What Am I Reading!.

• Meet Amazon’s first employee – Shel Kaphan (GeekWire)
• 10 Awesome pitch decks from world’s fastest growing startups (BuzzFeed)
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks about future strategy (ZDNet)
• Grim reality of climbing Mt.Everest (link)
  • This article also shows why there are so many dead bodies in Everest and never will be cleaned up.
• Rethinking the Marketing Funnel in a world of social media (link)
• Google just open sourced its AI engine TensorFlow.. check this blog here.

Bill Gross talks about the single biggest reason why a startup succeeds:

 

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed?utm_source=quora.com&utm_campaign=&awesm=on.ted.com_h103a&utm_medium=on.ted.com-android-share&utm_content=ted-androidapp#t-225543

I bought the Kindle 2 (3g access) in 2009 when it came out. It costed as much as a tablet these days (i believe I paid around $300). It had no touch screen, but E-ink screen was amazing. I loved the fact that I could load more books and read it like a paper book. Another feature I really loved was the ability to have Kindle read the books using Text-To-Speech. Using TTS I could listen to pretty much any book I loaded into Kindle. It did a decent job of converting the text to voice, no complaints. It was very convenient especially when you were driving. That generation of Kindle had its own set of issues such as navigating the text with the click-wheel and button based menu interface, not very convenient if you had to take notes. I’ve the habit of highlighting and taking notes on any book I read, one reason I don’t really like to sell the books once I’m done with. I always go back and re-read the highlights in the books I just finished. With Kindle 2, taking notes and marking highlights was a lot of pain than necessary.

Then iPad happened, and I started using Kindle App  more than Kindle 2 device. iPad is much more convenient to highlight and take notes using its wonderful touch screen. Over a period, I forgot about the  Kindle 2 all together, it was sleeping in the drawer. Once in a while I would take it out, charge it and use it to read few pages. I never really bothered to turn on text to speech.

Last week, I realized my son (12 yrs old) was spending too much time on his mini-iPad, supposedly doing his “homework” (reading assignments). I was wondering about a way to restrict his access to games, videos and browsing. It hit me that I could buy him the new kindle with touch screen and wifi. He won’t be able to play games or watch videos but can read, use dictionary and take notes to his heart’s content. Amazon selling Kindle for $59 dollar’s doesn’t hurt  either, great price for such a nice device.  So I went ahead and bought two Kindles, a Paperwhite ($119) and Kindle Basic($59), former for me and later for my son.

The device seems to have transformed his reading habits. It has a feature called “FreeTime” using which a parent can control and reward kid’s reading habits. He loves the fact that his Kindle has a touch screen and he can look up words in the dictionary. I also love the fact that my Paperwhite has touch screen and built-in front light, which makes it easier to read in any kind of lighting.

However one of the feature I really liked, Text-To-Speech is completely missing from this new generation of Kindle, doesn’t  have headphone jack either.  A bummer, but I think I can live with that. In general, the Kindles are fine devices if you are primarily interested in uninterrupted reading pleasure, they are meant to be used as such. Now I prefer reading books in Kindle Paperwhite with its touch screen interface rather than using iPad with its harsh back-lighted screen.

• Finding Alibaba: How Jerry Yang made the lucrative bet in silicon valley history (link)
  • Fascinating reading about the history of two companies, especially the relationship between Jerry Yang and Jack Ma. It also shows how great business decisions are carried out by nascent people-to-people connection.
• Anonymous messaging app Yik Yak raises $61m funding round. Interesting read about this company here (Chicago Maroon).
• There is a quite a bit of confusion about data science, especially analytics vs predictive analytics. Good read here (link)
• Shopify is an interesting startup with 120,000 customers and more than $5B in business transactions enabled for its customers. However, not many people never really heard of. Including myself until recently.
  • Read about Shopify here (link).
• Have you ever wondered how Amazon WebService (AWS) operates? How big it is?
  • Rare peak into massive scale of AWS (link)
• There seems to be not a single day passes without hearing about Uber in the news, positive or negative. As a business they’ve been very successful in setting strategy to go after their customers and compete with Lyft.
  • Read about some of the stuff here (link)

• Data Lake, Data Reservoir, Data Hub, Data Dump… (link)
  • Agree with Bill Schmarzo here. Who really cares what you call the place where you store all the data in an enterprise? As long as you truly use and know how to get value out of it.
• Last night me and my son (Anish) got a sandwich to go from a  restaurant near our house (The melt). I thought it was a cool restaurant, but didn’t realize it was funded by Sequoia and has Ron Johnson (former Apple retail chief and former CEO of JC Penney) as one of the BOD. Here is an interesting blurb from gawker about the $10m VC funding event (gawker)
• Many a times companies frown upon employees working virtually. I believe this trend is changing rapidly with the new technology and knowledge workers prefer to work from distant locations where they can spend more time with their family, work more productively, live cheaply and with flexible hours.
  • A good article on this topic here: It’s time your company went virtual.
• Linux Hackers Rebuild Internet from Silicon Valley Garage (wired)
  • Misleading title but makes for an interesting read
• The man who build a computer the size of the entire internet (wired)
  • Another over the top title, but this one at least has some truth behind it. I like what docker is trying to do.

