René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

Although Bangalore is not a too great place to hang out on weekends, at least its geo-strategic posi-tion is a great plus. Located right in the middle of the lower part of the subcontinent and through low-cost air carrier it allows for fast access to all the beautiful places in South India. So I decided for a 36 hours outbreak in Kerala, according to its own motto “God’s own Country”. Right so. Kerala’s lush landscape, the beautiful backwaters, the laid-back atmosphere and the sincere friendliness of the people are among the most relaxing in an otherwise rather hectic India.

Landed in Trivandrum, from there a 20 min taxi-ride to Kovalam, see picture which I took yesterday morning after a run at the beach. What a lovely little paradise to ingest some air, sun and sea. As just lying on the beach is rather a nightmare of boredom for me, I took some interesting stuff to read with me of which I would like to highlight two things:

1. The original research paper from Sergey Brin and Larry Page with a two other guys on Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd on “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.” The authors describe in detail the mathematical algorithm which made Google back in 1998 THE much better search engine on the market which still keeps its preferred position today. PageRank, a pretty simply principle, but you have to have the idea and then execute the concept as well as Larry and Sergey did it. Basically, the importance of a website goes back to the amounts of inward links whose weights in turn depend on their inward links etc. Once you have captured the entire web, extracted all links you get a perfect closed recursive system. The natural question for starting the calculation in such a scenario is: “Where to start from?” leads to the solution of starting to run the algorithm through a couple of iterations, whereas the actual value of PageRank will converge towards its true value. Reading though the article, I had great memories to my math-lectures around matrix-calculations, ei-genwert and eigenvector.

2. I make no secret that I deeply admire our current Pope Benedict XVI whom I remember well when he used to our Archbishop of Munich and I was a little boy. The intellectual depth of Joseph Ratzinger is unparalleled, the clarity of his thought breathtakingly sharp and his guidance invaluable. In my view, the by far most intelligent German alive is in Rome on the Holy See. Great. Just two weeks back, Benedict XVI. issued his first encyclical “Deus caritas est” which the former professor of theology wrote himself in German language, “God is Love”. Herein, the Pope makes an account on the various forms of love, doesn’t spare out the aspect of the erotic love and refers to the original love received from God which we get as His unconditional gift and the fundament of giving this love on to our life partner and neighbors. Furthermore, a refreshing distinction from the fanatics abusing Islam, the Head of the Catholic Church draws a clear line between what the state as “res publica” is supposed to do and to what the church’s role should be restricted to.

After those two quite different papers, I wondered what might be obvious differences or common tunes of the inherent logic of both. A couple of thoughts:

First, without getting too speculative: PageRank is a system where a webpage’s importance depends on the importance of its predecessor. In continuation, as described above, the system is recursive, hence closed in itself. In contrast to that, the Catholic faith in a strictly scientific sense, sees God as who as an eternal source has preempted everything which has been and said and thought in the past and will be said and thought in the future. The “logos”, the initial word, the initial thought, how Ratzinger explains in his “Introduction to Christianity” in detail. Naturally, and this is where this phan-tastic book starts from, the fine line to connect those two spheres is faith. “Etsi deus daretur” – what if God was really there – an incredibly strong fundament of a powerful standing, much stronger than a pure secular rationalism and a consequential starting point to build our reality on. And ultimately it comprises an exciting portal to my repetitively occurring favorite question “what is truth?” (Hence, in the title of my weblog also this referrer to “Cooperatores Veritatis”.)

The Pope would have certainly made an outstanding mathematician: his line of thought in semantic terms is as clear and consistent as mathematical equation. Reversely however, despite their commit-ment to Google’s “Don’t be Evil”, Larry Page and Sergey Brin would not make it to such powerful intel-lectuals. But it doesn’t matter. My world without Google would be certainly poorer. In that sense: Thanks guys, for this great invention.

11.17 PM

  Comments (2)

Trackback URL

Posted to Books,English,India,Technology,Travel,Veritas,Whatsoever

No doubt India has other issues as a country than entertaining some spoilt brats-expats. However, what has happened in Bangalore over the last say eight months is somehow a nightmare. The nightlife in the city used to be cool, two or three places one could go to, open till 2 to 2.30 am, good crowd, not a great variety, but nothing to complain either.

Yet, since the new government has come into power, things changed 180 degrees. With a new commissioner of police in charge, the ancient rule (since the British left?) is being imposed with utmost rigor: curfew at 11.30 pm, no minute longer, over and out. This means that in most places last order at 11.00 pm, and at 11.30 pm light-on and off you go. I have experienced even quite often policemen coming straight into the bar, with white helmets on their heads and wooden sticks chasing the guests out on the street like cattle. How sick is that.

Obviously, such a framework is not really too inviting and basically two things have happened: First, the overall amount of people going out in Bangalore has dropped. At the same time a few audacious entrepreneurs have opened a few new venues with the effect that the smaller audience gets distributed across more places. One can imagine how empty these places get and in an attack of desperation you start barhopping from one deserted place to the next. Today going out with my friend German Christian went like that: Taika (dead) to Tuscon Verve (hip-hop night with some Indian kiddies who pretend to be wannabe gangsta-rappers, well …) to Spinn (dead) to iBar (rotting already) to finally Sparks (didn’t let us in at 11.00 because it had “closed”). That’s quite unsmart – to quote the old platitude which yet holds true – in the city which likes to be called “The Silicon Valley of Asia”.

