What is creativity?

Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and other.

Three reasons why people are motivated to be creative:

1. Need for novel, varied, and complex stimulation
2. Need to communicate ideas and values
3. Need to solve problems

So now the question comes what you need/require to be creative or how to be creative?

In order to be creative

you need to be able to view things in new ways or from a different perspective.
you need to be able to generate new possibilities or new alternatives.
you need the ability to generate alternatives
you need to see things uniquely
you need to have more fundamental qualities of thinking, such as

flexibility
tolerance of ambiguity
and the enjoyment of things heretofore unknown.

Low-Cost, Open Source CRM

Open source may finally be arriving on the CRM scene. While still a minority in the market, a growing number of companies are choosing to provide CRM software free of up-front expense. As companies like Red Hat have demonstrated, free software can work for customers and make money. "The idea is that enough of CRM capabilities are becoming commoditized, so why not give those functions away for free and make money off services, such as customization, support, documentation, and upgrades. And i have been associated with one of the company called Apptility Software's in India. The company try to provide low-cost innovative solutions to small and medium enterprises by leveraging our expertise in open source and social computing technologies with an emphasis on measurable cost savings and revenue enhancements

Yahoo! has announced its entry into podcasting

Yahoo! has announced its entry into podcasting with the beta release of Yahoo! Podcasts. The new Yahoo! Podcasts service enables consumers to easily find,

listen to, rate and review online audio programs.

The entire development of the product took place at Yahoo!'s Bangalore Software Development Centre. “The development of Yahoo! Podcasts from our Bangalore centre brings new market innovations from India for the global market,” said Dr. Prasad Ram, chief technology officer, Yahoo! R&D, India. “Audio Search technology developed at Yahoo! Bangalore is the most sophisticated vertical search product to-date,” he added.

More Here

Blog Spammers Take Aim at Google

Google Inc.'s free BlogSpot service has become a happy hunting ground for spammers cashing in on the easy integration of AdSense advertisements into the 'push-button' publishing tool.

Over the past few days, the situation has spiraled out of control, prompting outrage from bloggers and third-party blog search providers and an acknowledgement from Google that there's a "tricky problem" to be solved.

An automated spam blog (splog) attack over the weekend was first flagged by Lockergnome's Chris Pirillo, who accused Google of hosting a "crapfarm" of fake blogs.

Or better we call it SplogSpot.

Indian President expressed concern about a free mapping program from Google

Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam expressed concern Saturday about a free mapping program from Google, warning it could help terrorists by providing satellite photos of potential targets.

Google Earth, launched in June this year, allows users to access overlapping satellite photos. Although not all areas are highly detailed, some images are very high resolution, and some show sensitive locations in various countries.

The Google site contains clear aerial photos of India's parliament building, the president's house and surrounding government offices in New Delhi. There are also some clear shots of Indian defense establishments.
Something very much concerning from security point of view?

More Here

E-mail Management

# E-mails are company documents.
# E-mails are not private; they belong to Microsoft
# Always think about how your e-mail reflects on you and Microsoft.
# E-mails you create can become public.
# Never use e-mail to make inappropriate comments about people or situations.
# While writing e-mails

* Be very concise.
* Don’t exaggerate points.
* Use appropriate language for business communication.
* Don’t disparage others in anyway.
* Don’t offer legal interpretations.

# Be careful when selecting to whom the e-mail will be distributed or forwarded.
# The bottom line is:treat all e-mail as professional communications.They're not personal; they're business documents.
# While there are plenty of instances where being creative in our jobs is a good thing, when it comes to e-mail, it’s in everyone’s best interest to follow the business rules.

Source- Shachi

Open source boom

A little factoid that many may not be aware of is that despite our massive IT balance of trade deficit, this country is the place to be when it comes to open source development. Believe it or not, Australia has more open source developers per head of capita than anywhere else.
Open source development projects with esoteric sounding names such as
Samba,
Mambo,
Squid,
Lams and Moodle,
plus better-known projects such as Apache,
OpenOffice.org,
Gnome,
KDE,
and MySQL,
have Australian developers in prominent roles.

More here

Gone are those days

Gone are the days when you had to plan to buy a PC, now all you need is to do is buy a PC first and plan...never! And the best part is, in these PCs quality is not compromised, rather to some extent it is made better at this price.

HCL has launched a PC at Rs. 9,990.
The AMDX 86 1.6 Ghz PC,
Is powered with a 128MB RAM,
A 40GB Hard Drive,
A 52X CD ROM, and
A 15-inch colour monitor.

The PC comes with Linux Operating System, but if you want, add Rs. 1,240 and get a new-launched Windows XP Starter Edition.

Corporate Business Communication

Hope this will help for those who are aiming for Business Roles.

* Listen, Enhance Active Listening and be Self Questioning.
* Do not be Blindsighted by Negativity or Coloured by Bias about anything.
* Never do Feature Comparison of Business Applications.
* Understand Business Needs and Their Concerns rather than proving.
* Understand before you trying to be Understood.
* Don't Fight the problem, Study it.
* Body Language leads the way and will Reflect in Communication.
* Always Listen to Understand rather than Listening to Reply.
* Uncover Hidden concerns and do not exhibit Selling skills everytime.
* Do not foster Risk Enhancement but foster Risk Management.
* Do not beg, plead or show desperation anytime. It will be Parent-Child communication and not an Adult- Adult communication. Have silent Confidence and gain silent Confidence from others.No one will have confidence in you when you don't have confidence in yourself.

Source- Microsoft

Open-Source Success Roiling Software Field

You probably paid too much for the software you're using — not to mention the software company you've invested in.

That's the growing consensus of analysts watching the rise of open-source software, built on the notion that software should be free for everyone to use, tweak and develop further.

For every multimillion-dollar software program being sold, there's a good chance that at least one free alternative can do the same thing, at a fraction of the cost.

If that's good news for tech buyers, it's downright chilling for tech investors.Few open-source programs claim to be as complex or full featured as their commercial counterparts. But for many customers, they're more than adequate.

Open Source: Now It's an Ecosystem

This software movement is branching into not just mainstream business applications but also the associated services. And VCs are eager to help.

Eighteen months ago John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor decided to quit their jobs at Epiphany, a maker of customer-relationship software. The trio wanted to target the same market, but write a new application developed using open-source code. It took them only three months to create the program and just another month to close their first round of funding. Little more than a year later, their company, SugarCRM, has given away more than 325,000 copies of its software, and raised a second round of capital, for a total of $7.75 million.