Redditech Blog

Arthur Lok Jok IMBDI - A risk worth taking?

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 02:43:06 +0100

I have always loved to innovate, to think of problems in a way that others hadn’t yet and come up with interesting solutions. However where I’ve always fallen short is in not just knowing how to drive those innovative ideas I’ve had into something concrete in the form of a business, but also to drive it to a success point I was happy with (in most cases simply making it a profitable business). This is why I was interested that the IMBDI that is now being offered at UWI’s Arthur Lok Jak School of Business. It just seemed one of those things that would fill a gap in knowledge I know I have, right now!

To give a taste of the new program ALJ hosted a two-day bootcamp featuring some of what students of the new International Master’s in Business Development and Innovation would expect to experience.

Day One

The first day focused on teaching the audience on what is known as the “Design-Thinking Approach” and was led by Professor Miguel Carillo, the Executive Director at ALJ . Not unexpected, I was pleased to see several former co-workers present from Medullan, one of the most innovative companies I have worked for, and also where I first learnt to hone my innovation and execution skills. Great minds think alike it would seem.

The Design-Thinking session was extremely exciting, energetic and amazingly fun. Traditional education makes us not believe learning as fun, but in this case it was definitely fun learning how to innovate with this approach, first realised by a company known for innovation worldwide, IDEO. Interestingly enough, the process of innovating with this approach was not totally unfamiliar to me as Medullan uses a variation of this style in many of its client workshops.

What surprised me is how well a randomly chosen group of people could adopt to the style within one day and actually produce a ‘new innovative idea’, build something concrete behind it and then present on it. “Making soca globally known, successful and profitable” was the sum of the problem looked at, and I must say I was impressed with my team’s design and delivery of our consensus-driven idea, which basically focused creating a ‘virtual world’ online that tied to an online music store and featuring cool mini-games like Soca-cise (think Tae-Bo is to Karate what Soca-cise is to wining).

Day Two

The second day was a similarly fun experience. Many folks from the first day also appeared, and it being a Sunday it was still surprising to see some 50 persons willing to give up their weekend for this. In this day, “Innovating Customer Experiences” we learnt from Angel Alvarado, the new Strategic Marketing Director at ALJ, to look at consumer experiences with new eyes. I must say I’ll never visit a SuperPharm and look at it the same way again, as part of the day was a ‘field trip’ to one to observe customer experiences in the dimensions the session guided us to. The workshop after this again went through the “Design Thinking Apprach” to generate some very cool innovative ideas of improving the customer experiences with the aim of driving increased traffic and sales per customer. Again, I was placed with a group, and again a cool new innovative concept was produced which was prototyped and presented. If Superpharm wants a superhero mascot that entertains and also sells some of the improvements we recommended, they should talk to some of the folks from that group.

Details of the IMBDI

Today, we got down to the nitty gritty details at their information session. I must commend Shivma and Risha for their continued smiles and attention to answering my questions, despite having worked 8 days straight to get all this content delivered to me and others like me. The basic cost, over 75,000 TTD (after GATE’s 50% coverage) for the two years, might be enough to scare off most folks, but after talking through with them the options of GATE, payment terms and schedules they had available, it still wasn’t a deal breaker. My concerns about the ILEA exam cost of $1000, which was non-refundable, and which one needs to do and pass before an offer can be made, were also addressed as I understood its purpose was only to ensure the caliber of your student peer group was at an exceptional standard since they expected graduates to go on to lead with great things afterwards. Having gone through working at companies and university programs where I felt like my peers weren’t as driven as me to succeed, I could respect this, and if this cost helps ensure it, I could respect that too.

One concern remained, which was that most of the grade for each course was driven by groupwork, and I’ve been stuck in some pretty poor groups before, and paid the cost for it. This was also addressed, as one of the first one-day workshops that are compulsory as part of the course gives you the chance to learn about your peers in the program, and choose your own group which will work with you throughout every course in the program. I’ve seen this approach used at top worldwide schools such as the London Business School in their MBA program, and I must say it’s a welcome relief to know if I choose the program, and they choose me, that I would have this level of control over my teams.

