Ethnic e-learning

Internet evolution has already seen outsourcing of home work. I mean it only half jokingly as kids can now get tutored online with teachers located around the world.
However, living in Canada as an immigrant, I see a lot of parents trying to connect their children to their roots. The main vehicle for facilitating this is language. People would like their children to learn read, write and speak (emphasis) their native tongue(s). However it is not very easy to find good teachers. Further, schedules may not always allow for such learning.
There is another aspect. Language is only one part if connecting with culture. There are local festivals / events, specific phrases and social activities that are also important. These are really hard to provide.
I believe this is a field ripe for innovation. Using the advances in technology and business process outsourcing it is possible to create an offering to capture this market segment. In some ways, motivated parents are relatively price insensitive as long as higher level of service and individualized attention is being provided.
Teachers from native countries could be used to provide tutoring in this specific area. Class sizes should be small. Video technology has to be utilized. I won't recommend one in one classes as it has been observed (from personal experience and industry research ) that children learn faster in company of other children.
Sound interesting? Fala Portuguese ?



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Large space Interactive advertising

The Olympic spirit is in the air, not withstanding Canada's loss to the USA, but the coming up contest with Russia.
I have been very interested in large format/space advertising especially when it is interactive. I saw a demo of an app based on Flash that projected using four projectors. It was projecting grass.
When someone ran along, the grass waved like some one was running through it.
Think about it.
How about an interactive display in the path that runs along Roy Thompson hall in Toronto which let's you race 50 m with a world class athlete and see how far you could reach?
It could be a valuable training tool as well. You could race with any athlete you like!

On a different but related note, try out Reactrix (http://www.google.ca/#/m/search?uipref=6&q=Reactrix&channel=gp1&og=gp&source=gp)

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Blogging from the iPhone

Life is busy. It has been harder and harder to write entries in the blog. It has been always on the back of my mind though.
I recently saw the blogpress lite iPhone app. So, I decided to try it out. I spend couple of hours every work day on the train commuting. So I thought let's give this a spin.
There may be spelling mistakes as thus touch typing (literally) is not the easy when u have thick fingers.
This whole technology thing is pretty cool eh?


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it's been a year

since I last posted here.
Well, I am working with a new set of technologies now. My favorite topic of work these days is enterprise search. Things like the Google Search Appliance (GSA), Google mini, Google Desktop Search, Microsoft Search Server and Microsoft FAST.
You know, search can be a really simple and effective knowledge management tool? In this economy, people are losing jobs and there is so much turnover that things are getting lost.
also, there is more pressure on people to be more productive as employers are trying to get by with less.
This is where enterprise search can really help locate the information spread in variety of sources all around!

Merb Sherb for Newbies | Part I

Just when I thought I had gotten a good enough handle on Rails, there comes Merb. Well, lets give it a spin, I thought. People I had spoken to (like my friend Peento at mdialog.com or Jarrod at Organic) seemed to think it was great, better than Rails, lighter than Rails etc etc.

So, I decided to give it a spin. First a couple of things:

• I wont be able to post everything I did in this post for the very simple reason I am not done
• I also intend this as a tutorial for newbies, who may be struggling with it (just as I did). Well, call me stupid :-) or slow - your pick. If you like this tutorial, please let me know

So, to start off with, hit the site http://merbivore.com .  This is the home page of the Merb framework. A good starting could have been http://wiki.merbivore.com. But it is kinda well, work in progress. however look at the tutorials link. The best tutorial that has ben kept upto date with the frequent changes in the code base is SLAPP. 

I indeed spent a lot of time going over old articles and tutorials that did not match the current state of merb.

Installation

Pre-requisites: Have Ruby and gem installed - which hopefully you do. Also, have a database installed. I like MySQL, and that is what is going to be used here.

Step 1: Install merb. You can do that using this command line:

$ sudo gem install merb --include-dependencies

This should install Merb. NOTE: As of writing the tutorial, Merb was on version 0.9.3. Things could change fast in the next major release and this tutorial could be useless (unless I update it). 

