Fountain of Knowledge

The Underdog showcases wikicamp 2007 in this video as a part of the movie that revolves around Jimbo and Wikipaedia . This movie also covers some unseen footage about wikicamp. For the team at TKF take some time out to watch the clip as it brings out some fond memories of the past. Good day Folks !

Tags: tkf, wikicamp, underdog, chennai, syed, razik, tidel, parkPowered by Qumana

Last weekend was a very engaging schedule starting from Friday evening when we had a very engaging discussion with Sanjiv Augustine on Agile programming and SCRUM practice prevalent in the market. Participants in the discussion were practitioners from Wipro, Thoughtworks, EDS, Cap Gemini, Cognizant and our core team of Sid, Narain, me and Yessel. The discussion happened in our recent venue (Gandhinagar Club) which is proving to be convenient both in terms of organising and economy of scale.

"Doing the same things everyday will not deliver new results. To change the results you ar egetting , you must change the things you are doing " - Robin Sharma

The entire discussion was towards quelling fears and doubts of Project managers of traditional waterfall model towards Agile practice and SCRUM. Discussions of this kind tend to throw light on the project management practices followed in different companies here. Interesting enough to hear that lot of IT companies are adopting towards Agile practices enterprise wide with an objective to drive quality to meet global standards.

It translates into a unwritten message that all these MNC’s readiness to adaptability and change management .Change is the most dominant force in the business climate today. Technology is changing , markets are changing and even our products are becoming obsolete by the time they hit our markets because the competition is always testing something more advanced. To meet such competion our service providers need to be resilent to meet such evolving changes with great agility and speed. Related to IT projects it visibly shows the readiness of our service providers to accept client changes at any point in the project and always work towards earned value metrics.

Earned Value management is a great advantage in Agile practice because the preparation of priority list by itself is done based on the features that delived value to the product owner /customer is placed under the same order such that the features that hold higher value are placed on top of the priority list thus as each sprint progresses greated value is delived to the customer thus making earned value management a great advantage on agile processes.

The evening was made very interactive by games based on the agile process that saw some active participation from the audience.We might see more of such programs in the months to come .

Tags: wipro, gemini, cap, eds, cognizant, fuente, scrum, agile, project, management, waterfall, model, sid, yessel, narain, thoughtworks, chennai, Tags: robin, sharma Powered by Qumana

Tags: syed, razik, scrum, sprint, planning, meetingPowered by Qumana

Filecrunch has been gathering a lot of momentum lately with traffic to the site and hits increasing from 125,000 users last month to 200,000 users this month. Way to go . Above is the snapshot of the traffic taken for the last week. This splurge in traffic has really posed a challenge to the development team to wait out for things to quieten down for them to announce the next release.

On a parallel front our other site Shoepursuit has started attracting a lot of traffic to lately. With the commencement of the shopping season we expect both the sites to garner a lot of hits and make things thus busy. Way to go team !

Tags: filecrunch, site, hit, shoepursuitPowered by Qumana

This weekend Fuente will be presenting a paper on this topic "Whether India is really really ready for Web 2.0 products ? "  Fuente has been in the thick of things related to product development and project management for the last 30 months and since July 2007 we have been on development of a Web 2.0 product called " CIRAKA" on a stealth mode

On a parallel mode another news is that Barcamp has come to Kerala and is hosting their first edition this November 24th. It’s probably going to be hosted at the Technopark Auditorium, Trivandrum, Mani who has been a part of the organising team of barcamp kerala has informed us at The Knowledge Foundation of this hushed up event.

Some of the topics proposed to be covered are

Good luck to the guys on a great initiative !

Tags: barcamp, kerala, social media, php, game, development, mani, ciraka, web2.0, fuentePowered by Qumana

This weekend i had ample time to catch up some quality reading and i canced upon reading this book by Lawrence Lessig : "Code 2.0" A book that every blogger needs to read, for that matter all those who create digital content and live most parts of their life on the virtual world needs to know.