The bottom line

So frankly, is it a risk worth taking? Well, your mileage may vary. I’m very enthusiastic about the program, but I’ve also invested a year continuing my M.Sc. Computer Science at UWI, so to do this program I’d have to withdraw from it, without any recognition for the last year’s efforts. I know for other students engaged in the IMBA at ALJ they face a similar choice. So in short, for me, as well as for them, it’s not a decision I’d make overnight, although honestly I am leaning towards it given my underwhelming experience at UWI in the Computer Science program this last year.

For anyone else though with similar ambitions, I’d highly recommend learning more about the IMBDI. It’s what’s needed for me and others like me, Trinidad’s entrepreneurs, to not just become innovative, but to be armed with the tools and networks needed to build and lead globally competitive and successful organisations. The opportunity to interact directly with lecturers from multiple reputable international business schools, including ones I highly respect like Harvard Business School, only adds to the ten-fold value I see being delivered by this program when compared to the cost. The IMBDI is worth exploring, and to most with my type of thinking, worth applying to.

Dropbox authentication: insecure by design

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:12:55 +0100

Dropbox authentication: insecure by design :

This article will really hit home with many of my colleagues as users of this service. I do not remain unscathed either, since I used this service too for personal use before Windows Live Mesh 2011 was launched and gained a client for Mac, and at one time I also encouraged use of Dropbox to my friends through the invitations that promised additional storage to me if I got others to sign up for ‘free’ Dropbox accounts as well.

Lesson learnt: “There’s more to consider about a cloud service than just the cool factor.”

This Dropbox exploit, as well as the recent GMail data loss and outage than spanned several days and affected both free and paying customers’ accounts, is revealing what I find to be a consistent theme as more service providers launch new cloud services and businesses want to jump on adoption for their enterprise without a proper evaluation.

This Microsoft-sponsored article has an excellent ‘Security Checklist’ page that includes some of the criteria to look at a cloud service provider more keenly with including:

Integration - how well does it integrate with security processes you already trust (such as those given by Active Directory)?
Privacy - how existent, and how strong is the encryption used for your data?
Identity and Access - What stops other users from accessing your data in the cloud? How is the database protected?
Compliance - There are standards out there for security in the cloud, which ones are your service provider certified for (if any)?
Service Integrity - How is your data protected from corruption?
Jurisdiction - Where is your data physically located? What country’s privacy laws protect it?
Information Protection - Who has access to your encryption keys? Who owns the data stored with your cloud service provider? How is the data backed up?

Even with this list, my prediction is that, for many of us, how to judge the trustworthiness of a cloud service provider will continue to be a big topic for some time as more of the startup services are scrutinised!

CodeMash 2011: Drupal with Jim Taylor

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:20:05 +0000

CodeMash 2011: Drupal with Jim Taylor:

Good stuff! Full integration of Drupal 7 with SQL Server, and addition of Windows LiveId authentication and Bing Maps module…Microsoft’s really embraced Drupal!

Encourage your people to blog!

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:22:24 +0000

Encourage your people to blog!:

In the age of Facebook and other social media outlets that are growing in usage by businesses looking to get our attention, some are really scared about allowing their employees a voice. Scoble offered some good advice on this post on Quora which addressed the misconception that employees of big companies cannot blog their opinions freely. There’s a difference between doing so freely, and doing so irresponsibly. Just to requote, here’s his lessons learnt for good blogging practices.

1. Don’t write ANYTHING you don’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow.

2. Understand your role in life. At Rackspace I’m not the CEO, so I don’t try to talk like the CEO. That said, I get around to places the CEO doesn’t, so if I have some advice for him, I’ll definitely post it.

