Swine Flu

"Swine Flu"! "Swine Flu”!! That’s what is in the news these days, and is creating a scare among people because of its ability to transmit from one person to the other. And it’s posing the biggest risk of a pandemic.


People are not taking the risk of flying and the airports are having thorough checks of their passengers before they get on the flight.


The WHO has raised the Pandemic threat level of the swine flu to Phase 5. Phase 5 is the WHO's second highest level of warning that a pandemic or a global outbreak of a serious new illness is imminent.


The start of Swine Flu, where the first known victim, was in a town La Gloria, which is in Mexico. Since the first victim, this virus has spread all over the world, killing an estimated 159 people in Mexico, and infecting people in at least eight other countries.

If any one, is experiencing, the symptoms below. Please see the doctor:

• Fever above 100°F
• Head and body aches
• Cough
• Sore throat
• Chills
• Trouble breathing
• Vomiting and/or diarrhea.


I hope the health official do get this virus in control and prevent it from becoming a Pandemic.

Netflix the Surprise Package!!

I still remember my days in California. I had loads to study and many other things to do over the week so during the weekend I used to look forward to watching DVD’s. All i had to do was to walk down to Blockbuster and pick up a DVD, but then I had to take the trouble of actually walking down there and then looking around for the DVD and then the most painful part, returning it!. Then I came across Netflix which simplified my whole DVD watching process.

Netflix is an online DVD rental service and it offers a flat rate rental by mail and online streaming in the United States. They have about 100,000 titles and are headquartered in Los Gatos, California. They started operations in the year 1997 and have come a long way since then and they currently have about 10 million subscribers today and they ship about 1.9 million DVD’s each day.

Today, with recession and many companies showing plunging profits and the many layoffs. Netflix on the other hand is making money and has experienced a major growth in the fourth quarter. Their profits are up by 45%, the company feels that this rise was due to their new streaming video feature , which allows viewers to instantly watch movies over their computer.

The news of the profits caused their stock to jump 7.4% percent to $32.38.

All i can say is that in these troubled times .. Way to go Netflix!!

Recession!!

"Recession", this word instills in me an unsettling feeling . Makes me think how many people have lost their jobs? How many people are getting laid off as I am writing this?

Recession, is nothing but a general slowdown in economic activity over a sustained period of time. It isn’t a minor headache that would just go away by popping a pill.


We all know that today almost all the big companies are announcing massive layoffs and pay cuts too. And also the current employment rate of 8.5% is at a 25 year high.

During recession, companies try their best to minimize their costs by all possible ways, before they decide to lay off their employees.

For example we will see that now Google will stop selling radio ads. Google paid $102 million to acquire dMarc Broadcasting, a radio advertising company, in 2006. If Google’s business still does not pick up, it will result in more layoffs this year.

Another saddening event is the closing of Circuit City, which has been around for almost 60 years, its sad to see that closing it would leave about 34,000 people unemployed.

But the future is not altogether bleak. I just read an article which says that the recession is abating( I cross my fingers and hope its true) and that there would be many job openings in companies like Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America and many more.


So all we need to do, is just wait for it to be finally over and when it is , well folks its party time!!

Tips for Startup Success

Below is the presentation from Scott Mcnealy, Chairman of Sun Microsystems. Sun has been having a tough time in last few years but it has been a very successful and innovative company.
They were the pioneers of the Open source concept and gave the world a beautiful language , Java.

Scott Mcnealy Presentation

Satyam Acquisition

After almost 3 months of speculation and uncertainty. Satyam was finally acquired by Tech Mahindra with a stake of 51%. But, uncertainty still looms for the employees of Satyam .Tech Mahindra hasn’t made it clear if they would, be any sort of job losses as a result of this acquisition.

Tech Mahindra has big challenge ahead as to how will they absorb the 43,000 employees of Satyam??

During an acquisition, apart from the owners, the employees also undergo a lot of stress, and have a lot of questions crossing their minds:

Will I loose my job?
If I do have my job, how much will I be paid?
What benefits will I receive?
Will I be in the same department?
Who would be my new colleagues? Will I be able to get along with them?
What will be the work culture? Will I be able to fit into that work culture?

