DesiPundit

The best thing about product management is probably the variety. It’s an excellent job for the generalist… the restless soul… the multi-talented, multi-tasker. As far as an occupational hazard the hazard that I see hit product managers most often is that it’s a bit of a tweener role.

Sundar Rajan talks to Sean Johnson, Product Manager at IBM’s Content Discovery Group on his experiences in Product Management in the IT sector.

DesiPundit Lekhni finds that moving her blog to her own domain is an unimaginably daunting job.

Lekhni’s Two Rules of Themes –

(i) How a Theme looks on the website has no relation to how it looks on a Demo;

(ii) How a Theme looks on a Demo has no relation to how it looks with all your widgets after you have installed it on your blog.

Having faced exactly the same thing about six months back, I completely empathise with her plight. What’s more, someone suggested to me that putting up a post about it would be useful feedback for developers. I didn’t get down to it but I’m glad Lekhni did. Now let’s all us non-techies keep our fingers crossed for tech-salvation!

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira writes that Google was not being evil in helping the authorities arrest Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid,accused of posting obscene content on the Orkut community “I hate Soniya Gandhi.”

The accused admitted that he posted the content to the Orkut group “I hate Soniya Gandhi.” Note that neither the creator of the group, nor any other member of the group was arrested, only the one who posted content that was in clear violation of Indian law.

While Valleywag,the Silicon Valley Gossip Blog calls Google evil for divulging the details of the user and helping in the arrest.

“Do no evil” seems pretty darn flexible if you’re a moral relativist with profitable interests in international markets.

Even though Parmanu has been using his blog and other digital media to share his travelogues and photographs, he wonders if paper still trumps the digital medium when it comes to sharing stories and memories.

She came back with a thick file and placed it on the table… She turned to a cycling expedition with another couple some years ago, along the banks of the River Elbe, from Dresden to Hamburg. The section began with a map of the route, which was followed by pictures that were clipped to the sheets with a paragraph or two of cursive script describing the moment. Then there were bills from restaurants they had eaten at, receipts from shops they had visited, tickets of concerts or movies, brochures of the region and other little scraps of memory that brought back minute details of the whole trip.

Rajesh has a great post that talks about Twitter - how it works and what’s special about it, innovative uses for Twitter and how it can be useful to corporates.   Oh, and it will certainly help bloggers reach out to other bloggers and readers!

Just for Fun – a random update from me, late evening, sometime last week “Sindhi Kadhi + Rice = Heaven” generated immediate response from not just Twitter but also Facebook friends (my status updates are linked to my Tweets and get automatically updated every time I write anything on Twitter). People were writing in from Bangalore, Delhi, Switzerland asking me to share the recipe, which I did over a few dozen Tweets. Soon more people joined the conversation over private messages, Facebook and email. Lots of thank you messages followed and many promised to try the recipe. A couple of them have, in fact, already done so – yes, it was fun and I might just do it again sometime. Not to be tried recklessly for fears of being termed spammer.

After spending twenty months at IIM Kozhikode, Rahul lists the tech college gear guide for B-schools. Some are obvious like a laptop but some oft-missed accessories can prove to be life-savers especially during crunch time.

If you’re one of those people bitten by the Twitter-bug, Aalaap’s post on mating Gtalk and Twitter, is a must-read for you.

Now enjoy your Twitter followers’ shock and awe as your Google Talk status messages get pumped (piped? fed?) into Twitter automagically.

Vijay has a great idea for an Indian startup - a website offering stock photography in the Indian context.  He believes there lies a very successful business opportunity in this market.  Whoever takes him up on this idea, don’t forget to send me the finder’s fee!

That said, we do have a small problem. I have friends who work with online portals and in running content who basically have this complaint: “We scrap content at times, simply because we don’t have a good supporting image to go with it”. Images are plenty and dime a dozen across the web. What they are talking about is an image that fits the context - the context here being, the audience, and the characters of the story being Indian.

Entrepreneurship being the latest buzz word, here comes one more competition for all you guys. This is open to early stage Indian entrepreneurs in the areas of Technology or Services.

Canaan Partners (in association with TiE) has rolled out the second edition of the TIE-Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge, a national level business plan competition for early stage entrepreneurs in India.

My wife just loves this way of writing exam and one day she asked me “when you have a laptop it is 1000 times easy to write the exam using that, rather than using paper and pen”. My wife gave me the same look I gave to that lady when she told she prefers typewriter to computers.

Brijesh Nair looks at our stagnant attitudes toward using technology in face of rapid change. Changing with the times can often be stressful and difficult to cope with as we get older but that doesn’t stop us from wondering how the heck did we survive back then.