Sivaram V. T.

Every one would like to have tips. Isn't it?

Check this tipswallet.com.
It is a portal where you can find tips on anything. That is the motto of the site.

I find it useful but it has got very few tips pages. I hope, once it grows, it will be an useful site.

You can even share your tips there. They allow 2 backlinks for every tips article you submit. Pretty nice.

For my recent web application testing, I tried IE 8.0, firefox 3.6, safari, chrome and opera browsers. I was pleasantly surprised about the speed at which opera 10.61 loads the web pages.

It is on windows machine and started loving to browse all over again.Look of the browser is so neat and impressive. But I couldn't get my favorite delicious for opera :(

Now, am forced to use both firefox and opera.

Guys, it is worth trying opera for windows machine. Am sure you would like it.
http://www.opera.com/download/

Recently, I had to work with a manager who follows traditional style of people management. I could sense that he failed utterly in his management. So, I thought to write few words on people management in a business environment.

People management is not an easy job. There are 2 schools of thoughts in people management.
1] Task oriented
2] Relationship oriented

I am not gonna argue on which is the better style but youth prefer the 2nd one and hate the 1st one. It also depends on the context and your sub-ordinates.

The manager I had to face came to me 3/4 times a day asking about the status of the work. He never missed to exaggerate the complexity of the problems. I felt very difficult to work with him & I spent some time in analyzing the reason behind it. Here goes few of them.

1] He didn't want to take the bottom-line responsibility.
2] He had never given me confidence to take up the challenging task but he talks about the complexity of the problem many times a day. This induced fear in me which made me little ineffective towards the work.
3] I was not empowered to produce better result; Authority was not rightly delegated.
4] He didn't trust my abilities.

Thought to post these points here at least for my reference.

Are you a manager? Give your people little breathing space and trust them; You will see the visible difference!

I have developed few business ideas & couldn't implement them because of personal reasons. I put them on hold. To my surprise, in a period of very short time, I could see them implemented by someone else.

I was thinking about it for some time and felt that we cannot really curb the competition. It is true that we cannot kill the competition. It is the time of entrepreneurship & everyone is competing to fill the holes in the system we have.

Then, how do we survive if another business' offering is same as ours? Think about the value you deliver. It is not the traditional product / service you offer but the value you deliver to your customers. Innovation lies there. It could be a subtle change but good enough to create a magic.

Sometime back I read this article in DARE site, How to zig when others zag. I found this interesting.

Recently I came across this site dryicons.com when I was searching for free icons. They make beautiful icons and give it for free. You can use it in your personal or commercial websites but attribution is required in a visible place. I would say, give that backlink in the footer. If you don't want to give attribution, then go for commercial license.

Now they are making vector graphics and blog templates as well. The template used in this blog is made by dryicons.

Thought to share this as I found this site useful for web developers

Akash Chopra in his article in cricinfo.com analyzed the captaincy styles followed by IPL team captains.

Here's the links http://www.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/453382.html

I feel we can borrow these styles for managing any teams.

Leadership by example
Leadership by direction
Leadership by seduction
Leadership by association
Leadership by delegation

Here's some good stuff on volume analysis.
http://business.rediff.com/report/2010/mar/26/perfin-when-to-buy-and-sell-shares.htm

Thanks rediff.com

Here is the crux (excerpt from the article ).

The basic rules of volume analysis are as follows:

1. When prices are rising and volume is increasing, the present trend will continue, i.e., prices will continue to rise.
2.When prices are rising and volume is decreasing, the present trend is not likely to continue, i.e., the price rise will decelerate and then turn downward.

3.When prices are falling and volume is increasing, the present trend will continue, i.e., prices will continue to fall.

4.When prices are falling and volume is decreasing, the present trend is not likely to continue, i.e., the price decline will decelerate and then prices will turn upward.

5.When volume is not rising or falling, the effect on price is neutral.

When I heard the term 'Social network analysis' for the first time, I felt it must be something related to analysis on networking sites like twitter or facebook. But after I spent sometime on it, I started feeling that it is not just analysis on social networks but far beyond that.


You can represent any data in a network (Graph theory network) if it has got nodes and connections between them. You can do whole lot of analysis & derive useful inferences from it. For example, given a social network from twitter, you can easily find out who is the most influence person in that particular network. We can think of many applications in this line.


There are so many opensource tools available just for this analysis and visualiation. In Windows world you can use NodeXL plugin to have nice network visualization and analysis in your Microsoft Excel itself. It is free!

Download NodeXL and connect to twitter and visualize your network. Have fun!

How is this new look? I liked it. It is like a bundle of old papers. I feel it is little cluttered but still it got my attention. Thanks to you folks at dryicons.com for making such a beautiful template!