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Came across a few interesting posts like this on my wall today.

The book talks about a set of habits which differentiates successful people from the normal. It criticizes [recently popular] personality ethic which it terms as deceptive and manipulative and calls for character ethic which is a fundamental change in human character. This change must begin from inside and spreads out [inside-out] and the reverse is not possible. The book is divided into three parts

The book compares a set of 17 companies that are considered visionary with similar 17 companies of lesser stature. I am avoiding gory details of their methodology here. To derive theory from practice, the book aims at debunking common myths about visionary companies.

Start-up One goal May have multiple products but all products are aimed at a single goal. All teams are working towards the same goal. Diversified Multiple similar goals Have several products (or several parts of a single product) aimed towards different goals. Teams gain by helping each other. The goals to some extent are complementary but (naturally with time) diverge away from each other. The tipping point comes when the goals become orthogonal and thus, any bonding between teams working on (orthogonal) goals goes to zero....

(Following are a few notes from the talk on corruption by Harvard Professor and Janata Party leader, Dr. Subramanian Swamy held in bay area on July 29th 2011) Corruption - misuse of public office for personal gains Five impacts of corruption **

The book is divided primarily into three parts, the pre-independence era [focused on the British Raj including some stories of the Mughal period], the post-independence pre-liberalized era, and post-liberalized India. The author was born in 1943 in West Punjab, which is now under the occupation of Pakistan. The author narrates his personal experiences of the economic conditions of India from 1947-2001.

The book interprets events in Mahabharata while trying to draw parallels from the contemporary world. Following are the key takeaways based on my understanding of the book. I am assuming some familiarity with the story of Mahabharata.

As the world moves towards cloud-based storage and computing, the task of storing our data on a PC hard disk is being replaced with cloud-based storage providers. This includes our emails, social data, professional data, and financial data. Accessing this data requires authentication, despite its various limitations, username and password are still the standard way of authentication [though OpenID is slowly becoming popular]. One thing which is crucial in this case is how web services store user’s password.

If you have been already a victim of this, then change your password and unlike the page as soon as possible. A malicious app called “aprilfoolsprank” which likes a page on a user’s behalf and tries to phish a user into disclosing his/her Facebook login and password is taking its toll on Facebook users.

Zynga’s market valuation has surpassed EA Sports market evaluation. Even though EA Sports is trying hands in social and acquired Playfish, their main source of revenue is still video games. Though the current user base of EA Sports (35 million) does not look impressive compared to Zynga’s (258 million) but a viral game from Playfish can always turn the table.