About the Author
Kiran Bulusu is a Strategic Account Management professional in Electronics Design Automation (EDA)/Semiconductor Industry.
He has experience in Product Positioning,Revenue Generation, building customer relationships and converting them into strategic accounts. His strategies and technical competence helped win many aggressive pre-sales campaigns in EDA and Semiconductor industry.
His technical experience is primarily starting from logic synthesis to GDSII including DFT/Formal Verification/Hierarchical Floorplanning on various process all the way from 0.13u to 32nm . He has worked ASIC designs implementation on couple of high performance processors from ARM (Cortex A9/15)/MIPS (74K,1004K,1024K) /Sun (OpenSparc T2 ) and Graphics Cores (SGX) from Imagination Technologies , UK .
His other interests include Management Consulting,Marketing and Entrepreneurship. He is currently employed at Cadence Design Systems.
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Category Archives: General
Cisco Valet router or Fon 2.0N :
Should I buy “ease of setup” Cisco Valet router or “smart router which can get more things done with ease of setup” aka Fon 2.0N .
I’m not writing a PR for Fon 2.0N nor this is a marketing blog for Fonera. I’m working on home automation on a tighet budget and have been looking at various devices and saw the video from cisco valet routers and after reading through the specifications , I had this question: why buy Cisco Valet routers when you can do the same and get more things done for lesser price . I’m talking about the Fon 2.0N router from Fonera . I’m an happy Fon 2.0N user for over 8 months and the setup is a breeze so it should satisfy the networking newbies as well (defaults works as well ) and can create seperate network for outsiders/guests (meaning no need to share you private wireless SSID/WEP keys). So question is why someone should 150$ for just “ease of setup”.. Fon works on opensource and also downloads torrents, converts 3G to Wifi, is media/print server, can handle youtube/picasa/megaupload/rapidshare . It actually serves large audience including newbies/geeks/students/wireless enthusiasts .
check this link from networkworld newsletter where the author tells that linksys E-series routers from cisco itself does all the above with lesser price tag..Even then, Fon 2.0N should be a better choice.
Looks like Cisco is trying to appeal consumers with “ease of setup” as their pitch…but will they succeed or will this be yet another router from cisco…?
What I have to admit is, I liked the product design and from what I have seen, they seem to have avoided the usage of technical terms including “router” 
and they use wireless hot spots/internet access which helps many users though… Since I haven’t tried the router hands-on and my impression was based on the router specs and videos from cisco, I might be wrong as well. If anyone has hands-on experience , let me know or let me know if I’m missing something
Partnerships ,Product eco systems and True solution offerings..
You would need to develop a complete eco system to fully and truly offer a product/solution especially if you are entering into newer market segments or you are redefining the way you approach and solve the problem. If you don’t have a good eco system , it doesn’t matter to most customers even if you happen to offer a cutting edge product or cheaper solution. Lets consider entirely different industries: Smart phones and mobile apps and Design automation industry.
If you have a smart phone with latest and greatest HW/SW,but don’t have a apps/other services built around your product either by you or your partners, most likely it will passed by even if you offer for hard to say no prices. On the other hand, if you have decent or not so great product , but you have entire eco system developed around, it will still sell big time. Readers can easily think of Apple Iphone vs Android vs Nokia Symbian ;
Same concepts applies to most of the industries/segments like Electronics Design Automation (EDA) which is key driver for Semiconductor industry. If you have a compelling synthesis solution or a complete implementation solution and you say you don’t have DFT solution, unless you partner with some DFT companies, most semi companies will not even look at you even if you offer compelling soln; You are creating and adding value to the customer not by just your product alone , but by offering the product ecosystem
Build a good community around your product..
Just a quick tip to startups and other companies who are introducing new product into the market. Build a community around your product . Its the quick way to get noticed, build good reputation for your product and company. One way is to evangelize. Make community building part of your product team. Explain the technology for newbie (sort of 101) ..then explain how your technology differentiates…Comment about the upcoming technologies etc..sort of a blog if you will..talk about how each of the features of your product applies to target users and how they can use/utilize and increase their productivity etc..if you cant find enough to explain , then you don’t need to have that feature..I will be posting more tips in future posts, but if they are any tips readers would like to add/share, please let me know and I will add it here…
4 things that make me still run Windows OS
My windows XP laptop at work started giving me all sort of headaches and so decided to shift to Linux despite my IT telling me that they dont provide any support for linux based laptops (ofcourse I’m glad that they allowed me to install another OS) . I have been using linux since RHEL 6.0 and I was confident that I will be able to manage . So while I’m cruising through , there are 4 things that hit me real hard and is making me run windows XP as virtual machine via virtualbox.