With so many questions and concerns the employee’s focus shifts from work, while some of the employees might move on to better opportunities outside the company.

If Tech Mahindra wants to be successful with this acquisition, and if they want it to turn out to be a fruitful one, they need to constantly communicate with the employees of Satyam, make their plans known to the employees so that the whole acquisition process goes smoothly with no hard feelings.

If not the chances of them loosing out on good employees is high and also it would create a very negative environment, which would not be beneficial for Tech Mahindra and Satyam.

Online Skill Assessment

Finding the right candidate for the job is a tedious task today due to the large number of applicants. Choosing the right candidate for the job is a crucial decision for any company. In fact, according to a study conducted by the Harvard Business School, making poor hiring decisions can cost a company as much as three times an employee's annual compensation package.

Thus most of the companies resort to skill assessment which is a method to evaluate the candidate before making the hiring decision. There are various forms of skills assessment like management skills, people skills, communication skills and technical skills.

Skill assessment, tests when used in conjunction with an interview and the manager's intuition is one of the very good ways of finding the right candidate.

Today the internet is almost indispensable, online skill assessment is becoming more and more popular for companies and recruitment firms. And it is really simple to use as all you need is an internet connection and a web browser, no software needs to be downloaded.

Geek evaluation is one such tool, which helps you to evaluate the technical skills of your candidate once you have short listed them. It helps you customize your own tests or choose questions from their huge question bank and evaluates the candidate based on their results at very affordable rates.


The questions presented to the candidates are random and of varying levels of difficulty. And their results can be easily analyzed by topics as well as level of difficulty.

For more details log on to our website at www.geekevaluation.com or please email at shruti.sharma@geekevaluation.com for login details if you would like to have a tour of the application.

$500 million offer for a company with revnues in .....$0

Sounds strange but this is the latest news on silicon valley's new crush , twitter.
Apparently facebook whose future itself does not seem so rosy because of the cash it is burning versus the revenue it is earning , offered $500 million for the new microblogging platform twitter
Not sure why the facebook offered this kind of valuation whose revenue till this date is $0.
Twitter does not earn even a $ versus other social networking sites who have at least some revenue model with advertising.

Still, combining the world’s fastest growing social networking site with what is quickly becoming the best known microblogging service is actually a natural fit.

While some sources at Facebook said Zuckerberg was becoming frustrated by the buzz Twitter was getting, a market that should have been dominated by Facebook others at the company said he was interested in buying Twitter because of his respect for its progress.

Twitter needs all the investors it can get, since it has no revenue, although it has been exploring things like charging business customers and adding advertising into the consumer service.

This brings back to again the same old question of how to value a startup. Some value based on the number of registered users, other value based on the no of hits.
Much also depends on how much hype is one able to create !

Tools for a startup - Part 1

One of the friends asked me when I was developing geekevaluation as to why I chose java.
My response was that I chose java because I know java.
Even if there was something which was better ,I would not have developed the application in a new language or platform because I want to work on my business plan , not learning new skill.There is your first tool

1. Chose the language you are comfortable with : Start your product development with the tools and technology you are comfortable with. Remember the idea here is to get a product which should validate your business idea, not your technical skills.

I also prefer Java because the power it gives in terms of open source. There are so many tools , servers , IDE free of cost to help you get started.What a beautiful thing software development is .
Can you imagine where you can start your business by not spending a penny ?

2. Source control options : I would imagine that you are a bunch of guys who are working at different locations.You could also have outsourced project to some small company and now you want to manage source code where all of you could do check in/check out.
I looked around a couple of ones.CVS dude is a popular options these days if you want to use CVS as a respository.
If you prefer to use SVN over CVS the code spaces & unfuddle are good choices.
For me the ideas was to keep the cost at minimum so I looked at code spaces and unfuddle.
I had some issues with code spaces repository when working with eclipse after 6-8 months so then swicthed to unfuddle.

3. Online meetings : Another important tool to hold weekly meetings .I am using dimdim for now which is free for 5 users. I am ok with the quality so far(there is voice lag in it).
Another tool suggested by one of the friends wasMikogo . Here you can share your dashboard.

I will cover hosting,email options in next post