How are they so good yet so chilled?

I look at the Swedes / Scandinavians and my god they impress me. They are so chilled, have time to be fit, play and party yet find the niche they are so good at. They take more time than an average Asian probably to be tech savvy and be glued to things online, but when they do, they excel at it I think. The programmers are great minds, the business developers think international and they do not have inhibitions in sticking their neck out and trying new things. They have no problem even if it has not been proven too much, and the best thing is there is no age barrier in their minds. There are people who are nearing 50 but still have no problems in trying out something new and starting from the scratch. May be the social / welfare system is turned to the positive side of things for these dudes, but I think its great lifestyle. And more so, they conjure up enough “offline skills” too, from repairing the boats, fishing, learning to build those houses, repairing the clogs in the pipe… they are much more rounded and diverse. So for me, I plan to continue doing things online, but also start spending more time offline and learning new hand skills. Let us see how it goes.

A boss? No, a friend.

When I took a vacation last week around Europe a little bit, there was one thing that really hit me hard. How can I have bosses who wish more for my personal well being than whether I am of “good use” or not? Why am I saying this?

Mr. Boss 1 called to check if I was having a good time more than once during the last 10 days. Second, he gave me his car and also some good advice about why certain things happen certain ways (more spice to those who know it ) and during the whole time never did we talk about work, or the deliverables that were on my plate (which I did manage to finish before leaving although not sure if he was aware of it). And when my CEO actually sent me a message saying, “enjoy your vacation…”, although I never really did a big bonanza with a project or anything before I actually took the vacation, it tells a lot about motivation and leadership. And I wonder how these guys can be who they are, be great personal friends and still be the whipping task masters if they want to. You guys at Result are simply too good to be true. Looking forward to do more cool things as always

Are bloggers entrepreneurs? How about those developers?

Stumbled across an interesting article at trak.in, and the question the writer asks is, “are bloggers entrepreneurs” and toeing the same line as the article, that is including only people who have registered their domains, paid a few dollars per year to get their blog started, do you consider them to be entrepreneurs?  

Lets define something called “life style entrepreneurship” which essentially means you are an entrepreneur by the day, have your own venture, put in a lot of time and effort into it (putting in lot of money is probably not as relevant since through the internet you can essentially start a business with almost no money), and then you have the others, people who create things as a hobby (and that could possibly turn into something serious later) and not worry too much on it, or are not solely dependent on it. So if we follow this taxonomy, bloggers who are serious, spend a lot of time on the design, the CSS, building a network around the blog knowledge etc can be considered entrepreneurs since there is a lot of effort involved, and possibly more money over a period of time. 

In essence, majority of bloggers are not just mainstream / lifestyle entrepreneurs, and hence its not fair to bestow upon them a title of an entrepreneur if they blog . And mind you, the output (here number of readers / traffic / hits) is not necessarily a yardstick to define if you are a life style entrepreneur or not. And just about the same way, how about developers who put in about 100 or so USD to develop those iPhone Apps and things on the SKD? Are they entrepreneurs? And this is again a brain child of new media that fall into the grey area with no exact classification or yardstick to tag!

TEDxStockholm : Richard Gatarski’s crowd sourcing

My very good friend Richard Gatarski of We Converse fame is doing a 5 minute talk at the TEDxStockholm to be held on June 6th, an invite only event with the license from TED being held by the Haren brothers (Teo and Fredrik), assisted by the likes of Henrik Ahlen (of Alfa Bravo and Internet Video Advisory Group) . And Richard being the creative man that he is, decided to “outsource” the contents of his speech (clever him) to the crowd (called crowdsourcing) for everyone to pool in their thoughts and ideas. The central theme is inspiration and the focus of his talk is “best start in life for our children”. And below are my brain dumps to him, albeit briefly for him to then be creative and develop it even more The original blog link is here

Planting creativity seeds in the minds and hearts of tomorrow’s world leaders:

Assumption: Kids / Children constitute for me 7 – 16 years;

- Digital natives being raised by digital aliens creates a mis – match. And that requires understanding and a lot of adjustments.

- There will be just 1 world  - both, online and offline will merge for them. And inspiration is not just from real people, but also from virtual objects – living and non living.

- Creativity is stifled by anarchic educational systems, and if conveyed wrongly, internet could be a bad vent for kids to get the frustration out. And there are opportunities to get it out wrongly.

- There will still be a world of difference in the outlook and mentality between kids in the developing and the developed world. Although the internet bridges the gap, there is still going to be a cultural divide.

- And finally, inspiring kids in the right way requires time and patience, and it comes when parents make sure they are in the right direction and not worry unduly about the details 

The event will be recorded by TED and might be up somewhere in some time soon.   More info when I get more

Is a blogger a journalist?

When I was in Barcelona with SIME on May 21, I had the chance to meet a veteran, well acclaimed journalist, Jennifer L. Schenker who is one of the industry’s most respected commentators with over 30 years working for leading publications like TIME Magazine, the International Herald Tribune and Red Herring. Since less than a year she runs her own venture, Informillo.com. And she claimed that bloggers are not journalists. She felt journalism is more about reporting facts and connecting information together without any personal bias, and blogging involves more of the personal factor, and is most of the times personal opinion more than information per se. Some how I felt that bloggers are journalists too since news events are first broken out in the blogs (and micro blogs now) too, and generally digg which could be a decent indicator of things that are on the top of the web mesh for the day predominantly features blogs along with news sites. And when you dig deeper, the word journalist encompasses both a columnist and a reporter. So probably blogging is all about being a columnist, but what happens if you include video bloggers? They interview people and spread information / news too. The intersection between traditional and new media is a grey area, and at least the pundits of the English language would not be a great fan of the cross pollination of the terms and usage.