Cracking Nutshell – What Stops Professionals from Becoming Entrepreneurs

It took quite a few months to sit and write for my blog again. What I was doing by this time has less importance to really know; whereas it would not be a bad idea to share the experiences I have been collecting to write this post!

I have been a professional in the Indian IT industry for more than half a decade, and the life was not that colorful to keep on writing for others – with a purpose may be for marketing or for entertainment, if not solely for information. Well, sometimes you go are forced to go technical while you wanted to be creative.

 

Everyone is born entrepreneur

Someone told me that a young man has a father sleeping inside, whereas I believe that an entrepreneur sleeps inside every grown-up guy or a woman. Especially, when you are in a developing country like India and suddenly getting to be almost flashed out of your stereotype life by a gusty wind or wave of Narendra Modi spread ‘Make in India’ or the type of enthusiasm. You get your hand dirty – this time trying to be an entrepreneur. Sometimes dirty affairs are not that dirty - at least one of the detergent power in Indian FMCG market claim that "dag achhe he[to get some dirt on your clothing]"

Trying to place some eggs in multiple baskets

As I mentioned earlier, I have few eggs and want to keep them in different baskets; at least a few would survive the unfriendly tussles while I would be trying to dawn a new avatar of being an entrepreneur.

I should not say that I have failed or succeeded in my entrepreneur run and now sitting to share those sweet and sour feelings. I am here while I am in the midway of my journey to become an entrepreneur. I thought to share a few points that may help you to understand how tough it could be to become an entrepreneur when someone is still a working professional of any organization!

It is not cocoon but a nutshell

Below I have shared my own struggling situation to dawn the role of an entrepreneur, in other words, what situation as a professional I have faced in doing own business is shared in this blog post. Gone are the days when you happen to consider yourself inside the cocoon – break out the shell easily eating the protein/food inside the shell – now it’s more of staying inside a nutshell that is quite strong to creak from within – you may get yourself killed inside like the insect inside the walnut. Yes, the pesticide spread outside the walnut would not hit you directly, rather makes the shell harder and difficult to break from inside.

Lose your bread in hand to earn a piece of cake nearby

There should not be any doubt in an entrepreneur’s mind that he or she must invest maximum time possible to get things placed on the right track or planned path. It is one of the beginner’s mantra to climb the ladder of success.

Well, investing enough time in the entrepreneurial efforts could be a challenging option for someone who is earning his daily bread from servicing an organization. Your serving organization needs more output than the stipulated/tabulated time limits ask you to invest in. If you could not innovate or contribute differently to the role you are serving, your primary bread earning machine- job could be in trouble!

 

Getting confused!

Now, this makes you feel helpless and confused to choose between the new or the old source of earning. You could see that investing a few more hours in your new step towards a new professional role (an entrepreneurship) may take you to new heights. However, your existing job responsibility demands more time to keep its promise of delivering the piece of bread that eventually running the engine within you.

Is it tough enough to decide between bread and cake while you are hungry? A piece of cake would douse the burning appetite within and can satisfy your testbeds. However, you must walk a mile to get it. While walking a few steps, you could get a piece of bread. The decision is yours.

Lose some of the eggs collected for the winter season

Someone, who beings their career with an entrepreneurial effort, could gamble anything to reach the target. What about you who has been in a service and collecting (saving) some hard-earned money for the future in the form of bonds or deposits in bank cellar?

When you are on an entrepreneurial journey, capital is something you would ever need to make liquid as and when to pour in different cups to offer in a lookout to gain some returns. Well, you can never make it assured to get back the way you could from the banks or other money-making instruments.

Putting eggs into boiling water

Are you ready to risk eggs by putting it into the boiling water and see those eggs starting to bounce suddenly? You should be careful enough to strain them out at the right moment without burning your hands or broking them! Either you risk your earning to see a brighter future or brace yourself to lose a chunk of savings that could have made your future relaxing without stoning at the hive of the honeybees!

Losing patience before seeing the seed transform to sprout

Patience is a virtue my dear and you must keep it remembered until you have explored all the means and spent time waiting to the extent possible to become an entrepreneur. Can you remember those days of searching job and not losing your nerves while being rejected time and again? Well, this situation is nothing of any sort for an early bud into entrepreneurial fleet. But these do matter to someone in the midway of their professional career. They have some money to invest into something that brings quick results. Well, the time they do not see the immediate outcome from the investments; now people are habituated to an environment where their managers ask for quick results. They lose their will to stick to anything. People must stay ready giving some time to the seed to sprout.

