What caught my eye on my Gmail chat window was this message: “Hiring: $1500 Referral Fee.” I had not seen that kind of message in a long time. Why, it reminded me of the mid 1990s when companies could not find the right people and it was not uncommon for companies to offer a referral fee for the right candidate. But, these are different times and I was curious to find out why Vikas Gupta, co-founder of Jambool, was offering $1500 as referral fee for hiring engineers for his startup.Here is the Q&A with Vikas.

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 Thanks for your continuing support and encouragement without which we would not be able to move forward. We are doing  a 12-part online radio series with Mint for their LiveMint Radio Show that is launching next week. The series is titled “Tune In To The Future.” The first 3 guests on the show are Yogen Dalal of Mayfield Fund, Mitchell Baker of Mozilla and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn. It was a wonderful and a delightful experience interviewing all three of them.

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History was made yesterday with the election of Barrack Obama as the 44th President of the USA. This was an election that was keenly followed by many people in India either on TV, newspaper, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.

Here is a round-up that I posted on Global Voices earlier today that captures the mood and infection of what bloggers in India had to say. Reading through the various blog postings the sense you get is that Obama’s victory does not belong to America and the Americans alone, but to the whole world.

Obama’s election appears to have unleashed a desire to get an Indian version of Obama elected. What will take to get such a person elected appears to be the sub-text of quite a few blog posts. I suspect that this election will be studied around the world  by various politicians and political parties on how to conduct an election campaign that is inclusive and harnesses the power of technology. I suspect that in the case of India it will be the mobile phone that will be harnessed. India holds its next general elections in May 2009 and there is a whole layer of young politicians, who are tech and media savvy, who will shape the election campaign.

Technorati Tags: barrack obama,us presidential elections 2008,us and india,obama and india

Wishing all of you a very warm and Happy Deepavali.

“I work in a bus company,” said the young software engineer when I asked him where he worked.
“What is a bus company?” I asked in a puzzled tone. I had never heard that term before.

Well, it turns out that in Bangalore if you work for any of the big IT companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS,  or MindTree (there are quite a few of them) they  are labelled as “bus companies.” And, that is precisely what this young software engineer from Bangalore was referring to.

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Mr. Ratan Naval Tata, 71, Chairperson of Tata Sons, the holding company of Tata Group a multi-billion dollar conglomerate is back in the news again. This time he is back in the news for a different reason. This time he is in news for giving $50 million to his alma mater Cornell University  in New York. The $50 million is split in two parts: $25 million will go towards establishing a scholarship for Indian students to study at Cornell and the other $25 million is towards the Tata-Cornell initiative in Agriculture and Nutrition. You can read more about this at Sajaforum.

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