A journey is best measured by friends rather than miles.

                                                                                      – Tim Cahil

Chapter – 1

My latest trip to Himalayas was one of the thrilling, mesmerizing and amazing experience that’s gonna long last with me. The trip that was planned out of random conference call between friends.  With this blog, I just hope to inspire you all to pack up your backpacks and start exploring the world that has stretched its hands wide. I have had too many trips off late with friends after seeing bunch of friends trying or struggling to escape with just 2 days off for a well deserved vacation with their friends. I wanted to experience most of the time i have with me now as a independent guy. I knew twenty -thirty years down the line i’ll be more disappointed with what i did not do than what i did.

I write down the my travel fantasy with Clinton and Aaron across the Indus River and up above Himalayan ranges.

The Plan

Well, there was actually no plan at all. We wanted a plan for Thailand or Bali trip and searched for options so that all of us can avail leaves. But, time was always a constraint. One day, Me & Clinton were on call discussing the possibility of a week long hide out somewhere that’s gonna be adventurous. Clinton Pulled Aaron on call and said we will at least go to  Leh – Ladakh, we all agreed for the destination and time was again undecided.

We decided we will go sometime in August as Aaron will be in India for one month and it was idea time to be in Leh – Ladakh.

The name ‘Jan Koum’ must be popping up everywhere on Internet, social media, TV and newspapers.  For the starters, he is a Whatsapp Co founder and CEO and is in the news for all good reason after his start up was acquired by Facebook. I woke up to that news in the wee hours of Thursday and clicked on to his profile on Forbes. It was relatively huge article to read around 4 o clock in the morning but somehow mangled it. Before I start let me give is achievement a credit, He is former Yahoo employee and was waiting in queue to get government food coupons few years back but today he is a billionaire worth astonishing $7 billion.

Jan koum, was born to working Jewsih family in Kiev, Ukraine where there’s political chaos everywhere due to communalism and anti semantic policies. Ukraine is a country where even a normal telephone call between the family members is tapped by the state, Condition is even worse for Jews. As a result his family planned a move to United States but only he and his mom made to US while his never made it and died in 1997 in Ukraine. At the beginning of their life in US, Jan wiped floors in a grocery shop for daily ends meet while doing his high school.  

He later started studying about networking from tech magazines from a used book store and started interest in networking and he meets a guy named Brian Acton, a Yahoo Employee. While pursuing his college he joined Yahoo as a Security and operations Engineer in 1998(time of net boom). He had to drop out of college as his boss at Yahoo required him to concentrate on work full time (Yahoo was a relatively small firm then). He went on to work in couple of other Job Profiles in the same firm for few more years. In 2007, Jan Koum who had $400,000 savings from all these years stint with Yahoo feels his daily job was too boring and he left the job along with Brian Acton.  Both roam around South Americas and some time doing nothing.

After returning from South America, both friends tried for a job in Facebook but were rejected outright.

As nothing to do both started spending free time doing nothing as they had huge chunk of saving they saved from their stint in Yahoo.

In these free years, he makes some Russian friends in a coffee shop to watch football matches.  In coffee shop, Friends used to wait for others to come till they came. So Jan started to think of an App which will show status about what a person is doing at the moment like ‘In gym’, ‘in a meeting’,’ I’m busy’ or even to say my battery is low. He shared the idea with his Yahoo colleague Brian who had invested few startups earlier.  After few months he finally met an Apple app developer and a beta or immature version of Whatsapp was created and was installed on Jan’s newly bought iphone but it had full of bugs and was very slow. Jan started working on building on numbers database to create accounts he primarily targeted his Russian friends.

The Initial version of Whatsapp which was intended to become a status conveyor was not so successful and Jan started to think of searching for a job. But Brian came and motivated him to give some more time and fought hard to get a venture capitalist.  With initial funding of $250,000 Whatsapp got financial boost and he called many other developed from LA. It was released on iPhone and was released to ping each other as a messenger rather than its intended development.

