My Thoughts On Handling People Who Are Bad Listeners

I was mulling over this topic of how to handle people who are not good at listening. Listening is one of most easily preached topic, yet very difficult to practice. How many times have you started a conversation and ended it in a manner that made you feel murky on why in the first place you chose that particular person to talk? Remember, listening is one of the great Leadership strengths anyone gets to possess and is the most difficult as well. You really need to keep the other person, whom you are listening to, at a higher level than you are and keep your emotions to yourself, to be able to be a good listener. Great leaders and coaches including top CEOs in the boardrooms are all people who just keep quiet and listen with a nice smile of their face. A simple nod giving confidence to the person who is speaking and encouraging him/her to put forth his/her points goes a long way to gain the speaker’s trust and binding.

So what thoughts come to your mind about ways to handle a person who is a very bad listener and also short-tempered? In general, I feel there are various levels of this behavior that differs from person to person, but I can think of the following three levels:   

1. Highly Impatient And Aggressive: This is the most irritating level and the most hurting to anyone who is listening. The impatient person never gives a chance to his partner to speak, and doesn’t even bother about his/her interests. The person is just bothered about how much he/she can shout aloud and constantly tries to put forth his points to as many people he can see around him. Have you ever wondered how it feels to talk to such a person who keeps saying “Wait.. Wait. just a min,,, You are Wrong! What your are saying Won’t work ok?!!” and keeps interrupting and constantly keeps harping on the same thing repeating the same sentence?

I feel such people are very difficult to handle and severely lack leadership skills. I have found them to resist change and always reluctant to learn new things about life. They are severely arrogant and ego-drive, always bothered about themselves. Sadly, they pay a huge price by losing relationships. Such people need severe counseling and sometimes I feel even if a good coach can ever bring any difference to them! The only way to handle such people is to get out of the culture yourself. There is no point in conversing with such a person because he never shows improvement in his communication behavior and is just not bothered about the partner he/she is talking to.

2. Moderately Short-Tempered and Interruptive: Remember all those moments with that person, whom whenever you talk with, keeps interrupting in between by nodding his head saying No!, breathing heavily and trying to stop you? Such people do give a chance for you to talk, but are never listening to what you are saying and you tend to lose interest in communicating with that person as the time progresses. Most of such situations are encountered at work places during discussion inside meeting rooms and at other places. I feel that the most common cause for this kind of a behavior is anxiety and the fear to lose. If the speaker is anxious about winning and is just not bothered about giving credit of the conversation to the person he/she is talking to, the speaker tends to interrupt and tries to grab others attention.

While the good thing is that these people are easy to handle compared to the previous category, the main challenge is actually in deciding what would be the right way to communicate with them. Everytime you keep saying something they remain silent, but at the most important part of the conversation they just blow-up and you feel like the whole purpose of communicating has been defeated. I feel the only way to handle such people is keep asking them the reason as to why they differ with you. Understand what makes them say No! and reason it out. You really have to pull the trigger of convincing them so that they don’t have a chance to interrupt by saying No! The way you deliver your message has to be well manipulated.

3. Less Tolerant and Deceptive: Imagine a situation where you have a great idea to discuss with someone and you approach that person to convey your thoughts. Let’s say that person listens to you for the whole conversation, patiently and interestingly, and in the end says “I have no clue what you are saying. I don’t know what you spoke and I don’t think this will work”. Wouldn’t you feel that the person just pretended to be listening and that he/she never paid any concentration while you spoke to him? I would put such people in the third category and call them deceptive. They tend to give an impression that they understood everything while you were in the process of speaking with them, but at the end they turn the stone 180 degrees to the other side. What you see at the end is a big black hole full of confusions. You seem to question yourself as to why you took all the effort of saying what you said to the person and whether all the effort was worthwhile at all.

I feel these people are easy to handle and can be made to change by modifying the way of your conversation with them. May be you should ask them questions sometime while you are talking to them like “Are you with me? Did you get this point that I said? What do you think of this that I just explained?” and similar. Even though they might resist initially, I think such people will adapt themselves if they are compelled to listen proactively.

