Startup Leadership Program, so it is called. The program's approach is highly practical. It teaches some of the most important lessons that any startup CEO would need while running his/her business. These include raising capital, financial models, business ideas, leadership, negotiations, scaling up businesses etc.

The program currently has 12 chapters globally include four in India (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad). Its a 6 months 60 hours course delivered over weekends or weekday evenings. It costs Rs 4500/- (India) in program fees.

I spoke to an SLP fellow to get an insider perspective. The key take away from the discussion was that SLP looks at you rather than your idea/business. Absolute dedication and commitment to the program is also an important criteria for selection.

You can checkout the program details at Startup Leadership Program

In the past few months, Facebook has really picked up in terms of user base. With over 500 million users, its a community that no advertiser can ignore. So which advertising platform is better?

It depends on what kind of promotion you plan to launch. Google adwords works excellent for direct sales where advertisers bid on specific keywords and send the highly targeted traffic to a specific product/landing page. It gives quick ROI on the money spent.

On the other hand, Facebook is a community website where people generally come to socialize and not buy. Hence the buyer's "intent to buy" is not present when he/she clicks on your ads on Facebook.

Facebook, however, offers very specific targeting. For example, you can target all Male members above the age of 18 from a specific area with a specific interest. Google Adwords does allow geo-targeting, but it doesn't give filtering based on user age, sex or other preferences.

Although the targeting can be very specific at Facebook, there may not be an intent to purchase your service. For example, you can run your ads to all male members above 18 years of age from a specific area about a local dating website. However, not everyone who sees such ads may be interested in the service. So how do you protect yourself as an advertiser from such clicks? To counter this issue, Facebook also offers CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) based pricing. CPM based advertising also works best in case the promotion is for branding purpose and not intended for sale.

The best campaigns where Facebook ads work good are "Like" campaigns for a Facebook page. A facebook like on a page makes the user a fan of the page. A Facebook fan will return to your page and keep a check on latest updates posted on your Facebook page. Hence the returns on such campaign last even after the ad campaign ends. This is not true for Google adwords where visitors simply click-buy and move on. As soon as the campaign ends, the flow of visitors stop. Unless they have specifically subscribed to your website newsletter or ordered something from your website, there is absolutely no way to get in touch with such users.

Also given that the Facebook system is relatively new, it is still cheaper compared to Google adwords where cost per click on some of the most competitive keywords exceed $30 USD.

In conclusion, each advertising platform has its pros and cons. Google adwords works best in a sales promotion and offers a quick return on investment (ROI) whereas Facebook ads work best on socially aware promotion campaigns where the users have an opportunity to engage with the brand/company. This may or may not result in an immediate sale.

Two people in my family recently purchased a Blackberry torch and apple iPhone 4, so I had the opportunity to spend good time with these two phones. Here's my verdict.

Processor Speed: Apple iPhone has a faster processor in terms of CPU clock speed. However, I didn't find the blackberry torch slow. It was responsive and loaded applications within seconds of clicking them.

Keyboard: With the physical Qwerty board in Blackberry torch, it is a far better phone when it comes to composing long email, send IMs and text messages. iPhone does have an on-screen Qwerty keyboard but typing long emails on an iPhone is not comfortable.

App store: This is one area where Apple iPhone is a clear winner. The total number of applications in Apple App store are far more than in the Blackberry App store.

IM: Most of my professional network is on Blackberry Messenger (BBM). Chatting through BBM is cost effective and reliable. Agreed, Apple has Facetime and supports whole bunch of other IM softwares. It's good to chat with family and friends through Facetime but when it comes to communicating with professional contacts, nothing beats BBM.

Battery Life & Memory: Apple iPhone's battery life sucks big time. Unless you shut down location services, notifications and Wifi, don't expect the phone battery to last more than 10-12 hours on a full charge. Blackberry on the other hand easily lasts for 2-3 days with regular email, wifi, app store usage.

When it comes to memory, the Apple iPhone memory isn't expandable. Blackberry comes with a 4GB MicroSD card and can accommodate upto 32GB card.

Internet Speed: Surfing the Internet, checking emails is much faster in Blackberry. The push mail feature is excellent. Most service providers including Vodafone give preference to Blackberry traffic on their network.

Overall Look and Feel: Apple iPhone is more sleek, feels solid in hand. Blackberry torch on the other hand feels like a delicate phone.

Cost: Blackberry torch retails for about Rs 29,000/- while Apple iPhone cost ranges from Rs. 35,000/- to Rs. 41,000/-

My overall impression of the iPhone is that is a good play device. Good build, lots of applications available through app store, location services, games, etc. However, there isn't much of productivity that I could achieve with this phone. Battery didn't last all day, Internet was comparatively slower (service provider network, not WiFi), Composing long emails was hard, not to mention the annoying spell checker. Its a good phone for a college goer (who can afford $1000 USD price tag) or someone who is looking for an entertainment features within their phone.

