Author: navin

The overheads of outsourcing

Munjal Shah, CEO of riya.com/like.com blogs about having to close their Bangalore office. The overheads of having multiple sites geographically separated (especially for a small start-up) are just not worth the (fast reducing) cost savings. for:

Bangalore wages have just been growing like crazy. To give you an example, there is an employee of ours who took the first 5 years of his career to get from 1% to 10% of his equivalent US counterpart. He then jumped from 10% to 20% of his US counterpart in the next 1 year. During his time with us (less than 2 years) he jumped to 55% of the US wage. In the next few months we would have had to move him to 75% just to “keep him at market.”

Keep in mind that Riya are at the leading edge of this trend. We tend to only hire folks from IIT or other top schools. We tend to only hire the smartest folks from these schools. We only hire in Bangalore (just too hard to have three offices). We tend to only hire folks with a lot of experience. These are all characteristics that are critical for technology startups, but not necessarily for a big company like IBM or a services company like Infosys who can afford to train new graduates. I do believe that other startups in Bangalore will see the same issue in 12-24 months.

See full article.
I found it here.

Sheep sold as poodles

My friends often think that I make up some of the stories I tell them. You can’t make these things up. I don’t have that much imagination. For example, see this:

Thousands of Japanese people have apparently been scammed into buying “poodles” that are actually sheep with fancy haircuts. The scam was uncovered after actress Maiko Kawakami showed a photo of her pet poodle on TV and commented that it “didn’t bark and refused to eat dog food,”

Pictures are here. One of the commenters there asks whether this is what is meant by a sheepdog.

Source: boing-boing.

Update: Hmmm… Taste of my own medicine. Normally, people forward me all kinds of internet crap, and I have to tell them it is a hoax. Now I got the same thing done to me. In the comments below, MJ points out that this is a hoax. Snopes (one of my favorite sites on the internet) has officially debunked the story. Serves me right for being too credulous.

‘Toy library’ promotes cleanup AND creativity

Your kids have too many toys? House is cluttered all the time? Maybe it is time to implement a toy library. This is a shelf in the corner of your house where the bulk of the toys sit, and your kids only get to check out a few toys at a time. Want another toy? Return something first! There are a bunch of interesting ideas in this post at parenthacks. Including:

Additional functions of the toy library:

1) Toy timeout home. When toys are left on the floor after cleanup time, they go to the library for time out. […] If you want a toy to remain available, it has to be put away.

See full article.