How to access web services from silverlight app
Posted by Ruchit in Uncategorized on June 29th, 2009
I dont usually post technical stuff on this blog, as i dont get to code on my daily office routine, but I have been trying to experiment with Silverlight for a while.
Recently, I have spent many hours just to be able to access a simple hello-world asp.net webservices from a silverlight 2.0 application. Process is pretty simple as explained in Tim’s blog post. Create a webservice, include its reference in silverlight project, add an object of soapclient, add handle to the functions ( since calls are async) and then call the actual function.
Everything worked fine, but my app was unable to contact to my webservices, even though i was able to ‘discover’ them if I make webservice as part of my complete solution OR could access service functions, if hosted webservices on my localhost (IIS7). I am certainly running into cross domain policy issues. Nothing helped, not even having crossdomain.xml or clientaccesspolicy.xml.
I could solve this issue by removing these files ( clientaccesspolicy, crossdomain) from C:\inetpub\wwwroot\MyWebService to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ and everything started working so perfect.
OK, i just found that Tim has another great post on cross domain policy where he has mentioned that I should copy policy files on the root of the website. Crap! I should read his blog post more often.
Almost half a decade of blogging
I was listening to one of the VCs I admire this morning and on this video he said he has been blogging for 6 years now.
That triggered me think, Ok, how many years I have been posting on internet?
I went digged-digged-digged upto my oldest post on this blog and found that I actually started blogging on blogger before moving to my self hosting wordpress based blog.
This seems to be the first blog post I made ever. Its been almost 5 years I have been blogging.
Had a quick glance at some of the old posts, and Its a bit of nostalgic moment.
How to approach venture capitalist.
Posted by Ruchit in Entrepreneurship, VC, education on June 27th, 2009
No matter who you are and what you want to accomplish, your relationships are going to play important role in your life. This is particularly very very important for startups as they are trying to create ’something’ out of nothing. Resources would always be less and time would always fly.
What can help startups is, their relationship with people in the ecosystem.
Just as an example, One of the most talked about topic between wannapreneurs ( individuals who wants to be entrepreneurs) is how to reach a Venture Capitalist. Many a times this thought gets into head and mess everything up even before individual has actually thought through the product/company he/she wants to make. This is beautifully captured in this post How to approach VC
You can also Follow me on twitter.
What is in a name…
Posted by Ruchit in Entrepreneurship on June 25th, 2009
I had a good discussion this morning with one of my friend who has just completed some course from IIM Bangalore and looking forward to start of her own. In this discussion she shared name of her planned venture with me, and looked for feedback.
Below is what I shared with her( and thought I should share it with you all)
- KISS: Keep it simple and stupid. Your product name can be VeryGlorifiedWayOfMentioningSomethingVerySimple, but if its this complex, I am not going to remember about it.
- Connect with Audience: Name should connect with users who are going to use your services and probably pay for it. e.g. I can keep name of my next webproject as httpWebRequestToFindBankAccountString, which might make sense to some technical folks around, but not for the people who might actually be using your product.
- Follow your heart: At the end of the exercise if you are not confortable with what you get, whats the point? Go for a name which you think is the best. After all you should feel attached with this new name too.
Once you are done with name which satisfies both of the above requirements, you can design logo and add a punchline to it, to add to the whole story.
What do you think when you think about naming a product or a company?
The Story of Twitter so far…
This is an interesting graphical representation of how twitter has evolved from the days of SMS to what we are seeing it today.
![the-story-of-twitter[1]](http://blog.siliconverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/thestoryoftwitter1.jpg "the-story-of-twitter[1]")
Phases in Leadership
Posted by Ruchit in Entrepreneurship, Management on June 8th, 2009
Leaders often always go through adverse situations charting uncharted terrirotories before they get recognized as a ‘Leaders’. One who is on the leadership path is percieved very differently from rest of the mass depending on which phase of leadership he/she is in. And people react to leader’s deeds differently.
Lets categorize leadership phases based on how people would react when a leader ( YOU) takes an initiative:
- Laugh: People would laugh on you. Quite possible, because you are doing something different than others. What you are doing makes no sense to others, otherwise they would have done it before you did. Maybe.
- Silence: When you keep doing all the stuff which made people laugh , but then which generated results, it shuts the mouth of people who are laughing. Its a silence phase when mass stops laughing and quietly observe what you are doing. They try to understand what you do and how you to doit.
- Follow: As a leader you continue do all the great stuff and people would start following you. There may be some bright talent around you who may get inspired by you and starts his own leadership phase, but most of them would follow you. They would try to mimic what you already did.
- Worship: This is an ultimate stage and I guess not so easy to attain. Most of the leaders we know may fall under phase #3. This is stage where people start worshipping you almost if not same as God. People can do anything for these leaders.
So now you know that when you take a new thoughtful initiative and people are laughing on you, probably you are on a leadership path.
This I learnt many years ago while I was still doing my studies, from a person I admire Kunwar Shekhar Vijendra.
How Natal can change the way we live
Posted by Ruchit in Games, Technology, Uncategorized on June 6th, 2009
I went up to the coffee machine and for a quick moment I was expecting dispenser to recognize me and serve me a coffee of my taste, I make daily for myself at my office kitchen. This happened right after I came back after watching Microsoft’s announcement of Natal at E3.
