Here is our first attempt at eNGy Animation.

This animation is intended as a small promotion anime for NGenius IT Hub.

It also encapsulates what we have learned the last fifteen years. I started business thinking that technology should be useful to business. Later on, I learned that it is not enough to be useful. Especially in gadgets and gizmos, and consumer retail, you should not only be useful — you should be cool!

One of the ironies of our times is the saying, ” the more you specialize, the more you generalize.” It used to be said that specialization means you have to know more and more about less and less, while generalizing means you have to know less about more and more. What the intense globalization and technology has shown us that what you really need to do is that both are viable strategies, and its up to you to choose where to make your stand.

The concept of whether to generalize or to specialize is a persistent question that a businessman has to answer everyday. It is also a question an employee has to answer everyday.

There are companies that are enormously successful by focusing, and there are companies that are successful by diversifying. If you look at Walmart, or Amazon.com, these are companies that have made it huge by offering everything under one roof, or one website. For every business book that says you should focus on core competence, there is also another book that tries

Read the rest of this entry »

Some people are making money not off customers but off investors.

Most of the ‘free’ sites are done to get traffic, and then sold off to investors who think that they can convert all the traffic to profits or some other objectives.

However, there are some products that are benefitting from the combined effort of many individuals who are offering the services for free and not seeking financial returns — efforts like open source software are able to compete with commercial software by appealing to the sense of community, or altruism, or harvesting the collective hate of people for a product or company to accomplish it.

Free economy and small businesses | Small Business Trends

Hi, I am your new manager.

I don’t expect all of you to like me, and I probably wouldn’t be able to like you all the same.

We have a tough job ahead of us, and when we are moving forward, I’d like all of us to pull together.

I expect to make mistakes, and when I do, I’d like you to tell me straight. There is no value in talking behind my back.

If we make some mistakes but do well in many other things, we should still be ok. If you help me, and I make too many mistakes, I wouldn’t need your backbiting — I’d probably fire myself anyway.

And if I do that, I would rather us part with beautiful memories of working together.

Microsoft has always win in the market.

Maybe there is method in their madness…. Its a continual understanding of the way businesses work — sometimes the best strategy may not be the most straightforward way.

When worlds collide: Microsoft funds Apache |CNET News.com

Microsoft, one of the biggest rivals to open-source programming, has begun funding the Apache Software Foundation, one of open-source software’s biggest supporters.

“Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software,” said Sam Ramji, a senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft. He announced the move Friday in a speech at the Open Source Convention, and noted Microsoft’s support of the Apache on the software company’s Port 25 blog as well.

He was an inspiration.

Live your dreams. Live your life as if it is your last day.

That’s great advice, and we should always remember that.

but we should remember that it is also important the other way - plan long term. Live some of your days as if you have a hundred more years to live. Some dreams and really great things can only be achieve by painstaking and unremitting focus for a good amount of time — something you cannot have if you perpetually think you will go away very soon.

Prof whose ‘last lecture’ became a sensation dies - Yahoo! News

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose “last lecture” about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.

who knows? At the end, as long as it looks like ‘magic’, people will get it.

Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank | CNET News.com

Though a distant third place to Google, Microsoft thinks it can teach its rival a thing or two about searching the Internet.

A big part of Google’s rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses a specific page’s importance by how many other Web pages link to it and by the importance of those linking pages. Microsoft researchers and academic collaborators, though, detailed an idea this week it calls BrowseRank that seeks to bring more of a human touch to that assessment.

This is worrisome….

InformationWeek | Daily Archive

More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy.

The study, “Analyzing Web Sites For User-Visible Security Design Flaws,” examined 214 bank Web sites in 2006. It was conducted by University of Michigan computer science professor Atul Prakash and doctoral students Laura Falk and Kevin Borders

Sometimes, maybe visiting blogs can still be a security risk?

PC Pro: News: Google Blogger “hosts 2% of world’s malware”

Google’s Blogger service is responsible for 2% of the world’s malware hosted on the web, according to a new report from security firm Sophos.

The security firm claims hackers are setting up pages on the free blogging service to host malicious code, or simply posting links to infected websites in other bloggers’ comments.

Here are scenes in the stock market that are becoming common — you beat your forecasts, you increase earnings by 31 percent, and then when you can’t increase it as much as they think you should, they pummel you.

The pain of becoming public is that even if you are the CEO, you hardly own or can dictate anything anymore….

Apple 3Q profit jumps 31 percent but stock drops: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Macintosh and iPod sales helped boost Apple Inc.’s fiscal third-quarter earnings 31 percent, beating Wall Street’s expectations Monday, but investors pummeled the stock after Apple issued soft guidance for the current quarter.