On the other hand, Blackberry torch is excellent with Emails, Internet, has fair number of apps in the app store and costs less than the iPhone. Its battery lasts much longer too! Its truly a phone for the professionals who have heavy use of emails/IMs.

Price: Considering it only costs $29.95 USD, its a big plus point if you want to try the new OS.

Encryption: Lion offers full hard disk encryption through File Vault 2. If your laptop contains sensitive information you may want to consider upgrading.

Apple Softwares: Many apple softwares in Lion have gone through a major overhual. New interface, more features. For eg, if you use Apple Mail extensively, that may be a reason enough to upgrade.

Networking: The new Apple feature called Airdrop allows you to send and share files with other apple users nearby. If you use Apple in a small office/team setup, you can quit using third party apps for this feature.

Usability: With new multi-touch features, tablet OS like interface, Full screen viewing and other 250 such features, it will be a boost to productivity.

Now lets look at reasons for not upgrading

Its new. Yes Lion has been in public beta for sometime and whole upgrade works smoothly. But its still a new OS. As with anything new, there are unknowns. It may be wise to just wait for few weeks and let more user reviews be posted about Lion before taking the decision to upgrade.

Also if you use any specific application that is not yet compatible with Mac OS X Lion, you should consider waiting.

There are lot of new features in Lion like versions which help you maintain file versions. However, they change the way mac users save files. There is a learning and "getting used" curve involved which may cause frustration to some users. If you are one of those types, you may want to postpone the decision by few months until these issues are ironed out.

Performance wise there is no data to suggest that Lion is better or worse than Snow Leopard.

As for me, I will be upgrading to Lion in few weeks. The 250+ new features are worth the price!

Before you upgrade make sure to clone your hard disk, just in case you decide to switch back to Snow Leopard.

The entire process of enrollment went pretty smooth. They take your picture, scan all 10 fingers and also do an Iris scan. An acknowledgement receipt is generated and given to the person enrolled. The whole process does not take more than 10 minutes.

What surprised me, however, was that the computer used for collecting all this information was running an unlicensed copy of windows. While its a different debate whether Windows OS was really required in the project, but having chosen Windows as the platform for collection of UID data, the government should spend some more money and procured licensed copies of the software.

How many Government institutions and corporate houses in India still use illegal softwares? There is more awareness about using genuine software today than it was 5 years back but given what I just saw today, India has a long way to go until we can truly call ourselves the super power of IT.

Google engineers created fake search results for nonsensical terms. Few weeks later, these results started appearing on Bing.

Interestingly Bing doesn't deny this. It says that their algorithm looks at more than 1000 signals to determine the search results. This includes analyzing the click-stream of its IE toolbar users on what they search and click on Google.

Google started its own investigation called 'Bing Sting' where they created fake search results for over 100 random nonsensical words. Google gave 20 of its engineers laptops with a fresh copy of windows installed along with Internet Explorer and Bing as the default search engine. Within weeks of searching these 'synthetic queries' on Google via these laptops, the same search results started appearing on Bing as well.

One such term being "hiybbprqag". Microsoft hasn't denied the report but later a spokesperson did say that "We do not copy Google's results!"

If you already own an iPad, this is still an excellent news. Now your iPad can be serviced in India. You can also extend your iPad warranty in India. Not to mention, the accessories are now officially available as well.

However, experts say, it may be worth waiting for a while since iPad 2 will be launched in April 2011. This is not yet confirmed by Apple officially.

- cannot send/receive money for personal transactions.
- cannot receive amount greater than $500 USD.
- cannot send money using Paypal balance (only credit cards)
- must withdraw all the paypal balance within 7 days of receipt.

It will also be interesting to see how Paypal manages the 7 days withdrawal rule. They will be flooded with NEFT and cheque withdrawal requests.

With so many changes, this is surely going to impact Paypal's growth and popularity in India. Unfortunately, unless the banking and foreign currency rules in India are modified, this change will remain with us for a foreseeable future.

The move comes after the Indian regulators (viz RBI) objected to the use of these cards in India.

Payoneer offers prepaid Mastercard that can be used to withdraw money at ATMs or used in the shops (POS) throughout the world. These cards also work online. It is a popular method of remitting money from various freelancing websites like Elance, Odesk, Scriptlance.com etc.

Payoneer says the problem is temporary and that they are working with the authorities to enable the services soon.

