Posted by chetan
on March 17, 2008
Indians are everywhere in the software world — from engineers to CEO’s — but they all share one thing in common: the products they’ve helped build are all for companies based outside of India and for the most part in the US. I had this very conversation with one of our developers in Chennai on my last trip to India. He’s also spent time abroad, in the UK, but had not noticed it until I pointed it out to him. My guess is that there’s just no domestic market for many of the products being developed abroad. Especially with regards to the Internet, with access at home out of reach for most people, it’s not hard to see why most entrepreneurs might end up in California instead of Bangalore.
Fortunately, that all appears to be changing. I was glad to learn that the recently announced Live Documents is made entirely by an Indian company based out of Bangalore (though it was founded by Sabeer Bahtia of Hotmail fame). I’d be curious how their product does in the Indian market, as opposed to the rest of the world, for which it seems to be primarily targeted.
Posted by chetan
on February 08, 2008
Saw some cool sneaks today, but, alas, they only carry up to UK12 and I’m a UK12.5.
Posted by chetan
on February 01, 2008
The traffic here is out of control, and, with the introduction of the 1 lakh car (which I think is fantastic, btw) it’s bound to get a lot worse, at least in the near term. For a while I thought a big part of the problem was the lack of traffic signals at most intersections and a complete lack of order on the road. The heterogeneous traffic mixed with the all out war mentality creates an extremely hostile environment.
It wasn’t until they put a signal at the [fairly minor] intersection near the office that I realized just how well “organized” this particular brand of chaos can work. Right away, about five minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening were added to my commute, just sitting in traffic. The very next day, the light changed to a flashing yellow (go slow!) with a traffic cop directing traffic. In the evening it seemed to be working normally but traffic was much more fluid. Ten minutes sitting still became roughly 5 minutes. Either people took a different route tonight or they just got used to the fact that, sometimes, you need to stop at an intersection.