mailanay

Although it is unfair to generalize this to all Indian software companies, unfortunately, it is mostly true. In my opinion the reason is mostly one of these three:

1) Some Indian companies, look to cash in the price arbitrage, and have a short term view (3 - 5 years). So they bid for projects, where they have very little expertise and experience. (In India, there is a huge market for sub-sub-contracting. Companies, win projects and then look for people with expertise to actually execute them. (Personally I have been asked to consult so many times)).

2) Education in general is in shambles and especially C.S. education. Also education is (unfortunately) a business. For example the latest fad is to start Android development classes. So many are coming up. (but most of them don't have good tutors. (Again, personally I am asked to come in as "Industry Expert"). Students join these classes and 3 / 6 months later they consider themselves qualified. (when in reality they know so little).

3) Most students (regardless of aptitude to software development) take C.S. is college because of better job prospects. Obviously they cannot be good engineers. There is such a shortage of engineers, that invariably such people do get hired (which feeds the cycle) and lowers quality of output.

About Me: I am an Indian software developer and founder of a software development shop.

Check out their About page: http://www.userlook.com/about/

Its amazing

This seems to be a software product opportunity. Shouldn't creating an ebook from existing Word and InDesign files be a pure software problem?

I am sorry, but I think I disagree with your viewpoint. My idol in being frugal (but not cheap) is Mr. Warren Buffett. I don't think he lost an opportunity by being frugal or has any regrets. Obviously it is a very personal choice. Some people do get pleasure by discretionary purchases, and some (like me) by knowing that there is money in the bank.

Thanks ! Extremely useful for non-designer programmer like me !

I recently read Ray Dalio's (founder of Bridgewater) principles - http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

It is very interesting in how he is focusing on "reaching goals" instead of "looking good" or "looking stupid" etc...

I think a must read for everyone

Are these fake apple stores selling genuine apple products? Or the products themselves are fake?

Google+ has the same buzz and expectation which was associated with gmail when it was first launched (with respect to scarcity of invites). I am based in India (not sure how location matters) and I remember I had to wait a few weeks for someone to invite me to gmail.

If that is some indication, then Google+ looks to be a winner. (I remember how I moved from Yahoo! and Hotmail email to gmail after I finally got the invite).

Please Check out http://buzzfactory.net/

On the web: 1. Hacker News 2. Techcrunch 3. Documentaries on Youtube 4. Interviews of Warren Buffett

Physical: 1. The Economist 2. Books by James Gleick 3. Reader's Digest

Imagine liquidity as tank full of fuel in your car. The possibilities of going with a full tank are endless. More fuel than tank's holding capacity is pretty much useless.

I don't know where you stay in India, but here in Pune (Maharashtra) the Government post is quite reliable

Sorry, but I don't get the point of this application. All this can be done by sending a simple email to the webmaster of the site.

Interesting, the reason of dis-agreeing with something might be influenced by what is the state of mind at that moment. I wonder how many comments and articles are down voted because of this reason.

To avoid such things from happening as part of my business decisions, I usually delay the decision making by a day so that I can "think clearly" before taking any decision.

In that case, what is stopping the data consumer in directly contacting the data provider?

No offence, but this comment sounds more like a one generated by a bot of some kind.

textpad

Many companies put such requirements as filters to reduce number of applications they receive. Going through a huge list of resumes is time-consuming and not exactly what a start-up is looking forward to.

I think one of the earliest questions to ask is whether would you, the builder, use it yourself and secondly, whether you would pay for it. If both answers are yes, then that is a start. Build a simple workable prototype (without too much effort and cost) and start finding customers and listening to them.

This sure sounds more serious than those "Hormone Imbalances" that we have been hearing. My dad suffered a long time because of Liver Cirrhosis before meeting his end last year. I know first hand how painful liver related problems can get.

wow! here in India every movie has an intermission.

No really, money is one of the easiest resource to get (as compared to other things needed to succeed).

Maybe it is besides the point, but I use YUI grid. Not tried Blue Print CSS, but it took me less than a couple of hours to get hang of YUI. Never looked back.

I had thought about the very high noise level. My argument is at a given place / time, if atleast one guy is "good" (obviously the immediate question arises is "which one"), it would be sufficient to escalate a "real situation" and supress a false positive.

Maybe this still is a bad idea. My point is we need to figure out how do we harness "intelligence" of ordinary "good" citizens who are on the streets at the time when things are happening or about to happen.

Please checkout http://txtme.savitr.net. This is a service started by my startup Savitr Wireless (http://www.savitr.net)

We have built a SMS Engine / Framework which easily integrates with aggregators / carriers to send and receive SMS messages.

We license out the Framework directly as well as provide API to our hosted service.

With tens and hundreds of emails in the INBOX, going forward, how much would email contribute to the virality of the application? Can SMS work out to be an interesting alternative? SMS is guaranteed to be delivered, there is no SPAM filtering yet and the probability of reading SMS is much higher than an email.

Let this deal go. The company, I was working earlier, had a habit of signing on every customer that knocked their door. In the long run, it created a lot of problems to support those customers (at a very low margin or at a loss), just to maintain the reputation of "not leaving the customers cold" in the marketplace.

Letting this deal go, might also send a strong message to X, Y, Z potential customers, that you are offering much more than the cheapest solution and are willing to walk away.