Four CEOs in five years! Yahoo was a symbol of innovation and success in its
first few years of life. Founded by two Stanford Ph.D. students (Yang and
Filo), Yahoo defined the Internet era of communities and sharing. It still
has an enviable community using various services like email, finance, news,
etc. It has lost much advertising dollars to Google. Terry Semel came from
Hollywood and wanted to make it a media company. That did not work. Terry
flew in every week on a private jet from LA to San Francisco and was driven
in a limo to work every day. His compensation was way higher than many other
CEOs at similar valley companies. Jerry Yang returned as CEO for the second
time and botched up a lucrative offer from Microsoft. Yang was no Steve Jobs
on his second return to the company he founded. He turned down the Microsoft
offer to buy Yahoo at $47 per share (current... (more)
I just spent 3 days in Bangalore for a board meeting. Staying in south
Bangalore around JP Nagar and Jayanagar area feels like the old Bangalore of
yesteryears – greenery all around, spring flowers, no high rise apartment
buildings, and comparatively more tranquil ambiance. Once I went to north,
around Whitefield area, the new Bangalore intimidates you – huge apartment
complexes, no trees, chaotic traffic and what not. All over town, one notices
the construction of the new metro – the overhangs spoil the beauty of the
city. Of course the area around electronic city is all concret... (more)
Big Data is a top technology trend for 2012 according to Forrester Research.
The Economist said that Big Data is a new game changing asset and The
Harvard Business Review termed it as a scientific revolution. Scientific
Revolution? Because it is data-intensive computing to unify, theorize,
experiment, and do simulation at scale.
It is also termed the Fourth Paradigm – “The techniques and technologies
for such data-intensive science are so different that it is worth
distinguishing data-intensive science from computational science as a new,
fourth paradigm for scientific explorati... (more)
Among the new crop of NoSQL database products, MongoDB ranks quite high, in
my opinion. The company that produces MongoDB is 10Gen, a venture backed new
start-up since 2008. But its rapid growth over last 4 years bears testimony
to its technical strength.
MongoDB’s name comes from the middle five letters of the word
“humongous”, meaning big data. It is an open-source, document-oriented
storage which is schema-free and can entertain dynamic queries with full
indexing. The programming model is BSON – binary encoding of JSON
(Javascript Object Notation), a lightweight text-based op... (more)
Wow Apple! The market value exceeded $500B and now everyone is speculating if
it will reach One Trillion, which no company has ever aspired. As I look into
the valuation this morning, Apple is at $505B. Microsoft is almost at half of
that at $266B. Look at the other big ones in technology sector – Oracle
($146B), Amazon($82B), Cisco ($107B), IBM ($229B), Intel ($134B), Google
($201B), and HP($50B). Other stalwarts for comparison are –
Wal-Mart($202B), GE($202B), and Exxon Mobile($408B).
Someone commented that if Apple was part of the Dow Jones, then the value
would have exceeded... (more)
Jnan Dash is Senior Advisor at EZShield Inc., Advisor at ScaleDB and Board Member at Compassites Software Solutions. He has lived in Silicon Valley since 1979. Formerly he was the Chief Strategy Officer (Consulting) at Curl Inc., before which he spent ten years at Oracle Corporation and was the Group Vice President, Systems Architecture and Technology till 2002. He was responsible for setting Oracle's core database and application server product directions and interacted with customers worldwide in translating future needs to product plans. Before that he spent 16 years at IBM. He blogs at 
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