blog@Yantrajaal

Why do companies exist ? Since companies consist of individuals who have the skills for which the market is willing to pay .. why is it that companies do not disintegrate ( or rather deconstruct ? ) into its constituent components ? Ronald Coase was the first to ask this question in 1937 in his essay on “The Nature of the Firm” and his answer was simple : The cost of doing a certain transaction – that adds value – is less inside company than it is outside. What he meant was that doing business by assembling all the right people and support services inside an establishment was more efficient than trying to find and coordinate the same things in the world at large. This answer was good enough for him to win the Nobel Prize because people saw for themselves how individual craftsmen in the cottage industry could not compete in cost and lost out to the mega corporation. But unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for many of us, this was not the last word on the subject. Jacques Derrida coine...

[ a more refined version of my earlier post on the same topic ] Movies created without a camera or human actors is nothing new. From animated cartoons by Walt Disney to dinosaurs in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park tools to create artificial characters have played an important role in movie production and of late productions like 300 have demonstrated the versatility of digital technology to transcend the limitations of physical reality. All this however pales into insignificance when we consider the immense potential of virtual worlds technology – as implemented in environments like Second Life and Active Worlds. Movie making as we know it today is set to change beyond recognition as producers and cinematographers realize the disruptive impact that this is going to have in the future. Virtual worlds have their origin in interactive computer games of the category that are commonly referred to as Massively MultiUser Online Role Playing Games. Technology that first appeared in games ...

St. Xaviers Collegiate School, Calcutta has organised a Computer Exhibition to help students look beyond the boring ( truly boring ) world of the Computer Syllabus that they have to follow. While most students stuck would still tend to stick to the straight and narrow, I helped my son and two of his class-mates create a movie based on and shot in location inside Second Life. If your bandwidth supports it, please watch ... but be aware that these are heavy files with embedded music & voice-over Part 1 Part 2 and here are two images ...........................................................................

I have been trying to access the article on Nandigram at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandigram but have not been able to go past the wikipedia home page and into ANY of the articles. I am from Calcutta and this has been going for the past two days .. My brother-in-law however is able to access the same pages from Ahmedabad .. which I thought was funny. What is even more funny is that even in Calcutta, if I dial into my office LAN and then access the internet through the company firewall ( which happens to be outside Calcutta ) then I have no problems in accessing the same pages. I do know that wikipedia is banned ( or rather blocked ) in China .. by the Great Firewall of China. Is something similar happening here as well.

As virtual worlds, as epitomised by SecondLife and perhaps ActiveWorlds , comes closer and closer to real worlds, where is it that we will have first contact ? where is it that the borderline between these two worlds will get blurred if not dissolved first ? The obvious answer in the domain of entertainment. But how ? Today's Business Standard carries an article that explains how game developers are planning to work with the Mumbai film industry ( painfully referred to as Bollywood !) to develop interactive games based on actual movies ... and possibly using the the names and images of well known film stars. This is good but this has been done before with Angelina Jolie and some of her movies but the real challenge is to take it to the next level ... Why not shoot real movies, that is movies that will be shown in real life, using settings and actors in virtual worlds ? The movie 300 has been in the news recently because of the extensive use of digital technology for creating t...

Today is the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Plassey , where on the banks of the Hooghly River, near the town of Murshidabad, Robert Clive and his Indian allies, defeated the Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal and laid the foundation of British Rule. There will be events to commemorate this Battle and the overwhelming tone and tenor of these events will be that of regretful nostalgia .. to commiserate with the subjugation of India and its loss of independence to a foreign military power. But is this really correct ? Should we not celebrate this event as the dawn of the Indian Renaissance ? Politically correct historians and semi-literate bards and dramatists have given this event an emotional tone that is quite out of sync with the real emotions that were felt by the common people who lived in those tumultuous times. I believe that the population was actually quite jubilant at the fall of the tyrannical Nawab -- and the utter lawlessness that his rule symbolised -- and a direct ec...

My article on what the future holds for Virtual Worlds or rather what Virtual Worlds hold for us in the future appears in the Economic Times today. You may read the full article here . There is one important prediction that I have made in this article, namely, "Today it is impossible to exist without an email-id in real life and who knows it may be the same with similar identities in the virtual worlds, which are on the horizon. " Let us see how far this holds true

My article on the what the future holds for Virtual Worlds or rather what what Virtual Worlds hold for us in the future has appeared in the Economic Times today ... Read the full article here .

