Anthony Tongbram’s Blog

One more good news for the SaaS enthusiast..

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a Fortune 500 financial services membership organization, is standardizing on Salesforce for Wealth Management. The company is deploying Salesforce for Wealth Management and will leverage the Force.com Platform and the Force.com AppExchange to build custom applications designed to improve client engagement as well as the productivity of financial representatives.[more]

The nuclear deal will spin off a 100000 new jobs. Good for the country.
Good for Rahul Gandhi.

And the game goes on. So this was all it was about..
And the opposition never looked so stupid..

Its been a crazy week. I guess its been three weeks. Even went home… for just a day, missed my best friends wedding, bahhh but I managed to meet my DEAD line.

Got invite for the first tweet-up. It is like a blog meet, but for twitter users. It is going to be a blog meet and a tweet-up and it sure is going to be fun this sunday.

The stock market continues to be in a hysteria. I stopped guessing a long time ago. I don’t like to see red in my portfolio though, but then who does. I kept some amount in stocks thinking I will sell off in march just in time to buy into ELSS for the years tax savings, but since they are in deep red, I didn’t dare sell. Well, this year might not be a very good year.

There already are rumours about firing freeze and IT spendings cut and what not.

India should grow though. Chidambaram’s master stroke of putting more disposable income onto the hands of the middle class might give a much needed boost to our consumer driven economy, and it might actually start to show in the second Qtr results. I am still bullish..

Thank god that my TV no more has more of Obama, Hillary and Britney Spears.

Slide got a 50 million funding. Big time valuation for a company that makes facebook apps and other social widgets. Facebook apps are getting big, even though there is no indication of any revenue in the near term. Two partners of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Bayers has already started a 100 million facebook apps only fund.

Iphone and Facebook seems like the only great invention since the invention of the wheel.

Iphone’s innovation lies in the design. But its greatness will be how people adopts it as a platform.
Facebook’s innovation lies in its platform. Anybody with a good idea can implement it on facebook. The possibility that facebook offers is endless.

Newyorktimes added mixx chiclets. Mixx looks great, the voting button makes it look so boring. They had to copy digg, but calling the button as migg or mixx would have been a downright copy of digg, so they used the more generic vote button, which made it look like the rating plugin that many wordpress users have.

Also the MIXX homepage breaks on my IE…. If you want to have the second mover advantage, you need to be far far better than the first mover. Just like Digg did to delicious.

And delhi bloggers, see you at the meet!

I usually play the FM sometimes on my drive to Office everyday, but I am not a big fan of any of the Channels or RJs. I just browse the channels at random. And there was this soft spoken RJ today who narrated an Incident. I think, she said something like, it was an incident from the time she used to work as a volunteer in a Hospital. Or maybe it was some story, but it really did touched my heart. It was about a 5 year old Boy. If the RJ knows about the boy, I would love to send some Toys and Chocolates

Let me share the story.

This little girl had this rare desease of the blood, and in order to survive she needed a blood transfusion from her 5 year old brother, who had miraculously survived the same desease, and in the process developed some anti bodies that can fight this desease.

So it was decided, and the doctors asked the boy, the 5 year old boy, if he would be willing to give blood in order to save her sister. The boy, after a moment of hesitation, said he was willing.

So, the doctors took the siblings in, and blood transfusion was started. As blood started to flow into the baby sister, and her color began to glow, everyone one in the room including the doctors and the parents smiled.

The boy, also smiled!
And then he asked the doctor, “Will I start to die now?”

All the while, the boy had misunderstood the doctor since he didn’t know what blood transfusion was. He was just 5 after all.
He thought, he would have to give his live for her sister.
And he was giving his life with a smile.

Dailytech writes that a twelve month long drop in world temperature wipes out a century of global warming. Sounds good.

But then, we don’t want an Ice Age situation like The day after.
Moreover, what we should remember is that the cooling could as well be a result of the Global Warming disrupting the natural atmospheric balance?

