So You Want to Be Your Own Boss

If you want to start a business but don't know where to start, don't worry--you are not alone. In fact, given the new economic reality of our time, more people than ever before have found the "job" they thought was waiting for them doesn't exist. Others have come to the conclusion that they would rather create work they love, constructed to fit with their own life goals. No matter what the motivation is to be your own boss, you can start today.

Here are 8 Tips to Get You Started:

1. Take a Stand for Yourself.
   If you are dissatisfied with your current circumstances, admit that no one can fix them except for you. It doesn't do any good to blame the economy, your boss, your spouse or your family. Change can only occur when you make a conscious decision to make it happen.
2. Identify the Right Business for You.
   Give yourself permission to explore. Be willing to look at different facets of yourself (your personality, social styles, age) and listen to your intuition. We tend to ignore intuition even though deep down we often know the truth. Ask yourself "What gives me energy even when I'm tired?"
   
   How do you know what business is "right" for you? There are three common approaches to entrepreneurship:
   
   Do What You Know: Have you been laid off or want a change? Look at work you have done for others in the past and think about how you could package those skills and offer them as your own services or products.
   
   Do What Others Do: Learn about other businesses that interest you. Once you have identified a business you like, emulate it.
   
   Solve a Common Problem: Is there a gap in the market? Is there a service or product you would like to bring to market? (Note: This is the highest-risk of the three approaches.) If you choose to do this, make sure that you become a student and gain knowledge first before you spend any money.
3. Business Planning Improves Your Chances for Success.
   Most people don't plan, but it will help you get to market faster. A business plan will help you gain clarity, focus and confidence. A plan does not need to be more than one page. As you write down your goals, strategies and action steps, your business becomes real.
   
   Ask yourself the following questions:
    - What am I building?
   - Who will I serve?
   - What is the promise I am making to my customers/clients and to myself?
   - What are my objectives, strategies and action plans (steps) to achieve my goals?
4. Know Your Target Audience Before You Spend a Penny.
   Before you spend money, find out if people will actually buy your products or services. This may be the most important thing you do. You can do this by validating your market. In other words, who, exactly, will buy your products or services other than your family or friends? (And don't say. "Everyone in America will want my product." Trust me--they won't.) What is the size of your target market? Who are your customers? Is your product or service relevant to their everyday life? Why do they need it?
   
   There is industry research available that you can uncover for free. Read industry articles with data (Google the relevant industry associations). However, the most important way to get this information is to ask your target market/customers directly and then listen.
5. Understand Your Personal Finances and Choose the Right Kind of Money You Need for Your Business.
   As an entrepreneur, your personal life and business life are interconnected. You are likely to be your first--and possibly only--investor. Therefore, having a detailed understanding of your personal finances, and the ability to track them, is an essential first step before seeking outside funding for your business. This is why I recommend setting up your personal accounts in a money management system such as Mint.com to simplify this process.
   As you are creating your business plan, you will need to consider what type of business you are building--a lifestyle business (smaller amount of startup funds), a franchise (moderate investment depending on the franchise), or a high-tech business (will require significant capital investment). Depending on where you fall on the continuum, you will need a different amount of money to launch and grow your business, and it does matter what kind of money you accept.
   
   
6. Build a Support Network.
   You've made the internal commitment to your business. Now you need to cultivate a network of supporters, advisors, partners, allies and vendors. If you believe in your business, others will, too.
   
   Network locally, nationally & via social networks. Join networks like NAPW.com, your local chamber of commerce, or other relevant business groups. Here are some networking basics:
   
   - When attending networking events, ask others what they do and think about how you can help them. The key is to listen more than tout yourself.
   - No matter what group you join, be generous, help others and make introductions without charging them.
   - By becoming a generous leader, you will be the first person that comes to mind when someone you've helped needs your service or hears of someone else who needs your service.
7. Sell By Creating Value.
   Even though we purchase products and services every day, people don't want to be "sold." Focus on serving others. The more people you serve, the more money you will make. When considering your customers or clients, ask yourself:
   
   - What can I give them?
   - How can I make them successful in their own pursuits?
   - This approach can help lead you to new ways to hone your product or service and deliver more value, which your customers will appreciate.
8. Get the Word Out.
   Be willing to say who you are and what you do with conviction and without apology. Embrace and use the most effective online tools (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn) available to broadcast your news. Use social networks as "pointer" sites; i.e., to point to anything you think will be of interest to your fans and followers.
   
   Even though social networks are essential today (you must use them!), don't underestimate the power of other methods to get the word out: e.g., word-of-mouth marketing, website and internet marketing tools, public relations, blog posts, columns and articles, speeches, e-mail, newsletters, and the old-fashioned but still essential telephone.
   
   If you take these steps, you'll be well on your way to becoming your own boss. It's important to remember that you are not alone. If you want to "be your own boss" but you still feel stuck, reach out and connect with other entrepreneurs in a variety of ways. You may be surprised by the invaluable contacts that are right at your fingertips.

