Not any more… Hotel Saravana Bhavan

Me and my family where going to the Thailand exhibition yesterday and it was noon, It was the first visit to Chennai trade center and had doubts on whereabouts of eat out places, so we wanted to have a light lunch as we had late break fast

.

We had a choice of going to Hotel Rathna, just then my wife said she wants to head for Hotel Saravana Bhavan just opposite the road, she was a huge fan of this Hotel, that was just about to change.

So we looked at menu and ordered for 2 sambar rice and a curd rice for my son.  The guy suggested I go for a full fledged meal. I said, I want only the things which I ordered, after few minutes he returned and said that the curd rice would take time. I was thinking, all full fledged meal had curd rice as part of menu. So how come they will supply Curd rice for those customers alone. Any way I was in no mood for argument, I asked him to get me a plain dosa. Look at what I received for sambar rice, I felt like they are feeding the dogs. The plates where already worn out. We couldn’t tolerate any more. Look at the heavy pricing and the little quantity, It turns out like that they are avoiding customers who can’t  make a minimum billing of 150+ per per customer. They know that they have enough customers why not charge them more, and the attitude of the staff was like if you wish, eat this piece of crab and this is how we offer things to customers.

This day we have decided no more to Hotel Saravana bhavan. I know there a zillions of Hotel Saravana Bhavan fans. Still wanted to say there are enough places which give you good vegetarian food with ambiance and be less pricey.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Panic Mode, Self Destruction mode – The future of Mobile Phones.

Well I did watch the movie Mission Impossible 1,2 & 3. I am taking this to next level, I think it is high time for Mobile phones to have this feature of Self Destruction mode. Why?

You should have heard about the excellent feature of Mobile tracker from Samsung. Wow -  Awesome, That Awesome didn’t help my friend to get back his mobile.

What is Mobile tracker?
The owner of the mobile phone needs to store 2 sets of mobile number on to Samsung phone. After which in any case some one changes the SIM card of that mobile with a new SIM card, Immediately a SMS is sent to both the registered numbers of the new SIM card inserted or mobile phone number is revealed. So that the Owner can track who is currently owning his/her mobile.

Now back to story…

My friend had recently lost his mobile tracker enabled mobile phone, in spite of he calling up the current mobile owner, the phone has not yet reached his hands. He threatens to throw the mobile in to a WELL, rather he returns the mobile of fearing a plot to get captured by Cops.

So here is my simple suggestion, I am sure the mobile manufacturers are listening

This phone should have these features

1) Data Sync

2) Panic Mode

3) Self Destruction Mode.

Data Sync: Why can’t all data be backed up instantly or atleast every day, week or month, Well I suggest that to happen automatically on a computer through Wifi or any other method possible. As soon as the user authenticates a particular computer and when the user is well inside the network it should back up the new updates, with out even bothering the Mobile phone owner.

Panic Mode: As soon as you loose your mobile phone, you send an SMS to your mobile phone with some unique keys. From then on any SMS on that mobile phone received will be forwarded to the desired number set by you, All voice calls in conference mode. The data card datas are completely erased.

Assuming the thief is smart enough,  inserts a new SIM card, Panic mode automatically gets activated and any future communications are to shared with the 2 desired numbers already set by the owner of the Mobile phone. More of an enhanced mobile tracker. Let us say the thief is even more smart enough to have an SIM card inserted with little money re-charged, then SMS alone gets activated and when money recharged with sufficient money it should do with conference call.

Self Destruction mode: Assuming you spoke to the thief and is not ready for any deals. Then why the heck he should have your Mobile phone or even sell them. Start activating the Self destruction mode by just sending the SMS with a unique key, kindly note that SMS can be activated from any mobile phone. The mother board starts to melt down by alerting the user with a speaker phone voice activated for self destruction.

Happen to read from Seth Godin blog on

Gil lost his cell phone

I think Seth would appreciate my idea.

