Small Pandas

Why does an Organization need to hire only bright graduates/professionals? Most organizations are fascinated by people who have great educational qualifications, but let’s step back and think …can these bright people bring that “micro insight” required for an organization to be innovative, competitive and stay ahead in the game? I ask this question as globalization and speed of innovation making the learning redundant and inapplicable.

As more services & products are focussed on “Bottom of the Pyramid” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_of_the_Pyramid ) (As C K Prahalad says : millions of middle class common people), may be the “ordinary & not-so-highly-qualified” person has more insights on what can be done to bring the differentiation to an organizations innovation in products & services.

This thought came up while I was busy looking to hire a “bright” professional in India for my start-up and I was surprised & happy to meet “not-so-highly-qualified BUT having excellent insight” types.

Any thoughts?

Sun has acquired MySQL for a $1 Billion. This is a great news for Open Source Business Model. MySQL has been the best to happen to open source world and their steady growth in terms of offering rich database kernel, API and documentation is always a benchmark among open source communities.

Now there is a rumour that Zend (the company behind PHP) may be a potential acquisition target by Sun. Having spent decades of working on Sun Technologies (Java, Solaris, etc) and recently building products on PHP & Java integration platform, we at Signure Technologies will be keenly waiting to see the development of a strong foundation between Java & PHP communities.

It is a known fact among Indian IT professionals that only minority % of employee stick to a company for more than 2 years!! Majority of them keeps changing job and aims to earn more salary. This is very alarming if you are thinking to put up a company whose strength is based on capabilities and intellectual assets of employees. However big companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS could still keep best employees by invloving them in onsite opportunities (sending abroad to US, UK and world-wide) and employees extra bucks by getting paid salary in $, £…etc.
The remaining employees jump the ship to get more salary elsewhere or join other company on the promise of getting chance to work abroad. So traditionally attrition rate is between 5% to 30%!! Companies have no idea which employee they can trust and how they can know early so to replace and maintain the resource capabilities of the organization.

This is where new ideas coming, according to IndiaTimes article here are what’s coming on

Now many top ITeS companies have devised an early warning system (EWS) to track employee behaviour and predict their likelihood of leaving. Identifying the employee is just the beginning, the HR has to then work out solutions for every possible employee on the verge of quitting.

Infosys BPO calls it `Attrition Forecasting’. “It’s an IT-based system which identifies 50 triggers that may lead to an employee leaving,” The software tracks their behaviour and shows events such as fluctuating productivity, increased absenteeism, rejections for internal job postings, drop in call quality, increased off-phone time et al. Keeping these in mind, the team leaders then enter qualitative information on a weekly basis after meeting each agent.

Masterminds at Convergys sat down and figured out about 50 distinct triggers, which could be as small as hygiene issues that lead to agent attrition. “We use proprietary software that tracks agent behaviour and indicates things like fluctuating productivity, absenteeism, and a myriad others indicators,”

The Indiatimes has series of such initiatives by various Indian companies, it is worth reading all.

During last couple of months I am bouncing few concepts, weighing their potential and during the process I have reserved few domain names for possible business. Had I known the links that Guy Kawasaki has posted in his blog on how to choose the name/naming strategy for domains, it would have saved few hours of mine. However after reading the article, I feel good that not many of my reserved domains sound absurd
This link is must have if you are coining domains names. How to Name a Name

Indian News portal Rediff has an interesting snippets from a forthcoming book on Google’s People Culture.

What Mayer thinks will be essential for continued innovation is for Google to keep its sense of fearlessness. “I like to launch [products] early and often. That has become my mantra,” she says.

Here go the key factors of Google’s success:

• Nurture great ideas from all levels of the company, not just the top.
• Be available to employees so that they have an opportunity to get their ideas heard.
• Demand creativity by giving employees “free thinking time” to develop pet projects, no matter how far from the company’s central vision.
• Acquire good ideas. Although preferring to develop new technologies in house, Google is also willing to snap up small companies with interesting initiatives.

Make Your Mark is back in action for 2007, they write in their website : The search for Britain’s most enterprising young people starts here! The deadline for entering Enterprising Young Brits is Monday 22 October 2007.

Part of the Make Your Mark campaign, the competition is open to people aged 30 or under who have grown their own idea, exploited an opportunity, or developed a new way of doing things.

Categories

* Business Entrepreneur: For enterprising individuals who have started their own business, large or small.
* Social and Community: For ventures combining the principals of a successful business with an emphasis on the social and environmental benefits it can provide.
* Teen: For anybody aged 13-19 who is making an idea happen.
* Creative: For enterprising individuals, businesses and endeavours that have shown creative flair.
* High Growth Business: For start-ups that can demonstrate rapid and sustained business growth.

