Three Fields, Three Rings, Troika

It’s been a long time since last post. The month of May has been absolutely insane! First, I am doing a couple gigs on the side. Second, I am seriously considering pursuing MBA this coming fall, so I’ve been busy taking GMAT, writing essays, and such (sponsorship, anyone? please?). Third, I had the luck of taking a vacation with my wife to San Francisco and Sonoma. We actually took an open cockpit biplane ride! I highly recommend it - anyone coming that way in Sonoma and planning to take plane ride should go there: Vintage Aircraft (http://www.vintageaircraft.com). I highly recommend these folks!

As June rolls in, I’ve decided to focus on these things:

1. Work on the consulting gig - this gives me the opportunity to get back in touch with software development world, and thus, keep my brain cells from dying out at disproportionate rates.
2. Work on my own family’s start-up. We have exciting things coming up, and the buzz among the musicians has finally picked up. Stay tuned!
3. I am thinking about creating a subsection on this blog, which will feature my analytical articles. These will, theoretically, feature synopsis of the market, company, or product, and associated metrics with it. I’ve always been interested in analysis - be it business or market, and then deriving the high level strategy based on the findings.
4. Preparing for the MBA school in Fall - if all goes well!

Today I again experienced the same manifestation of this fact: it’s not how hard or how well you work, but how cleverly you package the results of your work that apparently brings you success.

This is actually sort of disheartening, as one can be working both hard and smartly, yet if stars do not align your way, it won’t matter.

There’s been some buzz going around the Internet that Android SDK is still full with bugs and is still very much in pre-baked state to be truly useful for the developers. The CNET says as much: Is mobile really a sure thing for Google?

The critics claim that Google is too “desktop-centric” and thus the field of mobile apps presents risk to Google due to its relevant inexperience in this industry.  I somewhat agree, but I don’t think that the obstacles are that dangerous or unsurmountable for Google. For starters, Google has already developed the mobile versions of its applications such as GMail and GMaps, and quite successfully! One only needs to take a look at the newest version of OS for iPhone, which sports the new GMaps functionality developed in collaboration with Skyhook Wireless, that mimics the GPS functionality.

I’d just give Google a bit of time to shake out the bugs and streamline the development efforts, along with the negotiating efforts with the related companies.

Finally started playing with this stuff (especially now that my employer replaced my laptop that died with a widescreen T61 Thinkpad). And one thing worries me a bit: the emulator is a memory hog (or is it?). See the screenshot below. What do you think? Given that it’s Java technology we’re talking about, it’s of course expected. Still, this coming from Google, famous for its fanatical adherence to the “lean and mean” maxim - this makes one think.

Exactly a week later, Google released the SDK for developers! Read here. Tomorrow I’ll download it and start checking it out… To get your hands on the SDK as well, download it here: http://code.google.com/android/

And here we already can witness some resistance to Android - read the BBC article.

US Dollar is falling with no end in sight. Overseas the managers of sovereign funds are itching to diversify their assets into other than weak dollars (think China with its $1.4 trillion in reserves).  Financial powerhouses deliver us bad news every day, if not week. Oil is inching towards $100 barrier.  Are we becoming the Argentina of 21st century???

For those of you who are really impatient and want to go down Aptana/Eclipse road later, you can download InstantRails - as explained on the project’s website, “Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not modify your system environment.”

For those of you who were wondering, the official website for Google’s Android project is: http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/index.html

Stumbled on this: http://www.mscapers.com. Question: will they be part of Google’s Android initiative or not? How will that play out?