Contemplating on my favorite issue of “what is truth”, inferring that a Western lifestyle with going out to discos is the universal way to lead a proper life, is certainly a dull argument. However, trying to find an adequate grip on the grounds of Indian common values, then such a strangulating interference into people’s lives is not something which Indians usually like so much. Especially, if it cuts into freedoms which have been enjoyed quite unquestioned beforehand. So it’s rather the dynamics to the worse which I find particularly disturbing. But I know, with or with my disturbance, India will move on unimpressed ;-)

But, in the bottom line, here and today: Nightlife in Bangalore is dead as dead can be. Hoping for the next life in a hopefully vivid reincarnation.

11.21 PM

  Comments (5)

Trackback URL

Posted to Bangalore,India,Whatsoever

Every time I dive into some totally unchartered waters, I feel both positively primed and yet undefinable clueless, especially when the topic is so new that I really have to start building my knowledge from scratch: In this case it’s about engineering a consumer-centric internet platform which is supposed to propagate trustful interactions among its members (that’s all I can say here from the of degree of precision). So in the studies I also touched upon the famous article of two gentlemen called Page, Lawrence and Brin, Sergey on “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, basically the scientific foundations of a company known by the name of Google. By now I feel quite advanced in this research and in the beginning when I was scratching my head, one of my favourite quotations came to my mind. Bruce Lee, the God of all Marial Artists of all Times once said:

If you always put limits on yourself and what you do, physical or anything, you might as well be dead. It will spread into your work, your morality, your entire being. There are no limits, only plateaux. But you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.

I hope to get through that one alive ;-)

The Offshore Outsourcing Blog World makes the point that increasingly start-ups seek for advantages of offshore outsourcing. In fact it makes sense: When planning a company on the greenfield as opposed having potentially inherent reservations by firing people in an offshore scenario for an existing bigger corporation, you can really tackle the issue with a free mind and do what is best for your nascent company. However, one should keep the balance between obvious cost savings and the incremental governance effort over a whole continent and be prepared to invest a lot of upfront-time getting the right people getting it right from the beginning. Last week, John Doerr and Ray Lane from Kleiner, Perkins seconded during a networking event in Bangalore that this was an approach they liked a lot from a VC-standpoint as it can lower the cash-burn rate significantly.

In this interview on Contentsutra, a Korean TV-executive is upbeat about the Indian market. Particularly exciting is the fact that he sees the mobile as one of the key devices to broadcast the content. In that scenario explicitely no video on demand. Looking at it from another angle, it implies that the mobile in India will THE device for everything as a lot if Indian consumers are leapfrogging over the desktop/notebook to access the internet which requires another technology than receiving a broadcast. Exciting times ahead both on the hardware-front as well on the services side to integrate those various sources into an seamless and easy to handle user-experience.

This looks like a grand megalomania-project: Aamby Valley City. A sort of artificial, almost exterritorial enclave of sheer luxury 92 km east of Pune. Aspriations are high, but Marketing is pathetic. It caught my attention recently in a double-page newspaper ad with outright idiotic and dull testimonials from people like Boris Becker, Nadia Comaneci and the likes where I simply don’t believe that they agreed to putting such hollow phrases in their mouths. Also looking at the website: Old-school Flash-loaden show-off usability.

10.26 AM

  Comments (2)

Trackback URL

Posted to English,India,Whatsoever

Open Source Software is a phantastic “leveller of the playfield” as described by Thomas Friedman in “The World is Flat”. Basically, it decreases drastically the barriers of entry when it comes to setting up a new company which builds some “software as a service”. There is an enormous amount of open source “out there”, but getting the right piece of code requires either profoundest domain expertise, sheer luck of both. Time to fix that problem. This seems what Krugle is aspiring for.

Unlike conventional search engines, Krugle is designed to locate code. Krugle supports code search by crawling, parsing and indexing code found in all open source repositories, as well as code that exists in archives, mailing lists, blogs, and web pages.

A vertical search for code along with the usual Web 2.0 features of sharing and voting in order to add a layer of relevance through the social network. The service is not yet live, but those who are interested can sign up here. Curious to see what the service will be like. Here is at least a screenshot:

I love concepts like these: innovation which is market driven and delivers something for the good. Read the whole article:

Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates believes cell phones are a better way than laptops to bring computing to the masses in developing nations.

That’s an opportunity lots of VCs in India are betting on. And Ram Shriram, the first Investor in Google, said last week in Bangalore that he expects an billion-dollar company in mobile services with global impact coming out of India in the next few years.

Ein sehr lesenswertes Interview bei Focus Online mit Bradley Horowitz, Director of Technology Development bei Yahoo, wo er die Zukunft der Suche beschreibt: Neben Algorithmen werden soziale Netzwerke eine immer stärkere Rolle spielen, alles was noch irgendwo analog herumliegt soll so bald wie möglich digitalisiert werden und mit Plattformen wie “Yahoo Answers” soll auch das bisher nicht dokumentierte Wissen (z.B. in den Köpfen unserer Großeltern) zugänglich gemacht werden und Suche wird sich bald noch viel präziser auf Medienformen wie Audio und Video ausdehnen. Wie John Battelle in “The Search” zutreffend schreibt: Das “Problem Suche” sei hier und heute bestenfalls zu 5 % gelöst. Die Spielwiese für neue Lösungen ist riesig.