The news that SecondLife will become opensource is a big step in the development of 3D Virtual Environments. Should it become a genuinely open platform then evolution of the resulting architecture could become very interesting .. Individual organisations maintain their own physical servers and these can be accessed through the TCP/IP protocol. Currently, on these servers, we run the same HTTP application server (the 'web server') .. and anyone anywhere in the world can connect to the HTTP application server through the HTTP client ( the 'browser') Similarly, going forward, organisations can run their own SL servers on their own hardware and and allow ( or disallow ) individuals to connect their SL clients .. and this 'visit' SIMs ( just as we visit websites today) On current HTTP application servers we run fancy stuff like java applets, Flash animations, RealAudio and YouTube style specific applications ... provided they comply with correct protocols a...

This is an account of a very personal quest for the Truth. There are many ways to reach the same goal and this particular effort seeks to reflect the Truth in the still waters of a dispassionate yet rational analysis. Sages and seers from time immemorial have held that the Truth is beyond reason, transcends the boundary of the physical world and can only be perceived at an intuitive level. This humble exercise is an attempt to see things from a slightly different perspective. a rational approach, based on physical phenomena, may have many limitations but the desire to abandon it is an act of intellectual laziness. While it is true that many mystics have perceived the truth intuitively, it may be more satisfying to take the intuitive approach as a matter of choice and not of necessity. This analysis begins with the principles of Advaita Vedanta and maps them against known facts from the world of science. Unlike in the past we have neither tried to invoke Quantum Mechanics and oth...

The Deccan Herald has an article that features yours truly aka Calcutta Cyclone. Though the article is rather sceptical about SL calling it a fool's paradise, the fact remains that this is how new technologies are initially viewed. But we know that Satyameva Jayate, Truth shall Triumph, even though truth is portrayed in an illusion. The original page is no more available but you can see a cached version of the page here. Given the confusion with transient links ... here is a 'permanent' image of the article.

An article on SecondLife in the Deccan Herald features your truly, that is Calcutta Cyclone . The original page is no more available but a cached version of the page can be viewed here .

The disastrous performance of the Indian Cricket team in the World Cup will no doubt spawn an outpouring of unimplementable solutions like "change the coach / captain", "get fresh players" etc .. however all these and other respectable solutions are useless because the people who are entrusted to implement any of these are all (a) corrupt and (b) incompetent and there is no hope of anyone who is not corrupt or not incompetent to find a place in the cricket administration . Hence I would like to propose a solution that is absolutely person independent .. Let us create a catalog of all possible first class cricketers in India. Let us define a metric against which the performance of any cricketer can be measured. This could be in terms of runs scored, balls faced, number of 4s/6s, wickets taken, runs given away and so on. This metric should be moderated by certain weighting factors, like 'strength' of the opposition ( obviously, 50 runs scored against South Afr...

Sometimes it feels good to beat your own chest ... and say ... that I said so. And that is precisely what I intend to do in this post. Way back in 2005 i had written in a post that games of the future would be controlled by thought processes and had said that perhaps it will take 10 years for this technology to mature. And here we are today with Emotiv Systems announcing that this is a reality today and would be commercialised by 2008. My second prediction was that if you want to make money in Second Life it has to be initiated through the entertainment route. Not financial institutions or banks. Today we have Sony announcing their presence with a world similar to Second Life where you can not only build and create your own stuff, you can actually play the Playstation type games. I have two other predictions that are coming close to realisation. First the 3D graphic displays and Open clients that will allow anyone to connect to ANY of the virtual worlds using the SAME client softwar...

Good Morning friends : It is my pleasure to deliver this key note address and I thank the CII-Eastern Region and its Chairman, Mr Bhusen Raina for the privilege of addressing this august body. We are assembled here today to talk about how we can enable excellence and I believe that to excel it is necessary to have the talent to excel. So my focus today will be on the management of Talent in India. We are told that India is moving away from an agrarian economy to an economy dominated, not by industry as it has happened in the west, but directly to a knowledge economy .. an economy dominated by services. As a management consultant, buzz words like these should be a part of my professional repertoire but strangely enough I am always hesitant to be so discrete with my thoughts. The world is not quite so black-and-white ... it is always shades of grey. So when I talk about an industrial approach to talent management I will try to weave into my words, some thoughts and ideas drawn fro...