Whatsapp 2.0 released with a pure cross platform data messaging service and rest is historyJ J. Today, jan is worth $7 billion with his 45% of shares in Whatsapp and his partner Brian Acton worth around $2.5 billion with his 15% shares in Whatsapp.  

Emotional man Jan signed papers of the Whatsapp and Facebook deal in the bay area where he used to get food coupons from the government.

Once a Facebook reject Jan koum, he will join Facebook as a one of the director’s very soon. 

Texting is definitely one of the more iconic communication methods of my generation. I had grown up around adults who were getting cell phones as a means of ringing up one another while away from the landline, but by the time I got my first cell phone most kids my age were primarily using texting. Why? Well, it allowed us to be discreet and sneaky punks without our parents knowing any the wiser. But after a couple of years or so after really becoming a popular form of communication, texting got complicated. And rules from TRAI made it difficult by limiting no of messages.

Instant messaging which was famously started by Blackberry as BBM was quite successful. At some point BBM was a major reason for sales of Blackberry mobiles. Few more apps followed that way to provide apps for phones with platform specific. Google announced Android as open source, intense competition started between companies to develop cross-platform messaging services.

As of today we have WhatsApp,Wechat and Line as the most successful cross platform instant messaging services and huge crowd of not so successful apps including one from Facebook as Facebook messenger.

With decrease in user engaged time on Facebook they found out that instant messaging app driving their users off their path. Another thing what messaging apps have to offer: private chatting with people you are friends with in real life. Instead of passively stalking people you barely know on Facebook, messaging apps promote dynamic real-time chatting with different groups of real-life friends, real life because to connect with them on these apps you will typically already have their mobile number. After achieving major blow from Facebook messenger, Facebook tried to acquire Snapchat for $3bn but was turned down by Snapchat management.

Since Facebook acquired Instagram, There has been much speculation about its plans for the popular photo-sharing app. Now, new reports indicate that Instagram is working on a messaging feature. It claimed the new feature would pop up in an updated version of Instagram before the end of this year. But we at Kornerseat speculate that Update may come anytime now before the start of 2014. Facebook may tempt to cash on Christmas holidays, busiest season for Photo sharing and instant messaging apps. How better the new venture fares have to be watched.

We come across many people are on their mobile devices, reading, scrolling down, tweeting, emailing or just surfing. If you want to understand just how ubiquitous social media is, Social media is the single most important disruptive technology we have seen in a generation primarily because it is actually changing the way we behave. It is changing our concentration spans and points of reference and our capacity to absorb messages and information.

Social media is a phrase being heard lot these days, but it can sometimes be difficult to answer the question of what is social media is. If Facebook is a social media site, and twitter is a social media site, and Wikipedia is a social media site, then just what is social media? The best way to define social media is to break it down. Media is an instrument on communication, like a newspaper or a radio, so social media would be a social instrument of communication. This would be a website that doesn’t just give you information, but interacts with you while giving you that information. This interaction can be as simple as asking for your comments or letting you vote on an article.

Social media growing beyond boundaries from what it was supposedly invented for, its impacts are seen everywhere Politics, Business, Technology, Entertainment, lifestyle, Sports and even Personal life.

It was the reason for a revolution, Arab spring. It was the reason for the fall of few monarchy’s people from radical rulings. It became a medium of free expression. or dictators. It threatened the long standing kingdom of Saudi, which forced the king to offer citizens with perks to keep his seat safe (for some more time at least).

Social business is growing more sophisticated, with social business tools moving beyond simple business-to-consumer product and brand promotion to sophisticated platforms for both internal and external communication and collaboration.

Descent number of followers for a particular brand on Social networking site is good thing on company’s portfolio. Even companies do paid promotions to gain more followers. Here are few stats, 84% of online shoppers use Social media so advertising on media can get 15% more conversion rate. Social media gives double business leads for one lead from any other medium.

Commercially, for small companies social media is a terrain changer. My startup Kornerseat, which was just an idea from last few months, now has taken very tiny shape because of the social media. Which I believe can give a platform for my venture in it’s started commercially. More than that, it is evolving all the time and advertisers who are deploying resources to on-line and social media should be aware of these changes.