The zigzag road ahead

When you are on an entrepreneur journey, the destination is fixed but the roads may keep turning - pass through the tunnels, take on the zigzag shape – ultimately, the roads take your time making you impatient to reach the destination. There may not be the ‘on time’ reaching situations. If you can have unlimited faith in God whom you have never seen to help you directly, why are you not ready to have patience on something done by yourself? You should wait for the possibility of seeing the fruit. There are possibilities of getting a positive outcome in higher proportion than getting answers to your prayers from God. If you believe that God is busy to fulfil the desire cum wish of someone’ else, your entrepreneurial efforts will also bring results provided you give it sometimes. You got to be ready to carry a certain amount of patience – are you?

I am not done yet

Well, I am amid my entrepreneurial journey, and have found these three major roadblocks that tried to prevent me; in fact, still pulling me from behind. Next time I come across other such obstacles, I promise to share them here. Till then wish you good luck if you are an entrepreneur or have thoughts in mind of trying to be one in future. Bye for Now see you sometime or some days later with something poking me to write here for sharing with my readers.

Peering into The Future: Artificial Intelligence is The next Step in Online Advertising

A close look at the business expansion and diversification strategies of technology giants like Google, Apple, and Facebook have led me to a simple conclusion – Artificial Intelligence (AI) is trending and is going to dominate the future technological development. In the month of September 2016, Google acquired API.AI which developed ‘Siri’ like bot that can recognize speech, intent, and context of the commands. While in July 2016, Twitter Inc. had already acquired Magic Pony which works on improving User Experience through better image and videos search.

I was thinking about one thing, why the tech giants were spending crazy amounts to acquire these startups who were working on AI developments? Suddenly one notification popped up on my phone from online shopping marketplace Amazon and it was suggesting me the slashed prices of books on technical writing.I could connect things then! I understood that the era of suggestive advertising may be soon over with application of interactive advertisements.

Surpassing online AI already reached out of the home

A little research on AI led me to the world’s first artificially intelligent poster campaign which ran at a bus shelter outside Selfridges on Oxford Street in the month of July 2015. Though it appeared to be a simple poster for an instant coffee brand created by M&C Saatchi in partnership with Postercope and Clear Channel UK, a camera was integrated with the poster to capture peoples’ engagement based on their emotional reactions (happy, sad or neutral) after seeing the advertisement and the poster was writing creative copies at per those reactions.

I realized the AI has started spreading its influence quite a few years back on advertisement industry to give actionable insights of audience reactions, far from being suggestive; the campaign was a part of the trial which was putting AI to create self-writing ad campaigns in the interactive method!

SMS: Prices slashed by 30% for technical writing books - visit www.amazon.com today!

Coming back to Amazon notification again. I began to think how suggestive advertisements are influencing me? Are such ads still suggestive or the use of AI already has made them interactive? Data analysis is a part of AI and the big data analysis has made filtering of social sentiments, product pricing, predictive customer segmentation and sales forecasting easy. Added to the analysis and prediction is the use of image recognition, speech recognition, and content generation to push the boundary where creativity meets technology.

Is it advertising agencies or technology firms trying to add the human mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding (through thought, experience, and the senses) to mechanical processes? Well, my understanding of AI in the ad creation tells me thatAI is trying to give importance to what works than what a human being thinks it should be. I doubt the creative heads and copywriters must have started scratching their heads!

Let us try to understand few aspects of how AI is putting forward result-oriented advertisements with complete and accurate view on performance against every ad displayed online:

AI is helping to identify pattern of users’ decision making

Millions of people are active online and they have different mindsets towards products, services, and related advertisements. It is difficult to analyze their decisions; when people click on ads there could be predictions following the activities thereafter but what about people who stay neutral? Here comes AI with its deep learning process. The high level of abstraction methodology is put to understand data; the process involves analyses of deep graphs with multiple processing layers to craft features that recognize attitude, intention and overall mindset of the visitors of any web page or website (in any version of display – desktop, mobile or tablet).Added to these is a deeper analysis of historical data available from different e-commerce sites.

Here the funda of AI lies in an analysis process that uses a mathematical structure which is inspired by biological neurons in our brain to interpret user description, for example, in buying or selling analysis.