1. IMAP Calendar Plugin : There was no good solution to pull microsoft exchange calendar and do a 2-way synchronization. Evolution was too slow and Thunderbird with lightning extension doesnt solve. After googling around, found davmail which acts as intermediate gateway between your IMAP mail client and microsoft exchange gateway and does 2 way sync etc. But its still not stable/usable in the production/corp environment.
If Canonical/Ubuntu instead of working to shift window indicators like min/max/close to left (in lucid lynx 10.04 ), if they spend few more hours and developed a robust calendar plugin, it would have served 90% of the corp users like me . I hope they will consider this in their next releases atleast . BTW, I tried Zimbra desktop and its painfully slow. I dont know if its slow because of the Ajax client or someother reason. It does more than what I need It pulls my calendar and also our corporate and IT calendars which I dont care and it really floods my calendar with unnecessary stuff. Other clients/extensions dont do this, so it must be zimbra specific.
2. File synchronization : I’m a big fan of Microsoft Live Mesh (which runs on azure clouds I guess) and they dont have a linux client. I have done lot of research/googled around looking for a file synchronization sw which is free , gives more storage space/unlimited folders and is truly cross platform, the closest I found is dropbox, but it doesnt serve my purpose (unlimited folders, same storage space as live mesh etc & is FREE).I have different folders which I share between my work/home laptops,my parents & cousins etc and I want to do the same in linux , but it doesnt have one. Crossover/wine neither works with live mesh.
Ubuntu one seemed promising , but they dont have any intentions of developing a windows client ( probably for the same reason microsoft doesnt develop linux client) .
3. Photo editing software : I have Nikon D90 and I shoot in RAW (NEF). I use ViewNX/CaptureNX2/ColorFx/NoiseNinja and couple of other SW for slideshow etc. I have a whole workflow setup using these SW. Sadly, none of these have linux version. I wish Nikon recognizes there is decent size of linux users for them to develop linux versions. The closest program is dcraw/GIMP , but there are lotof reason why I cannot shift to them yet (probably will explain in another post). Again, tried Crossover/wine neither works.
4. Office apps : I prepare powerpoints/Xls all the time and with lot of customers shifting to 2007/2010 version of Microsoft Office, I received and send files with pptx/xlsx extension. There are 2 alternatives I found for handling this in linux. One is openoffice 3.x from Oracle and another is Softmaker 2010 . While both can handle docx , only openoffice can handle pptx/xlsx extensions. I wish if Softmaker had this already and its worth every penny to buy their solution. Keep in mind, we never know when Oracle will stop releasing openoffice as free alternative and this makes SoftMaker as the only solution available in linux. I installed their linux2010 beta version and it worked out fine and never had any single issue with the docx or doc/ppt/xls extensions. My beta expired, but when they make pptx/xlsx, I will revisit their soln, but for now, I have to live with slow,not so attractive looking openoffice (It works though!! so, cant really complain hard)
My friends say this is reason why I have to shift to mac, but sorry!! I dont have budget for buying those pricey macs and later I have to buy all the apps and no free/opensource versions.
Nokia N95 8gb with firmware ver 31.x.y
Updated to the Firmware 31.x.y, I should say, I’m not all impressed with the performance..its slow and i can feel the difference..I use emoze for checking emails of all my accts incl outlook and it painfully slow when i invoke it..
On the positive, I no longer have the sound when the camera clicks..apparently theres a law in US which says whenever a camera clicks, it has to have a sound..
Second diff I noticed is, I see PTT (push to talk) options ..not that I want to use it as radio , but feels good to know that N95 has so many features…
Hopefully, I will be able to uncover few more in coming weeks…
BTW, I had to change to EURO1 using NSS to test this firmware