Listening is a skill. It takes time and patience to really learn how to communicate with a person who is a bad listener. We have bad listeners everywhere (not saying that I am a good listener though ), and the more you read about this topic and the more you speak to people who are bad listeners, you improvise upon this skill and get better and better as time progresses. It is important to tailor your speech according to the person who you are communicating with and learning more about that person ahead of time will always help a ton in ensuring that you remain confident while speaking to him/her. Remember, ‘Silent” and “Listen” are just words with letters re-arranged. So, remember to just Shut-Up and Listen! If you are great listener, you can always conquer anyone around you, a skill that I always read about in any Leadership book that I pick up. It is ironic – be a good listener, and you don’t even have to talk; your thoughts are automatically heard

Business Case, Business Plan and Business Strategy

Many a times, the difference between a Business Case, Business Model and Business Strategy is quite confusing. I was reading some material on this on the book by The Economist, and the difference is beautifully explicated there.

A Business Case is the actual opportunity that you are looking forward to harnessing, to create a Business Model out of it. In the sense, the case is the potential reasoning that you provide whenever you propose to approach a venture capitalist for funding.

A Business Plan, on the other hand, is the detailed layout of the journey that you plan to embark on to realize the above business case. In other words, a business plan, often presented in form of a document details the various steps that you plan to take before you really begin to put your acts together. The steps could be something like who you plan to hire, how much money would you need and where would you set-up your operations.

Now, a Business Strategy is quite different. Business Strategy, by itself, answers the question of what you really are at the end once you realize the plan you laid out in the beginning. For you to have a solid Business Strategy, the book that I read says that you need to able to answer few important questions including:

1) Who are your customers

2) What do they need

3) How do you plan to engage with them

4) How do you place your uniquely in the market

and so on. It was interesting read that it is quite important to always have a Business Plan accompanied with a Business Case when you approach someone for funding; a contemplative thought.

Btw, here is another article that nicely explains how Strategy, Model and Customers are related.

 

 

 

Declaring a #URI both as a Class and as a Type of another Class in an Ontology

Usually in an Ontology, we have classes, instances of classes and properties. Have you ever thought of a situation where a class has been declared and the same Class has been made as an instance of another Class? This is an interesting state where something behaves both as a Class as well as an instance of another Class. I am jotting down my thoughts on the same and elaborating the advantages/purpose of doing so while defining an Ontology. The points below are borrowed from a discussion recently on Semantic Overflow.

Consider the following case for an Ontology. Let’s say we have a Class named Animal which is a sub-class of Mammal. On the same lines, let’s say we have another Class named AnimalSpecies which is a sub-class of MammalSpecies. Now, let’s consider there is a sub-class of Animal which is Cat. These relationships are described below in the following code written in OWL:

ex: Animal a Class ; rdfs:subClassOf ex: Mammal .

ex: AnimalSpecies a Class ; rdfs:subClassOf:MammalSpecies .

Now, let’s say we have a sub-class of Animal which is a Cat. This is written as follows:

ex:Cat a Class ; rdfs:subClassOf ex: Animal

Any OWL reasoner would infer that any instance of Cat (i.e. anything that is a Cat) is also an Animal; and since Animal is a sub-class of Mammal, it is also a Mammal.

Until above, we spoke of the usual OWL code that we write. Now, let’s discuss about something called Meta-Modeling or Punning supported by OWL. Suppose we add the following statement to the above set of statements:

ex:Cat a ex:AnimalSpecies

Let’s quickly create an instance of Class Cat:

ex:Tiger a ex:Cat

Now, it gets a little tricky because for anyone who is not familiar with the concept of Meta-Modeling, it may sound like we are declaring Cat both as a Class and as an instance of another Class AnimalSpecies. Well, now we are talking punning . Basically, the concept above is slightly tricky but is very intuitive once you get the hang of it. For a moment, consider that we would like to enhance the knowledge of the Ontology domain by adding statements which say Cat is an AnimalSpecies. Well, the last OWL statement above just does this. It just simply says Cat is an AnimalSpecies. it gets confusing when you think of Cat both as a resource and as an instance of another Class, but it gets intuitive when you basically think of it as an added knowledge element to the domain represented by the Ontology.

Having said this, the following inferences may be made from the above data-model besides what is already conveyed by the code written above.

1) Tiger is a Cat.

1) Anything that is a Cat (i.e. any instance of the Class Cat) is also an Animal; and also a Mammal (since Animal is a sub-class of Mammal).

Hence, Tiger is an Animal and Tiger is a Mammal too.

2) Cat is an AnimalSpecies.

3) Cat is also a MammalSpecies.  (Since AnimalSpecies is a subclass of MammalSpecies)

It is very important to note that an instance of Cat (anything that is a Cat) is not an AnimalSpecies; it is neither a MammalSpecies. So, it is incorrect to say that Tiger is an AnimalSpecies. It is also incorrect to say Tiger is a MammalSpecies. This is because unlike the rdfs:subClassOf relation, the a (or rdf:type) relation is not transitive.

