is a good place to start exploring about their offerings. They have a nano tube production unit with - 20kg/day output.
They make their own Scanning Tunneling microscope and export them too. A Nano additive for petrol makes it greener. They do Stem cell research and have made advances in cellular nano scaffolding.

Responding to the question of how resources gets shared, Prof Beitollahi recounted how every research group wants their own machinery and control them with lock and key. To encourage sharing, the Iran Nano Initiative has devised a incentive program that makes more funding available based on sharing score. Even service offered by technicians are included in the scoring and surprisingly and very interestingly, the incentive program works. Yet another reason to go to the conference at Tehran and see for yourself how it works!

Here is a segment from the conference website that caught my eyes:

So strong is the Persian aptitude for versifying everyday expressions that one can encounter poetry in almost every classical work, whether from Persian literature, science, or metaphysics. For example, almost half of Avicenna’s medical writings are known to be versified. Works of the early era of Persian poetry are characterized by strong court patronage, an extravagance of panegyrics, and what is known as سبک فاخر (”exalted in style”).

“Love’s nationality is separate from all other religions,
The lover’s religion and nationality is the Beloved (God).
The lover’s cause is separate from all other causes.
Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries”.—Rumi.

Nanotech is verse of different kind and Iran India Joint Conference on Nanotech will showcase some of the gems of that kind for sure.

Further, Mr Ali Morteza Birang, Attache, Head of Technology Cooperation Section, Embassy of Iran at New Delhi will be happy to provide additional information and coordination for the event. He can be reached by email birang at gmail dot com.

The Nano Technology Conclave 2008 was jointly organized by Nomura Research Institute Here I’d like to highlight some of the key aspects of Nomura that I learned and their motivations to be part of Nano Tech Conclave. Frankly, I heard the name Nomura for the first time only in the context of the Conclave, prior to that I just thought Nomura is a just a Japanese last name. From the internet lookup and from the NRI web site, it is clear that they are part of large and reputed financial services business(ESTD ~ 1925) with the associated research and consulting practices.
I was throughly impressed by Dr Naoki Ikezawa, Chief Industry Specialist, NRI, for the thoughtful assembly of experts for the conference and enthusiastic participation in the conclave from start to end.[Unlike the Indian counterparts who disappeared from the scene mid-course of the conclave. I'm sure they must be having very good reasons for the same yet I'm not impressed!]

The content presented by the Japanese team was relevant and of excellent quality. For instance, at the forenoon session, just after Dr Sivathanu Pillai outlined the need for a national Nano Technology Mission, Dr Naoki Ikezawa outlined how accurate information and forecast to stake holders could prove valuable to steer the mission. He illustrated it with patent heat map of Fullerene( nano material) in Japanese regions over time and how policy makers were able to create enablers around them. This presentation was backed up by a Day 2 Session by Hideki Murayama San of Frontier Carbon Corporation who talked about how they started Fullerene production at industrial scale and brought down the prices from US $7000 per gram to $5 a gram over a decade.

Tetsuya Kaneko san of Nomura further highlighted that nano tech for Japan is a survival strategy. Nano technology as an enabler that will touch all industries rather than exist as standalone industry was explained with an excellent metaphor: salt like tech and rice like tech. Salt is not visible in the food as such, but it has significant impact on the food similarly nano tech will not be visible yet pervade across industries. Unlike rice like tech say like iron and steel or IC chip industry which is very visible and bounded.

The sincerity for partnership with India on nano tech was very evident from the Japanese team facilitated by Nomura/Dr Naoki Ikezawa san. Keneko san was outlining where Japanese nano tech is strong and where there are collaboration opportunities. For instance, bio-nano tech with health care focus is not a strength of Japanese nano-tech industry, whereas nano-tech for sensors, measuring instruments with applications in electronics, computer, automobile industry there is definite leadership.

Each of the partnership/opportunity area mentioned was backed up by a presentation by experts from the specific field. Be it presentation by Masahiro Takemura san of National Institute for Materials Science- Japan, on Japan, Nanotechnology activities, or Denso Corp Nobuaki Kawahara san’s presentation on Automobile and MEMS, or Takashi Tomita san of Sharp Corp on Nanotechnology and Future of Evolution of Photovoltaic, or Hodeyuki Matsuoka san of Hitachi Ltd’s presentation on Research on spintronics at Hitachi, or Hideki Murayama san’s presentation on Fullerene or Tatsuaki Ataka san of Olympus Corp on Micro-nano Technology in Olympus, the underlying openness for partnership was the common thread.

Come to think of it, the initial presentation by Nomura and the subsequent presentations by other Japanese companies were statement complete - as in a patent draft - key concepts referred in the patent are defined somewhere within the patent document. It is just amazing how a handful of people from very large organizations are able to present themselves as cohesive team.