Related to reading of this book I also happen to do some research online on how cyberspace has exploited our younger generation and i came upon this interesting article in the New york times here . This could happen in any of our home in very unsuspecting manner. After you read this real life account one starts to realise the need for a framework, constitution that can govern the realm of cyberspace. After reading the NYT story the book reading becomes all the more interesting 

 "Liberty in cyberspace will not come from the abscence of boundaries, Liberty there as anywhere will come from a state of certain kind. We built the world where freedom can flourish not by removing from society any self conscious control, but by setting it in place where a particuler kind of self conscious control survives - called constitution"

This constitution is necessary not for governemental control (big brother attitude towards giants like microsoft) but this constitution seeks to determine what collective values we build in the cyberspace and what values are to be protected here. This post will continue as series and will delve over topics like about copyrights and on the other hand Privacy and how we safeguard that such values are take care of ? Good day !

Tags: code 2.0, lawrence, lessig, nyt, cyberspacePowered by Qumana

Google has already captured the Search market across the cyberspace amidst bitter competitors like Yahoo, MSN so on… Now that it has become the undisputed leader in that space google aims to capture another big space "Personal Health care " Google seems to have immense plan on storage in terms of the commercial health care market. Net savvy users have the habit of using the search capabilities of Google and similar search portals to understand complications in personal health and related issues. When it comes to storage of personal medical records and data online and access anywhere, google stands at a better place for providing such services online. Marissa Mayer, Head of Search at Google was speaking on a recent Web 2.0 Summit at San Francisco outlining the huge plans of Google. She also reportedly said that Google’s healthcare initiative backed by her has currently developed a prototype that allows for storage of health records and related data online. The features and the application are currently put to test within a closed user group of beta testers . The Search giant also provide features like " Find a nearby doctor" facility for identifying professionals and expert resources locally. Online diet regimen features are also made available.This would also serve as a excellent platform for revenue to the giant. The objective of the entire exercise is to make the healthcare data portable and easier to access from anywhere anytime. Google is not the only company that has been working on this platform. Competitors yahoo and MSN have been busy acquiring medical storage and search related companies on a frantic spree. Will this be next wave from google ? More about the same is available on the video here :

[youtube video="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPj3oRBYOUw"]

Tags: marissa, mayer, google, search, healthcare, msn, yahoo, medicorp, healthvault

By November 30th 2007 , Fuente will be gaining the training excellence of having Certified Scrum Master on roll to take lead on its web projects team. The training will be under Pete Deemer, former head of development at Yahoo Labs. Certifications on Scrum are provided by Scrum Alliance and are a great advantage for practicising project managers particularly on Web development and Web 2.0 projects. This initiative is one among the list of ongoing steps that Fuente undertakes to ensure that we serve world class quality to our customers worldwide. Good Day ! 

Tags: scrum, pete, deemer, yahoo, development, projectPowered by Qumana

BarCamp has been a great Sensation across the world on knowledge dissemination among techies and geeks.  Interesting the latest edition of Barcamp seems to have taken a key topic for discussion . Knowledge Management and its measurements and metrics. We can look forward to an exciting session on the same during the event . Pls rush to register ! This is one Kamp not to miss !

FileCrunch is the latest offering from the house of Fuente that is due to be released on beta by November. Filecrunch operates on the storage domain where users are able to store data on their user accounts totally free. Plans of opening storage to nearly 1 gb for free users is on the wraps for the launch. Also the next iterative release that is planned is that FileCrunch storage services will be offered in other indian languages very shortly. The First build would be for Tamil before the end of the year and will be toward enriching the facility for the tamil blogging community to take advantage of the same. Popular tamil bloggers who would like to take advantage of the premium facility during its trials and testing can gaet in touch here.

File Crunch has gained tremendous popularity in the Indian subcontinent on par with Rapidshare and Megaupload. However the latter sites seems to have very limited connections to indian users so that most of the time you find that connections are refused thereby disappointing users. FileCrunch had crossed 100,000 users in June and Come November we prospect that it will cross 150,000 users monthly.

Shortly FC is lauching video platfor for popular content from various IT and Non IT conference in India . As a Maiden effort in this direction FC will be hosting all SearchCamp related videos in a single platform. Organisers of similar conferences can get in touch with FileCrunch Head Syed Nazir Razik here to avail similar facility free. 

Tags: searchcamp, megaupload, rapidshare Tags: filecrunch, storage, users, analytics, fuente, syed, razik, management, searchcampPowered by Qumana