Clean Tech Event

PANIIT USA Cleantech Event

Register at: https://sites.google.com/a/iitbayarea.org/cleantech/

Probabilistic Computing/Quantum Computing

I remember reading about quantum computer during my college and was always fascinated by the idea of trading the accuracy of results with computing speed. The green or power angle is an interesting one and that is achieved in a very different manner.

Here is a networkworld article talking about the latest research in probabilistic chips. I did some more research on probabilistic chips to see if there is any resemblance with a quantum computer. No, this is completely different. You can read the research papers from Dr. Krishna for more details but the gist of the approach is that in current computer architecture, to avoid errors chips are operated at very voltage and he is trying to reduce the voltage that is operating the chips. This definitely will lead to a whole world of algorithms that are error tolerant etc...

I believe that algorithms developed for such an architecture would definitely overlap with quantum computing as the basic idea of working with errors and developing algorithms which are error tolerant is similar.

I am no expert in this field but found it very interesting.

Amazon to Sell Wine in the cloud?

Yes indeed. You can get details here. It is rather old news but I heard about it last night at a networking event. I find it very interesting to see what all amazon has doneover the last 6-7 years  and what it is trying to do. The breadth of services offered by amazon is amazing. EC2, Mechanical turk, kindle, book store, genereal groceries and what not! The very interesting part is that they have got decent success in most areas and they have revolutionized some areas. The EC2 launch has changed the way people are thinking about IT infrastructure and I am sure in next couple years everything (not just your IT infrastructure) will be in the cloud. 

I will write more thoughts about cloud computing in future blog posts but here is a link to a panel discussion on cloud computing to be held on Feb 19th.

Selling Ice to Eskimos

The phrase "Selling Ice to Eskimos" is used often to praise a sales person and it is easy to understand why that is such a big compliment. 

Well I believe that you can "Sell Ice to Eskimos" but it will end up becoming "shelf ware" and the shelf life would be pretty good for ice :). Any company where the product becomes shelf ware ends up dieing sooner or later. It is incumbent upon Product Management team to make sure that the product sells well and deploys well too. 

There are companies out there (RIM) which pay the sales people only after the product is deployed or in use and such a model goes long way in creating a company that is "Built to Last". 

While on the selling topic, one of my favorites is "Selling the Wheel"  

 

Product Design - What is the killer feature?

Recently I bought a Warm mist humidifier for my home. The product works great and this blog post is not a review of the product. I will try to put myself into the shoes of the product manager for this product. When the product was under design, the product manager and the engineering teams studied competing products and listed certain features that the competition has: 

1. Support for adding the inhaler or cough suppressant
2. Auto shutoff when it runs out of water
3. Should last 8 hours

In addition they must have considered the pricing to make sure that it is few dollars cheaper than the competition. I am guessing under the competition and market pressure what they forgot to do was add an on/off switch to the product :)

The product does auto-shutoff when it runs out of water but to turn it on again (when I fill the water), I need to pull out the plug and put it back. 

Interesting learning for me as a product manager: Create a list of basic features that a customer cannot live without in addition to studying the competition. Assign weights to each feature in the list so that you don't ignore the basic features.

Can an upstart replace PayPal – Noca thinks they can

Noca is an online payment startup that claims it is more secure and also cheaper for merchants. Techcrunch(www.techcrunch.com) has a great article titled “Is Noca the next paypal(http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/09/is-noca-the-next-paypal/)”. Yes, I could not come up with a better title for the blog J. Here is one of the comment on the blog which describes how this works in depth:

Fraud in checks/ACH is substantionally less than fraud in credit cards. The reason is simple - credit cards don’t require “two way” identification. Doing an ACH transaction requires both transacting entities to have bank level verification as opposed to credit cards. If I have somebody’s credit card info I can commit virtually unlimited fraud. Having somebody check/bank account number doesn’t give me that ability.

As far as individual indemnification is concerned the user is indemnified by the bank and NACHA (federal govt body that regulates ACH/checks) regulations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.....ring_House

“In accordance with the rules and regulations of ACH, no financial institution may simply issue an ACH transaction (whether it be debit or credit) towards an account without prior authorization from the account holder (known as the Receiver in ACH terminology).”

At surface this looks very secure but really painful from a customer experience standpoint. Imagine that you have to approve each transaction with your bank. Doing approval for large transactions does not make sense either as that is when I need a credit card.

 

If the ACH transaction were to become mainstream, then the NACHA compliance will become a big software industry just like PCI compliance. This approach also heavily relies on consumer cell phones. What about the security on windows mobile? Cell phone security is becoming a bigger market with the growing use of smart phones and services like this will make mobile devices a target for hackers!

Long blogging break...

It has been a while since I wrote a blog. A long vacation and then all the work that got piled up while I was on vacation has kept me busy :) or should I say kept me away from writing...

I am going to start again and start writing about some different topics.