Here is the picture of Dr Naoki Ikezawa San along with Dr Shri Sivathanu Pillai. Photo courtesy The Hindu.

Also in the picture is Neeru Dhall able and deft Japanese-English Interpreter. She runs a consultancy company called Trans-Wel out of Delhi specializing on Research, Coordination, Interpretation and Translation service. Her appropriate informality and general (radiating of ) people empathy was impressive. Neeru, hat-tip for bridging the cultural and language barrier!

Here is my 2 cents on how the Indo-Japanese cooperation and how future conclave could be made more effective(Read what was oddly missing):

1) Layering was missing. In a conclave where wide range of people come together, there were no thumb rule to distinguish between present and the future, research and technology, engineering vs ready to use product.

2) Clearcut entry points for small businesses, and SME pointers were missing. Indeed, if nano-tech has to take off in a big way, the big players like the Japanese companies will have to transform themselves as platform players and actively encourage co-creation by much smaller players. If Amazon could do it effectively for IT infrastructure with Amazon Web Services, why not in other infrastructure intensive domains? Opensource techniques could to be explored to open up non-core patents and non-core infrastructures, thereby reducing entry barriers and increasing spurt in growth.

3) Risk capital opportunities and exits are not outlined. Risk capital and entrepreneurial action are key ingredients for disruption. And without disruption, even nano-tech will be pretty much boring :).

4) Entry for small and micro players through trading and service opportunities are to be outlined to make the ecosystem more vibrant.

Overall, the Indo-Japanese initiative is very promising and the Japanese sincerity is to be matched and cultivated by the Indian industry and other stakeholders. Hats off CII for facilitating the initiative!

The most inspiring session at Nano Tech Conclave was the talk by Dr Arup Chatterjee CEO, I-CANNano.

I-CanNano’s success story thus far is a case of applying cutting edge technology to an age old commodity product - the humble paint and coatings. The fundamental change in material characteristics translates as benefits like scratch resistance, less corrosion, longer life etc. At the coating front, the automotive glass coated with I-CanNano coating makes it more transparent under rain conditions. The water droplets run off due to the smoothness of the surface thereby increasing the clarity.

They have applied their nano material knowledge to fine tune different properties like, transparency, thermal or electrical conductivity, corrosion resistance, scratch resistance, etc and perfected the production method to industrial scale.

Interestingly, they undertake collaborative contract research too. This is a good thing, they are not stuck with product mindset or too carried away by service mindset( the bane of IT boom). Surely I-CanNano and its founder Dr Arup Chatterjee are worth watching and tracking. His team is poised to be the Infosys of Indian nano-tech!

I was invited to be part of Nano Technology Conclave 2008 organized by Tamil Nadu Technology Development & Promotion Centre, CII, and Department of Science and Technology, in association with Nomura Research Institute Japan. The highlight of the inaugural session was keynote address by Dr A Sivathanu Pillai, Chief Controller R&D – DRDO and CEO of BrahMos.

The keynote covered the entire spectrum of Nano Technology from present scene to future projections touching wide ranging industries and concerns. Here is a glimpse into some that caught my attention. I’ve categorized them into five broad areas to make my understanding easier:

Dr Sivathanu Pillai caught the attention of experts and novice alike by illustrating the charm of Nano-technology using peacock feather as an example of nature’s won nano-particles at play making vivid colors. Then quickly got on to estimates for 2015 when Nano Tech will be ~ One Trillion Dollar business by conservative estimates and ~ $ 3T by libral estimates. Nano boom is set to coincide with the convergence of Information Technology, Bio-technology and Nano tech advances, with growth estimates at 50% CAGR beating the growth rate of IT and BT at ~35% and 25% respectively. Even if you take it with a pinch of salt, the numbers are just amazing.

If quantitative estimates did not sweep you, the qualitative potential will:
Nano materials and their disruptive potential

Right from the day to day dress material to aerospace materials will be re-looked and redone to incorporate nano-tech advances. A nano-particle coating on dress material will make them stain and dust resistant - changing the concept of washing them.

A shoe made of nano-material will enable a person to walk faster!?

Displays, all kinds of coating, chemicals in short all thing manufactured will be touched by nano revolution.

MEMS and nano fabrication has a lot of disruptive potential too.

Nano Technology and Health care
Natural bone surface is a nano-surface, Tissue engineering is more effective with nano-technology.

Integrated drug delivery can change the fundamentals of medical science: Cancer can be detected at very early stage and cured early. A glucose sensor and insulin delivery system could manage a diabetics insulin levels automatically.

Magnetic nano-particles along with cunning use of magnetic field can be used as localization tool that can bring down side effects significantly.