Less than one month into 2008, in the technology community the money and investments all appears to be flowing to open source. Just recently open source database software company MySQL was acquired for $1Billion by Sun Microsystems and open source adserver OpenAds received $15.5Million in Series B VC funding. While 2007 saw the acquisition of numerous online advertising entities like DoubleClick, Right Media, 24 Real Media and ADTECH the early money for 2008 is flowing to open source entities. Why is this occurring and where is open source headed both as a community initiative and for major corporations?

With SUN opening up, Mysql was a very good fit. This is also an immensely good opportunity for Indian IT companies to look beyond the SAP, SOA implementations.

While many speculate how open source entities generate revenue the growth of these popular applications like Linux, Joomla and WordPress and the MySQL acquisition showcases the tremendous growth in this sector.
[Via Email from 5W PR]

There will be lamp posts….but only good for the dogs. What with thieves on a rampage stealing the copper wires. With the ongoing astronomic rise of the prices of precious and base metals, thieves are targeting the copper wiring in the lamp posts.

Park officials said more than a mile of copper wiring has been stolen from lampposts in the East River Park and along highways, costing the city thousands of dollars and leaving many areas without proper lighting to curb more crime.

[link]
And I thought these happens only in India. It was rumoured that Reliance employed local goons to safegourd their cables when they were laying the country wide fibre optic network, not just to curve the loss of cables from thefts, but to prevent the delays due to such loss.

Where I go for work, there is this Central Library. Well, libraries have books, and I haven’t read a book in a while, so there I went with the intention of picking up a book or two. Books, I didn’t bring any but how could I? There were rows and rows of my favorite movies, well cinemas would be a better word.

We don’t get too many World cinemas back in India, and there is this guy at Pallika Bazaar who sells DVD copies, the source is limited. And the library was a… well, “Porn to my eyes” ( That is the best I can think of for my eyes).

I have a good collection of Akira Kurosawa back in India. And I watched two here. Stray Dog and Ikuru. I don’t want to watch more AKira Movies. Each time I watch one, re-run or a new one, I have this funny feeling of being a born again film maker. Like I could really make good movies. And act, now don’t laugh! Blame Akira!

I am watching at one a day. This weekend I finished 3, and all were exceptionally good. If you get a hold of a copy, you should watch The lives of others (Das Leben der Anderen). You will not foget it!

For the past half an hour, I have been trying to make some buys, so that I could at level out my losses, or even make a profit, and I can’t bloody log into my account. The internet speed is like a freeway here, and I can continuously stream youtube, but our Icicidirect won’t open. What is the use of an internet trading account if the website cannot respond on such a critical day? Just because I can’t login, I don’t know if I will lose potential profits, or even make a loss. Because my portfolio is lying unattended when the market is fallen by more than 1500 points.

This is trading account for god’s sake. Why would I need an online trading account if I were an IPo investor. I buy and sell shares according to market movements and I bloody want the service provider, whom I am paying a premium, and brokerages in thousands, that they at least provide me with a website that is not DOWN. For god’s sake. I had a kotakstreet account which I closed because I thought they had an IT insufficient infrastructure. I am paying a brokerage about 1% with ICICI, which is about 300-400% average brokerage, just because I thought they had a robust IT infrastructure and won’t fail me.

I definitely don’t recommend icicidirect.com as the preferred broking services, even after spending more than 4 years of trading and brokerages that I can’t even think of. It sure is time to switch to a new provider. If you know any Net trading set that was not do today, do let me know by adding a comment.

And the brokerage that I paid in the four years. All for nothing.

Mihir Bose writes something very interesting. Apparently Harbhajan Singh did not call Andrew Symonds ‘monkey’ during the episode at the Sydney Test that provoked the recent cricket crisis between Australia and India. He actually said “Maaki”.

Thank god Symonds heard it only as Monkey and not as Maaki, not that he would have understood. If calling him by the name of a very distant primate relative could stir up such trouble, imagine what would have happened had he understood what Harbhajan said that moment. I mean, we are used to the words Maa ki or Bhen ki, since it is spoken minus the word that has an obvious reference to a certain female genital part, But Maa ki only refers to that, and it is a swear word that would not be taken in good light if it were translated in the true form.

Well I have explained more than I should, but Monkey or Maa ki, it shows a very high level of immaturity on our part.