Kindly note: Mobile manufacturers, If you intend to use my idea, Kindly reward me. Let’s discuss.

Know you customers – need & usage

A disappointed salesman of Coca Cola returns from his Middle East assignment.

A friend asked, “Why weren’t you successful with the Arabs?”

The salesman explained, “When I got posted in the Middle East , I was very confident that I would make a good sales pitch as Cola is virtually unknown there. But, I had a problem I didn’t know to speak Arabic. So, I planned to convey the message through three posters…

Man exhaustedMan drinking coca colaMan is energetic

click on the image for a large view

First poster- Aman lying in the hot desert sand…totally exhausted and fainting.

Second poster – man is drinking our Cola.

Third poster – Our man is now totally refreshed.

Then these posters were pasted all over the place

“That should have worked,” said the friend.

The salesman replied “I also didn’t realize that Arabs go from right to left”

Kindly note: this was a forward mail, I liked it, so I am sharing with you all.

How to choose a stable working software product?

My Product Manager was recently here at our Chennai, India office, currently he stays in the U.S He actually suggested this to our customers or who ever he met at the trade shows, (when customer do enquire about stability) on how to get a stable working software.

Simple look at the build number for a released product, if the last two number was Zero after the last dot, it is not the right time to upgrade from the previous version, Which you currently have. The better one would be when product makes updates of the release and the build number reflects a decent version number. Well the “decent” depends

What makes the difference on the build number?
As soon as a software get released. Customers download a free version of the software or even buy them and install at their working environment. For some it works like a charm, for some the hell freezes over. This doesn’t mean that the software is not tested on different working environments, it is just that very few test bed opportunity happens or few environmental simulation happens, and adding fuel to the fire -  customer environment may have different hardware to software and some software may actually have conflict with the newly installed ones.

So the development team gets the feedback fixes the bugs and make a update of the release. So does the Build number change for any product.

one more other way to ascertain that the product is stable, is to look at the forums of the product or any other public forums if available. Look for number of recent issues, bugs being reported. If it is moderately low, It means you have “decent” version out there for you to install. Kindly note: I assume that the product is fairly known to the outside world.

What he said seems to be very true?
An year ago, I was an early adopter for the Mahindra Renault Logan in India, “Thee Car”, there has been a substantial improvement done on the new Mahindra Renault Logan and the price being much cheaper than when it was released.

The logic can be applied to various other fields, wait and watch.

I am sure most of you know this trick, I just made this post for the new bees. Hope this helps.

Chennai water Desalination plant

We all know that the next time, if there is war it has to be for water. I am not joking. Water is abundant, very much true. How much of water is fit to drink remains a major question.

If most Governments take the Eden project seriously, they could end the war for water.

I have been watching Discovery Channel at 9 P.M amazing. Here is what I would like to suggest to Chennai Metro water department. I am sure they are planning for water desalination plant, but would be great if they could look in to the latest technology of producing water to its clearest form with one time production cost.

As Nature seems to do the natural work of desalination.

The project is seawater greenhouse, the idea was sort of dream for Charlie Paton. So go a head and check out the Eden Project.  You may want to look in to the video of water is naturally desalinated to obtain pure drinking water.

If you liked the idea, and you felt Chennai should install a low cost desalination plant with no fuel for production, please blog about the Eden Project. You don’t even need to trackback to this blog post. But do blog if you are blogger, if you are a reader please do share this blogpost by bookmarking on delicious, digg, reddit, fark, clipmarks, stumbleupon and please do share the you tube video

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How Commercial Software, can fight against the Free Softwares?

Before you jumping in to making of a software you looked in to the market and realized there is enough market share. Now you made it, wanted to test them. You made it free as a beta Phase, you now started making commercial version of the same and by retaining the free version with limited features for people to try.

Guess what? A new player comes and provides a me too version of the software for free, only revenue channel being advertisement inside the product.

How do you fight the free version?

Now let us look at same problem solved by the big software companies, I am just taking 2 examples.

