Ravi’s Blog

Last weekend I saw this movie indian move Laage Raho Munna Bhai. I walked in with tempered expectations as this a sequel to a really funny first part. How often do sequels improve on the original? In my opinion - rarely. Given that sequels are very very rare in indian movies, i guessed this would be an average movie at best.
But it was funny as hell. More than being funny, this movie weaved some themes and plot lines to make the movie touching. The story involves a mob boss falling in love with a Radio DJ. He wants to meet her, and manages to win a quiz contest about Gandhi. Yes, Gandhi 1.0 the original - the same one who preached non-violence and love for all human beings. Of course, our mob boss friend tells the DJ that he’s a professor. To keep up his act, he has to really learn about the life and ideals of Gandhi. As he learns about this great man, he starts applying his gandhian principles to tackle the situations he used to tackle with brute force. The movie is funny throughout, but the touching scenes are about the transformation of this mob boss to a gandhian idealist. The movie ends on a high note and is bound to bring a tear or two to viewer’s eyes.
This movie has sub-titles and is playing in the fremont (Naz movie theatres). I’d recommend every one (indian or not) to go watch this movie.

If you are going to watch only one foreign movie this summer, then go see “Lage Raho“

Last year, when the new yahoo maps api came out, i developed a quick wordpress plugin - GeoPress - that allowed a user tag their wordpress posts with lat/long. It was a neat toy, but wasn’t as fun or usable. For example, folks could only include static maps vs the cooler, nicer draggable maps. I wanted to add a lot of features but i was unable to do so due to lack of time, needing to focus on my startup.

Earlier this year, Mikel Maron, approached me and wanted to pull together a group of folks to develop geopress into an open project. I loved the idea, and wanted to contribute along with andrew turner. Once again, time constraints did not let me contribute anything meaningful.
I am glad to see andrew made great progress and released a really really cool plugin GeoPress 2.0. Download it and play with t. Congratulations andrew, on a great job and a cool plugin!

I hope i can contribute to this plugin in future as well

One of the side-effects of visiting india regularly is that i got caught up in all the realestate related excitement in india. Indian cities , especially Hyderabad and Bangalore, have this boom town feel where everyone is excited to make a deal, try new things out and move up fast

I recently put a down payment for a house in a venture called “MapleTown” in an area called Bandlaguda. The pricing was reasonable and most of all i had faith in the realty company. Anyway, those same builders are now selling some more lands/plots near shamshabad (where the new intl airport is expected). Here is the blurb from the marketing executive - Mohammed.

This is Mohammed here from Radha Realtors Pvt. Ltd. After the stupendous success of our Housing Project MAPLE TOWN now we are Launching our new project OXY-GEN CITY at KANDUKUR on Srisailam Highway. OXY-GEN CITY is a 700 acre Integrated Township first of its kind in Hyderabad City with Independent Duplex Villas, Residential plots, 60 acre 9 hole golf course, 30 acre Cricket stadium, 20 acre International School, 33 acre theme park (Ocean Park), 20 acre Medico Tourism Project, 2 Club Houses, Helipad, Bowling alleys, Commercial Spaces, 100ft, 60ft & 40ft roads, 1.5 acre Road Junctions and Many more.

OXY-GEN CITY is located about 4 kms to MUCHERLA I.T. Park, 15 Kms from OUTER RING ROAD, FAB CITY, NANO TECH PARK & HARDWARE PARK and surrounded by SEZ’s ( Special Economic Zones) . OXY-GEN CITY accommodates about 300 King Sized Villas and 3500 Residential Plots. Each Independent Villa is Centrally air conditioned in 1200 sq.yds of land, 4300 sft of built up area with own private swimming pool. Residential Plots ranging from 500 - 1200 sq.yds. Please find the Location Map & Layout copy of OXY-GEN CITY as an attachment.

Mohammed’s contact number - +91-98492-31784. So if you contact him and end up buying properties in either maple town or this new oxygen city, let me know. I’d be interested in seeing if this blog is effective.
I am attaching couple or marketing images he sent. Location & layout

You have to be an indian citizen or person of indian origin to be able to purchase land in india.

About 45 days back, i posted about a contractor who was unreachable after taking some advance money from me. It took a bit of introspection for me and hesitation to post something negative like that. Eventually, i felt that as a contractor he is different from an employee and he deserve get reviewed online. I caught some flack for blogging about this contractor - private as well as public. I suppose most people were either indifferent or appreciated the warning. So couple of days back someone posted a comment to my blog about a wayne deviney who stole goods from them and got arrested, I was surprised. I went to news.yahoo.com to search for wayne deviney and i found this. The photo is the wayne deviney that i signed contract with. So now i feel that i should have blogged about wayne earlier and not have hesitated as much.
oh as an aside, google news did not find this article, just yahoo news. Oh, i also saved it on my web, so the article can be cached.

Here’s a great post from dave shen. I can tell you more about it, but read it for yourself and enjoy

My last post, got me thinking about how the world changed and how one can find out a lot about a person by just searching for that person’s name.
Specifically, the thought that employers are looking online for more info on candidates made me think of “employee reviews” sort of like restaurant reviews. Of course, I am not talking about posting someone’s annual review here. I believe an Employer-Employee relationship is something that is almost like a marriage . It’s a deep bond where both sides sign on with a trust that they will engage in this business activity together. An employee (especially the one who take stock options) make a deep commitment to the company’s well being and employers offer to help improve employees life rather than just simply giving money for work done. Given that, i donot think it’s fair to share reviews, assessments about co-workers and employees with the rest of the world. Confidentiality is implied and critical.

