Author: rakesh

“All of human unhappiness comes from one single thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room.” — Blaise Pascal (from The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham)

I’ve uploaded my first batch of photographs to flickr — see them among other photographs tagged with barcamphouston.

I’m headed to barcamp houston this morning. Look for a full report later on. Here’s a write-up of my experience at barcamp delhi in March.

Read the story

I have to admit that I’m a big fan of many (but not all) Google products. One product that I’m a fan of is Google SMS. I’ve turned quite a few people on to this since I started using it more than 9 months ago and I still have people coming back to me telling me about how useful it is to them. And in spite of now having access, through Cingular’s EDGE network, to mobile versions of Google’s local search, I still use Google SMS fairly often. So I was pleased to see my cell phone carrier, Cingular, promoting Google SMS to subscribers in a recent e-mail newsletter I received:

Is Google paying for this or is Cingular simply deriving extra text messaging revenue from this?

I had someone IM me today to congratulate me on my new job at Microsoft. Nope, I said, that’s the other Rakesh Agrawal. There’s also a third Rakesh Agrawal who studied journalism at Northwestern’s Medill that used to factor into search results on the net for ‘Rakesh Agrawal’, but I don’t see him around as much anymore. What happened to him?

I’m reading Yann Martel’s “The Life of Pi” and I just read a brilliant chapter on fear, chapter 56:

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

from hugh macleod

Wow, Vonage is really hard-selling their IPO. In the past week, I’ve received two emails, a voicemail (on my Vonage line) and a piece of postal mail from Vonage advertising the customer IPO purchase plan. I also saw the IPO mentioned on slashdot.org. They’ve set aside a pretty significant portion of their IPO shares, something like 15%, for purchase by current customers. It seems that customers are an important part of Vonage generating demand for their IPO. I wonder how they did with their roadshow and with other more sophisticated investors.

I’m personally not that excited about Vonage’s long-term prospects because of the competition that is and will be there in the voice over IP space. Yes, they’ve grown at an incredible rate, have spent tons of money on marketing (for several quarters, they were identified as the #1 advertiser on the Internet, according to the IPO prospectus) and are a well-known brand. But I don’t think they have the differentiation or the DNA, at least not at this point, that they’ll need to survive the onslaught of competition they’re going to face.

I’ve studied this public offering closer than any other in the past so it will be interesting to watch it play out next week.