Find more detail in :
http://makeyourmark.org.uk/get_involved/enterprising_young_brits

My Company Signure Technologies is looking for smart people for our India Innovation Centre. This positions offers excellent growth, mind blowing opportunities to be part of our core team in developing products that we are shaping.

We at Singure have a team of thinkers, innovators in UK and another team in India. Some of our cheer leaders are ex-BBC, ex-Skype, ex-eBay type; we have also leaders from hard core start-ups.

We are passionate about creativity in its smallest form.
We also think innovation has no boundary.
We simply believe in team, be it our Product Development Team, Sports team, just the team.
We expect our people to be surprised discovering their creativity.

Role:
This a full time role based in our Innovation Centre, Pune, India.
You will be leading, participating to research, architecture, design & development an innovative solutions.
This will involve wearing different hats at different time.

Following are job description in brief.

- 3 to 4 years of experience in developing online commerce solutions using PHP, MySQL, AJAX, Object Oriented Approach, MVC, Java Script
- Experience in Zend Framework or other PHP frameworks (like Symfony
- Hands-on & very strong in Object Oriented concepts, design and architecture
- Ability to discuss, analyze and suggest Rich UI development approach

Nice to have things which will make us take notice:
- Data modeling experience and Object Relational Mapping Experience (like Propel, Doctrine, etc)
-Any other MVC framework knowledge (like Symfony, CakePHP, etc)
- Experience in designing and developing Large Scale, high performance web based application architecture, design, development and deployment

We have detail information in career section. Kindly refer your contacts and spread the detail. To apply : sign@signure.com

Coming from Java background, I was shifting to PHP5. Here are some quick info for Java geeks who wants to use PHP5 (there are many reason why should you use PHP 5, I won’t go in detail into that).

1.You can continue using your favourite Eclipse IDE for PHP5 programming. Use PHPEclipse http://phpeclipse.sourceforge.net/update/releases

2.PHP5 is a full blown language, so like ANT, you have a make/build tool called Phing. This is based on ANT so you can migrate your ANT script for Java to build a PHP5 project. Yes …with little restrictions.

3.If you have been designing Enterprise style Java application having fine grained tiers like Web tier, Business Tier and Data tier …you can continue following the same approach!!
4.If you are coming from ORM (Object Relational Mapping) background like Hibernate, good news …you have plenty of choice in PHP5. My favourite is Doctrine. Those Doctrine developers are the smartest kid on the block. Doctrine is the best thing that has happened to PHP world. I will be writing shortly a Quick Learn article on my use of Doctrine in an application.
5.Now does there a Unit testing framework like Junit in PHP5. Yes … you have PHPUnit which is also part of XUnit family, also there is the simplest testing framework called SimpleTest, SimpleTest is sweet one, it gets you up & running in few seconds. So you can use TDD (Test Driven Development) and build high quality PHP app.
6.In case you are looking for a framework like Spring Framework in Java/J2EE, then there is Zend Framework. Though Zend Framework can’t be compared to Spring in totality but it is built using loose coupling concepts … it doesn’t dictate you and you can follow your own design & architecture.

7.How about MVC framework like Struts? There are plenty of choice in PHP5 like Symfony, CodeIgnitor, CakePHP. But I liked Zend Framework’s View, Controller approach as it allows me to use my own design and architecture approach and not tightly integrate the modules.
8.So what about Tempalting framework like Velocity and Freemarker in java…is there anything like this in PHP5 ? Yes, there is Smarty, which is programmer’s first choice.

Using the above framework on your Eclipse IDE, you can rapid develop application in PHP5, increase testability, and improve productivity.

There are great framework out there but my approach in this article has been to choose only those API/framework which matches with what I have been following in Java world for years.

Seedcamp folks writes on their blog :

our Facebook group is growing like crazy - we’re just crossed 600 members

we’ve already had nearly 100 from all over Europe including France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and the UK. We’ve also had applications from India, Israel, Russia, South Africa and Latin America

You have until midnight August 12th to submit your completed application

successful applicants will receive both in the week of September 3-7 in London and in the 3 months afterwards.

To Submit  your application : http://www.seedcamp.com/pages/apply_application_critera

India’s Newspaper Economic Times reports : The government of India on Friday launched a facility for e-filing of patent and trademark applications to expedite the process of securing exclusive rights over a product or trading symbol.