Natal, as you might be aware is a new xbox project announced by Microsoft, which would change the way players interact with their gaming system (xbox console). You dont need any controller to do whatever you have been using it to play on xbox.
This is a dawn of a Natural User Interaction (NUI).
All of this and other observation leads me to this conclusion:
As we become computers, computer becomes us (human).
We first trained ourself to to be able to interact with computer the way it understand, and now we are making computer to understand human. I believe this is a law of human machine interaction. I would call it Garg’s law of human machine interaction.
While Natal is a big step towards the realization of NUI, I believe its just a scratch on the surface of the possibilities. There are machines/equipments/tools all around us which decides its behaviour (or perform it function) taking external factors into consideration (say thermometer, barometer), but now machines would be capable of considering one more a very important factor i.e. human body.
Be it getting trained on salsa in front of your TV screen, lessons on table etiquette, or practicing or even conducting interviews via Natal enabled system, possibilities are endless.
Just try to imagine a human in a machine when you go near a machine next time and tell me what you thought it could do.
Till than game On!!
Bike to Work
Its spring here ( finally) and we have started seeing sun more often. To leverage this opportunity to flex my muscles and hopefully reduce some pounds, I have started riding bike to work.
I have bought this Schwinn’s Broadway hybrid bike which is much advanced than what I used to ride in India ( almost 10 years back in college days).
Its fun so far! riding 4 miles uphill to office and another 4 miles back home.
Testing RSS to email service..
Posted by Ruchit in Uncategorized on May 16th, 2009
Testing if RSS to Email service from feedburner ( now part of google) is back into action. It has been acting flacky for past many days and have not sent out email updates to my readers for my recent blog posts.
If you seeing this message in your email box, you may want to visit http://blog.siliconverse.com and checkout some of the latest posts you might have missed.
Guest Post: What I am worth? Part-4
Posted by Ruchit in Management, guest post on May 12th, 2009
This post is a part-4 (and final) of multi-post series by Barry Bainton on What I am worth. Checkout Part-1, Part-2, Part-3
What can my company afford to pay me?
What can I afford to pay myself?
As an active owner/operator of your business you must accept the conflict inherent in being both the boss and the employee.
The life blood of a business
Revenue is the life blood of a business. Revenue is the money that flows into the company from all sources and is used to pay for the expenses the company incurs doing its business. Revenue consists of three sources. Two of these sources we have discussed earlier. These are the proceeds from equity (sale of shares of ownership), and debt (sale of IOUs) offerings. These sources are critical to getting the business up and running.
The third source of revenue is cash/cash equivalents (sales of goods/services produced by the firm). Cash is cash in the bank. A cash equivalent is a very short term debt — an account receivable — owed to the company by a customer. Revenue in the form of cash/cash equivalents represents the only new money that can be used to sustain (pay expenses and debts) or grow (invest in) the company.
Cash flow is the key measure of success for a start-up. If the company is spending more money than it is taking in then it will eventually “bleed to death.” If it is taking in more cash than it needs to operates, then it can grow. The critical point for a start-up is the “break-even” point where costs and earnings balance out for the period.
The Active Owner and Cash Flow:
The active owner/operator faces a real challenge especially if the owner is a sole proprietor.
In the role of company owner, you want to insure that the business survives and grows. Survival gives your owner’s equity share value. Growth increases the value of that equity. Therefore as an owner you want to preserve and use cash efficiently to increase your revenue or the ROI for every dollar spent. One way is to minimize your cash expenses. In your role as a creditor, you also want the company to succeed so that it can continue make its interest payments and to pay back the loan principal.
In the role of employee, you want the company to pay you a fair wage/salary for your current time and effort. Just like other employees, you want a wage that reflects what you feel is the value of your efforts for the company. Thus as the owner and creditor, your salary/wage represents an expense to company which increases the cost of doing business and reduces the profits and eats into capital. But as the employee, it pays your bills and supports your life style.
This paradox is especially challenging for the sole proprietor who, when considering taking a salary or wage, must choose between the short term and long term cost and benefits to himself and to the company.
Salary/wage is a taxable event:
As the active investor/owner your decision to take a salary includes subjecting yourself to federal and local personal income tax as well as the employee’s share of FICA (Social Security) taxes. Being a sole proprietor requires you to pay the full self-employment tax — both the worker and employer portions of FICA.
The Questions to ask yourself if you are planning to take a salary:
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Just how much cash do I require to meet my personal obligations and needs?
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Do I need a salary?
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Do I want to pay personal income tax?
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Do I deserve a salary?
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What can I afford to pay myself?
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How much can the company afford to pay me?
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How much value will the company get for that expense?
Conclusion:
A Start-up business is a birthing process. You invest your time and talent, heart and soul, into an idea. You develop it into a concept, test it, and make a commitment to yourself, and maybe others, to take the next step. At this point you form a “company” to wrap around the concept thereby creating a new entity (a business) which is part of you but also has a separate life of its own. This entity requires revenue and nurturing if it is to grow and survive. Most start-up businesses that fail do so because they do not understand or plan for the financial responsibilities they are going to face when the founder(s) ask themselves — What am I worth?
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