There are several examples that you may come across while reading different Ontologies and it is important to keep the above point in mind and not to confuse and mix the attributes together Your thoughts are welcome.

What is the actual difference between IaaS, SaaS and PaaS in Cloud Computing?

Almost everyone who is beginning to read about Cloud Computing will encounter the difficulty of understanding the intricate difference between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS under the Cloud Computing realm. I happened to attend a BarCamp recently in Bangalore and there was a nice explanation provided by Janakiraman from Microsoft who leads the Cloud Computing initiative there. I am detailing the differences below in a way I understood it. May be you have an alternate approach to understanding the difference, nevertheless I believe that the explanation below gives you an insight into the beautiful difference between the three terminologies.

Firstly, the terms stand for the following:

SaaS: Software as a service.
PaaS: Platform as a service.
IaaS:  Infrastructure as a service.

Whenever you consider a cloud computing system, (or rather let’s consider a simple server), there are three main types of capabilities that it exposes. These are:

1) Computing: Of course, you need lot of computing power to perform complex calculations. This is achieved by installing high-end complex processors into the hardware to expose to computing capability. Such processors could be used for various kinds of calculations such as BioTech related, Mathematics and may be even Textual String Processing.

2) Storage: Any cloud computing system has to provide a service to enable you to be able to store large amount of data into the hardware. While calculations is one thing, storage is a different ball game all together. So when a cloud computing system exposes storage as a capability, you leverage it to be able to organize and store the data in an organized fashion you want to. Later, you use the same storage capabilities that the system exposes to retrieve the data you want.

3) Management: While you have hardware to compute and store, management is something you cannot ignore. You need various kinds of API functions and other management capabilities that you want the system to expose, so that you are able to specify various tasks and organize them or queue them up for processing. Consider the case of a Mc Donald counter here. Having the Computing Infrastructure to fry chips and Storage Racks to store the goods is not enough. You need a Management System to be able to organize the incoming customers in a queue and then also to be able to distribute the work among the workers, right?

So, while we spoke about the 3 kinds of capabilities any Cloud Computing system should enable someone to leverage, now let’s talk about what exactly is IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

IaaS: When the cloud computing system that is offered to you provides you with only infrastructure or the actual hardware (servers and disks), the system is essentially a IaaS. What you get is an infrastructure. You are responsible for installing all the required platforms on top of it. You are responsible for upgrading the necessary platforms if there is a new version released in the market. Let’s say you have installed the .NET Platform on IaaS. Whenever Microsoft releases a new version of .Net, you as an end user of the cloud computing system, take full responsibility of upgrading the system to a newer version of the .Net. It might require you to completely bring your website running on the cloud down, to complete the upgrading process and you will have to live with it

PaaS: Platform as a service as you have probably guessed by now, provides you all the hardware and computing infrastructure, and in addition also takes care of the platforms that are installed on top of the hardware. Think of PaaS as an additional layer on top of IaaS. You don’t need to bother with the platforms up gradation process and you don’t need to worry about your website coming down during the maintenance process. The cloud computing service which is a PaaS comes as a package with the platforms that it supports and it takes complete responsibility of maintaining them. PaaS is like a box that comes with the computing infrastructure and the required platforms. You basically pay for what you use. The platform that is pre-installed could be .Net or something else.

SaaS: Now the last one which is SaaS, is the top most layer on the PaaS service. If the cloud computing service is a SaaS, then it means that you not only get the underlying hardware infrastructure and installed platforms on top of it, but also various kinds of softwares on those platforms. A simple software on top of .Net platform could be a simple calculator that allows you to send numbers and perform calculations. Calculator is the software running on top of the PaaS (which consists of the .Net platform). Think of it this way. Any software needs a platform to run. So SaaS gives you all those softwares. Now the kinds of softwares that run may intern depend on what kind of cloud computing SaaS is the company providing. If the SaaS is for enterprise, then you will have various pre-installed enterprise softwares. If it is a e-commerce SaaS, then you have various e-commerce related softwares at your disposal. SaaS requires you to basically send data and you will get data back.

I personally feel that the gap between the three types of services above is diminishing and very soon everything would be offered as single package, allowing the end-user to use what he wants.

There are various Cloud Computing Service providers coming up in the market and each one of them is known best for the kind of service (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) they provide.

Very Simple Beautiful tools to share data on the Cloud

How many times have we scratched our head when it comes to sharing a portion of text (email, articles or any copied text) or even a huge piece of code with someone quickly over a meeting/messenger? At least I have encountered such a situation many times and the tool that comes to our mind is email. We open our mailbox, enter the addresses (imagine if you have to send it to 20 people!) then attach the file (uh!), and then send it.