  1. Microsoft Windows VS Linux
  2. Camtasia snagit VS Firefox addons Screen Grab VS WINK (Free)

Microsoft Windows – People continue to make fun of the “Blue screen of Death” in Windows, but funny bone people continue to run their machines with the same Microsoft Windows OS at least the majority of them.

When the threat came from Linux for Windows, I remember every media said that it was death of Windows and even now people say that web will be the new OS, that is still speculative.

What did Microsoft Windows do?
If I am not wrong, they came with lot of advertisements to educate users about the benefits of using Windows. They came with Windows XP SP1, SP2 & SP3 and fixed as much as they could. They executed it well.

I believe the marketing spend on Microsoft XP could have been almost or significantly nil when XP sales was at its peak. Word of mouth still holds good in business. Techies still continue to say XP is stable compared to Vista and there is no major innovation in Vista, that people have upgrade to Vista.

To say, we are still dependent on Microsoft for most of our office productivity. Aren’t we?

The second story is the most significant one. Their product is easy to create and it requires less effort and they still continue to be leaders in their USP. I am taking about TechSmith the makers of Camtasia Snagit.

They did face the similar issue of free software from the open source community.

The popularity of Firefox add ons created a market slow down for Camtasia Snagit and on top of that was the Freeware software called WINK, it did almost the same functionality of Snagit and it was free and forums was available for support.

How did TechSmith Camtasia Snagit fight?
Camtasia Snagit 7.2.5 the earlier commercial version of the software was given free.

Do you want to know why they made it free?
The story goes like this in the Indian shop vendors or Medical Shops, If you ask for a medicine and if it is currently out of stock, they will send one of their members to collect the same medicine from the medical store just opposite their store or even few streets away to procure the same and give it to their customers. It is that the customer gets a feeling that any medicine he needs can be obtained. And that he will come back to the same medical store if he needed one.

TechSmith didn’t want end users to try free software instead allowed users to try the previous commercial version for free.

I use Camtasia Snagit free edition as I experience the reliable, proven and easy to use screen capturing/recording software. BTW, I have already tried the software and its features, and even know each and every interface. It is just that it is easy to use, Comfortable. The only feeling being left out, that I am unable to use the advanced features, which are available in the current commercial version.

For the extra mileage they have contributed few projects called Jing Project and ScreenCast
That takes care of community etc etc

Final Notes: Winning over Free is difficult, but not impossible. If you believe in Free, you can’t win over Free. Undo the learning and fight against Free. If you wish to.

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Egg logic – apply to reduce Fuel price

The below mail was forward, I think it is worth a read for people who want to reduce the price of Petrol. If not many, I would like to still support this movement. Wish there was some website to educate people.

A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast.  When he goes to the
grocery  store he pays 60 cents a dozen. Since a dozen eggs won’t last
a week he normally buys two dozen at a time. One day while buying eggs he
notices that the price has risen to 72 cents. The  next time he buys
groceries, eggs are 76 cents a dozen.

When asked to explain the price of eggs the store owner says, “The price
has gone up and I have to raise my price accordingly”. This store buys 100
dozen eggs a day.  He checked around for a better price and all the
distributors have raised their prices. The distributors have begun to buy
from the huge egg farms.  The small egg farms have been driven out of
business.  The huge egg farms sell 100,000 dozen eggs a day to distributors.
With no competition, they can set the price as they see fit. The
distributors then have to raise their prices to t he grocery stores. And on
and on and on.

As the man kept buying eggs the price kept going up. He saw the big egg
trucks delivering 100 dozen eggs each day. Nothing changed there.   He
checked out the huge egg farms and found they were selling 100,000
dozen eggs to the distributors daily. Nothing had changed but the price of
eggs.

Then week before Thanksgiving the price of eggs shot up to $1.00 a
dozen. Again  he asked the grocery owner why and was told, “Cakes and
baking for the holiday”.  The huge egg farmers know there will be a lot of
baking going on and more eggs will be used. Hence, the price of eggs goes
up. Expect the same thing at Christmas and other times when family cooking,
baking, etc. happen.

