Capers, thoughts, bloopers, of a maveric

The past week has seen the unfurling of the debate between the NRAI  and Zomato  over the deals and benefits of Zomato Gold. The debate has reached such a crescendo that the #logout campaign has started. There are certain pro's of the business models and where there are pro's there are bound to be cons of the business model. And No this post is not about what is happening..... As my interest's lie in Productizing and Business cases, There are two sides to this story and here are a few interesting perspectives: Zomato gold is open to anyone who has the app installed. Zomato gold comes at a extra-premium to the app user; of say Rs 400 - Rs 1800 based on the location you are at.  I am not sure as to how much a hotel has to pay Zomato for being on the gold list, this is what I have got off the web "Restaurants also enjoy additional visibility across the Zomato Platform with the Gold tag and Gold filter" The Zomato enterprise in all their wisdom, have pivot...

As part and parcel of my professional life, I have come across numerous instances wherein the Higher-up's have gone to varying length's of extremes asking me to come up with "Estimates", Yes Accurate and Precise estimates. And when asking for the same, there have been very-many instances where-in the Grey's in the "To-Be-Requirement-List" have outnumbered the whites 1:1000. Yet the demand has always been the same "Give me the estimates". In some places I've had the luxury of time, In some places I haven't had any. The story does not end after estimates are given, after a period of time has elapsed, folks from the Quality Assurance team, the Quality Systems team, come knocking, this time for metrics. Along my journey through all of this, I have gone ahead and picked up some tricks-of-the-trade, that I would like to share with you, so that the estimations that I give out end up being as Accurate(closeness to the t...

Pic courtesy Anna Bradley's books I have been a LinkedIn faithful from the time it started out in India. I still remember; in the good ol' days we had to wait for someone to send us a invite to gain an entry into Linkedin. I have had the experience of experiencing most of the avatar's that Linkedin has gone through. There is a nice link here that documents the timeline: A Brief History of Linkedin Now that I've been using Linkedin for so long as a user, A few weeks ago I thought, hey let me put on the hat of a "Intelligent Product User" or let me say a "Product Manager", what would I like to see More of as part of Linkedin features and what would I like to see Less of as part of what I see everyday while going through the site. I would call this "personalization" and if in case that is already available as part of being a Linkedin Premium Member, then feel free to skip this post. And no this is not a rant ! If some aspects of t...

A basic introduction to Markdown Being an old school fella, in most of my dealing with code-versioning systems(Clearcase, SVN and  CVS),  I used to keep references of what each folder did by thinking  of good-old names of what each folder and file within did. Sometimes  in order for me to take care of boiler-plates or other known issues or  improvements, I would go ahead and maintain a README.txt. Starting a few months ago, my interactions with git and git based code started increasing a lot, and over there I started looking at  README's with an extension of .md, this piqued my interest a few  weeks ago and I started reading up more on this and this blogpost is  the culmination of what I've understood md an introduction md stands for markdown which is a lightweight markup language that contains formatting all done via plain text. And when hosted in git, appears  in a convienient html format which is easy to read. (I no...

If the year that just passed by was the "Year of the Mobile App", I have this strong opinion that this year is going to be the "Year of Wearable Technology".... Now how this happen to me to wake up and come to make such a conclusion? Read on to know more. The Year of Wearable Technology There have been many a fitness app's that you could install in your smartphone and then have them track your progress through the day. These apps come in majorly 2 forms     -- Ones that require you to keep your phone with you at most times         Examples: Noom, endomondo, Walkdroid, Runtastic, Run     -- Others that require you to keep feeding in data for achieving goals that you have set yourself.           Examples: CalorieCounter, Weight Tracker Now it is in both these forms that I see downsides or laggards leading to wide scale usage, these could be summarized as follows: I do not keep the phone with me during all...

It has been the season of Christmas and now is moving onto the new year. I have been using many online shopping sites for purchasing stuff online. Mostly I have bought books online and now in the recent past I have moved onto buying Clothes and Sunglasses. Now this is what I used to do, whenever I wanted to buy a book. I would log onto  http://www.indiabookstore.net/  and key in the title of the book I want to buy and lo presto!!! it would pump out the book and the site that would have the least cost for the book. This site would account for flipkart, amazon, indiatimes, crossword. There was this extensive media campaign a few months ago by PolicyBazaar.com that told us, we could compare insurance policies and just needed very little data from us to get us our quote As Apple Computers released their new iPad Air, I was hooked and wanted to buy my first iPad, I hoped to find a site like the one mentioned above that could compare the prices of the iPad Air across all ...

Hello Everybody!!!, Its been an astounding year and there have been a lot of changes that have happened. It has now been eon's since I found the time to write about the stuff that is happening around, So, Here goes!!! :) This blog post is a comparative post wherein I present to you 10 reasons to mention why I happen to like a lot in Yahoo mail as opposed to Gmail. By this post I hope to showcase the difference that I have felt (from the time Marissa Meyer's made the transition from Google to Yahoo) Reason # 10 A More Accommodative Yahoo Yahoo allows me many inclusive options to get onto Yahoo, namely the ones that you see in the image above, FB and Lo Behold Google is also included. The Gmail option enhances and showcases multiple options of the Internet Giant, A wonderful case of marketing their products. A product owners dream of marketing come true. Reason#9 No Chat or should I call it Hangout in the Landing page Yahoo does not let me be visible to all m...