Social media is playing huge role in promotion of movies, music alums or any other format of entertainment. Success of a movie trailer or music video or song uploaded on sound cloud is counted no of hits. We have come across billboards which say 2 million views in 24 hrs, a new record. A review from a celebrated movie critic can decide box office of a movie.

Social sites latest ways of finding love, thousands if not millions of people get married to a person met on social site. One such very recent example being a Patna gal married to a guy from US, whom she got introduced to on FB. These are just a couple of the numerous ways that social media can thwart would-be relationships. And needless to say, online profiles, new “friends” and unwanted notifications can also cause unnecessary problems once a relationship has begun. We have all been guilty of going through our current flavor du jour‘s photos only to see old pictures of his former flame. Suddenly you have burbling feelings of jealousy all because of some stale images from long ago. You are his present, but social media have you living in the past

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It’s been a lazy summer, so I’ve had enough surplus time and energy to keep up to do something productive, as I’ve been in sort of a sabbatical from programming since May. Hence planned to develop a Windows Mobile app and started SDLC work from the scratches. When i designed UI for the same, i wasn’t impressed at all. The reasons are either my coding skills are too bad or Microsoft Technologies doesn’t provide edgy tools to create a flashy and entirely new apps. The latter reason was more obvious, my coding skills doesn’t matter as I will take Google’s help anyway.

I felt Technologically, Microsoft isn’t advanced as one expects it to be. It is unacceptable to a company which set benchmarks in personal computing two decades ago and had monotony over IT Sector for a considerable period. I believe any Computer graduate from my generation would have dreamed to work in Microsoft one day but it’s not anymore. Analysis was started from my side from all the little knowledge and resources i have.

Bill Gates, who has retired to a living sainthood, did a huge mistake when he left. He chose a Sales man to head his Tech INC. The CEO of Microsoft focused on Marketing and Sales and lost control over Innovation and Product-wisefocus like Apple on iPhones and iPads. The CEO of Micorosoft Steve Ballmer,is one funny personality he should have been a Standup comedian instead of Chief Executive of such huge corporation. His Famous jibe at Apple, when they launched iPhone in the beginning. He said 500$ for smartphone is too costly and he is healing his back pain ever since.

Under Ballmer, Microsoft’s well-known  fast-follower strategy becomes yet another “leadership” problem that prioritizes feature copying (which, it is uncritically implied, is somehow a vaguely dishonorable business strategy). He copied everything that was happening around, started a Search engine as Google was a huge hit and he failed, ventured into cloud computing as all other companies did, failed, released same OS with little UI and functionality changes, it bombed. Produced it’s tablet ranges as iPad’s were huge hit, started his own mobile OS as iOS and Android were doing wonders, failed yet again.

Few may argue,If Microsoft had succeeded rather than failed, and Apple and Google had failed to make their leaps ahead, similar (and equally contrived) stories could be written in reverse. If Gates had stayed, the story would likely have been the same. If Gates had chosen a technologist instead of a sales maven as his successor, ditto. Momentum and cultural inertia are facts of life, not matters of CEO choice.

I’d say strategical failure. and also remember, The direction of the wind matters a lot more than the captain of the ship when big technological forces are opening up new oceans of opportunity. There are enough ships waiting and positioned for every possible direction of the shifting wind. But ultimately it’s Captain’s job to direct.

Microsoft’s true problem is that it is caught in the “innovator’s dilemma”. That is, once it had captured the dominant position (Windows OS) it focused the majority of its energy into keeping that specific innovation at the top. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, technological dominance of any one product is fleeting, and Microsoft certainly did a great job of keeping its main drivers of earnings at the top of the heap for a very long time. But it must end.

There is always somebody in the right place, at the right time, with the right personality, within a company with the appropriate culture to sustain the successful strategy. That does not mean they fundamentally “cause” the success (or failure). Microsoft may or may not survive. But the grand narrative of technology deserves to be more than a series of Monster of the Week slayings of out-of-favor leaders.