• 10 Hot Startup Websites (FoxBusiness)
• Your Company is not a Family  (HBR)
  • Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn hits the point home very well. A company is a team, not a family.
• Every company should dream of getting this kind of endorsement from a VC that has invested in it (a16Z)
  • A blog post by Steven Sinofsky about Tanium.
• Breakthrough Technologies every analyst should know about (analyst one)
• Big Data & Business Intelligence Forecasts and Market Estimates 2014 (Forbes)

Yesterday I was asked by someone… Can I play with PivotalHD and HAWQ? How? What do I need?

This prompted me to think about going through this process myself afresh using my home computer to make sure everything works as smoothly I expected to work when we put together PivotalHD/HAWQ VM.  As I was downloading and trying to run the VM I realized that though running VM, thereby PivotalHD/HAWQ is straight forward there is no single place the entire process is laid out.  Therefore, hoping this blog post will guide someone step by step, from scratch to run PivotalHD and HAWQ.  In particular, in addition to running VM I wanted to show using HAWQ with pgAdminIII a popular open source tool used by Postgres community.
Install VMPlayer
Step 1: Skip this step if you  have either VMWare Fusion (for Mac) or VMWare Workstation/VMPlayer (for windows) already installed in your computer . If not, proceed to download one of these tools  from https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads.

Tip: VMWare Fusion (for Mac) and Workstation (for Windows) are paid tools. If you are running windows and don’t want to pay for Workstation, you’ve the option of using VMPlayer which available only for Windows or Linux, there is no Mac VMPlayer. If you are using Mac/OS X you would’ve to use other free alternatives.  VirtualBox is a free Mac alternative to VMPlayer you could try. Be warned, I’ve not tried this option myself, but should work. I’m sure you can google  http://smallbusiness.chron.com/open-vmdk-virtualbox-28847.html

Scroll down to “Desktop & End-User Computing” section and download VMPlayer.

 

Download Pivotal HD.

Download Pivotal HD VM from http://gopivotal.com/big-data/pivotal-hd.

 

VM is pretty big 1.9GB, be patient. At my home, I’ve reasonable fast AT&T uverse. It took approximately 45min to download the entire file.

If you don’t have unzipping software, you can download 7z windows version from http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

Once unzipped, right click on the file PIVHDSNE110_VMWARE_VM and select “Open with VMWare Player” option to open using VMWare Player. Once launch happened you’ll see PivotalHD Desktop as shown below.

 

HAWQ administration documentation can be found here: http://docs.gopivotal.com/pivotalhd/HAWQAdministration.html

Double click on “start_all.sh” to start HAWQ services in the VM.

 

Before connecting pgAdminIII to HAWQ host based security should be enabled for the local host.

 

[pivhdsne:~]$ echo $MASTER_DATA_DIRECTORY
/data/1/hawq_master/gpseg-1
[pivhdsne:~]$

cd to “/data/1/hawq_master/gpseg-1” and open the file “pg_hba.conf” in your favorite editor. Add your local host where pgAdminIII runs as shown below.

 

After saving the file, run the following command to reload the configuration file.

[pivhdsne:~]$ gpstop -u

 

Now configure

 

Connecting pgAdmin3 to HAWQ.

Click on the connect icon. In the dialog box, enter your pivotal HD virtual machine ip address. To find virtual machine IP address enter the following command in a terminal window

 

[pivhdsne:~]$ ifconfig
eth1  Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:29:D8:10:3B
inet addr:192.168.2.104 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fed8:103b/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
…..

……

In the above example, virtual machine address is 192.168.2.104. Enter this in the host field of pgAdminIII. Enter username as “gpadmin” and password as “gpadmin”.

Click “ok” to connect to HAWQ. Ignore following warning message.

 

Download pgAdmin3 from this link: http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/pgadmin3/release/v1.18.1/win32/

Once successfully connected you should be able to see pgAdminIII screen as shown below.

 

PivotalHD tutorial can be found here: http://pivotalhd.cfapps.io/index.html

PivotalHD samples can be found here: https://github.com/gopivotal/pivotal-samples