3. Before you throw someone under the bus, put yourself in their shoes. I’ve thrown lots of people under the bus in my 10 years of blogging. Heck, just recently I told the CEO of GM that he should be fired. I posted that knowing that he just might know our CEO, which could cause us trouble. But, I put myself in his position and figured it was worth the risk to post that. It is something I’d say to his face, too. But, this is VERY risky in a public company, or, really, any company. If you ruin someone else’s reputation or product launch, for instance, expect blowback.

4. Know the law. You better know the law surrounding financial results, patents, and other things, before you really screw up royally. I once spent a weekend with a lawyer from Microsoft learning how they think and getting up to date on what pisses them off. That was invaluable.

5. Culture is NOT a line in the sand, it is a membrane that you can push on.You better know how taut that membrane is, and how many people will hold you in if you get resistance from that membrane. Each person will have a different membrane (a contractor at Microsoft got fired for breaking an NDA once, if I did the exact same thing my boss would have shrugged it off). Each company has a different membrane, too. What I was doing at Microsoft was NOT tolerated at Google or Apple, for instance.

What Programming Language Should I Learn?

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:15:00 +0100

This was the question a colleague asked me today. It suprised me, even though an urban myth in the non-IT community is that every “techie” person can or likes to write software. So when the question was asked of me, the first thing I did was ask more questions:

Why do you want to learn to program? To go into the profession? To add it to your resume? A quest for enlightenment? (The last one is a joke)

This had my colleague thinking, so I furthered with the most pressing question, that in hindsight, should have been my first:

What do you want to build?

Today, we have mobile applications, web applications, Windows applications, Cloud-driven applications and embedded applications, just to name a few. For each type of application, there’s usually a different language that preferably “fits” into the style a programmer wishes to adopt to maximise performance in building applications for each. And to compound things, each language usually has a preferred IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that makes rapid development of applications in that language that much quicker.

This is also where language frameworks start to matter. Just as different languages can each be optimal for building each type of application, each language usually carries its own language framework, sometimes called a system library, or simply a framework. The framework attached to a language usually provides a series of commonly used classes, methods, extension points and other useful “plumbing” that gives great power to a developer using that language. While this is definitely fun for the passionate programmer to learn, it definitely comes with an overhead cost for those of us trying to meet a deadline.

This is where the Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft .Net Framework starts to make much more sense for those of us passionate about building all types of applications and not afraid of learning different programming languages but still concerned about losing the “experience advantage” gained by the investment in learning a framework attached to a programming language of choice, along with a preferred IDE.

This might be getting abstract, so let me bring it back to real experiences for a second. Pre-university I learnt QBasic, a DOS-based programming language that came with most versions of MS-DOS purchased at the time. Great, I was off an running as a programmer! And then my school’s computer lab got Windows 3.1, and subsequently Windows 95, there was Visual Basic ready for me to maximise some of those “Basic” skills in programming (pun intended) as I learnt about GUI development.

Then it got a bit tricky. At University I had to learn Pascal for the first year. While it was definitely a more structured programming language that built my discipline for the craft and prepared me for OOP challenges of later years, it was painful to have to learn this new Pascal library framework. In my final year at University, we were then introduced to Java. While not as painful as it could have been for me, since I had dabbled in OOP (Object Oriented Programming) with Java between breaks in Secondary School and University, I saw so much pain in my fellow students as they painfully, again, had to learn a new library framework, this time Java’s. I won’t get started on what happened when I had my Computer Graphics course, and got to know about tuples with much grief now understanding what the CPython libraries were. I wasn’t the only student who cried “Good Grief!” that year, or in subsequent years, I’m sure.

Would it not have been simpler, and more beneficial for me as a student, to have been able to maximise the investment I made in learning a standard framework that crossed multiple languages, and maximise it moving forward as I advanced in my degree, not to mention my subsequent professional career?

What would have happened if, on entering University, I had started with C# as an entry to learning proper OOP? The Microsoft .NET Framework would then be exposed to me as well, and moving forward provide a foundation for branching into the various application programming languages and the problems learning them would help me tackle: perhaps something like VB.Net for Windows GUI application development, Silverlight and ASP.Net for mobile, web and rich Internet application development, F# for functional programming etc.

