mind × the + gap ™

FINALLY, THE IT TZAR TAKES THE BACK SEAT. And as Mr. Bill Gates completes his last full working day by the EOD today - June 27, 2008 - at his Richmond, WA office in the US , an era of Biggest, Richest, and Fastest draws towards a change. Call him Innovator , Software Evangelist , Chief Software Architect , or by any other name, above all, Mr. Gates is a successful businessman, Zero-to-billions kind. And that is how I would want to reckon him, for Mr. Gates is not perhaps a mesmerising orator, neither a charismatic leader, nor a magnanimous personality. Even if he is all of these, they rather remain secondary, for the bottomline is, Mr. Gates knows business, does business and means business. Period. Arguably the world's most famous dropout - and thus perhaps the tallest example that education and money may not have a direct corelation - wrote the first BASIC compiler 17 years ago, and left the legacy as the world's richest man with such words: "There is nobody getting ric...

"The special commodity or medium that we call money has a long and interesting history. And since we are so dependent on our use of it and so much controlled and motivated by the wish to have more of it or not to lose what we have we may become irrational in thinking about it and fail to be able to reason about it as if about a technology, such as radio, to be used more or less efficiently..." -- John F. Nash , lecture at CII in Mumbai, Feb 2007 IF THE WORLD IS CONSIDERED A "CLOSED SYSTEM", deeming it a Zero-sum game, Nash Equilibrium could certainly offer a different meaning to the notion of money, and thus, to the word richness or net-worth and the world economy. [Today, June 13, John F. Nash, Jr. turns 80. A humble tribute to the 1994 Nobel Laureate legend.] Arguably, the Nash equilibrium is the single game theoretic solution concept that is most frequently applied in economics. In terms of strategy and planning, the equilibrium could be simplified as...

"Achieve What You Can Imagine." --imaginecup.co.uk invention, innovation, inspiration, imagination... If any of the i's tantalise you, entertain yourself with this cute little 1.5 minute teaser video, which in fact is a runnup to the ImagineCup 2008 due this month. "Great innovators don't imagine things in the future; They imagine them in the present, and change the future..." Go here for a list of Software Project designs that made it to the semi-finals of the innovation competition this year. [The video above is one among many created by the students of Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. Go here for the video on YouTube, and here for other possibilities from Microsoft.] Edit: The '08 finals will be held in Paris between July 3 and 8, 2008.

Yahoo: Clinton suspends campaign, endorses Obama . And now, it is 'young' Barack Obama pitted against 'experienced' Mr. McCain. Let's suppose that Senator Obama continues the momentum, wins over the Clinton vote-split, manages to prove that young is the new 'old', defeats the myth by showing that change could also be other than what is loose in your trouser pocket, and finally makes it to the 'White'house, should he rename it? [Above: Girls from Obama village in Japan dancing for Barack Obama's campaign.] Talking about names, I am almost certain that it is purely coincidental that Baraq Obama sounds so similar with the two other major disasters for the Bush Administration: Iraq Osama Edit: Oh, by the way, Obama's middle name, through his Kenyan father, is Hussein - as in Saddam Hussein...

TODAY, JUNE 5, IS THE WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY . It is an open secret that China is the biggest abuser of environment in the world. Most of the manufacturing in China uses coal-burning furnaces, and that one single industry equals more than the most the whole of Europe in terms of CO2 emission. At the same time, China is the single largest country to have invested the most - USD 8 bn - into planting trees. Criticised yet again though it is doing some serious spend, the reason is rather different from a change-of-heart or accountability or even a soft-corner for environment. Beijing, its capital is being subjected to sand storms so frequently that the Chinese have already coined a term for it - Yellow Dragon. Sand from this area have already started crossing the Pacific and reaching Americas. [Above: an artist's impression of the Green wall of trees stopping the Gobi desert in its tracks.] This is the Gobi desert from Mongolia making inroad into China at an alarming pace - claiming 3,6...

A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO I was sitting over the fence of 80% and 20% of the opinion makers reacting to the possibility of success of the IPL business model. 80% were the sceptics and believed that as it happened with ICL (Indian Cricket League – Chaired by Kapil Dev and sponsored by Zee Entertainment), IPL would find very few takers – perhaps only the useless of the useless lot would devote time to this remix masala version of the gentlemen’s game. To my mind, both these Indian T20 “cricetainment” versions were not at par: ICL was but a “zee thing”, where as the Premier League had the mind, money and muscle backing of BCCI – an important element that could make it swing and bounce. [Above: Team Jaipur after winning the maiden IPL. 1 June 2008. Source: http://ipl.indiatimes.com] It appears that this compressed format of the game may not have gone down too well with all quarters of the cricket, especially the British media and "empirical" standards. Lord Archer , for example, has...