Sunday, October 23, 2011

Those little moments of happiness

Sometimes things really do give you a pleasant surprise. I recently met someone who brought to my attention that there's a ton of information available about me on Google. Obviously, I got worried, and wanted to find what they have up there. So I quickly went back home and searched for "Akansh Khurana". My linkedin profile, my blog, some random comments across websites, and my resume from almost 6-7 years old -- all of these things showed up. Honestly, my old resume (that I don't know how to remove from my college website) was the most embarassing of the lot. But overall, I was happy to have found so much about myself on Google. Having a web presence can sometimes make one feel happy - that's what I learnt from all the searching effort.

Well, I continued to scan through next few pages. On the third page (I think), I found something else too -- which I found even more interesting. I saw that Bain (on its recruiting website) displays my name as a Bain alum who is one of the students at the London Business School.

Until then, I never thought that systems are such well coordinated in the Bain system. Displaying the names on the website must be a part of the exit process - maintaing an exhaustive database of what Bain alumni are upto. Or may be Bain closely works with the core business schools it hires from. More than the fact that Bain systems and processes are well coordinated -- never thought that Bain actually promoted our names to prospective employees. Was a pleasant surprise!

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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

What Steve Jobs can still teach us!

Today’s world offers plethora of opportunities, a culture of immediacy and a highly competitive environment to work in. This has made most of us impatient, and has reduced our attention span. For those most of us, Steve Jobs is an ideal example. Steve’s focus, self-motivation and persistence helped him innovate and push the human race forward. And those three are the most important traits we all need in today’s world. These traits are not only foundations to achieving perfection in what we do and winning in the competitive environment, but also making a difference in the world around.

Saturday, October 01, 2011

Technology on the roll

I recently read about few different things and when I tried to connect the dots, I realized how amazing the world is going to be in near future. What is fundamental about these things, what really is an enabler is 'Technology'. I've now started to believe that technology, just as dreams, has no boundaries.

First, Facebook's Timeline allows users to tell the story of their lives chronologically with photos, videos, and music -- what an amazing way to keep track of our lives. Remember, if every user goes about creating this, it will mean a lot of information and data. Second, www.1000memories.com is trying something similar too. The idea of 1000memories is that every individual in this world - famous or infamous - has the right to keep a record of his/her life. Their idea is to create this record using pictures. Wow - more information and data. Third, I read about the potential room for growth in photography. It was incredible to find out that 10 percent of all photos ever taken were photographed in just the last year (check this: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/30/technology-advancing-art-photo-apps/). And with applications like Instagram and Path - I can't even imagine the upcoming world of photography, and amount of information and data. Fourth (and final for this post), I read about Zillabyte - a product of few ex-Googlers. These guys have figured the need to analyze and manage all the content that we've been talking about (and much more!).

All of this just makes me think of a ton of opportunities across the value chain of content - source of creation, actual creation, and management and analysis. The opportunities for entrepreneurs will always remain, always!