Nano technologies impact on social engineering, governance
Nano membranes has huge potential for drinking water purification. In the future, it will be possible to filter out harmful viruses like polio virus using a nano-filter. This has huge implications in terms of water security.

Certain disabilities like blindness and deafness can be overcome using bio-chip implants. There was even a video of Parkinson disease patient implanted with bio-chip while awake, and instantly gaining motor skills.

Nano technology can be used in pollution control. Even heavy metals could be filtered out!

Counter terrorism, bio-warfare weapon detection, carbon nano-fibers based radars can help stealth and counter stealth efforts. Similarly smart carbon dust could help survive a nuclear attack.
Nano technology and energy security
Energy security is one very promising area where nano-tech is on the verge of playing a crucial role. Firstly, the renewable energy solar cells can be made more efficient, and cheaper with nano-materials. Fuel cells is another very promising area.

At personal level power generating dress is possible with TiO2 coating on the dress. Similarly rechargeable batteries are set to see revolutionary high performance.

Lighting applications of nano-materials could save upto 10 percent of energy.

Nano technology Startrek Sci-Fi reality culture
The following stuck me as straight out of Sci-Fi:
Bio-chip implant, molecular robots that will co-operate to seek and destroy viruses within the body( a futuristic video clip was shown to this effect), cheaper faster space travel.
Life span increase with Artery cleaning and such exotic medical applications. Molecular level self replicating bionic ‘bots.

Dr Sivathanu Pillai further outlined that more than 2 million knowledge workers are needed for nano-tech. He further lamented that while papers are getting published, conferences are held, there is no concerted effort towards global nano-technology leadership. On the industry side for instance, DRDO is forced to get into manufacturing certain materials, whereas the industry could do it and re-purpose the same things for consumer and medical applications. The industry is yet to wake up and invest in a big way. The academic is not fully ready yet. A mission mode approach is to be put in place with a full reputed mission director.

We better wake up to this nano-revolution lest we miss it just like we missed the industrial revolution.

Sundararajan - Director ARCI, Dr Naoki Ikezawa - Chief Industry Specialist Nomura Research Institute, V Aiyagiri Rao Adviser DST, Bill Dobson - Director Ontario Industrial Research Assistance Program, A Nagarajan IAS, Princiapl Sec Planning and Development TN Govt, Anjan Das, Head Technology, IPR, TDC’s CII presented at the inaugural session. This post has already overshot its length to include them here.

Overall it was very educative and inspiring!

Who needs fiction when blogs are there or when truth is stranger than fiction? Warrren Adler Short Story writer was at Amazon Island in Secondlife to share some of his Short Story writing tips. It is natural to understand his lament that “short story has gotten a bad rap during the past few years and many outlets for this medium have closed”. Well, when some doors close, some other doors open. As demonstrated by his SecondLife presentation itself. Hey, when an 80+ year old non-techie uses any form of digital it is worth celebrating, when he uses the edgy SecondLife to talk about literature it is a landmark event.
In this first of the five part series, Warren and others discussed about three short stories of Warren. The theme of the discussion was to illustrate the structure of a short story. And what really makes a short story come alive. The stories were: “Good Neighbors,” “The Mean Mrs. Dickstein” and “The Cherry Tree.”

As I unserstood from the session, the story has a start, the middle and the climax. Purpose of start/build up is to set the context for the middle. And in the main, there must be conflict. Make the characters as plausible and keep the conflict logical. That is the way to make the reader relate. Once this tension is built, climax is the way to release the tension in any particular way. Climax is an opportunity to infuse your unique point of view to the situation. This creative high is what authors live for and Warren Adler is no exception.

Of the three short stories discussed, “The Mean Mrs. Dickstein” was very hilarious, here we go from the chat log:

WarrenAdler Aeon: In this last story a nice older woman sits on her favorite bench in central park reading a novel;.
[12:58] WarrenAdler Aeon: Another woman sits next to her and beging to annoy her by using her cellphone to change the venue of a fancy party she is having.She is particular loud and annoying and after awhile this nice lady asks her to please lower her voice. She tells her to go away.and continues to bew loud and obstrreperous.The nice lade is motified by her behavior. After she changes the venue of the party to another restaurant she says something nast and leaves. The mild mannered nice lady who has never hurt anyone in her life and has overheard the woman, calls the new venue and cancels the womans’ new party. What do you think?

If you have missed the first session not to worry, there are four more sessions in line(from Jeff-Barr’s blog):
Session Two (Feb 2
Tragic events and how they resonate Mr. Adler will discuss two of his short stories that deal with the aftermath of 9/11 and how these tragic events linger in memory and trigger ideas for stories. The two stories are “I Can Still Smell It” and “That Horrid Thing.”

