graylightning

Themes, Light Bulbs and Hackers

As I start posting each day there will likely emerge a group of themes which I find interesting, and bring up from time to time. These themes are continuously manifesting themselves in news stories, market trends, government actions, and best of all, startups. Its funny, between working on Sand Hill Rd (Venture Capital's epicenter) and spending a year in a developing country, I feel as though I have viewed a bit of both America's future as seen from the streets of Asia (impending environmental destruction and ad-supported mobile gadgets & applications) and the world's future as seen from the labs and offices in Silicon Valley (real high-tech innovation around life sciences and the consumer web).

Having spent the last year working in Microfinance in India, some of the themes that immediately strike a chord with me and will likely get a mention in the coming weeks:
-Personal finance management, whether for rich or poor, investment/savings/bill-pay or loan-based
-Social networks around investment and stock-picking (there's a ton of new startups here, I hear of a new one almost everyday)
-Payments - mobile and web-based, particularly for lower-end consumers, especially around the growing remittances market
-Experimental sources of clean and renewable energy and transportation (it only takes an hour of sitting in Delhi traffic for you to start feeling the impact on your lungs, seeing it in the sky, and believing the doomsday scenarios)
-New forms of web and mobile search and better search user interfaces
-Friendship Bracelets and News (this one's a game-changer! don't believe me? Just ask PayPal founder Peter Thiel) If you still don't understand what I mean, start using one of the dozen social tagging and sharing websites out there, I mentioned three of them on Tuesday.

None of these themes are by any means brand new, and my comments may verge on re-iterations of information already out there. However, I hope my personal experiences in i-banking, development and venture give me a unique eye with which to view these areas. I will try to make the light bulbs go on for people.

A bit of follow-up on Wednesday's post - Pakistan has lifted the ban on YouTube and claimed it never intended to take down the site globally, quote, "We are not hackers. Why would we do that?" I'll leave you to make your own inferences...

Pakistan vs. YouTube

Who'da thought a group of generals, religious police and technocrats in what was almost a failed state could knock one of the most popular websites in the world off the Internet?

Well that's exactly what happened for two hours on Sunday, as the Pakistani state-owned telecommunications company sent a false domain name broadcast out over the web telling ISPs (Internet Service providers) around the world that its servers, and not the Google-owned ones in California, held the actual IP addresses of YouTube.

CNet has a great write-up of exactly what happened, but here are a few paragraphs that give a brief, layman's explanation.

"A spokesman for the Pakistani embassy said on Monday that the order to block access to YouTube came from the highest levels of the government. It would have been passed along to Pakistan's Electronic Media Regulatory Authority and then to Pakistan's telecom authority, the spokesman said, which in turn would have issued the formal order to the Internet providers.

Pakistan Telecom responded by broadcasting the false claim that it was the correct route for 256 addresses in YouTube's 208.65.153.0 network space. Because that was a more specific destination than the true broadcast from YouTube saying it was home to 1,024 computers, within a few minutes traffic started flowing to the wrong place.

A timeline created by Renesys, which provides real-time monitoring services, says that it took about 15 seconds for large Pacific-rim providers to direct YouTube.com traffic to the Pakistan ISP, and about 45 seconds for the central routers on much of the rest of the Internet to follow suit.

YouTube took countermeasures within minutes, first trying to reclaim its network by narrowing its 1,024 broadcast to 256 addresses. Eleven minutes later, YouTube added an even more specific additional broadcast claiming just 64 addresses--which, under the Border Gateway Protocol, is more specific and therefore should overrule the Pakistani one. Over two hours after the initial false broadcast, Pakistan Telecom finally stopped."

Pakistan gets a tough rap in the West. We heard much about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and of the continuing violence and extremism in the Northwest Frontier Province, but the actual elections last week, which were by almost all accounts peaceful, free and fare, got very little airtime.

However, when I read about stuff like this, I can understand the media bias. If Pakistani officials wanted to ban YouTube from users in their own country, their telecommunications officials could have accomplished the task by just blocking YouTube's IP addresses rather than broadcasting a message to the world claiming to be those addresses. Whether they did this on purpose or by accident isn't clear from the government order (here's a copy courtesy of CNet), but regardless, it shows either maliciousness or incompetence.

We can only hope following last week's elections in Pakistan, that the moderate and democratic parties that emerged victorious over Musharraf and the MMA Mullahs on February 20th will stop the government from interfering not only with Pakistanis consumption of their own media, but also with the world's use of its Internet.