Advaita Vedanta is the school of thought that lies at the heart of the perennial philosophy – the Sanatan Dharma – of India and it has been elegantly articulated by seers like Sankara and Vivekananda. Second Life is a popular software application that has evolved in the 21 st century out of the seemingly trivial genre of computer games that are collectively referred to as Massively Multiuser Online Role Playing Games. Is there a connection between the sublime and the apparently ridiculous ? Perhaps there is … That is what we explore here. Advaita Vedanta is a profound discipline that has been researched and commented upon by numerous learned persons and it would be futile to try and explain it in a few paragraphs here. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this article, it is necessary to look at some of the important concepts around which it is based. An important idea that Advaitins believe very strongly in is the concept of : Brahma Satya, Jagat Mithya – the World is an Illu...

or "Why you cannot create a camera in-world in Second Life" It all began with a simple desire, to know who was visiting my Mahamaya Temple in SecondLife and the first step was very simple. I created a phantom, nearly-invisible, trip-wire around my teleport point and sent out an email to my blog whenever someone passed through it and this helped me track who all were visiting the Temple. But then I got ambitious and decided to see if I could create an in-world camera that would take a snap of the individual instead of just sending the email. I thought that it would be easy but it is not. The more I thought about it, the more difficult it seemed to be until I realised that it is IMPOSSIBLE .. and here is why. Objects in SL are represented as pieces of data and it is the SecondLife client software that assembles this data and gives it a visual representation. So if I had to create an in-world camera, then I would have to use LSL to create an full fledged SecondLife client itse...

I am often asked a question on whether it is possible for SecondLife to be a source of revenue and my answers is simple : depends on what you do there. Like the Web, SL is a platform and a platform does not make money. There are websites that are a source of revenue and there are websites that are purely informational or educative and SL is no different. I believe that one of the biggest sources of revenue in SL could be online games. Games are a worldwide industry that draws billions of dollars of revenue and the popularity of this industry lies in the fact that Microsoft, with XBOX, Sony with PS3 and Nintendo have developed specialist hardware devices for people to access these games. If you look closely, the fundamental architecture of the games that run on these platforms is very similar to the 3D Virtual Universe technology that is the backbone of SecondLife. It is all a matter of positioning and moving 'solid' artifacts through a virtual space and making them interact wi...

After all the murder and mayhem around SEZ and the obnoxious quota regime, there is a ray of hope that things can improve for the better in India. First of course the news Infosys and its 50% growth in quarterly profits. More than Infosys, it is a great sign that things are going well for outsourcing industry in general and the IT industry in particular. But IT adds only 5% to the GDP and touches perhaps 3% people in the country. For the other 97% there is a bigger ray of hope as well thanks to two initiatives taken by the Supreme Court. First : They have tried to free the police from the tyranny of the local party bosses. Policemen are corrupt but not all ... there are some honest law enforcers still left but the moment they do anything good, they are transferred out of the jurisdiction by party bosses whose toes have been tread on. With the formation of the police board in each state, this should be minimised to a large extent. The Home Minister and his cronies will not be able to ...

My last post of of 2006 had proposed ( 'predicted' ) that if SecondLife has to thrive and become the defacto standard for the Virtual Universe, then there is no option but to take the open source route. Proprietory products, especially when they are so very useful, cannot stand up to the tide of popularity that sweeps in with Open Source products. I am not sure if someone in Linden Labs heard me or read my blog ... or perhaps it is that fools seldom differ .. but I am delighted to note that earlier this week, the Second Life client has been put under open source GPL. Anyone can download and modify the product and if their modifications are good and useful, everyone else, including Linden Labs will use it. This is stupendous news. This is now like the browser and the way it has become an open product. Now we will have hundreds of developers working on enhancements and no other Virtual Universe product will have the werewithal to stand up to this tide. Which is wonderful. As this...