AI is personalizing ads with self-learning algorithm

A good example of machines learning from mistakes and developing self-learning algorithm could be of Yann LeCun, director of AI research at Facebook, who taught a computer system how to recognize the differences between images of dogs and cats. Every time the machine fails to recognize the difference, he would correct it until the program figured out (learned) the reason for its failure.

Deep data mining to segment content per location, weather, time and even gender, age, profession or interest of the user have been made a projection of adverts possible in a personalized version. AI has started newly to add speech recognition with natural language, and image recognition alongside search analysis. Such processes help in customer segmentation with personalized outlook.

The aim is precision in advertisement campaign management

All the AI elements right from deep learning process to image or speech recognition aim at providing a complete and accurate view of advertisement performance. Detailed reporting enables optimized delivery of ads to the targeted audience. It helps the businesses to invest in buying or selling of advertisement space in real-time at per their value to users. The AI has also made real-time bidding of advertisement space to generate more revenue without affecting the interest of the advertiser/investors.



To conclude, some questions would always remain open for the use of mechanical reaction or the Artificial intelligence in an advertisement. Even if it becomes possible to write code for any unlimited number of situations to present personalized advertisements via AI, how long it will take to rectify wrong mechanical manufactured expressions (“It’s late excellent blend time” and “Bahio is the new steam” as found in AI driven poster ad campaign mentioned earlier)? Will it be possible to add a genuine emotional (human) touch in presenting copies and content of advertisement through machine/program? AI developers and users are hopeful. I found Neil ChapmanfromClear Channel (though he is basically from out of home ad agency)being quoted in Marketing Week: “We know that this is merely scratching the surface of the potential for artificial intelligence in the digital out of home arena and are very much looking forward to exploring the possibilities this kind of technology presents for advertisers in the near future."



image courtesy - www.tech.co/

video courtesy - www.thedrum.com/

video courtesy - www.finance.yahoo.com/

2016 Saw Large Corporates Finding Reasons to Acquire Promising Start-ups

In the year 2016,the world of Information Technology, along with us, sawthe giants like Apple, Google, and Intel acquiring promising start-ups Turi, Moodstocks, Itseez and the likes. Should we identify these as acts of killing the competition and competitor or gaining grounds in the field of nascent technology? Let’s script a drama around some acquisitions in anew unconventional structure.

Denouement (intention and outcome)

The general outcome of any acquisition and merger is the increased strength of acquirer and dilution of the acquired. Under the name of acquisition the act of silent butchery of growing competitors and establishing market supremacy take place. It would not be an exaggeration if we mark the year 2016 as breeding and budding time of machine learning, artificial intelligence and similar technologies that grew and showed its promising future from the nests of IT start-ups?

Let’s have a look at the activities of some giant corporates who acquired many start-ups. These may help us to understand what made them acquire rapidly growing and promising start-ups. Salesforce alone acquired 12 companies spending $5 billion; in other words, every month it acquired one company!

(set –Data Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning)

Act I, scene I:
Intel Corporation acquired computer vision and machine learning start-up Itseez in the month of May 2016 as part of its strategic shift from PC chip to cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and analyzing data from devices.

Scene II:
It seemed as if Google was waiting for a few months to analyze the outcome of Intel’s acquisition. In the month of September, it acquired API.AI which developed ‘Siri’ like bot that can recognize speech, intent, and context of the commands.

Act II, Scene I:
In Jan 2016 Apple acquired Emotient that works on Artificial Intelligence to develop technology for detecting emotion from facial expressions. After a few months, in July 2016, Twitter Inc. acquired Magic Pony which works on improving User Experience through better image and videos search.

Scene II:
How can any other company think something that relates to search bypassing Google! Yes, Google could not tolerate Twitter’s move and in the same month of July 2016, it acquired Moodstocks which develops machine-learning based image recognition technology.

Prolog (break the convention)

An Acquisition is no sudden incidents only from the likes of Google, Apple, Twitter or Intel. Cloud computing and king of CRM, Salesforce, was found to acquire PredictionIO in the month of February 2016. The start-up develops an open source-based machine learning server which would strengthen Salesforce’s grip in machine learning and data analytics. It also repeated the acquisition in April 2016 by acquiring MetaMind which works on predictive analysis to predict outcomes for language, vision, and database task. The end of the year 2016 saw Salesforce acquire Twinprime which works on app User experience optimization. Hat’s off to the aggressiveness of Salesforce for going to the ‘extreme’ level of acquisition (more than 40 acquisitions) which forced them to post a negative profit.

Image courtesy www.appannie.com