Smart Phones – An exciting tool for a Smarter Life

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As we race by the seconds of time into the future, the means we pursue to reach the ends of all the tasks in our daily lives is increasingly becoming more important.
These new “means” or “smarter paths of action” are crucial in maintaining smarter control midst the maddening tug of ever important competing priorities pulling us into multiple directions at the same time.
This means how we manage time, how we manage to control the sources of information and thus managing our resultant actions based on such information will increase the percentages of success vs failure in all these competing priorities.
This means in the abundance of information ,speed of retrieval and optimum selection of choices in this pool of information has a direct as also indirect bearing on the leve of success we would achieve in the several tasks we want to achieve.

And there is an increased integration of these smartphones in daily lives. The following link is a good article on the facts supporting this.
majority-of-smartphone-users-integrating-devices-into-every-aspect-of-daily-lives/

I recently also participated in a discussion around the role of smartphones in enhancing productivity in workplace on linkedin.com in the Future Trends group. Some of the thoughts I expressed in the post there which touches upon how Smartphones are penetrating the numerous spheres of our lives .

“……
These days we take pictures of cheques and deposit them from our smartphones and so a workplace which requires a similar exchange of information to happen, smartphones will definitely help in speeding up the workflow.
Ability to print or fax documents right from your smartphone through mobile apps provided by document management websites are also good enablers indeed.
Restaurants collaborate with websites,or on their own come up with mobile apps which allow you to scan what’s available right on your palm. You place the order well before you leave the office and by the time you go there it’s ready. So no time wasted in waiting.
……”

So all this and ofcourse needless to say the entire world of information like weather, news, stock prices ,online coupon information in real time is mad available by the ever increasing number of “smart” apps should I say for our smartphones.

And use of scanning through Smartphones like scanning of QR codes is opening the doors for such amazing innovation like the use of it in Virtual Stores created by Tesco in South Korea. An amazing video on how this is helping achieve realistic manifestations and contributing to real business.

Do see this youtube video in the link below , it is an indeed amazing concept at work.
Tesco Virtual Market in South Korea

So after having seen the clip above, you will agree that indeed smartphones are very much centerpiece fuelling innovation which is vying to touch several aspects of human life.

So in the future smartphones hopefully would provide more means at adapting it’s capabilities in solving more real life problems in truly smart ways. That would push the limits of mankind to envision and implement new ways of being more productive and successful in life.

 

Buying a Used Car – Part 1

Buying a used car is no small undertaking if you are serious about getting your money’s worth on the car you buy.
There are sufficient resources to guide you on your endeavor to buying a used car. I shall list some of them here as well as point out certain experiences of my own to provide my 2 cents in this matter.
There is no doubt that the Internet is now a huge enabler in the information gathering and confidence building exercise for the prospective buyer of a used car.
This post has a heavy rooting to used car buying in the United States.
The points of focus /interest in a used car will vary from buyer to buyer. But I guess safety of driving the vehicle is of paramount importance.
Now the links I provide does come up with checklists which would attempt to be complete but I would still advise further caution on alertness and encourage cross verification with other sources from the web/ social sphere on verification of these lists.
Other aspects like the history of the vehicle in terms of accidents and open recalls, mileage travelled on the vehicle , generally it is good to have it under 12,000 * number of years (from manufacture year to current date).

It is very necessary to analyze and identify your actual needs present and in the near future of this vehicle that you want to buy. This is something really basic and not something new that I am saying and rather putting this down as kind of a formal first to point out in articles on this matter.
Go ahead and continue reading through the point wise aspects that I have laid out for this exercise.
Part 1 will be about the kick start of the process and which websites to pay that initial visit and get into the groove and Part 2 will be more about some of my experiences and considerations, About importance of Carfax & Autocheck and why spending around a hundred bucks to safeguard your investment of thousands is a good thing to do.
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A new page called General Matters

Hello everyone . For long there has been a hiatus on this blog of new stuff. I apologize but for some matters of higher priority my wirting on this blog was put on hold by me .
I wanted to bring stuff into this blog after good research to provide the readers of the blog quality stuff.
Good news is that the wait is over !!
Also the very direction of this blog is now in for a change and headed towards a transformation from being a strictly technical and industry oriented blog to something which will retain the previous values but also add in more generalisitic topics of life not necessarily technical in it’s core.
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How to create a separate page for posts of a particular topic on wordpress based blogs?

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How to create separate pages for posts on separate topics on wordpress based blogs?
The following information is just one of the ways possible for the above task which I adopted on this website for older wordpress versions < 3.0.
I do not claim this to be either the best method and do not indicate this to a part of some standard process also. This is something that I did and see to be fairly easy to accomplish and wanted to share with my readers . I greatly admire the wordpress platform and love building further on the tenets of this platform which I would like to further explore and implement.
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What is Billing?

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In several responses and replies to me in emails, people have wanted to know basic import on the terms on which this blog is based. So I will now attempt to answer these questions in this post as well as future posts. So Billing will be first term that I will try to address.

The Wikipedia and several other places on the net provide the different definitions for billing.
Let me attempt the turn of explaining this to you in a simple sequence from the inception of a business to the action of billing for initiating the chain or cycle of activities which help in recognizing the revenue of this business.

Say there is a need for some service/product which an individual, a group of individuals or a more specifically say a company /organization requires. So in absolutely bare terms and though there are more factors to it but in the minimalistic sense when the need for this service permeates beyond a critical number of individuals then the chance arises for a market to be created for this service.

Now this critical number is never a fixed number, it just cannot be. This number is recognized as demand defining threshold. And this threshold is the trigger which makes people having the resources, plan and knowhow to kind of satisfy this demand start taking notice of this demand.


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Time for the enterprise to be REALLY GREEN

Going green is pretty much everyone’s claim. You have all the right sounding numbers, percentages, and company grants all making it to the right positions in all the advertisements of any enterprise out there. I will not be totally sarcastic about it and there are organizations who are affording a serious look towards exercising green practices. I appreciate and salute their initiatives.

Unfortunately there is a still a lot of BUT to it as a lot still remains left out in terms of on the on the ground practice in the corporate world. In this post I will touch the subject by re-affirming known best practices and how they can easily defeat daily deficiencies in being green. I will also ponder on highlighting future possibilities and how technology is getting aligned to help us be green.

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Can 3G in India spark service innovation?

Taking the entire country in perspective for the 2G & 2G+ scopes the revenue model has still been largely voice dominated. Yes definitely the mobile subscriber community in the metropolitan circles have matured and evolved in sophistication in it’s usage patterns using the various Data based services riding on the advances in the mobile internet space.

But all will agree we have eons to march ahead in Data penetration in the total mobile subscriber population of the entire country.
Innovation in the structure and introduction of services riding the 3G spectrum can become a useful metric to measure the usefulness of 3G to all parties concerned.

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IT – Driver for Business Growth

Different functions like appropriate customer usage analysis, accurate and targeted surveys, envisioning new service offerings, innovative bundling and packaging, customer retention & loyalty enhancements, innovative marketing strategies provide us fodder to accentuate business growth.
I would like to add on my thoughts on this very purpose of business growth from an IT perspective.

In our Telco world we want to do wonderful things for both Business as well as Individual consumers – absolutely why not? but how many STABLE features of your underlying “system” are there to boot for your future visions.
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