Do What Matters

Zillow's algorithm of calculating home values (also called as zestimate) is unknown and can be disputed, but there is no doubt that zillow estimates provide a starting point when you try to buy or sell a home. Fluctuations can be attributed to the lack of relevant data (as they say) but here is the chart for greater San Jose area: Zillow Home Value Index You need the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. Download the free Flash Player now! More San Jose Home Values

Fortune publishes its list of top 100 companies to work for. Business Intelligence company SaS gets the top slot. Watch the video posted here and see for yourself. The other companies in top 10 shows here.  The full list of top 100 can be found here. So why SaS? Is it profit sharing among employees or the perks like in-house child care, in-house doctors, flexible work options or everything combined as a package? Interested to know what you think...

Image source: www.santabanta.com

This is a thought provoking blog comment by Suresh M Soni on PPI blog under the topic - Solution for better governance. Please be aware that this topic has specific context of Socio economic progress in India and Indian's mentality of tolerating everything in life. In case, you do not know about PPI, It is an unusual initiative taken by Indian professionals(doctors, lawyers, technologists and other working class people) to setup a political party to contest elections with pro-people progressive agenda. My objective is to draw your attention on the comment by Suresh M Soni . Let me know what you think...

I have been an occasional listener of KLOK1170 AM in the past, but recently, I was really impressed with the broad spectrum of topics they cover on their talk show. Today, the talk show "Sapne Salamat" hosted by famous Serial Entrepreneur  Rohit Chandra caught my attention.Last I heard that my friend and ex colleague Siva Sreeraman (founder of Indian Music Band Eastern Winds ) was invited to his show. Today's guest on the show was a distinguished women Dr. Anuradha Basu who is  Director of the Silicon Valley Center for Entrepreneurship and Professor in the Department of Organization & Management at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley. Rohit Chandra, a successful innovator and entrepreneur himself sounds very passionate about what he talks and does. He owns a very famous patent for Personalization of web url and currently runs a web company roohIt.com which provides free highlighting of content on any website that you visit. To appreciate...

The popular micro blogging site Twitter has become an avenue for marketers, promoters, technologists, celebrities and now catching on with investors as well. I am not immune to this phenomenon. I subscribe these tweets (micro commentary - junk most of the time) in the search of some goldmine :) See the number of followers some of these tweets have (including some big names):        Twitter                           Followers       Why News & People    ABC News                      7,549              To  get notification about important shows CNN Breaking news       2,848,743      Get breaking news from CNN BBC South Asia News    1,455             BBC south Asian News (primarily Indian sub-continent) NDTV...

When TV broadcasting went digital last summer, fragments of analog TV spectrum were left unused. Traditionally, TV stations used to broadcast over wireless frequencies that carry information longer distances. They used spectrum between 512 megahertz and 698 megahertz, to broadcast analog TV channels 21 to 51 which is totally unused now. Now these so called "White spaces network" are being utilized to provide high speed internet to rural America where the broadband companies did not want to go before. United States rank 17th in the International rankings for percentage of homes that have broadband/high speed connection. Next month FCC is expected to allow commercial white spaces internet, which can bridge the digital divide and hook up 54% of rural america with high speed internet. source: spectrumbridge. A company called Spectrum bridge built a white space network under FCC's experimental license in Claudville Virginea. The company setup a radio transmitter at the ...

I am currently reading the book GenoType Diet and I must say, its probably the best health and nutrition book I have ever read. I haven't read Dr. D'Adamo's previous books (Blood Type Diet and Eat right 4 your type) his GenoType calculator and formulas are already making sense to me. So, What is GenoType ? According to Dr. D'Adamo, an individual's GenoType determines every trivial details such as shape of your teeth, length of your legs and the pattern of your finger prints. The most importantly, your GenoType decides, which illness you are most at risk for, which food will suit you and help achieve happier and healthier life. Sounds interesting? Wait, by the time you finish reading this blog, I am sure you are going to order this book or reserve at library. Dr. D'Adamo has identified six GenoTypes: the Hunter, the Gatherer, the Teacher, the Explorer, the Warior and the Nomad. He provided simple tests in the book which if you take, will decide your GenoType. ...