Session Three and Four (March 6 & 13)
Short Story Contest Mr. Adler will discuss his short story contest and why he decided to start it. He will also announce the winners and discuss each story and why he chose them. If possible, contest entrants will convey their story lines or read the stories.

Session Five (March 20)
How to put “life” into stories
Mr. Adler will talk about his novel FUNNY BOYS and how it took shape. He will describe the era that is described by the term “Borscht Belt”, how it came about, what life was like then (1937) and the brutal gangster era at the time when Murder Inc., a group of Jewish and Italian killers, was in its heyday.

Join “Warren Adler Fans” group in SecondLife for notifications.
If not anything, you can watch unleashing of the digital age - see how Amazon Shorts or SecondLife is able to collapse geography!

I got invited to the CII Member Fellowship Evening organized by CII Southern Region.
Three speakers representing varied background and interest were lined up.

C K Prahlad was first to go. He started with ‘I’m going to disappoint many of you – I’m not going to talk about BoP’ instead CKP talked about his upcoming book to be released in April.
C K Prahalad wasted no time drawing the audience towards Next practices rather than Best practices. Underlying theme being: Innovate the innovation process itself. Fundamental shift in paradigm from Firm Centric view to customer centric – dealing with customers one at a time. He made a powerful illustration citing the case of Build a Bear – a specialty store where children can custom build their teddy bear. Where the ingredients of making a teddy bear are assembled Just in Time with the ultimate end user fully involved. Very Agile indeed. The teddy is Given a Life by the child with a heart, a sound effect and an external style with whole nine yards of birth certificate and a promise to be the best friend to the teddy. For the parent and the child pair, it is not the product, it is the experience -an opportunity to co-create is central to the experience. For the store, there is a significant reduction in total SKUs and the SKUs in the inventory are in synergy. Further there is opportunity to up sell merchandise like sports tees and accessories enhancing the experience for the child and revenue for the store with very high profit margins.

With this, C K Prahalad asked the industry captains: Why are you not pitching your biz this( customer experience centric) way? Why pitch by cost, quality and response time efficiency?

C K Prahalad went on to illustrate the point with more serious/life critical example - pace maker expert monitoring. With pace-makers, there is not much point in arguing about quality. Here the opportunity for value creation is outside the product as such – ability to monitor state of your heart by remote expert, totally personalized. [Alluding to how Medtronic - long time market leader in pace-maker woke up to effect CareLink]. Under special circumstances, different service partners are to be activated( articulated as CKP likes to put it) to deal with the situation. Sometimes the local hospital is involved, some times an ambulance is involved and of course some times the priest gets involved! Reinforcing the concept of customer centric, fulfillment one customer at a time personalized to fit his/her context well.

C K Prahalad formulates serving one customer at a time as N=1. In order to service this one customer like this, a whole lot of reliably working partnerships are to be forged. It invariably will have to scale globally like it or not. This if formulated as R=G( Resource = Global. Or simply as I see it - Radius of operation = Global ). This is what OnStar by GM did to high end cars monitor special conditions and articulate service partners to respond to customer’s specific situational need. To a lesser extent by Dell to assemble a computing hardware of your choice by N=1 and R=G.

The key characteristic of a The Firm serving N=1 with R=G are:
Node within a global web.
Personalized Experiences
Co-creation
Celebration of Individual
Thematic experience.
Delivery Network.
Li & Fung is an example of 100 year old US$10b trading company illustrative of ‘Platform Play’ success. Netflix, Google, Amazon are other examples cited.
Obviously this is going to be capital intensive and highly IT intensive says CKP. Thanks to the India growth story, capital is within reach. And IT is abundant in India. Why are we just using it to make others rich and competitive? With that challenge, he went on to question if Science is the way to do Innovation?
There was a quick run-through of palletized biomass fuel powered smokeless stove. The stove will free the rural women folks from smoke and soot exposure. IISc folks pitched in with ceramic coating. Like that a whole lot of resources were used to assemble the stove and the supply chain around it. Millions of pieces are deployed in India and it is getting deployed in other developing markets. BP the sponsor of the project got entry into consumer space that too at the base of the pyramid. The R=G is kind of obvious here but the N=1 eludes me. Perhaps I need to check the case study in detail.

For me, with Social Media familiarity made me easily relate to what C K Prahalad was talking about to the point of wondering if the YouTube like democratization( N=1 + Affordable = Democratization, unlike say OnStar) play out in physical space more intensely and much faster than anticipated.

PS: I attended an Agile event on the same day. I found it bit ironic that Old School industries are emulating user centric Agile like tech success stories. And in Agile the good old manufacturing best practices are gaining new currency.