Here are couple of simple beautiful apps that I found that lets you share text quickly by placing it on the Cloud. Just open the following URLs, paste the text and voila!, you have a weblink on top that you can just throw at someone who can view your shared text. Simple, beautiful

1. Write.fm: Just paste the text. It is too simple in a way that it doesn’t allow much control over the text. Very handy if you want to scratch something and show it quickly to someone.

2. Pastie.org: Has everything that Write.fm can do and in addition, lets you get control over the actual code that you want to share. You can even specify the code language, highlight text and even mention comments

3. Task.fm: Beautiful cloud based tool that allows you to send simple menssages to your self. What more, it is intelligent with natural language capabilities built inside it which enables the tool to understand if what you are writing is an appointment like “Remind me again at 3:00 PM”.

I think there are more tools like the above which places content on the cloud (of course, privacy has always been an issues with Cloud ). Let me know if you have any in mind that is smarter than the above!

Challenges of Triaging Twitter feeds

Having used my iPad for over a month now, I should say that the Flipboard app is the most interesting one on the device. It turns my Twitter account into a beautiful magazine that I enjoy reading every tweet that is pulled from my twitter client.

Deciding which of the several tweets would be of interest to me has always been on top of my mind. After all, who would be interested in reading junk!

Few ways by which you can Triage your tweets are as follows:

1. In almost all the cases, the topic of the article pointed to by the tweet is evident from the title itself. So, I can decide and filter almost all of my tweets based on the tweet headline. While this is a good strategy, it doesn’t work always because the complete clue might not be evident from the title itself. Imagine someone replying to his friend saying “This article refutes your assumption!”. You definitely can’t say what is it referring to, unless you have tracked the conversation of this tweet.

2. Everyone is aware of Twitter lists, a group of selected twitterers put together in form of a list that can be followed by anyone. No doubt this is an organized way of segregating a particular Twitter topic/trend, it relies upon the basic assumption that the people in that list are consistent with the kind of topic they are posting.

3. HashTags are always there to attach a tweet to a particular tag that may be searched for later. It does help in grouping tweets together so that a simple search for the particular tag will show all those tweets which are tagged with that HashTag. I think for the search to be effective, first of all, all tweets should be tagged and also the tags should form a closed well defined set. In addition, twitterers should be aware of the best HashTag before tweeting. As far as I know, none of these are in place yet.

4. Twitter trends according to me, is too basic and naive. I am not sure how effective is a search based on the Twitter trend. I am not aware of the way it is constructed and the trends themselves are not a closed set. To add to that, the trends are subjective.

While there are few players who help you search for relevant content from Twitter, I am still not aware of the most accurate engine in this space. Anyone into semantics and contexts will easily understand the challenges of deducing the meaning from a small context of length 140 words!

If there is someone who can really make a dent into this space and at the same time cater to the usability part, it is the combination of Flipboard and Ellerdale. Flipboard no doubt is the best app for anyone who enjoys reading tweets in the form of a beautiful magazine, all they need now is to add some semantics into their engine. Ellerdale’s algorithms have been extensively used in different search engines. We all know how good iPad is for consumption of content and if these two guys can crack the challenges of the list above, I think Flipboard with Ellerdale’s capability inside its magazine will be the killer app for iPad. It would be interesting to know if there are any other challenges besides the one listed above and in any case, how does Flipboard leverage Ellerdale’s capabilities in Triaging tweets!

Waiting anxiously for Flipboard to release their semantic power!

The Web is Dead!

I came across two interesting articles that try to convince you that the Web is dead and instead it will be the Internet that will take over. The first article:

The Web is Dead; Long Live the Internet

talks about how we have more focused small platforms on which we run specific applications like Twitter, Facebook and RSS Readers helping us keep abreast with the news around us. It shows that the long story of HTML pages that are crawled by search engines is now a dead story. True in fact, because when you look around for smart applications that bring you the latest information real-time to your desks, they don’t it by parsing and crawling HTML pages, but rather by applying intelligent algorithms to twitter, facebook and RSS feeds; SILOs of information that are rich in their own way.

The second article:

Do we Still Need Websites

talks about how we don’t need websites anymore and how brands are promoted using Twitter and Facebook as client applications. Interesting to see the article quoting solid examples to support the idea. I wonder how many times have I really visited a pure HTML website for some information. More often, we get the information in form of Google Snippets or other short-hand forms. Nevertheless, I do feel we would still need websites that promote brands that look aesthetic on HTML pages that are beautifully designed. Well, there are plenty of beautiful HTML5 designed websites on the web.

