Project defense

As usual, long time since my last blog.....it time to add in some new updates. First of all I would like to talk about my master's project defense. Before the final presentation, I gave a demo presentation to my advisor Dr. Sid Green. He wanted me to speak a little louder and gave an example of Abraham Lincoln's presidential acceptance speech. During those days Lincoln didn't have a microphone and had to speak in his own voice to address the whole crowd. That is why Lincoln is considered to be a Legend.

This also reminds me of a completely un-related scene of Tom Hanks's speech in the movie Forrest Gump. I absolutely loved that movie, the whole theme of it - "just doing best in whatever you are doing" is simply mind blowing. I want to watch that movie again. This also reminds me of a quote from the evergreen classic, Shawshank Redemption - "hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies". Man we can learn so much just from the quotes in that movie. Hats off to Stephen king for writing the novel, Frank de bont for directing it and Morgan Freeman, Tim Robbins for acting in it. A real classic.

Business Analytics

Well its been forever since I posted my last blog.....the thought of writing one again came from compulsion not of interest. One of the classes I was taking this summer had a part where I needed to write an article on Emergence of Business analytics. The prescribed book to look for guidance is Competing on Analytics by Davenport & Harris.

Well Analytics, the idea seems to be for those business school geeks, who seem to go to the depths of each fundamental detail and brainstorm every possible, bullshittest idea to generate one more buck form an already existing model.

When I started reading this, I realized its not as nerdy/geeky as I thought before. One example is Netflix inc. which started as a rival to blockbuster. The legend goes that Mr. Hastings (now C.E.O of Netflix) got hit by a $40 late fee for Appollo 13 he rented out. He started with an idea of developing a model which has montly rental just like a gym. The result is outstanding.

He used analytics in the form of clustering to determine the tastes of audience and kept the customers happy by offering best choices and kept the no's increasing. The result - a $1 billion company in 2006. Staggering!!!

Hope

This week has started really gloomy..it has been snowing like hell on saturday and sunday and it was all cloudy on monday. My mind was also in a similar phase with gloom all over.

I was just waiting for the sun to shine bright again and hoping it will bring with it the warmth and courage to my mind. It was really terrible to hear about my colleague getting fired last week. It added a lot to the gloom I was having today. I dont know-all seems to be like destined to gloom.

And this is when I realised that during these times, we really need to trust in HIM and keep working. In times of pleasure and happiness everyone will have trust, but only in testing times like these do we need to have that faith that everything will work out well, if we give our best shot.

My mind has kind of came out of that gloomy attitude towards more sunnier, merrier attitude as I wrote this blog post. Cheers to HOPE......and I recommend lots and lots of it!!