(Courtesy : http://www.entrepreneur.com/ )

DynamoDB - A typical solution for our NoSQL requirements

Leverage Open Source to Achieve Strategic Objectives

Realize the maximum benefits from open source through the following services:

• Licensing/IP Strategy – Analysis of technology and IP portfolios, including both open source and proprietary software, to harmonize licensing choices and compliance requirements with system architecture and commercial goals
• Product Strategy – Applying open source industry best practices to creating innovative products and services built with, on and for open source software, and creation of business models for monetizing and scaling revenues from OSS-based offerings
• Community, Ecosystem and Channel Development – Developing an open source community and ecosystem, strategy and interaction model to derive maximum benefit from community and commercial participants, while effectively managing community interests and developing, supporting and monetizing open source technologies.
• Go-to-Market Strategy – Deliver a unique value proposition to the right target market through market and customer segmentation, product and services portfolio definition,  pricing and revenue modelling, and tuning promotional vehicles to reach developer and user communities
• Legacy Migration Strategy – Review and analysis of legacy / proprietary software portfolios and creation of strategies and financial models for replacing select applications and software stacks with open source alternatives, with accompanying integration and support models for maximizing ROI
• Due Diligence Strategy – Our experts provide the responsiveness, speed and discretion required to help you reduce business risk, meet deadlines and keep merger and acquisition (M&A) deals moving.
• Community Intelligence Reports - Receive in-depth analysis and strategic insights of open source software projects, featuring key metrics highlighting underlying trends in the communities and ecosystems around these OSS projects. Additionally, our experts will evaluate the implications for organizations interested in embedding and distributing, developing with and deploying specific project technologies.

  (Source : Black Duck Software)

Slick grid scaling issue on iPad

SlickGrid is a JavaScript grid/spreadsheet component.
It is an advanced component and is going to be a bit more difficult to learn and configure, but once you realize its full potential, it will blow your mind!

Some highlights:

Adaptive virtual scrolling (handle hundreds of thousands of rows with extreme responsiveness)
Extremely fast rendering speed
Supports jQuery UI Themes
Background post-rendering for richer cells
Configurable & customizable
Full keyboard navigation
Column resize/reorder/show/hide
Column auto sizing & force-fit
Pluggable cell formatters & editors
Support for editing and creating new rows.
Grouping, filtering, custom aggregators, and more!
Advanced detached & multi-field editors with undo/redo support.
“GlobalEditorLock” to manage concurrent edits in cases where multiple Views on a page can edit the same data.

Scaling of the grid in various devices comes to the picture when we applied it in real time process. The grid that embedded with SlickGrid can be able to load more than 1Lakh of data as usual with its default behaviour. The scaling issue occur when we deals with some PDA devices like iPad.The SlickGrid is not much more compatable for iPad or responsive manner initialy but we can able to fix the scaling problem in iPad by applying some quick fixes in CSS styles and JavaScript codes.

/*

 Fix for the iPad, set the overflow as scroll and overflow-x as auto.

 add webkit overflow touch option

*/
.slick-viewport { 
  overflow: scroll;
  overflow-x: auto !important;
 -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; 
}

Apply the above code by detecting the iPad devices through JavaScript code on the fly.

 var headID = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0];         

     var cssNode = document.createElement('link');

     cssNode.type = 'text/css';

     cssNode.rel = 'stylesheet';

     cssNode.href = 'iosStyle.css';

     cssNode.media = 'screen';

     headID.appendChild(cssNode); 

Apply the css style in the 'ioasStyle.css' file.And we can able to detect iOS devices using the code,

 
function detectIOS(){

     var standalone = window.navigator.standalone,

        userAgent = window.navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase(),

        safari = /safari/.test( userAgent ),

        ios = /iphone|ipod|ipad/.test( userAgent ); 

    return ios; 

    }

This function returns a true state with the ios devices. Also we can able to detect the device navigation tools too.

Does using == in JavaScript ever make sense?

I'm going to make an argument for == 

JavaScript is a behaviourally* typed language. Things are treated based on what they can do and not their actual type. This is why you can call an array's .map method on a NodeList or on a jQuery selection set. It's also why you can do 3 - "5" and get something meaningful back - because "5" can act like a number.

When you perform a == equality you are comparing the contents of a variable rather than its type. Here are some cases where this is useful:

• Reading a number from the user - read the .value of an input element in the DOM? No problem! You don't have to start casting it or worrying about its type - you can == it right away to numbers and get something meaningful back.
• Need to check for the "existence" of a declared variable? - you can == null it since behaviourally null represents there is nothing there and undefined doesn't have anything there either.
• Need to check if you got meaningful input from a user? - check if the input is false with the ==argument, it will treat cases the user has entered nothing or just white-space for you which is probably what you need.

Let's look at examples and explain them behaviourally:

'' == '0'           // got input from user vs. didn't get input - so false
0 == ''             // number representing empty and string representing empty - so true
0 == '0'            // these both behave as the number 0 when added to numbers - so true    
false == 'false'    // false vs got input from user which is truth - so false
false == '0'        // both can substitute for 0 as numbers - so again true

false == undefined  // having nothing is not the same as having a false value - so false
false == null       // having empty is not the same as having a false value - so false
null == undefined   // both don't represent a value - so true

' \t\r\n ' == 0     // didn't get meaningful input from user vs false number - true 

Basically, == is designed to work based on how primitives behave in JavaScript not based on what theyare. While I don't personally agree with this point of view there is definitely merit in doing it - especially if you take this paradigm of treating types based on behaviour language-wide.

* some might prefer the name structural typing which is more common but there is a difference - not really interested in discussing the difference here.