This block is similar to the one imposed on Paypal few months back. Paypal resolved the issue with RBI and IncomeTax authorities by making it mandatory to provide PAN (Permanent Account Number) when you open a Paypal account.

I come from a tech background and will speak about tech startups in general.

In theory the idea looks excellent. You have a great product idea. You need money to get that idea to the market. You do consulting to generate some cash that pays for the development and other expenses. I wish it was that simple in practice.

Secondly, consulting eats your time. In a startup, founder's time is very critical resource. You need to be completely focused on your product development effort instead of troubleshooting client issues. May be hire a consultant to take care of the consulting projects? Well that's a dangerous path to tread into. Sooner than you realize, you have transformed into a fully service consulting company.

Also, investors consider consulting income as a distraction. Many of them would want you to completely stop consulting before they would even consider your business for funding.

This does not mean that consulting is not a way to bootstrap your startup. There are product companies that have used consulting gigs to bootstrap their product development effort. In fact a consulting company is exposed to lot of customer pain points and could be a platform for innovation.

The good news is that Freelancer.com announced that it has acquired LimeExchange.com services including users & projects.

We regret to inform you that LimeExchange.com and all associated services will be shutting down effective on December 30, 2010. LimeExchange will stop accepting new projects and user registrations effective immediately. If you already have any open projects you will need to complete them and withdraw your earnings from wallets on or before December 24, 2010, as we will no longer be able to support your projects after that date. Any funds remaining in wallets will be released to Buyers following the December 24, 2010 cessation of services. We strongly urge all buyers and service providers to continue to honor the project agreements they have made with each other even after we have ended the LimeExchange service. To be clear, all LimeExchange services (including the Affiliate Program) will cease operation on December 30, 2010. Please feel free to reach us at Support@limeExchange.com for any help regarding withdrawals, escrows , project status and payments.

1. Take some time off
2. Start another venture/business
3. Go back to school and learn new skills.

After much deliberation and discussion, I chose option 3.

GMAT tests many of your abilities such as analytical, quantitative and verbal skills. However it also tests your time management skills. It is important to remember that you have limited time to finish each question.

If you were above average in Maths and English during your high school and +2 courses, then cracking GMAT should not be a big challenge. By cracking, I mean getting a 700+ score.

You should start by giving the Official Guide (OG) Diagnostic test. Check your percentile score and also check the areas where you are weak. It could be Geometry or Probability or even Sentence correction. In my case, I was little weak in the verbal section esp Reading comprehension and Sentence correction.

I ordered the following books to prepare for my GMAT.

1. Complete set of Manhattan GMAT Prep books (MGMT 8 books)
2. Official Guide 12th Edition (OG-12)
3. Official Verbal and Quantitative Guide 2nd Edition
4. Kaplan 800
5. Kaplan Premier

I started with reading MGMT books and practicing questions from OG-12. It took me close to 6 weeks to complete these 8 books along with OG-12. After this, I gave a few practice tests and checked my score. My accuracy was fine but I wasn’t able to finish any of the papers on time. I knew I had to work on my timing. I practiced Official Verbal and Quantitative guides for next 1 week with the aim to improve timing and score. However, what really helped me achieve good timing was the Kaplan CD that has multiple timed sectional tests. MGMT tests are also very good. They are relatively tough to crack. However, the post test analysis in MGMT online tests is excellent.

Another excellent book on GMAT is Kaplan 800. I regret picking up this book only during the last week of my preparation. Kaplan 800 has some really good problems in Quantitative and Verbal sections. However, many people advice reading this book only after you have exhausted other books. I would, however, recommend solving this book just after finishing with all Official Guides. I took me close to 8 weeks to prepare for my GMAT. I scored 700 in the test but couldn’t finish my quantitative section. Based on my experience, I can’t stress enough on the importance of practice tests. Try and give as many practice tests on a computer as possible.

Meanwhile, the unlocked iPhone has been traded by George for "Nissan 350Z and 3 8GB iPhones".

Hopefully by understanding the hardware hack, someone would be able to come up with a software to unlock the iPhone.

Switch off your phone and replace the back panel. Remove the battery and check the front cover. Does it read "BL-5C" as the battery model?

Nokia says only the batteries manufactured in Japan between Dec 2005 to Nov 2006 are known to have this issue. So the next thing to check is the country where the battery was manufactured. Thats easy, your battery will have "Made in China" or "Made in Japan" or something similar written on the front or back panel.

If you do have a BL-5C battery thats made in Japan, don't panic. As per Nokia, the issue only occurs when charging the phone. But its best to switch off the phone and take it to a Nokia service center to confirm if your battery is affected.

You can do a check on the Nokia website by inputting your battery serial number at the following link

http://www.nokia.com/batteryreplacement/en/