Thursday, October 27, 2011

Cheapest Tablet in the World - Made in India

Check out "Akash" - World's cheapest tablet.  It is unabashedly optimized for cost. To be priced at $35 a piece (subsidized by Govt of India) for educational institutes and $60 a piece for retail sale.



Aakash Tablet from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

Specifications

  • Screen: 7-inches; 800-by-400 pixels; Resistive touchscreen
  • Operating system: Android 2.2, Froyo
  • Processor: 366 MHz Connexant; HD Video co-processor (both with graphics accelerators)
  • Memory: 256MB RAM (internal); 2GB Flash (external)
  • Storage: 2GB card included, expandable up to 32GB
  • Ports: Two USB 2.0; 3.5mm audio out jack; 3.5mm audio in jack (No built-in speakers)
  • Connectivity: GPRS; Wi-Fi 802.11 a,b,g
  • Power: Up to 180 minutes on battery; AC adapter, 200-240 volt
  • Weight: 350 grams

Sunday, October 16, 2011

How great leaders inspire action

One of my favorite talks from TED by Simon Sinek.

Simple, effective and insightful.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Agile tour pune - 2011

I delivered a talk on "Scaling agility" in the enterprise at Agile Tour 2011 @Pune. It was a great experience addressing some 70 odd agile enthusiasts, including some renowned thought leaders in the industry.


The talk aimed to answer the following questions:
- What are the typical challenges faced by enterprises while scaling agility (slides 8 ~ 12)
- Why we can not leave it to self organizing teams to manage scaling of agility (slide 14)
- What values the agile leaders should espouse for successful scaling of agility, in the form of a manifesto (slides 15-28)




Any suggestion or feedback to further improve the content will be appreciated.

Monday, October 10, 2011

A Chicken's manifesto for scaling agility

In agile Scrum parlance, the term 'Chicken' refers to those who are involved (but not committed) in the project and stand to benefit from it. Examples: Managers, Leaders, Coaches, Sponsors etc.

In a typical Scrum team, the role of Chicken is somewhat marginalized, at times to the extent of being derogatory. However as organizations Scale agility from doing individual pilot projects to enterprise wide Agile adoption, the role of Chickens assumes significant importance. A thoughtful organizational change management by the Chickens, can be the differentiating factor between success and failure.

Introducing 'A chickens manifesto for scaling agility':
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"As responsible agile practitioners, we are optimizing the value delivered  through agile software development by adopting innovative practices. In addition to the manifesto for agile software development, we have come to value:

attitude over skill
adaptability over predictability
effectiveness over efficiency
optimizing the whole over improvement in parts
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."
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I picked these values based on my own experience of scaling agility from a small team to be an enterprise wide phenomenon. Keeping your agile adoption journey in context, do you identify with the above mentioned? Do you have any other useful values to add?

Please leave a comment.