Comments(2) This one caught my eye from Market for Home Sales Slows
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‘Many in California have reached the dream of living in a million-dollar home without moving,’ said Appleton-Young [Chief Economist of the California Association of Realtors]. |
What do I know - I am not a professional economist … this must be some recent “innovation” in economics.
Comments(0) The sky is falling, the sky is falling - India is going to run out of engineers soon!
Here is a news item Projected shortage of engineering manpower rings alarm bells which is projecting forward the current boom in IT recruitment in India and raises concern that India will run out of engineers, particularly in non-IT industries.
And the proposed solution?
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Academic sources suggest a major planning and development initiative in the next couple of years. The dean of a premier institution and a placement officer in a private engineering college near Chennai came up with the same idea — industry bodies such as NASSCOM and CII must set up a task force, in collaboration with universities and institutions, to project the entire industry’s manpower needs over the next five to ten years. They can evolve a strategy to meet those requirements and identify specific branches of study they need to promote. The force can put in place a strong industry-institute framework to foster collaboration between in the overall interest of education and industry. |
Yes, that will do it. We will invite wise men to sit around a table, and project the entire industry’s (no less!) manpower needs. Humble little people like me cannot even project a small team’s staffing needs over, say, the next 6 months, but of course, these worthies can project demand 10 years ahead for the entire industry. (Technical note: No, there is no law of large numbers that lets you get away with it here - the demand for staffing is at least partly scale invariant because a few large companies constitute so much of the demand, so you are adding very dissimilar random variables to get the total demand).
In the post-independence socialist era of India, an omniscient government ministry, ably assisted by the Planning Commission of India used to project demand and react ahead of time. And that kind of foresight led to … an awesome per capita GDP of somewhere around $300 by 1990 and the famed Hindu rate of growth.
Old habits die hard.
Comments(0) … spammers will take over the world.
From Wikipedia on Turing Test
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The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”, it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently IRC or instant messaging. |
The problem is that if a machine can successfully masquerade as a human, all spam filters will fail. No Turing Machine [i.e a computer program] will be able to detect spam. In fact it is worse - not even the human recipient of spam will be able to tell spam from genuine mail. Spammers will be able to craft an infinite variety of very original, moving stories in an automated fashion to impress the human to part with their money.
The only way to stop that would be some kind of human-authenticated and human-issued online passport, the use of which would be necessary if email is to be received by any human recipient. We are probably already moving towards that era.
Comments(5) Zoli Erdos asks the question Would You Rather Be First to Market or Better? in reference to the early history of Zoho, when we were attacked as copy-cats (OK, it was really one guy who raised a ruckus, a competitor, no link love for him!)
To be honest, we never thought of ourselves as fast followers. The history of Zoho dates back to the telecom/dotcom nuclear winter. In the late 1990’s AdventNet emerged as a key supplier to the telecom equipment industry, a position we proudly hold today. Along with that status came the pain during the downturn. Being a prudent company, we never were at risk of going out of business or anything like that, but it was definitely painful. And we found ourselves with a lot of free time too.
It was sometime in 2003 that a couple of engineers asked me “Why not do something different, like an online office suite?” I said “Come on guys, tell me something more obvious”. They were persistent. Finally I gave in, and we started a small project. We had some false starts, with yours truly implicated in some key technical decisions that proved, ahem, a bit unwieldy - never trust your CEO to make technical decisions 
- particularly if you want to ship a product. But our engineers being smart, they recovered, and we ended up shipping Zoho applications eventually.
Actually only one of the Zoho products, Zoho Planner was inspired by the competitor-I-won’t-name. It started out as a fun project, in response to the take-it-or-leave-it attidue they exhibit (to this day), and the explicit challenge “If you don’t like our attitude, go build your own”. We come from a different philosophical approach to business, where Customer-is-God, so we decided to build our own - that was the real story behind the copy-cat label. By the way, customers seem to love our alternative-without-the-attitude.
In hindsight, it is obvious that the idea of online office applications occurred to a lot of other people, and some of them even got to market ahead of us. That meant we did seem like fast followers, but I wish we could follow that fast!
About the copy-cat label? Initially I was a bit defensive about it, but later just developed a thick skin. If Zoho is a copy-cat, we are in some glorious company, as Zoli points out. What matters to customers is how good the overall product is and how it is priced. We are focused on delivering great products at affordable prices. Everything else will take care of itself.
Thanks, Zoli!
Comments(0) Unfortunately, we lost connectivity on our phone lines to our sales & support center today, second time in a week. Recently we moved our offices, and it seems our old request to move got activated now, and our service provider disconnected our circuit in preparation for the move (which already happened). We are scrambling to restore service now.
We apologize for the inconvenience. The two incidents this week mean we will get a back-up circuit in place soon.
Comments(0) One of our phone lines is down, and this outage has impacted both our toll-free 888 number as well as extensions in the 925-965-…. range. We are working to fix the problem. Our apologies …