In a NY Times article “The Wealth Trajectory” Greg Mankiw, a Harvard Professor and a famous economics blogger explains the differences in earnings for average workers and the super rich. I found the following statistics good on value of education

In 2005, each year of college yielded an additional 12.9 percent. The rate of return from each year of graduate school has risen even more — from 7.3 to 14.2 percent.

Another thing to note for the premium on education is due to the age old supply and demand equation. The demand for educated people in the last few decades outpaced the supply there by raising the earnings of educated class. That also explains the reason for immigrant me being here.

But still education can take you limited distance on the path to super richness. The “real” reason for it seem to be being educated and lucky

Maybe educational levels are like Willie Wonka’s chocolate bars. A few of them come with golden tickets that give you opportunities almost beyond imagination. But even if you aren’t lucky enough to get a golden ticket, you can still enjoy the chocolate, which by itself is well worth the price.

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YouTube revolutionized the idea of embedding videos into websites. It was a matter of time before before various domain specific websites started embedding videos in their sites. There have been numerous job sites on the internet for job hunting. Now comes Nextjob for landing you the next job. They have a unique feature that the resume poster can embed a short video about himself and his skills. Kind of video resume. If you are in the job market do give them a try. Here is how a video resume looks like

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Having been in SAP for some years I get asked this question how to get into SAP as a career. I was writing this to a close friend of mine and thought of putting it on the blog. This advice is a rather first step to decide which stream to join in SAP -

1. Technology Consulting - understanding the architecture of various SAP solutions and advising the IT department of clients on what is best for them and then helping them implement it. Your end customers in this case is always IT department people. This is purely technical job :D Folks who work in this area are called technology consultants. On the first day of project you can recognize these guys as someone who is wearing a suit but is uncomfortable in it.
2. Business consulting - understanding the capabilities of SAP’s solutions and implementing them for the client’s business. For example let us say you manufacture bulbs - you have plants where you make them, you have suppliers who supply you materials, you have distributors who distribute your products and finally you have customers. Also don’t forget the employees. So you implement SAP solutions which take care of all these folks and the processes they are involved in. People who work in these areas are called functional consultants and they love to wear suits :D
3. Solution Delivery - both of the above activities could involve multi-month engagement with the end clients with a team of functional as well as technology consultants. This engagement would be called a project. There are folks whose main job is to deliver the on time within budget and scope delivery of these projects. These are your project managers. Usually PMs evolve organically from the above two roles. But you might see folks coming out of B-Schools directly jumping as PMs. This guy is a leader and can be seen very nervous during the first few days of the project ;-)

Once you have decided one of the three above you can focus on a particular SAP product. I wrote this with SAP in mind but I think this would be true for any enterprise software product.

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Last night I landed back in San Jose on US Airways 162 which should have been dubbed rather TechED flight. I am sure more than 50% folks were returning from Mandalay Bay. It was easily the biggest TechED so far with 6000 folks from all over the US, quite a few from outside US too. Attending the sessions you like and managing the schedule can be a lot of work - see right.

eSOA was the biggest theme this year and it was quite fun to participate in the Product Strategy workshops with Product Management folks. There were also quite a few sessions on Composition Environment. In fact Vishal Sikka’s keynote demoed some parts of the CE. Some of the other interesting things

ADoW - ADoW or Application Delivery over WAN was announced last year and it was good to hear that SAP is using it internally for their portal. It is a software appliance to speed up the delivery of NetWeaver Applications over the long haul WANs like between continents and long distances. It is achieved by caching and bandwidth shaping etc.

“New” Identity Management - is based on SAP’s new acquisition Maxware. This will be very useful and powerful tool in SAP’s portfolio. I can see this tool filling a lot of gaps I have seen on NetWeaver implementations. Virtual Directory Server (VDS) concept inside this tool is quite powerful. VDS can put a facade around most of the user stores like LDAP, DB, ABAP user stores. Right now this exists as a separate tool from NetWeaver. Hopefully SAP would be integrating this with NW pretty soon. 

Virtualization - is a recurrent theme which has been very hot in the last few years. VMWare and Intel were seen promoting this heavily and I attended a session on virtualization and Linux

SDN Clubhouse - Not a technical thing but IMO clubhouse was the most fun place to be between the sessions. Cappuccinos and Mochas were excellent. Met a lot of interesting folks over here. Good to see Craig Cmehil, Mario Herger, Irfan Khan and Kartik Iyengar. There were a lot of activities going on like SAP demos on the pods, community theater, 5 partner stalls with lots of ipod touches to give :), check your basis skills in the back etc.

Overall a fun and tiring TechEd. You can see a large collection of photos on Flickr. On Monday the first day I picked a lot of ribbons I associate with. Sticking them together and hanging under the badge would have made a nice necktie. But I chose to wear just the badge. Anyway here are the ribbons stuck together

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What is the most widely used SOA enabled application? If you work with enterprise software, like I do, names of large German software vendor or the one here locally from Redwood City or up in the North of bay area may start popping in your head. But I would say think a little bit more. Consider this, the application being talked about is used by millions of users, across operating systems, hardware platforms with so much ease that even the metaphorical grandmas can use it. The application is blogging engines like Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger. All these engines have evolved in a service oriented framework without consciously keeping the SOA approach in mind. A typical engine offers the following services

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While driving around riding my new Firefox 1.5, I stumbled across something called FON. Initial words “FON is is wifi revolution” caught my attention I started reading more about it. It is a pretty interesting concept analogous to File-sharing networks. Here instead of sharing your files you are actually sharing your internet bandwidth so that FON members can utilize your bandwidth and surf the net while they are near you and you get the same benefits if you happen to be near a FONer. From there website

FON is an integration of those wanting to contribute to free universal communication and solidarity. We are a usernet growing larger every time we exchange part of our bandwidth for the ability to connect to the bandwidth of other FON members, in every moment from every location in the world.

Pretty interesting. I am sure telecom companies won’t like it. They might even introduce a clause in the service :D But if an idea catches up with the masses there is nothing there to prevent it from spreading like virus. So far this is only in Europe let us see when it becomes common in US specially the silicon valley

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Recently a close friend started an aggregator for India related news with the name Grabline. Well wishes to him. Take a look if you are interesed in reading India related news at one site.

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