The essence of scrum ?

I read this somewhere: For mid-size software projects (10-30 person weeks) I would recommend a scrum-like approach, where you collect the main requirements at the beginning, decompose these requirements into manageable pieces, attach estimates/prices to those pieces and decide together with the customer what should be done in the first 2 weeks. After 2 weeks [...]

A (Larra)Bee in Intel’s bonnet : The real nVidia and AMD story

THIS is one superbly researched, behind-the-scenes, whistle blower article. Wow. A window into the murky world of billion dollar CPU and graphics designs. Personally, I am rooting for nVidia (thanks for the Linux support!). But, just last week I built a machine for virtualization – Quad X4 620, on a Gigabyte 785GS board with integrated [...]

S40: How Yahoo can take over the mobile world

Very easy – the strategy is to take a huge ignored segment and hijack them with an offering to knock them off their feet. Huh? One of the interesting news released today is Nokia prepping an App Store with almost 20K apps. The problem with this story is that it is going to be restricted [...]

Global chip sales reverse trend

The Semiconductor Industry Association issued a press release that the sales for semiconductors in March rose to 14.7 billion USD from 14.2 billion USD, the month before. One of the possible reasons it comments is that, chip buyers have used up their inventories. Well if that is true, it bodes well for the IT industry [...]

IPV6 as an election manifesto

I have been wanting to write this post for sometime – primarily to educate our upcoming political leaders on what is needed to realize their dream (real or concocted) for a highly connected India. Recently, there have been posts by people like Sudheendra Kulkarni (of the BJP – surprisingly the Congress has no opinions) about [...]

A Business case for Infosys to deploy its “bench” towards FOSS

This is an open letter to several of India’s IT offshoring companies, who are suffering the problem of too much idle manpower to utilize this lean period to contribute towards Free and Open Source Software and in the process gather free PR and Marketing, as well as expose their employees to excellent mentorship. Dear Project [...]

Transmeta and the Ipod

What does Transmeta and the Ipod have in common? Well, that question was posed by this post and its comments .The question was, did Transmeta never have a foot to stand on in the first place? I dont think so. Take a look at this article. What we have here is a prediction that 30% [...]

Knell bell : The Chakravyuha

The inside tale of Sequoia’s presentation to its portfolio companies: Here’s the juciest part If you have a product, reduce expenses around it and boost sales. If the product is ready, cut the number of engineers. – Doug Leone Cold cold world out there. But dusting off my memory tomes of 2002 – not unexpected. [...]

Hotshot investors ring the knell bell

Sequoia Capital and Ron Conway sent a mail/held a meeting to warn their portfolio companies about the need to tighten their spending belt. These were early warning alarms to the tech industry who had thought they would be secure from the Wall Street meltdown. Ron’s mail is particularly chilling – he attached two of his [...]

EDA Duopoly: One too many?

Ever since Sramana Mitra analyzed the Mendance deal as a necessity for consolidation as well to spur innovation, I have been keen in studying how this might play out. Not in the hypothetical, over-a-Heineken manner, but in a more Nash-equilibrium kind of a way. A very interesting financial engineering paper is Product innovation and imitation [...]