With the advent of the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) even the dynamic languages could now be available to me. Life would be so much simpler if I did my degree today, since using IronPython for Computer Graphics I could rely on my previous years’ knowledge of the Microsoft .NET Framework experience to get right into the mysterious of tuples and image transformations and not get too tied up in the non-essential “plumbing”. And what’s more, each of these languages works within the same IDE provided by Visual Studio!

So the answer to the question that started it all? What programming language should I learn? Well, it still depends on what I want to build. But with Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft .NET Framework, I now know that the effort I put into learning a language such as VB.Net, C#, F#, Visual C++, IronPython, IronRuby or any other language to come that utilises the Microsoft .Net Framework and compiles to the CLR (Common Language Framework), will be an investment bearing great fruit by minimising my own learning curve and overhead when I choose to learn a subsequent language for something else I wish to build.

Bipolar Order art exhibition in #Trinidad. The man is truly...

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:25:00 +0100

Bipolar Order art exhibition in #Trinidad. The man is truly talented! The artist really appealed to me with those pieces of his inspired by London, where I lived for about a year, as he truly captured many of my “perceptions” that stood out as a Trinidadian living in this strange land. From now till May 8th, check out some fantastic pieces by my friend Kevin McMayo at Brian McFarlane’s Mas Camp on Rosalino Street, Port-of-Spain. You can find more details of the exhibit from the Facebook page as well.

#trinidad #ttcs lunch at Asian Buffet in Trincity Mall was fun...

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 20:39:47 +0100

The Asian Buffet

A few folks during the meetup

A few more folks during the meetup

#trinidad #ttcs lunch at Asian Buffet in Trincity Mall was fun yesterday! Nice to see everyone excited about actively planning the next set of events.

A few things I’d be interested in hearing feedback on:

What is the best day/time/location in Tobago for the TTCS Monthly Lime? The weekend would make most sense for those of us from Trinidad wanting to visit to participate, but we really want to encourage Tobago computer users and TTCS members to attend at times most convenient to them.
Are there any TTCS members currently in Tobago willing to volunteer to drive the logistics of arranging such an event?
What developer products and tools (Microsoft or otherwise) would you like to see the TTCS hold a user meetup on?
What Microsoft products would you like to see the TTCS hold a user meetup on?

My personal picks for the ‘sessions I’d like to see’ are:

For the desktop computer user focused around Cool Stuff in Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s Home Security Essentials product and Office 2010 (especially PowerPoint 2010 since I’m seeing some ultra cool new stuff in it)
An ‘In Plain English’ Cloud Computing Introduction (possibly using the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform as an example).
A really meaty developer session focused on ‘Building in 60 minutes or less’ something in Visual Studio 2010. My idea on this was around an ASP.Net MVC 2 Web Application using jQuery, ADO.Net Entity Framework 4 and SQL Server 2008 R2. Alternatively this could also showcase how simple it is to use the Windows Azure platform products to host and provide remote file and database storage for real web applications built in Visual Studio 2010.

Whatever events are planned next, I’m sure they’ll all be exciting stuff!

Here is one of the #trinidad teams in Microsoft’s Imagine...

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 13:33:00 +0100

Here is one of the #trinidad teams in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition collaborating intensely as they get their entry ready for the local finals’ April 28th deadline. This past Thursday was a busy one as well for me, as aside from meeting with this team from the University of the Southern Caribbean (USC), I also headed to the University of the West Indies’ (UWI) St. Augustine campus to meet with the UWI Computing Society and talk about what the Imagine Cup competition is, and how they could start preparing now for Imagine Cup 2011. I also talked about how programs like Microsoft Live@edu, MSDN Academic Alliance and Microsoft Dreamspark were giving Computer Science (and other) undergraduates access today, legally, to the software tools they needed to learn that not only better readied them for entering the workforce when they graduated, but to collaborate with other students to build into reality the innovative ideas they had today!