I got this spam in my work email Inbox. I have pasted the email below, If I remember, I have got this email a couple of times in the past and instantly figured out that its a SCAM. Please don't feel proud that you were selected to be included in this unknown "Strathmore's Whos Who" and DO NOT fall into this trap. This time, I decided to do some internet research and found that many "professionals" were fallen into this trap and send them money for plaque and certificates. The thing bothers most to me is that how do these scammers get my work email address. I used my work email address only to subscribe professional journals and magazines(some are free) I am sure they sell the email address to third parties to make money in exchange of free magazines they deliver. At the bottom of the email there is a unsubscribe link which points to a domain called  http://analeptic.sunsetresources.net/  which again is a scammer. Here is the email, if anyone knows any offici...

Embedded databases are hidden gem, their prime advantage is availability and speed. Embedded database does not run in a separate process, instead linked into the application that requires the database. This is in contrast to the traditional databases like DB2 or Oracle which runs as a separate process and to which application connects using some protocol such as TCP/IP or sockets. I needed an embedded databases to use with my hobby project, so last few days I did a lot of research and compare with various alternatives. If you are looking for same thing, this blog post intends to make your life a little bit easier. #1 IBM solidDB solidDB is IBM's in-memory database that can be embedded directly into application. It supports standard application interfaces such as SQL, JDBC and ODBC. solidDB is good for critical applications as it keeps two copies of databases and can restore data in seconds in case of failover. IBM allows you to download and use trial version for 90 days. This D...

Many tech gurus are calling Virtualization of server and desktops a red hot tech trend of 2010, but a hardware vendor has taken virtualization one step further with a device called Pano Device . They refer Pano devices as Zero Client as they have no CPU, no memory, no operating system, no drivers, no software and no moving parts. A pano device connects to a virtualized Microsoft Windows desktop running on a server in the data center. These devices are made stateless, so you can disconnect your virtual desktop from one Pano device and connects from another. Pano device has won the Best Innovation award for 2009 in Computer Hardware category. Does this mean desktops days are over? I don't think so... first of all these devices are not cheap, the panalogic online store shows a started bundle price (includes 5 pano devices along with 5 client pano manager licenses) of $1899, which comes around $380 a piece. Today, you can get a very powerful desktop computer for $400, probably much l...

One of my friends asked a forum question last week about Python and its growing adoption in big companies like Google. When you think about a scripting language being used at enterprise level then obvious question is raised that how do these power users manage to use a scripting language alongside with mainstream programming language such as C/C++ and Java. No one can ignore the benefits of scripting language; John Ousterhout Prof. of Computer Sciences at Stanford and creator of scripting language Tcl calles scripting languages, a higher level programming language of 21st century.  SWIG makes it easy to connect scripting languages to C/C++ code. So, what's magic behind SWIG?  David M. Beazley creator of SWIG explains  in his tutorial SWIG Master Class .  How did I get interested in SWIG? I was looking at ways to put C/C++ programs in scripting environment to be able to test and debug. Can I use python interpreter as an interface to test/debug C++ code?  If I ...

If you don't know about CES, its the biggest and greatest consumer electronic trade show of North America. CES 2010 is in progress Jan 7 - 10 2010 and Intel's Paul Otellini delivered a keynote at Hilton Las Vegas at 4:30pm this afternoon. Here are the interesting stuffs(quoted by news outlets and cnet reporter, no youtube available yet): HD is out, 3D is in. According to him, 3D is the next big thing going to explode in 2010. 3D TV, 3D games, even home user might be able to record home movies in 3D and stream.  everything user creates will need to be shared - USB 3.0 has arrived and LightPeak (high speed optical cable technology that transfers data at 10 Gigabits per second, WOW 1 blueray movie downloding in 30 sec) is coming Intel Wireless Display or WiDi which is available on Intel's i3, i5 and i7 core systems and using WiDi, these processors based systems can talk to each other with just an adapter.  40 million netbooks using Intel's Atom processor have been ...

Today, I went to google to search for something when I noticed Nexus One ( specs here ) link below the search box. Phone looks cool, google selling unlocked phone for $529 ( we were debating this yesterday over lunch table - this price will scare the crowd) , with Tmobile 2 year contract $179. Verizon and vodafone options are grayed out currently and coming in Spring 2010. This is definitely going to start the trends of buying an unlocked phone without being tied to service agreement, most of Asian countries do not have any service agreement concept. You buy whatever phone you want, you buy whatever service works best in your area. Recharge your sim card when you are out of minutes; just like a phone card. Lets see whether consumers win as a result of all out war between Apple & Google.

