Technology Strategy

I recently posted an article on Linkedin about what people were doing to make working from home during the start-up phase of their companies successful ( http://goo.gl/otqA2 ). Here is a summary of hundreds of responses I received. (1) Make sure you get dressed for work, as if you were going to the office. (2) Make a separate area where you conduct your work, a dedicated working space. If possible a separate room or corner away from distractions like food or TV. (3) Try to attend meetings or networking events once or twice a week to get some human interaction. (4) Try to keep a very detailed check-list of the things you need to get done each day, and stick to it. (5) Be disciplined about when you are working and when you are not (6) Exercise regularly ! (7) Take proper meal breaks, and leave the work area. (8) Turn off all personal mobile phones, tv's etc - remember you are working ! (9) Keep away from the bedroom ! (10) Stay connected with colleges or collaborators...

I posted a question on LinkedIn Perl user group and I was amazed by the response. This is an attempt to create a list from the responses of the things people love about programming in Perl. 1. You can return scalars or arrays - Perl does not care. In most other languages type checking will prohibit this behavior. While in the wrong hands this can be dangerous, in the right hands it is very powerful ! 2. There are many, many very good Frameworks in Perl. One well used one for web development is Catalyst 3. There is a very knowledgeable and supportive programming community - which are perhaps more technical and skilled than other communities. Perl has grown out of the spirit of co-operation and the help is usually of very high quality. 4. CPAN is a repository of Perl classes and its quality and coverage is excellent. You will find almost anything you are looking for and if not maybe someone to create it ! Some examples : Win32::OLE - module to read/write office documents and spre...

Any reasonable person knows to be weary of any ranking, after all there is usually some subjective criteria by which the position in the ranking in judged. For example, how does one determine wealth ? Is it cash in the bank, assets, potential assets etc. The same care should be taken with MBA rankings, which often have a very strong weighting towards salary increase. You should be aware that this might be the reason many MBA schools are keen to recruit young students (their potential earnings can only go up !). Also watch out for fluctuations in exchange which may cause disproportionate salary increases when adjusted to the US dollar (or British Pound). Another often considered factor is the International flavor of the course, but many of us have dual nationalities and this figure can easily be fudged. Faculty members qualifications and academic contribution is also often weighted, again there are various ways in which this figure can be fudged. All in all, you should not choose an...

Interestingly, having in my last post posted a model, the issue I want to address in this post is the misuse of models. Firstly, let's consider what a model is and what it is not. A model is really an abstraction of reality, in most real-life situations it is impossible to capture all the parameters that influence any social phenomena. So for example, in economic growth there are far to many variables that impact economic growth. We can create some simplified model, which helps us attempt to capture at least the most important variables and suggest a way in which the economic growth mechanism works. Note, this is not a theory, a theory is an attempt to explain the workings of a mechanism whereas a model is only a simplification of a mechanism (see Mario Bunge for more discussion on this). When one person or organization create a model, it is with a particular context and set of assumptions in mind. If they create a model which is valid for all contexts and situations and does not ...

A couple of years ago, whilst attempting to complete a masters degree in Business Administration  I somewhat naively attempted to create a model linking entrepreneurship to economic growth. I began a 3 year quest to read all I could about entrepreneurship and economics. It become apparent early on, that academics simply do not agree on what entrepreneurship is. Furthermore modern economic theory has very little to say about the entrepreneur. I found this to be somewhat confusing, being a simple engineer, I expected there to be at least some basis on which to build an economic theory based on entrepreneurship. Afterall, it would seem evident from our current and historic experience that entrepreneurship (if we agree on what it is) generates economic growth. Almost every nation has a host of policies trying to stimulate entrepreneurship, however, academics did not seem to have a very good idea of how this growth worked. I presented my model for my dissertation, however, ...

I have been following quite a few very good Tweeters, some provide me with a daily digest of really interesting information. Then there are the ones that provide me with nothing at all and yet others that are amusing. Irrespective even the good ones can get to a point where they are over-tweeting. What is most relevant, what is the optimum number of tweets to keep peoples interest and when have you gone too far ? I think there is a fine line between interesting and annoying and getting it right in terms of both content and volume could be the key to generating happy tweet-fans .... Would it be sensible to set yourself tweet quotas, e.g 1 tweet per hour or 50 tweets a day ?

I recall working at Motorola at a time when we were gaining significant market share in the mobile handset market. Yet the gains were precarious, we produced some very attractive phones (the Razor was a first of a kind) and although the user interface and software reliability was not 100% there, the phones looked the part. Looking back, I was always concerned about the software reliability (since it was part of my job) but in fact we should have much more concerned about the usability and the Interface. Something the Microsoft has always been aware of. When I look at the Nokia and Blackberry offerings currently on the market, the phones look ok, they work ok, but somehow there is something unfamiliar about the user Interface. It is almost as if the User Interface Fashion (UI-Fashion maybe) has swung - very much in favour of the Android and iPhone. Even though the target markets for the Nokia and Blackberry phones may be slightly different than that of the iPhone or Android, this doe...