EnjoyTech

These are the 10 business books published in 2010, that I would recommend you to read. Originally, I wrote this on Quora, in response to " What are must read business books of 2010? ". Yes, I have read all of them, and no, they are not in any specific order. 1) What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell and his style. This is a compilation of his "The New Yorker" stories. Even though the articles are available on his website, this book makes it a great read. 2) Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky The next time someone asks you how come people have so much time to blog, answer questions on Quora, or contribute to Wikipedia, ask them to read this book. 3) The Big Short by Michael Lewis Want to know all about CDO and subprime mortgage and still be entertained? This is the book. Michael Lewis has great storytelling skills that makes serious and complex topics fun to read. I like this book as much as I liked Moneyball - http://amzn.to/b9YP

Check out the Part 1 if you haven’t already read it to better understand the context and my disclaimer. This is the Part 2 covering the assertions from 6 to 10. Assertion 6: Appliances should be "software only." “In my 40 years of experience as a computer science professional in the DBMS field, I have yet to see a specialized hardware architecture—a so-called database machine—that wins.” This is a black swan effect ; just because someone hasn’t seen an event occur in his or her lifetime, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. This statement could also be re-written as “In my 40 years of experience, I have yet to see a social network that is used by 500 million people.” You get the point. I am the first one who would vote in favor of commodity hardware against a specialized hardware, but there are very specific reasons why the specialized hardware makes sense in some cases. “In other words, one can buy general purpose CPU cycles from the major chip vendors or specialized CPU c

The two-third of world’s 4.6 billon mobile users live in the emerging markets. Millions of these users live below the poverty line and are part of the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). Nokia is the market leader in these emerging markets, at least for now, with 34% market share. It’s clear from rapidly declining Nokia’s marketshare and an appointment of new CEO, Stephen Elop , that Nokia needs a second act. I believe the BOP is what could be the next big thing for Nokia. The recent NYTimes story highlights a Nokia’s service, to supply commodity data to the farmers in India, using a text message . So far, 6.3 million people have signed up for this service. Nokia is planning to roll out this service, Life tools, in Nigeria as well. This is part of their Ovi mobile business. I have written before on impact of cloud computing and mobile on the bottom of the pyramid and the importance of public policy innovation in emerging markets . The BOP is one of the biggest opportunities that Nokia curren