Now, there are a couple of steps that you should also perform:

$ sudo gem sources -a http://merbivore.com

What this does is add merbivore.com to the list of place gem looks for when searching for updates to gems. Merb is a fast moving project, with lots of changes going in frequently. So,  you may want to do this frequently as well:

$ sudo gem install merb activerecord merb_activerecord merb_helpers rspec merb_rspec

This will make sure the gems required for Merb are installed. Note that Merb supports three different ORM tools. However, I am familiar with ActiveRecord due to my Rails background, and that is what I am making sure in installed.

At this point, you should have Merb installed. 

Step 2: Creating a Skeleton App

This is really simple and close to how you would do it in rails:

$ merb-gen app Helloworld

So there! merb-gen is a generator which does several useful things. Think of it as rails and script/generate in Rails. Now you should a bunch of directories inside the directory HelloWorld. Take a look, poke around. You will see some differences from Rails. The ones I noticed immediately were around lack of model information. No database.yml, no model directory, or migrations stuff. I didn't know whether to be happy or sad. But that we will discuss in the next part when I take the generated app and try and configure it.

Arch with a Mac(h)| Enterprise Architecture and Mac's

I recently turned independant. Formed my own company called Agiliant Enterprises. I am currently working for a large mining company called Vale Inco in Toronto. I am part of the tenterprise architecture team doing interesting stuff. One of the comments the director of the group had when he saw my Macbook Pro -

You are the first Enterprise Architect I have seen with a Mac.

I took it as a compliment - a personal preference had turned into a differentiator.
However, let me give a you preview of life with a Mac. I have been using MS operating systems for a long long time. I started with DOS 1.1 and followed it closely. However like most windows user, I was frustrated with the stability and virus issues. Since OS X, I noticed the core Unix (Mac OS is based on BSD) underneath the pretty GUI. I have done most of my development work on Unix systems, with Solaris being my favourite Unix flavour. I was hooked. The thought that I could open up terminals and do things like gawk, grep, lexx, yacc, top..... you get the point.
So how do you use the tools that need Win to run? Things like ErWin database modeling, Rational Rose modeling etc? Simple - Use Parallels. It is an amazing piece of software - Viva La Virtualization. It evens runs faster and better than Windows by itself. No more crashing.

For some other things, I needed to get alternatives which also work great. For Visio, I installed ConceptDraw which is a great program. I also use Ms Office products on Mac.
Plus, as a free lancer, I am not tied to corporate standards for email. I us my gmail and yahoo accounts with Mac Mail application. and boy is it amazing....

he real reason for getting onto Mac - Rails team uses mac. I was hooked... here is a group of serious programmers doling out kick ass software on a Mac. I could too...

A nice side benefit - My documents look awesome impressing almost all clients ...
so Mac it is for a while....

ps: There are still things I dont like about MAc - too locked down.. but I am not complaining just yet...

I have been trying to get new stuff in Toronto. I cameacross this excellent resource for getting insurance quotes. Unbiased online car insurance quotes are offered by this site. Check it out.

Personal Lifestyle Management solutions to urban middle and upper class households

I had written this as a business plan. However, never found time or energy to take it forward. Here it goes though...
================================================================
1. Introduction
We would like to leverage the mobile technology platform to provide “Personal Lifestyle Management” solutions to urban middle and upper class households. The specific product categories we would like to introduce to the market are:
1. Vehicle Security System: The product can be fitted in any vehicle and will allow the owner to remotely control actions of the vehicle. It will also enable the owner to get location information of the vehicle and trigger certain actions. The owner shall be able to perform such actions easily using mobile phone. This product is aimed at the C and D segment of cars.

2. Home Automation System: The product suite will consist of devices that will allow home devices/gadgets to be controlled from a single place, and/or remotely even through a mobile phone. Devices like a/c, lighting, locks, ovens suit themselves to be operated remotely.

