A nice hotel is a must for any business traveller. A good night at a decent hotel can do good for the business. As a SAP professional constantly on the road, I can associate with this. Just read over at Rajesh Jain’s Emergic about the new hotels from Tata group called indiOne. Rajesh has good things to say about this hotel. From the looks they look pretty decent. Have a dekho yourself

Nice fact about the hotel is that first the price of the rooms was fixed and then the infrastructure was built backwards from there or as Rajesh puts it “bottom-up innovation”. For 1000 bucks a night this is great deal.

Considering SAP India is in the walking distance from there I might just land up there some day. If you are going to SAP TechEd ‘05 Bangalore, this might be the place to spend your nights.

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Just got to know about Placeopedia, a simple site to connect Wikipedia articles about places like Ambala, Chandigarh to their geographical position on google maps. No points for guessing which places I have pin pointed :D

Ambala

Chandigarh

Punjab Engineering College

Please switch to Hybrid view once you are there. While in Ambala - try to find the air force strip, and in Chandigarh you can see the lovely Sukhna Lake. Too many fond memories associated with it. Here is a pic for your eyes

 

Create you places. Let us tag this round planet :D

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In a personal email thread on Gmail the geeks from CELPEC decided to mull over 5 things

1. What 5 things in the last ten years have really made you jump out of your proverbial bath tub and run through the streets all excited?
2. Corollary to (1), What 5 things have really been very useful for you in the last ten years?
   
3. What 5 things you see as absolutely neurotic, or useless in the last ten years which have come about and are just not dying out!
4. What 2-3 ( or more if your heart so desires ) things or innovations would really make a difference to your life?

Being a online community guy I decided to give it a shot on Beta Thoughts :D. So here it goes

Jump out of proverbial bath tub

• Wifi - from the day I started using this, I am in love with this. Now a days I even stream video from my desktop to TV with a notebook on wifi connecting to desktop
• P2P - This is just amazing. Have you ever looked at the Detailed view in Azureus
• Google Earth - While it did make me jump when Guru demoed it to me while it was still keyhole. I used it a lot for doing my apartment search. But now that the novelty has worn off. I am back to Google Maps, if only they would implement A9’s proximity images in it
• DVD Backup - How easy it is these days to do it and once the DVD is in on the harddisk opportunities to modify the content are endless.
• Modern Telecom - just the fact that I can talk, video conference, voip with any one with relatively ease still makes me jump from that damn tub. I talk over cell phone, AD conversion, communication with cell tower, base station, may be sattelite, may be fiber under see, voice reaches India, Ambala exchange, my home. All this in before I can count to 10 I mean wow.

Really Useful

1. All the above except Google Earth which is useful sometimes.
2. Cell phone is mighty useful
3. Gmail Conversations.

Neurotic and Useless

• Didn’t knew about 5 blade Gillette. But would be absolutely useless
• Telemarketing on Cell phones. God save me from them
• Healthcare as a bottomline caring business
• Apple’s stubborn persistence on single button mouse. But it has changed with Might Mouse

What would make difference to my life

• Netflix or someone going true video on demand
• Fiber to my home with at least 1 GBps
• Cheaper Hybrid SUVs with 50 miles/gallon efficiency. Toyota Highlander is a step in that direction
• Better cheaper dental floss devices
• 4GHz Dual CPU 8GB RAM 1 Terrabit HDD System under $500 I will use the home 62″ plasma for the display so don’t care about the monitor :D

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In the rosy days of late nineties there were three pure portal play companies. Plumtree, Epicentric and Toptier. Then sometime in late 2000 SAP decided to complement there technology platform with a portal offering. They acquired Toptier for whopping $400 millions and married it with their existing portal product called workplace. This was a great buy for SAP as the acquired product has now morphed in the very mature people layer of SAP’s Netweaver platform.

Then somewhere in 2002 came Epicentric’s turn and it got acquired by Vignette for $32 millions. Vignette complemented their content development platform with the content delivery platform via Epicentric.

Today I read the news of Plumtree’s acquisition by BEA via Phil Wainewright’s excellent Loosely Coupled blog. It is sad in the sense that there is no major Pure Play Portal vendor left in the field :( But does that mean being pure portal vendor is not viable in today’s economic scenarios. You got to be an applications vendor and club portal as delivery platform. SAP has a whole slew of applications to be delivered via portal i.e. CRM, BW, HCM, SCM, and SRM etc. Vignette has while not a business application vendor has the content management system up its sleeve.

This gives rise to the question what application does BEA has? But again BEA has been a pure technology platform vendor. What perplexed me as rightly pointed by Phil in LCBlog was the decision to keep BEA’s existing portal separate from Plumtree stack.

“We now have leadership in both transactional and collaboration portals” Chuang said.

Both Chuang and Carges stressed that BEA will maintain separate portal offerings. “We will have two separate portal product lines for as long as we can see,” Carges said.

Keeping both the products separate would mean more pain for the customers in maintaining and operating two separate stacks. It would be interesting to see how long both of the stacks remain separate from each and how they evolve.

Last a disclaimer I have been a SAP Portals consultant for the last four years and naturally I have a strond bias towards SAP Portal which I consider the best positioned platform sitting at the top in SAP’s Netweaver Platform’s People layer. Also it would have been more interesting if Oracle had bought Plumtree :D

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I have always wondered about the idea of Audio Books. I mean one grows up hearing the old adage the books are once best friends and such things. I never had a chance to try any audio book until now. See when you have to do an hour long commute on Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco you tend to find better use of that time. Besides many in the valley term the folks doing this kind of thing as having suicidal tendencies :D

Any way to better utilize the time I got myself this very famous book “Good to Great”. There is no question that the book is great (a review will follow some time later) After listening to 2 out of 5 CDs I have made few theories about the audio books

1. I miss the capability to easily read and re-read the passages I like.
2. How do I highlight the stuff I really like.
3. How about doing a very quick revision of what I have read so far
4. The impact of written word is totally missing. This may have to do with the our mind showing more love for the visual input.

Based on the above facts I think if you are a bibliophile AudioCDs are great for story telling books i.e. stories, novels etc but for the serious non fiction work good ol’ treeware books still rule.

Do you have similar experiences? It will be interesting to know..
 

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