However, if i hired a contractor ( a company or person) and that contracting entity did not deliver, then they are fair game for a online review in my opinion.

Here is my experience with one such contractor.

His name is Wayne Deviney. At the time of this incident he used to live in san ramon. He had prior experience as a CTO at Go Interactive LLC, Director at Scene One, Engineering role at Incenta and a long stint at Microsoft, among other roles. He responded to my advertisement on craigslist for a contract opportunity to code a IE toolbar. He was prompt and clear with his communication, and vouched that he’s also doing a contract for Hotjobs (Yahoo). He said that he’d be a better bet for doing something like this because of his long tenure at microsoft and his expertise. In fact, his contention was that he can build this very quickly (2 weeks). So we agreed upon a sum, and contract terms. He came over from san ramon to palo alto on a sunday to sign the contract and pick up the check.
Of course, as you expect, this is when my troubles began. He sent over some xml that i need to prepare for the toolbar to behave as i want it. I asked him some questions on it. He kept on saying that i’ll get something to you by end of day and missing. Then he started blaming his ISP, saying that he’s been prompt and sending me emails but i haven’t been getting them.
Suddenly he stopped responding to my emails, then my phone calls, then my voicemails. He definitely cashed in that check though. I talked to my lawyer and sent a notice to him that i fired him and he needs to return my money. Of course he hasn’t yet.
So, if you want to hire Wayne Deviney - Go Ahead. But If he tells you that his isp has ben acting up and his gmail has been acting up, you know what’s coming next.

may be i should have a link roll or something to point people to what i read. While i think about that, i still have a good blog post for you folks to check out

Given the rise of blogging, does owning a blog do good to your career or the opposite? The conventional wisdom is that it improves your career prospects. Here’s an argument from chyetanya that folks hiring should not take a potential employee’s blog too seriously. I tend to agree with the line of thought he has. Unless you have a work focused blog and what you wrote on your blog matters to your ability to perform the job, it shouldn’t matter.

Today amazon.com is taking a beating in the stock market. The stock is down 22% similar to yahoo, however, their report seems much worse than that of yahoo!. Only the revenue year over year grew, but rest of the numbers were down and down significantly (20%-50%). Market cap for amazon.com fell as low as 11B dollars.

Is this an opportunity to buy? Yahoo has been up 10% in the last week after that horrendous drop. Will amazon do the same? I doubt it. Yahoo has a book value of 6$/share. Apart from this book value they have stake in yahoo! japan and alibaba.com (china). We can put an intrinsic value of the stock at 12-13$. So we would have been paying 13$ for yahoo’s US business. Sounds cheap doesn’t it? So, i can see some justification in a lot of value guys picking up yahoo!.

Looking at amazon, the book value is 0.777 per share!! I would imagine they’d have higher book value because they own warehouses and trucks that go around taking pictures. I am going to stay away from this stock.

In the last year i have visited india 3 times and going back there again in early august. My needs to send US dollars to india (for my expenses and family expenses) increased a great deal compared to before. India is getting more expensive and i noticed that i was sending decent sums of money to india.

What took me a few transactions to notice is the extra charges credit cards charge and how various banks give a conversion rate that’s much much lower than what’s quoted on yahoo! finance. There is a huge difference in rate citibank offers to what’s quoted as a exchange rate in the market (almost off by 1 rupee!).

Since then i looked at different ways to send money. Overall, I love money2india.com and i have been using them consistently. It is a service offered by ICICI bank. They can send money to any bank in india, or deliver it by Demand Draft. You can wire money or transfer by ACH. You can send to various types of accounts (NRE , NRO, local etc)!

To top it all off, i have found they had the best rates and they are transparent. The conversion rate is still a tiered structure - you get a better rate if you send more money - but even along all the tiers, the rates are much better than citibank.

Overall, great service, easy to use and sends money quickly!!!

Yahoo’s earning report came in yesterday and the stock is down to $25.12 right now (12:00pm PST). Ouch. Even though i quit yahoo in march, a substantial portion of my networth is still in yahoo shares. 22% cut in yahoo shares hurts pretty badly.

The reality is that the numbers weren’t all that bad. The earnings met expectations at 0.11$/share and the revenues were slightly lower than consensus (1.123 B vs 1.14B). The short fall in revenue is 17 million dollars. That shortfall in revenue triggered a loss of ~10B in market capitalization for yahoo. I suppose that loss of 10B in market cap had more to do with the announcement about delays in the Panama project. Even here the delays announced were not really bad. It’s not like windows vista which got delayed by years. All they said was that this product is in QA and it will take atmost another quarter.

While there can be ton of speculation on whether or not this sell off is justified, the conclusion that can be drawn is that investors are not comfortable with yahoo’s growth propects and ability to deliver on the story as promised.

What does this mean for yahoo!? I believe this stock drop is going to force yahoo to find partners. The extensive partnership with ebay is perhaps on everyone’s mind and ebay might be a strong partner. I wonder who is a better partner ebay, microsoft or aol?

UPDATE: No, I don’t believe this represents a buying opportunity. I would wait until something concrete emerges. For example, a merger/acquisition/partership or release of panama and panama becoming a killer product or even some other killer product.