Panic in Indian Stock Markets!

  

The Real growth Story in Social Media

 

$100 Billion Cloud Index

Still doubtful about the whole cloud computing thing? Here’s a new metric that should probably change your mind. The combined market capitalization of the Top 30 cloud computing companies is now north of $100 billion.

http://allthingsd.com/20130729/bessemer-venture-partners-launches-100-billion-cloud-index/

Turning 50(or 60,70) Means Keeping Up, Not Resting

If you wonder on a daily basis , as I do, as whats really happening at the workfront, it will give you some comfort reading this WSJ article on a middle manager in his 50s. as I have always argued in my blog, a new breed of management model is urgently required. Models which will go beyond Flat worlds, which will potentially shed light on decades of upcoming struggles. Models which Governments worldwide will use to create new programs to help their own citizens. Else we are doomed with rusted thinking which is prolonging agony across decades. Read on…

"I know I've peaked in my career," Mr. Toal said at the time. "I am never going to be a vice president. But I'm running as fast as I can, and I don't know why."

To other middle managers, I'd say: Be flexible and open to taking on new challenges because it makes you quick on your feet, gives you more understanding of how a company works.

One of the things I did learn is that it's really hard to choose your own path. Things happen, and you go with it."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323997004578644281045966670.html

New Skills, Old Tasks

To stay afloat, he has reinvented himself again and again. Once specializing in managing production, he learned marketing, then purchasing, then finance. He gets up at 5 every morning and doesn't get home until 8 p.m. Yet he still does essentially the same job he did 10 years ago: overseeing a small staff, making revenue projections and supervising expenses in the sales division and resolving disputes over salary compensation.

Only this year did he get back to earning the salary he made in 1989.

When Mr. Toal's father, a union machinist, was 54, he had already begun planning for retirement, was respected by his union and company management, and had become active in the local United Way. Mr. Toal recently stopped coaching his 16-year-old daughter's soccer team because he has no time. He can't imagine retiring because he has no pension—just money in a 401K plan and a series of worthless stock options. He pays $27,000 a year to send one daughter to Simmons College in Boston. His other daughter heads off to college in two years. His wife works part time as a teacher's aide.

Eyes turn to Mr. Toal. "No clue," he says. "I feel like I've peaked in my career, but I don't think I've peaked as a human being." He loosens his tie. "Things are not what any of us anticipated--that with natural talent, hard work and good moral values, there would come some sense of stability. There is no security and no stability."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB862794279247838000.html

World Innovation Clusters

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517626/infographic-the-worlds-technology-hubs/

Tom Preston-Werner’s GitHub Is an Exceptionally Free Place for Open-Source Software | MIT Technology Review

San Francisco startup GitHub has all the hallmarks of the next big social network. The company’s base of 3.6 million users is growing fast, and after raising $100 million last year, GitHub was worth $750 million, at least on paper.

Yet GitHub is not a place for socializing and sharing photos. It’s a site where software developers store, share, and update their personal coding projects, in computer languages like Java and Python.

“It’s a social network, but it’s different from the others because it’s built around creating valuable things,” says GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner, whose company has been called “Facebook for geeks.”

GitHub’s mix of practicality and sociability have made it into a hub for software innovation. People log on from around the globe (78 percent of its users from outside the U.S.) to test and tinker with new ideas for mobile apps or Web server software. For Ethan Mollick, an assistant professor at the Wharton School, GitHub is one of a new class of technology platforms, including the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, that allow innovation without the traditional constraints of geography or of established hierarchies. “Virtual communities have more influence on reality now,” he says.

What all this could mean for software hubs like Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley isn’t yet clear. Certainly, in the post-GitHub world you no longer have to frequent the right coffee shops and parties in the Bay Area to make a name as a talented coder. Companies get founded on the site, and it’s a favorite hunting ground for recruiters as well.

The features of GitHub’s service and community that have driven its popularity could appear opaque to non-coders. The guiding principle is that any and all possible barriers to one person contributing to someone else’s project must be stripped away. That means avoiding e-mail and conventional management. “That idea of not having to ask permission to be involved in something is really big,” says Preston-Werner.

Preston-Werner says GitHub, launched in 2008, has been profitable, and signs up around 10,000 new users every day. The newest feature of its business model is to rent out a version to companies they can use internally. In Marissa Mayer’s first company-wide memo after becoming CEO of Yahoo last year, she listed GitHub as one of the ways she intended to fix her company’s stifling bureaucracy.

GitHub’s most important feature is the pull request. It allows a person to suggest a modification to the code of someone else’s project, and shows that suggestion to the project’s owner in a way that makes it easy for them to review the changes. A single mouse click can merge them into the project or start a discussion about the changes. If a person’s pull request doesn’t stick, they can “fork” the project to create a parallel version on GitHub with their idea included.

GitHub’s only physical location is an office in San Francisco where about one-third of its 176 employees work (the rest work from their homes, coffee shops, or rented desks in the U.S. or overseas). No one at the company has set working hours. Some show up at noon and work into the night, others arrive close to dawn and disappear by midafternoon. Only Preston-Werner, as CEO, has a formal job title. Everyone else uses generic or frequently changing descriptors such as “Bad Guy Catcher” or “Señor Open Sorcerer.”

GitHub now plays a major supporting role in the creation of widely used open-source software, and the company uses it to maintain and expand its own service as well. Although Preston-Werner may set the overall goal of such projects, details of how it will be achieved are left to his workforce. Teams of GitHub workers form on an ad-hoc basis, growing, shrinking, and melting away as the company’s needs change and people find new things to work on.

Meetings are seen as a tragic waste of time, and thanks to the pull request, fewer are needed. “I don’t think we’ll ever have to hire managers,” says Preston-Werner.

Preston-Werner hopes his philosophy will spread and that more kinds of work will happen on GitHub. The platform already has features targeted at designers working on images. Some journalists, academics, and even the White House are also experimenting with GitHub to collaborate on articles and write research and policy documents. “Software is where we’re starting, but the vision can encompass a much broader scope than that,” says Preston-Werner.

Tom Preston-Werner’s GitHub Is an Exceptionally Free Place for Open-Source Software | MIT Technology Review

How SMBs use (Cloud)startup software to save big bucks

Its a cliche to say Cloud is disruptive. Its already mainstream as evidenced by the adoption across the spectrum. I came across this article which expounds on this theme. Below are some excerpts:

CEO and founder David Soutar said that almost all of the software they used had come out of the startup community, and that because they can relate to how the development process works, they are willing to accept a few bugs here and there. But it also means that the businesses creating these products understand that startups don't have a lot of money to spend, and price themselves accordingly.

"The companies that come from startup roots understand that as a startup company, you don't have a lot of money to spend.

In fact, Soutar sees the minimal features of Google Apps and similar cloud services as being a cost saving compared to "installable" applications.

And there are areas where enterprise systems haven't yet caught up. For example, WattCost is using Flowdock to tie everything together on the social media and, to a degree, customer relationships management side. It's a combination of an internal instant messaging system and an inbox that can be hooked into other services like Twitter, Facebook, Zendesk, and GitHub.

http://www.zdnet.com/case-study-how-smbs-use-startup-software-to-save-big-bucks-7000017488/