But while I read these two articles, one point that strikes me is that I read all this on a HTML page , and on the WEB!

A No Google Day?

I sometimes wonder how much effect has Google had on each of our lives. We use Google almost all the times, when we want to search the web, send emails, manage things on the cloud and Google is no wonder a word in the dictionary these days. In fact, I came across a tweet which shows the Google score card where Google has been evaluated against its own set of objectives and that they scored C. Well, the top objective against which they measured best was that Google always believed “Keep the user in mind and rest all will take care of itself”. No doubt with this kind of an objective, the impact they have had on users comes as no surprise.

I also wonder what if we have a “No Google” day sometime? What if all Google products are shut down for a day and we measure the impact? Will work just halt or will people switch to other service providers? Which other search engine will people be tempted to switch to if we do this? Would it be Bing? Or people more familiar with semantic resort to another semantic search engine? Noe let’s leave out all the data on the Google cloud from the discussion here. Of course, it is implied that if we shut down Google, none of that data would be accessible. What I am wondering is about the sudden change in the web usage trends of people and how would people reach to such a situation.

It appears that people have got so used to keywords based searches that Google offers that we have adapted ourselves to Google search engine rather than vice-versa. Even with so many other smarter search engines in the market, I still think people are reluctant to go and try them out because of a comfort zone that they have created with the Google Search engine.

What do you think? Would an initiative like shutting down Google help discover the power of other search engines and products? What changes in the trends do you foresee?

Fooling your senses when you eat

We all know that we have 7 senses viz. hearing, smell, sight, touch, taste, equilibrium and intuitive. What if we modified any of these artificially to fool a person? Did you ever complain that the food your mom prepared doesn’t taste good? I always wished everything that I ate tasted like chocolate.

Well, I came across this interesting video which does this. Basically, they try to fool our senses by using a device which emits chocolate flavor near our nose when you are actually consuming a plain-flavored cookie. While the system isn’t that scalable, quite interesting to see a vision based application:

Flavor Changing Cookie

When you read it, it may so appear as if scientists have cracked the sense of smell. Of course, there is more vision than anything else here. But more than anything else, after having read the book “On Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins, where he speaks about how our senses are controlled by our brain in the form a hierarchical network in the neo cortex, I ask for myself if it is really possible for you to fool your senses when you already know that you are wearing a device and the purpose behind wearing it. Wouldn’t your mind already have a bias towards the objective? In any case, it is a smart demo of object tracking and augmented reality.

The Next-gen payment models

The method of making payments at shops when you buy something these days is taking a smarter shape. If you look at the variety available today, you will soon realize that there is no need to carry paper money in your pockets anywhere and that you can pay money in a much more safer and a smarter way.

Square, a company founded by Twitter employees lets you pay everywhere for everything. They seem to have a special card reader which can read any payment card and when you connect this reader to your mobile phone using an audio jack, the payment is transferred to the shop’s bank account and you get to sign a receipt on your mobile. Smart, but I feel not convenient. You Need to take their square wherever you go and then should also have a mobile with you. You may read about them at Squareup.

Boku another company in the smart payment space eliminates the need to carry any card/stuff around. You just say “pay by mobile” on laptop, enter the mobile number and then approve the request on the mobile. These guys are smarter and offer flexibility towards making payments. You may read more at Boku.

Besides the above smart ones, you also have few players who let you scan a particular QR code and then the transfer money. Such methods require QR code generators and also QR code readers. Of course AT&T and others have introduced QR code readers for blackberry and other smart phones these days. Scalable but requires initial preparation.

I came across another article Smart Phone with Electronic Reader which seems to be the latest wave in the market today. AT&T and other providers seem to be aiming towards the total smash of master and visa cards. It appears that the technology requires you to hold your smart phone against an electronic card reader. It would be interesting to see what comes up and how comfortable and scalable it would be.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a payment method that doesn’t require you to carry anything and still be able to transfer the money promptly? What if biometrics are used wherein you scan your finger when you enter the shop and then as and when you put the RFID tagged goods into your basket, your bill is calculated. Then, at the checkout stage near the exit, you approve the money? Wouldn’t it be easy then to eliminate the long queues, unwanted cards and mobile phones? Of course your fingerprint needs to be register with a bank, but that is just one time and the process is secure. Do you think there are any holes in this process? Well, let’s wait and see how far will the payment methods get smarter!