This pattern continues until the price of eggs is 2.00 a dozen. The man
says, ” There must be something we can do about the price of eggs”.

He starts talking to all the people in his town and they decide to stop
buying  eggs. This didn’t work because everyone needed eggs.

Finally, the man suggested only buying what you need.  He ate 2 eggs a
day. On the way home from work he would stop at the grocery and buy two
eggs. Everyone in town started buying 2 or 3 eggs a day.

The grocery store owner began complaining that he had too many eggs in
his cooler.  He told the distributor that he didn’t need any eggs.  Maybe
wouldn’t need any all week.

The distributor had eggs piling up at his warehouse.  He told the huge
egg farms that he didn’t have any room for eggs would not need any for at
least two weeks.

At the egg farm, the chickens just kept on laying eggs.   To relieve
the pressure, the huge egg farm told the distributor that they could buy
the eggs at a lower price.

The distributor said, ” I don’t have the room for  the %$&^*&% eggs
even if they were free”.   T he distributor told the grocery store owner
that he would lower the price of the eggs if the store would start buying
again.

The grocery store owner said, “I don’t have room for more eggs. The
customers  are only buying 2 or 3 eggs at a time.  Now if you were to
drop the price of eggs back down to the original price, the customers would
start buying by the dozen again”.

The distributors sent that proposal to the huge egg farmers but the egg
farmers liked the price they were getting for their eggs but, those
chickens just kept on laying.  Fin ally, the egg farmers lowered the price
of their eggs.

But only a few cents.

The customers still bought 2 or 3 eggs at a time. They said, “when the
price of  eggs gets down to where it was before, we will start buying by
the dozen.”

Slowly the price of eggs started dropping.  The distributors had to
slash their prices to make room for the eggs coming from the egg farmers.

The egg farmers cut their prices because the distributors wouldn’t buy
at a higher price than they were selling eggs for. Anyway, they had full
warehouses and wouldn’t need eggs for quite a while.

And those chickens kept on laying.

Eventually, the egg farmers cut their prices because they were throwing
away eggs they couldn’t sell.

The distributors started buying again because the eggs were priced to
where the  stores could afford to sell them at the lower price.

And the customers starting buying by the dozen again.

Now, transpose this analogy to the gasoline industry.

What if everyone only bought $10.00 worth of gas each time they pulled
to the pump?  The dealer’s tanks would stay semi full all the time.  The
dealers wouldn’t have room for the gas coming from the huge tank farms.
The tank farms wouldn’t  have room for the gas coming from the refining
plants. And the refining plants wouldn’t have room for the oil being off
loaded from the huge tankers  coming from the oil fiends.

Just $10.00 each time you buy gas. Don’t fill it up.  You may have to
stop for gas twice a week but, the price should come down.

Think about it.

As an added note…When I buy $10.00 worth of gas that leaves my tank a
little under quarter full. The way prices are jumping around, you can
buy gas for $2.65 a gallon and then the next morning it can be $2.15.
If you have your tank full of $2.65 gas you don’t have room for the $2.15
gas.

You might not  understand the  economics of only buying two eggs at a time
but,

you can’t buy cheaper gas if your tank is full of the high priced stuff.

Also, don’t buy anything else at the gas station; don’t give them any
more of your hard earned money than what you spend on gas, until the prices
come down…”

just think of this concept for a while.

………………please pass this concept around….reaching out to
the mass ..the world …..the universe

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Are we still Indians?

The question which raises in mind, because of two issues which I came across the “The Times” daily, seems to be better than “The Hindu”. Content is the King.

  1. Hogenakkal dispute – border for Tamilnadu and Karnataka
  2. IPL – Indian Premier League

There is no dispute in this world which cannot be solved by just talking
All it takes is members from both sides to talk about their issues and come to a conclusion for the wellness of the society.

