Facebook GRAPH

I know everyone(at least pretend) uses Facebook and you should be noting that for last few weeks your Facebook homepage must me appearing different. Don’t say me no. It’s all due to new application from Facebook called as GRAPH. The is the 3rd revolutionary application from their stable. The other two were Newsfeed and Timeline.

So what’s Graph, it’s a search application (remember the various graph algorithms we studied in our days of Engineering) and it works in the same fashion. Suppose you wanted to search anything about let’s say about Tiger. Traditional search solutions like Google will return the same results for everyone unless you signed in google and they track your search using the cookies. Facebook GRAPH will use your friends list (Deloitte calls it as Networking) to get everything related to Tiger. If someone in your network had visited Bandipur and commented that its better than Mudumalai, it’s going to influence your decision. Some of us stalk behind people to get info, no need going forward.

You can also have a little bit more insight about graph based search from the below link,

Regarding the privacy, yes Facebook allows to have a control on the visibility/availability of your profile for search.

Who should be rewarded? Employees or Shareholders?

Every Quarter and at the end of each financial year, its the responsibility of all companies to publish their both audited and unaudited balance sheets. I had a chance to go through the balance sheet of a tier-2 IT company. It had reported a profit of 82 crores and for interim dividend alone it allocated 54 crores out of 82. I’m aware that according to stakeholder definition it includes employees and shareholders. But the dividend goes directly to shareholders. So what’s the benefit for the employees who toil hard for the sake of the company. Do the shareholders be rewarded generously for the sake of holding shares? Take the scenario of IT giant Infosys, it missed it revenue guidance and it kept its employee appraisal process on hold stating weak macro economic conditions but rewarded share holders with around Rs.20 as interim dividend.

So all of those who read this article, kindly let me know your opinions on this.

Data Pollution

We know different kinds of pollution but there is a new kind of pollution that doesn’t affect the environment but seriously hampers our ability to take decision. We can name it as data pollution. With cheap data storage devices we are lethargic in maintaining quality of data. Even though we strive to maintain quality of data in the warehouses through various control measures, still the volume of data is huge causing considerable amount of pollution.

Data pollution is caused by poorly formed data which is of less importance to humans. Recently we faced a similar problem where one user entered alias name for our currency as Indian rupee and another as Indian national rupee. The above mentioned is a perfect example of data pollution.

We BI people always take pride in fancy reports which we developed for people in the higher management. Suppose the same report displays the amount for a report based on the alias name of currency instead of currency codes definitely there will be amount mismatch which destroys the credibility of the entire report. The business impact varies based on the variation or difference in the amount values.

I think growth in volume of data is the only serious competitor to Moore’s law and reliability of data is very high these days and even the Indian government has to change its IIP (Index of Industrial Production) figures as there was data pollution causing huge embarrassment. So kindly takes steps to control pollution of data.

Kindly share your thoughts on how data pollution has corrupted your data.

A futuristic approach-Moving Gaming to Cloud

I was in constant fear due to my aging laptop as with the new games it needed a upgrade to support them. Everyone knows that upgrading a laptop is an expensive affair. I was wondering why we can’t find a solution to this with available technologies. I think the answer is cloud computing. Nowadays we see very large implementations being moved into the cloud space and infrastructure is being used in a wise manner. We also need to know that the popular games in facebook like Farmville can also be categorized as games in cloud.

If we move all our games to cloud then it’s just a plug and play type. All we need is switch on your laptop connect to net, login and start the action. The companies like EA sports, Microsoft also stand to benefit as if the gaming is moved to cloud it will totally eradicate piracy. Even from mobiles which have less computing power compared to desktops can be used as a medium to play power packed games.

But I guess it will take time to move gaming into cloud as still the penetration of broadband internet is low and initially it may face a stiff resistance from the gamers as even the fortune 500 companies are yet to move their entire IT infrastructure to cloud. But it will be a paradigm shift as the industry will coin a new term called GaaS which Is an acronym for Gaming as a Service.

The Mega Satyam Fraud

The satyam episode is an eyeopener to various Indian entities as most of them are owned or promoted by large Indian families.The corporate governance is necessary and auditors role pays a key role in the transparency of the management.Now the future of the employees hangs in air.Even the auditors PriceWater Coopers who are one of the big 3 among the global auditing firms like KPMG,Ernst and Young.It is a black mark to the bubbling indian IT industry which is already under crisis due to the recession which has left any sectors untouched.But even there are people  who admire Mr.Raju.No one can doubt that he had risen to this level only due to sheer hardwork.But this again proves the point that people from agricultural background have strong penchant to land and their will to own lands will not decrease.He also wanted that his company should not face any hostile takeover bid from other companies as he may lose management control.Still inspite of all this i still support him,the mistake he made was trusting too much on the politicians where after the elections he was quick
to change sides from Naidu to YSR.
But there is lot of same between Raju and Gelli,the man who became the first person to start first private sector bank Global Trust Bank which also collapsed in the similiar fashion.For both firms the internal auditors where PriceWaterCoopers.Both brought lot of pride to Telugu people and placed Hyderabad in global map.