Web Roadtrip Checklist

Before I get too far down the road on this journey, here's a current checklist of my top ten favorite free web gadgets that I use for daily orientation.

I have a couple of relatives, friends and co-workers, and several ill spent hours of web wandering to thank for this bag of digital goodies. Don't leave your homepage without them.

del.icio.us to store each thing in its right place
Digsby to keep tabs on my social messages
Kayak to go from point A to point B
Mahalo for people-powered search
Mint to watch where all my money's going
Mozilla for better browsing
Pandora to find the music that I didn't know I liked
ShareThis to learn how to share with others
StumbleUpon for endless waves of Internet surfing
Xobni for the frustrated Outlook user

Share your favorite free web tools in the comments section below and maybe I'll start packing better technology on my trips too.

On-line in the Old Town with a New Blog

I am back in San Francisco, and after a 3 month hiatus, on-line again.
I have moved home to work for a technology venture capital firm.

I am excited to be back and happy to be closer to my family. It's nice to taste good wine and to ski and surf again.

My return to the U.S. is not an abandonment of the beliefs or interests that caused me to go overseas. I remain deeply interested in India, in economic development and emerging markets, in social enterprise and microfinance. However, I came home because I had an opportunity to learn new things at a place that was too good to pass up.

My work involves a mixture of the disciplines I've been involved with for the last three years, but on a very different playing field. I'm still in the business of financing companies, still working with entrepreneurs, but now it's with entrepreneurs who are global thought leaders in technology, and who aim to change the world on a massive commercial, not necessarily social, scale.

With my move came the need for a new blog. I am no longer a banker, nor in India. My posts from the Bay Area will differ from those on the Sub-continent.

The new site name, graylightning, is a metaphor for the biology behind the act of thinking - The electrical impulses that pass through synapses in our cerebral cortex, the gray matter that forms the largest part of our brains. Chemical synapses in this gray fiber allow neurons in our central nervous systems to form interconnected circuits. On these circuits run the biological computations that underlie perception and thought.*

As I try to capture the ideas and experiences that flash through my synapses and find their way on to this virtual page, the topics may range wildly, but will reflect my long standing interests: Curiosity for new places, companies, ideas and technologies, and a passion to continue exploring our increasingly interconnected, but immensely diverse planet.

I no longer have India as a canvas, and there are few places that can inspire as much story-telling as a developing country, but San Francisco is a nice landing pad from which to re-launch. There is no shortage of creativity, intelligence or change here.

I will try to post as often as I can, daily, if possible. I will write to keep you, and me, entertained.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark

* Adapted from Wikipedia.

On-line in the Old Town with a New Blog

BankerInIndia is now Graylightning.com.

Click here to be re-directed to the new site.

I am back in San Francisco, and after a 3 month hiatus, on-line again.
I have moved home to work for a technology venture capital firm.

I am excited to be back and happy to be closer to my family. It's nice to taste good wine and to ski and surf again.

My return to the U.S. is not an abandonment of the beliefs or interests that caused me to go overseas. I remain deeply interested in India, in economic development and emerging markets, in social enterprise and microfinance. However, I came home because I had an opportunity to learn new things at a place that was too good to pass up.

My work involves a mixture of the disciplines I've been involved with for the last three years, but on a very different playing field. I'm still in the business of financing companies, still working with entrepreneurs, but now it's with entrepreneurs who are global thought leaders in technology, and who aim to change the world on a massive commercial, not necessarily social, scale.

With my move came the need for a new blog. I am no longer a banker, nor in India. My posts from the Bay Area will differ from those on the Sub-continent.

The new site name, graylightning, is a metaphor for the biology behind the act of thinking - The electrical impulses that pass through synapses in our cerebral cortex, the gray matter that forms the largest part of our brains. Chemical synapses in this gray fiber allow neurons in our central nervous systems to form interconnected circuits. On these circuits run the biological computations that underlie perception and thought.*

As I try to capture the ideas and experiences that flash through my synapses and find their way on to this virtual page, the topics may range wildly, but will reflect my long standing interests: Curiosity for new places, companies, ideas and technologies, and a passion to continue exploring our increasingly interconnected, but immensely diverse planet.

I no longer have India as a canvas, and there are few places that can inspire as much story-telling as a developing country, but San Francisco is a nice landing pad from which to re-launch. There is no shortage of creativity, intelligence or change here.

I will try to post as often as I can, daily, if possible. I will write to keep you, and me, entertained.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark

* Adapted from Wikipedia.