Interesting events around movietowne #trinidad, sadly not part...

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 22:44:44 +0000

Interesting events around movietowne #trinidad, sadly not part of the #ttlug meetup

Happy Birthday Reeza (guy on right), our resident MSTT Software...

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 10:58:10 +0000

Happy Birthday Reeza (guy on right), our resident MSTT Software Architect, the dude’s probably as old as MS itself

Can you guess where I’m working now?

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:31:13 +0000

Can you guess where I’m working now?

At the Microsoft #trinidad developer bootcamp in the hyatt...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:44:06 +0000

At the Microsoft #trinidad developer bootcamp in the hyatt regency

Safe trip little brother. Here my big brother and I say farewell...

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:31:51 +0000

Safe trip little brother. Here my big brother and I say farewell to my little brother Runcie as he returns to his duties in the US Navy.

At the #ttcs pizza hut lime in Valsayn, #trinidad

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:24:23 +0000

At the #ttcs pizza hut lime in Valsayn, #trinidad

Courtesy of ICTS, Paula Richards of IBM took some time to...

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:01:00 +0100

Courtesy of ICTS, Paula Richards of IBM took some time to educate Trinidad on Cloud Computing. Many solid facts that apply to cloud computing considerations for any platform’s offering were brought up, although product offerings such as Lotus Live, Cloudburst and Tivoli Services Automation Manager did have their appropriate mentions. Her own watchwords of ‘design and architecture’ when it came to applying the cloud computing paradigm to current systems were quite refreshing to hear. I thank ICTS executives of Fenwick Reid, David Green and Cindy Ramsook for making this event happen, as well as my friend Richard Lee at IBM for pointing me to such a pleasantly informative event.

Some takeaways and near-exact quotations from this seminar for those who want an idea of the pulse of the talk follow:

In a cloud world, QoS (Quality of Service) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) become uber-important.

“Cloud makes IT consumable” - The Apple App Store is a good example of a ‘cloud application’

“Cloud Services vs Cloud Platform” - IBM is working with open standards bodies to define the API for Cloud Services around the aspects applications, provisioning and metering. Websphere is an example of platform as a service.

Businesses are using cloud to “get control of IT” by bringing value to the business service itself.

IBM has an ROI tool to help businesses calculate the impact of undertaking Cloud initiatives, and the bottom line impact.

In IBM’s ROI analysis, going with cloud ‘liberated funding’

Cloud Services Delivered = Smart Business Services

Cloud in a box = Purpose-built infrastructure = Smart Business Systems

The low hanging fruit for cloud include Analytics, Collaboration, Development + Testing and Desktop services

At TTLUG Meet’n’Greet demoing OpenSuse Linux...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:07:00 +0100

At TTLUG Meet’n’Greet demoing OpenSuse Linux development using ruby on rails and aptana radrails. We meet in J. Malones at Movietowne every month, come join us for a drink or to share your latest Linux hacks

My last private job as a techie setting up a wireless router for...

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:54:48 +0100

My last private job as a techie setting up a wireless router for a friend. Details will follow soon on my first purely non-techie role in Trinidad!! I’m very excited!

Just off the west coast of Trinidad there are also several much...

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:54:09 +0100

Relaxing In Gasparee Island

Talya and I relaxing 'Down The Islands'

Gasparee Islands view from the villa

Just off the west coast of Trinidad there are also several much smaller islands that are frequented by nature loving vacationers who don’t mind trading in the Hilton/Hyatt for a more rural, nature-trail experience. I was lucky enough to visit Gasparee Island and as the pictures tell, it was a very relaxing mini-vacation. Called collectively ‘Down The Islands’ by locals and frequent visitors, this type of ‘adventurer’s experience’ is definitely recommended.

Part of my perpetual professional ethic to work hard is that I often forget the ‘play hard’ part of the original saying that brings balance to this equation for a good, well-balanced life. For the last several weeks, between job hunting, re-associating with old business contacts, blogging about local events of interest to me and other geek-related activities I realised I was falling back into my workaholic habits, covering at least 6 days for the week without any leisure activities.