I was researching some innovative ideas to share peer knowledge at work and came across rather old but interesting concept of unConferencing. The idea is to embrace free form gathering like coffee break for peer to peer learning collaboration and creativity. Kaliya who is an acclaimed designer and facilitator of more than 100 "unConferences" maintains a website where she writes everything from attending and organizing an unConference. I have been an active participant in a coffee break at my workplace, but now when I know the modus operandi of so called "unConferences" I can't claim that ours fit that category. MassTLC innovation 2009 was one such unConference organized by kaliya last year. I liked the idea of freeing the audience from pre planned agenda and let them create the agenda on-demand. This can spark innovative and new discussion and engage audience more. To learn more about how it works and how to prepare for one, you have to browse through kaliya...

Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius the co-creator of famous free database MySql has created a website to garner support for saving the database from Oracle's acquisition of Sun. So far he has gathered more than 19002 petitions (according to the website)  from MySql users, developers and customers. Here is the petition if you would like to support.

Yes, I am talking about the remarkable collections of ideas of the great business philosopher and management thinker Peter F Drucker.  I bought this book sometime in June last year, so decided NOT to read because the daily dose starts from January 1 and each one of his thoughts and ideas is concluded by an Action Point. I loved the idea because the book does not just leave you with open ended thoughts and philosophies, but ask you to work on it. In my opinion, some of his doses convey extremely powerful message yet simple to understand, but some of them are difficult to understand for some one like me who lacks academic knowledge in the field of management. As planned, I started taking doses this year and I am going to write about some of them every week. This week, I am picking up his January 2 does on Identifying the future.  In this dose, he highlights the importance of identifying the  future trend which has already happened. He suggests that futurists and vi...

We always had lunch table discussion on hedge fund after the credit default swap fiasco, but I must confess, I never understood the characteristics of Hedge Funds until I watched this youtube video. Educate yourself by spending 10 mins:

Depends, how we look at it. If we look at sales data of last 4 years, the current prices look very attractive. The other side of the equation is that homes are abundant in this area and there are more than 18000 properties either foreclosed or in the process of getting foreclosed. I was told by a real estate professional that banks are sitting on most of them and not listing them at once. I verified his claim both on city-data reports and local MLS Listing  service myself. One thing is sure that, Sacramento and surrounding neighborhood real estate saw the boom first so when credit crisis was exposed, Sacramento was the one which crashed first. Take a look at the Home sales graph from city-data; the median price touched $370k in 3rd quarter of 2005 which started to decline in late 2006. It nose dived early but look carefully, when entire nation was seeing sharp decline in home sales, in Sacramento investors started to move in again. I was told that bay area investors are the one w...

This is the coolest thing, I have found lately in the area of eGovernance. This sounds like best use of tax payer's money to open up government agencies to the citizens. The city of New York has opened a software challenge in October which is closed for entries but opened for public voting. There are $20K award associated with this challenge. I love the idea, can other local governments learn from this? I played with some of the submitted applications, check it out the Application Gallery . I specially loved these: NextTown  - This map based app lets you track your representatives and also what are they doing for your community. Wish Indian local governments could make the data available to make it possible to build such apps. Actuatr  - This is a platform built to open up data for developers. Anyone can upload data and developers can build apps using simple REST API. Request URL is provided for API and data is returned either in JSON or XML format. There are datasets av...

I googled for "New Year Resolutions" last year and it returned over 24 million results.. Surprised? wait... I googled just now and it returned 72 million results. I don't know what to infer from the information growth of this particular topic, but one thing is sure that a huge number of marketers and fitness gurus have been  targeting individuals using internet. Resolutions are nothing but goals that you want to achieve in life, so my question is that do you really have to wait for new year to start working on your goal? Absolutely NOT. Many experts point out that for majority of people resolutions do not work because of lack of dedication and commitment. Lack of dedication and commitment can be attributed to the following: We typically consider resolutions as "should be doing" items instead of "need to be doing" items. For example, exercising/ practicing yoga 15 minutes every day is going to be a new year resolutions for many. In my opinion, to make...

Click the "I am feeling lucky" button on google and you will see Happy New Year messages popping up all over. Happy New Year again !