Strategy:

A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. Strategy is differentiated from tactics, or immediate actions, with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed.

In the last post we saw how Bill Gates used a Portfolio of Strategies(henceforth called PoS) to remove some unnecessary uncertainties from the market. Today, we will extend and innovate on the PoS strategy in relation to internet marketing.

There are clear identifiable steps to deploy PoS strategy. And they can be roughly classified in the following manner:

1. Identify a global aim. First you have to identify the common meeting point where you want to go with your PoS.For example, the global aim of Microsoft was to be the leading PC software company. Each strategy in the PoS was achieving this common goal.
2. Contextualize your PoS. Just identifying a goal is not enough. Next comes putting your PoS in a context. Contextualizing mandates setting limitations.Let’s say your global aim is to make money through blogging, then contextualizing the PoS would amount to (more…)

   Tags: Bill Gates, Marketing, Microsoft, Strategy, Uncertainty

Coutsey : www.scu.edu

There are a few books which impact you on so many levels and from so many angles. ‘ Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty‘ by Prof. Muhammad Yunus is one of them for me. The book is about the story of Grameen-Bank and how it came about, how it expanded and how it changed the life of millions of people. The book is just unputdownable.(Grameen-Bank and Prof.Yunus got the Noble Peace Prize in 2006.) I read around 200 pages in just first sitting.(it has 277 pages.)Through this book I witnessed the very soul of entrepreneurship and have gleaned some lessons for you:

(1) Believe in the creative spirit of yourself and others around you. When Prof.Yunus started the Grameen Bank his basic premise was the power of creativity of the borrowers of micro-loans. Without believing in the creative spirit of the poor borrowers, there is no way micro lending would have succeeded. Even if you are just self employed, if you believe in the creativity of your model and the people who use it, quickly your model will be adopted far and wide. That is also what happened with open source technology.

(2)An entrepreneur has to see through social conditioning. Entrepreneurship has one major thing in common with philosophy of science. That thing is (more…)

Tags: Bank, Banker to the Poor, Business, Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize, Poverty

Courtsey: farm1.static.flickr.com

I love communicating with people and sharing ideas with them. And most of the conversations are
fulfilling and productive and we both end up learning from each other. However, there are times
when I find some glaring logical fallacies in our language which hinder communication and stunt intellectual growth.I do not mind them when we are talking informally, but in any serious conversation logical fallacies can create major misunderstandings.Those are the ghosts worthy of exorcism. Here are some common logical fallacies which I observed.

(1) “Statistically most of the Indian policemen have mustache. Mohan is an Indian policeman hence he should have a mustache.”
This sort of argument suffers from a basic statistical mistake. Statistics talks about things in bulk. It does not say anything about one particular case. Hence to draw particular conclusions from statistical data is fallacious. Mohan might be an Indian policeman but you cannot infer from that that he must have a mustache.

(2) “I found evidence of no disease.”
There is no such thing like (more…)

Tags: Fallacy, Informal Logic, Loaded question, Luck, Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Statistics

SocialRank seemed like a brilliant idea. You get to the far flung niches and aggregate and rank the blogs in each niche.And you get a huge market of eyeballs. And not only our intuition but also a mathematical idea supported this assumption.That mathematical idea is called ‘The Long Tail‘, much popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name.I remember that this book was touted as the prime inspiration for the creation of SocialRank. When I first heard about it I was excited too. I was supposed to architect and program the algorithm which would do the job.And so I did.

As the work progressed, I took a peek into the book, which was the basis of the SocialRank marketing strategy. The more I thought about the idea the more it seemed dubious. And one of the major factors pointing towards the unsoundness of the idea was the mathematical giant named Benoit B.Mandelbrot(He invented Fractal Mathematics and he is called the father of Chaos Theory).He wrote in one of his papers (more…)

Tags: Anita Elberse, Chris Anderson, Education, Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business School, Long Tail, Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

I attended the recent barcamp in Joho Bahru, Malaysia(6-7th December). Barcamp is an open source , international network of user generated conference(or unconference as many like to call it).The first barcamp focused mainly on web applications and other related open source technologies. Later the concept spilled over to health care, political organization and so on.