This is not the first time in the NEWS about Hogenakkal, Tamil people residing in Karnataka have under gone the troubles, Vandalism to Tamil people’s property is outrageous, with cops being on their side and the political system adding fuel to the fire.

Whom are we fighting against?
Aren’t we brothers and sisters, fighting is good for good relations. We have seen them with siblings. But destroying your own brother’s/sister’s property is not tolerable. Parents have only one thing in mind, their children well being. So what is the political parties behaving as parents do?

So coming to the IPL – Dravid remarked that after hitting a four in his own country, India, there were no cheers from the crowd. What a shame being brothers and sisters. Well about Sreesanth and Harbajan Singh I would say that happens in Cricket, I have got the beating from my friends and some times have given blows to my close pals, players have the right spirit – sportive ones.

I feel Political systems in India have turned us in to enemies in terms of borders,landmarks, divisions,caste, creed for their own benefit of making money and remaining in power.

What can make politicians run for their lives or at least change them to do some thing good for people of India?
People refraining to VOTE

The current political motives is exposing to the outside world about our own unity. There needs to be significant change in the way we think about being Indian. Were is all the taxpayers money getting into. Just wishing if some money put to educate people to unite.

Mera Bharat Mahan

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LEAVE STEVE JOBS ALONE!

Just happened to stumble upon justine’s blog, an ardent apple fan . Her video remarked to be either sarcastic or she really felt for Steve Jobs.

The whole world knows when you buy new Gadgets or Status icon products, they are meant to be bit pricey and as time passes by, old models have to give way for the new model products and the prices have to be slashed in order to keep the old one in the market to meet the manufacturing cost of the production.

I bought my Nokia N70 in India, when the product was just launched it was 25000 INR (USD 500 approx.) and 6 months down the lane it was 15000 INR (USD 300 approx.). Does it mean, we all send mails to Nokia.

What a crap, There are still Iphone users who believe that they have premium product or atleast an usable product.

Well I love Apple for the WOW/usability products, being an ardent fan of the PC for years, I do have second hand Ipod mini Apple did replace the batteries free of cost after 1 yr and would love to possess the Iphone when it hits the Indian market.

Steve I am not complaining, just get us the Iphone to India, even if you hike and reduce the price, there will Indians Apple fan who love your products.

One thing I would like to say “Steve you have crazy Apple fan, who makes crappy videos out of your name”

Justine: No hard feeling, If you felt the post is in appropriate, let me know. ( I am away for this weekend, no computers, no cellphones. Will respond soon.)

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What it takes to float a SMS based advertiser company?

We have mGinger coming the big way and after few days of waiting period, the entry of SMS2India, and now comes adMAD or I would say there are more services be made available with the help of a small gadget.

Here is what it takes to make a SMS advertising company

  1. a SIM card from any Mobile operator (you could get fancy numbers like 5555)
  2. a GSM modem
  3. a software to send SMS to multiple user list.
  4. a software integrated with user list to calculate the money to be given to each user.

That is the reason it takes only few days to float a SMS based Mobile advertiser company.

As far as I have known mGinger is the only company which has done some effort to explain the user about its advantage in different media (TV or internet ads). While companies like SMS2India and others have been using mGinger’s advertising spends and have been penetrating in to mGinger’s market share.

PS: kindly note all these companies are trying for a very small market which is not yet tried tested or proven. Atleast in India, it is because of the easy business model setup (like making HTML templates and not flash based sites) people have been floating these companies. I have no hope, that none will survive and make pure loses. I don’t want to say mGinger, SMS2India, adMAD is fake, because they believed that there is market. Let their belief come true.

ManageEngine Opmanger has a addon SMS toolkit which allows users to receive SMS  as notification when their server or router in their network gets in to trouble. SMS toolkit users a GSM modem, so that is how I knew that it take few days and little money to buy these hardware and software to float a company the only thing they need to develop is the billing system.

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