Thanks to my good friends, I’m reminded that this a habit I have no shortage of company to help break. Many birthday greetings to my friend Aaron, whose birthday bash led us to ‘Down The Islands’ in the first place, and to my carpooling buddies Marc, Ahmad, Matthew and Talya as well as the host of new friends I made who made for excellent company during this mini-vacation.

The India-Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:05:00 +0100

The newly formed ITTCIC logo

Friendship Lamp Lighting By Officials

Friendship Lamp Between Our 2 Flags

Naparima Sea Scouts

Dev Gosine - ITTCIC

Mariano Browne - Min. Trade+Industry

Malay Misra - India H.C. to Trinidad

Joseph Ross - Tourism Minister

Paula Gopee-Scoon- Min. Foreign Affairs

The Head Table at ITTCIC Launch

The India-Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce launched yesterday to a packed room at the Centre of Excellence. Political officials were aplenty, with 3 Ministers, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and at least one other Member of Parliament present.

To me, there was not enough hard facts given about how exactly the organisation would be helpful that gave value to me as a technology entrepreneur being there. There was no general networking (or even bathroom break) time given in the almost 3 hour schedule. Other than the period between the advertised and subsequent late start, the face time I had was only with those at my table, which in itself was valuable enough to make the event worth it for me, given that I sat with persons I met at eTeck’s seminar the previous week.

This seemed more a room for the older heads, or those with already established businesses looking to collectively gather their resources as a lobbying force. Some interesting points of note came up though.

Dev Gosine, who seemed to be a driving force behind the formation of ITTCIC, promoted several factors as to why to become a member of ITTCIC. According to him, membership in ITTCIC would give the member:

Access to Technical Awareness and Training resources
An initial stepping stone if one was an entrepreneur in the making, creating a growth path for future captains of India/T+T industry
fertile soil to grow the economy by bringing Asian resources here, helping stem the traditional ‘brain drain’ effect that happens
an open invitation to break bread with other members, and forge linkages there
an instrument for the creation of wealth in Trinidad

The devil *will* be in the details on these points and I’d love to pick his brain further on the actual implementation details of these points that he gave.

According to one presenter, Dr Tim Shaw, chambers of commerce are de-facto think tanks. I’d love to meet the new ITTCIC thought leaders and share further insight into what sort of real, concrete objectives they’ve targetted to build their credibility as this type of true think tank.

The Indian High Commissioner to Trindiad and Tobago, Shri Malay Misra, who I gained much respect for his having not read from a prepared text, (the last person whose speaking presentation I attended to have done this so elegantly was Kwame Ture), made several notable points as well.

Mauritius is the biggest investor in today’s India, because of a Double Taxation Avoidance agreement between their two countries. Trinidad and Tobago is a similar size, and already has a similar agreement in place, so there is no reason we could not become the same.
Trinidad has 3 frameworks signed already with India for trade, and he would like to see a Preferential Trade Agreement with CARICOM appear on the horizon of discussion someday.
A major challenge is not just the 22 hour flying time (not including stopovers) between India and Trinidad and Tobago but also the cost of the flight. Talks are ongoing with regional carriers to provide cheaper flights between the two countries.

All in all, it was very informative for me in getting to know the players in the formation of this new not-for-profit, non-political, “purely commercial” entity. I hope they live up to their motto of “Our only business is your success” and keep the confidence, trust and support of their membership with their future actions.

My notes from this Leo Laporte interview from Mashable Two...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:01:00 +0100

My notes from this Leo Laporte interview from Mashable

Two pre-requisites for popular Internet media websites
- Have great content
- Make it easy to access
We’ve trained our audience to sit down and shut up
- TWIT/Leo trains them to stand up and be heard
People prefer to be active participants in the content!
Leo’s foundation of popularity in Internet-media was based on mainstream media, but launching off this is getting harder and harder, and will in a few years be impossible