January 2nd, 2009 by Anshuman Aggarwal
Tags: iPhone Dev Talks, Presentation
Let me sum up the message first: It doesn’t matter how big a company, how nice the slides, or how many the presenters…DO NOT OVER REUSE YOUR SLIDES. Well now that I have said it, I’ll elaborate.
This was our experience at a recent iPhone Dev Talk conducted by Apple at the Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi. For the uninitiated, Apple has been conducting these talks across the globe to encourage the development of applications on its new mobile platform, the iPhone.
In my opinion, the Apple IPhone is a game-changing product which shines because of its technical superiority, excellent marketing and innovative ideas. With such a breakthrough product backing you up, its hard to go wrong in a developer session. However, the presenters failed to make an impact, in no small part because they seemed to be sharing a common slide deck with a few changes. When you couple that with the fact that no time was allotted for questions even at the end, the audience is left to wonder if they didn’t have enough to talk about (Any experienced presenter will tell you that they have had to reuse or refer back to a slide or two but never more).
In a nutshell: If your content is dry, don’t make it worse by repetition. Yawn…zzzzz
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April 12th, 2008 by Anshuman Aggarwal
Tags: jobs
After lots of deliberations and discussions, we decided that we will take a similar (read unusual) approach to HR as we have done with our technology innovations. Head over to the job listings to see the details but here is a summary of our approach:
- Be completely work driven. As long as the external commitments are met or exceeded then you’ve done your job (hey, its your life and time, enjoy it, take a vacation…just get the work done to the schedule, be it in your PJs or a business suit)
That’s it. There is a lot more to spiel about employee happiness, work environment and all that but we could go on for hours about it. In any case, most startups have a fairly loose environment, and we’re no different.
We also realized that there is a sufficient mass of talented people who would like to do interesting development work in their time off. We have built the processes and systems to be able to assess, QA and deliver using ad-hoc resources to augment our delivery capability, while keeping the company nimble and light footed.
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April 12th, 2008 by Anshuman Aggarwal
Tags: info
Finally, we distracted ourselves and enough developers from their primary tasks to get a site up and running. Now if we can only get them to give us some resume writeups for the about page…
WordPress does make it easier so, here is a ‘Vive la Open Source’ and a promise of a fat donation one day to the OSS boys and girls out there.
Leave us a comment on how you like the site design, we always look forward to hearing from people who care.
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