Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ups and downs

Everyone has stories about the highest and lowest moments of their professional lives. An entrepreneur faces highs that are incredibly ‘high’ and lows which are incredibly ‘low’ everyday, often taking him or her into emotional territories never experienced before. If you have not yet felt this, trust me, you will feel it soon.

The fact is, you are working very very hard to fulfill your vision by building and selling products which are close to your heart. You can repeat the same pitch 100 times a day and not get tired. Yet, despite all your enthusiasm, energy, attitude and willingness to serve each stakeholder, you get hit from all sides: landlords, customers, vendors, prospects, and team members.

An entrepreneurs challenge is to stay focused on the goal in the midst of all this ‘distraction’. Problems will not stop, they will only escalate. Either you learn how to juggle them or your drown in the constant stream of failures that come you way. The choice is yours and yours only.

RahulLakhani.com and this blog

Have not blogged here in a long long while. I won’t be blogging very frequently but will use this place to capture my personal and professional life.

Also, registered http://www.RahulLakhani.com amd http://www.RahulLakhani.org today :)

Taare Zameen Par Playlist

Saw this movie last night…was blown away….sharing the songs (legitimate :) )

Wipro to buy CapGemini?

  • TechCrunch reported it here
  • Plugged.in reported it here

The smoke is out, when will the fire surface?

This acquisition, if true, will bear huge significance in the coming of age of Corporate India. Sure, the steel tycoons have made purchases outside India but for an Indian IT firm to buy one of the leading global consulting firms is a huge moment. Kudos to Wipro if they can pull this off.

Awsome Holiday Lights Display

A close colleague of mine has been creating really cool holiday light shows at his home for the past 3 years. Using a completely DIY approach, buying off-the-shelf H/W and writing custom S/W to achieve cool lighting effects. Check it out for yourself

Need an invite to Grand Central?

Folks, I have some beta invites to GrandCentral if you are interested. Drop me a message with your email and I will try to send you one.

Print and send photos directly to India (itasveer.com)

My family is in India and since I started using the digital camera I have always found it difficult to send pictures to my family. You could get your photos printed through Walgreens or Walmart and mail them physically to India but admit it, its quite a pain doing that (Yeah, I am lazy). Then I came across itasveer which is a pretty neat service.

It automatically connects with your Picasa or Flickr accounts so you don’t have to upload any of your pictures to itasveer (very smart feature in my opinion). All you do is: login, select your pictures, enter shipping address in India, and checkout. Snap, snap and the pictures will show up at your designated address in India. An added bonus is that prints are quite inexpensive so its a pretty good deal overall.

I believe snapfish and zoom.in also offer such services, so give these a try if you send photos to India on a regular basis.

FB: Stop Invading my Privacy

Take action: Sign the petition at http://www.moveon.org to voice your discontent with the new Beacon system from FB

Facebook’s new Beacon system captures your purchase information on partner sites and broadcasts that on your FB connections’ news feed. What if someone with an embarrassing disease bought a book about that disease on Amazon and that information shows up on your FB friends news feed? I can think of many such scenarios that will cause this system to invade your privacy. True that the user is given two opportunities to decline this information from being broadcast, once at the merchant website, and then when you login to FB. However, it is really easy to mis-click these or not notice these options when you login. I am not at all comfortable with that. I hope FB takes note and changes the system to be “Opt-In” rather than “Opt-Out”.

My daily rant about the apartment management

It is a phenomenon that transcends geography. It is a problem I faced in Atlanta, Austin, and now Sunnyvale at my current apartment complex. Those of you who live or have lived in apartments before know this very well. Why are apartment management rude and uncooperative? Why are they hellbent on coming down heavily on tenants to enforce trivial apartment laws. My apartment management will get any car not parked exactly between the 2 white lines towed without warning. Guess this will improve people’s parking skills, but I have a feeling that is not the management’s ultimate objective. I recently received a notice about getting my washer out of the patio (yes, thats a different story altogether), and within 1 day of the notice the “guy” from the office started calling me asking me to remove it else I will “hear” from the “Manager” of the community. Arghh..why can’t I just get to chill on a Saturday and catch up on College Football.

OpenSocial and my excitement

If you follow the Web 2.0 phenom as much as I do, you have probably noticed the quiet yet explosive entry of Google’s OpenSocial offering. I can’t wait to see what the new “Axis of Social” (MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Ning, etc) who have signed up for OpenSocial will change our online experience. The next few months will be very exciting…