It was amazing to find people coming together to unconference about things that they like, things that they think they like and things they don’t like but pretend to like it anyway.

I could sense a combined consciousness emerging from (more…)

Tags: BarCamp, Malaysia, Open source, opensource, Programming, Technology, Theory of Relativity, Unconference, Video game, Web application, World Wide Web

How much value you place on the next five years of your life?

I read a piece of news a few days ago about a person  falsely accused of sexual abuse. After spending five years in jail, it was found out  that actually he was innocent and the detective who investigated him was having an  affair with his wife.

The point which jumped out from the news article was that he got $16 millions over  the wrongful conviction. Note that the judge equalized the value of his lost five  years and harassment to $16 millions. The question I ask is  : How much value do  you place in the next five years of your life? Allow me to put an entrepreneurial twist  to the question: How much value do you think you can create in the next five years?  Is it more or less than the value placed on the life of a man who spent five years in  jail doing nothing? Can you at least aim for producing value worth $20 million  dollars in five years? Or $50 millions?

The problem with us is that (more…)

Tags: Gene, Human, Law, Mathematics, Nonlinear system, Physics

“Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love”

~ Einstein.

Last time I talked about Quantum Tunneling, a strange phenomena whereby particles tunnel through barriers where they are not supposed to be according to classical physics.

But according to Quantum Physics, this phenomena happens at precisely the rate the maths of quantum physics predicts.

Quantum tunneling is the secret behind the tunnel diode. So, the next time you listen to a high quality stereo music, remember that none of it would have existed if quantum tunneling did not exist.

Today I will talk about Time Travel. (more…)

Tags: Einstein, General Relativity, Kip Thorne, Quantum mechanics, Relativity, Stephen Hawking, Time Travel

“You are not thinking.You are merely being logical.”

~ Neils Bohr to Einstein when Einstein rejected the Quantum Theory.

Stephen Hawking founded a new branch of physics called quantum cosmology. At first glance it may sound quite paradoxical since quantum physics is the physics of very small sub atomic particles and cosmology is the physics of very large and distant objects like stars and galaxy. And the laws of physics governing the micro world and the macro world are so different that they seem irreconcilable.

It is the idea of quantum cosmology which holds the key to the feasibility of parallel universe. (more…)

Tags: Einstein, Quantum mechanics, Theory of Relativity

In the last post I promised to elaborate on what I wrote and to give an escape plan to evade our imminent doom. Even though this post can be read independently, it would be good if you read the previous entry before or after you read this one.(If I were you, I would read it ‘after’ I read this one.Sometimes, reading backwards gives you a novel perspective on things.[1])

So here it goes.

Two stories. Nothing highfalutin: just two stories, no big deal.

First Story: Romance across multiple universe.

Science fiction writer John Wyndham wrote a short story called “Random Quest”. In the story the protagonist Colin Trafford is a physicist and a victim of a botched experiment. By a freak accident in some high energy experiment, the fabric of space-time is torn and our hero falls into a wormhole to emerge in a parallel universe[2].

It is theorized in physics that at each moment the time forks out producing two(or more than two) different sequences in time, hence producing two(or more than two) parallel universe. (more…)

Tags: collapsing universe, Cosmology, Edwin Abbot Abbot, Flatland, John Wyndham, Multiverse, Parallel Universe, Random Quest, Romance of Many Dimensions

I will tell it very succinctly: It all started with a ‘ big bang‘, and it is all going to end with a ‘big crunch’;(most probably.)

When they stumbled upon the debris of the creation of our universe, they thought that it was bird poop. And they shared a Noble prize for that.

Radioastronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected some strange noises coming from nowhere. Of course, there had to be a mistake. They heard it again and concluded that a bird had pooped on their disc detectors. Apparently, they did not find any bird poops, or any other fecal mater much to their surprise and dismay. So, they set out to calculate the exact properties of those mysterious noises emanating from nether land.

While Penzias and Wilson were ruminating about bird poops and micro-fecal matters, other scientists were busy theorizing about the origin of the universe.And they figured out the exact (more…)

Tags: Arno Penzias, Big Bang, Big Crunch, Bird Poop, Cosmology, Hubble's Law, Hubble’s Law, Metric expansion of space, Red Shift, Robert Wilson