2. Target Segment
Before embarking on a detailed study of the business idea and its feasibility, it is important to understand the market segment for the product offerings. Both products are aimed at the urban middle and upper class households with average monthly incomes not less than Rs. 100,000. This segment is increasingly witnessing the following changes:a. Higher degree of mobility and less time available for personal lifestyle management: The households under consideration are being increasingly characterized with a very high degree of local, inter city and inter country travel. Hence, people in this segment are feeling an acute need for being able to manage things on the go. This is clearly borne out by the spectacular increase in the usage of high-end mobile phones and PDAs in the country. However, while the current devices are able to service the information requirements of the customer, the personal lifestyle requirements like switching on washing machine/ AC or remote car security etc as per requirements remain largely unaddressed.b. Rapid increase in number of double income families: The rapid increase in number of families with both family members working has led to a much larger customer base for products in luxury segment enabling niche businesses like the one being proposed to become viable.c. Changing value system and beliefs of customers: The society is witnessing an exponential increase in consumerism in the urban markets. The worth of an individual is being increasingly being determined by his/ her material possessions. In such a scenario, a very high emphasis is being placed by individuals to showcase their wealth in order to gain respect and admiration of society. Our products have a huge potential in providing the customers with immense emotional benefits of state-of-the-art and contemporariness associations with the product.

3. Market Portfolio Gap
Based on the above analysis, we perceive a clear need gap between the current market offerings (e.g. Autocop car security systems/ Timers in electronic gadgets) and the requirements of the customer. The need gap for each of the products can be articulated as under:
1. Vehicle Security Systema. Based on sound and light alarms hence usability over a narrow range of distance.b. Useful only in prevention of theft. The current systems are ineffective in the retrieval operations.
2. House Automation. Specific devices like TiVO and Televisions have the timer options. Most other products (e.g. Ovens, Geysers, ACs) lack any remote management options.b. Remote Security alarms not possible. A point to be noted in case of House Automation is the rise in the housing sector of accommodations with very high end specifications in cities like Gurgaon and Bangalore (with estimated market price in excess of Rs. 10 Million). These houses can easily absorb an incremental cost of the order of Rs 10,000 and can provide a compelling value proposition for remote house security at a nominal expense.

4. Interesting/ Unique aspects of our plan
1. Unique product categories: The product categories we are planning to enter are essentially untapped markets and hence we do not have to contend with competitive threats associated with penetration in existing markets.
2. Potential for deploying High Entry Barriers: The buyer groups for our products are essentially large builders and manufacturers of premium segment cars. We intend to get into long-term contracts with these entities thus ensuring that threat of a competitive entry is eliminated. In addition, by partnering with these customers in the design phase itself, we intend to gain additional insights into customer requirements thus ensuring vastly superior designs with greater ability to meet customer requirements.
3. Assured cash flows and early break even: Since the plan is essentially based on capturing a large market base through contracts, the viability of the business and cash flows are assured at initial stages itself.

5. Market Size Estimates
1. Vehicle Security System: Based on market research by Murad Ali Baig, a leading auto analyst, the total number of cars in the C and D segment sold in India annually is around 75000. If we are able to capture 10% of the market share in this segment owing to the tie up with car manufacturers, we are looking at a volume of 7.5 K cars annually. At Rs. 10,000 per car, this can amount to an annual sales turnover of Rs. 75 Million. In addition, we may want to take into account sales potential in B segment cars (annual sales of 140,000 units), even a small percentage of which can greatly enhance our overall turnover.
2. House Automation System: Though no comparable products exist in the market, a research study conducted recently placed the number of households with annual income of Rs. 20 Lakhs and above in the 50,000 to 100,000 range. Taking a conservative estimate of 50,000 such households and an adoption rate of 5% in the segment, we estimate 2500 households to try our product giving us an estimated sales turnover of Rs. 25 Million for the product. Additionally, if we include even a fraction of the demand emanating from the Rs. 10 L to Rs 20 L segment, we can expect a healthy revenue stream from this line of business.