Musings on Tech

Over the last few days, few of my friends have been asking me about NoSQL and its relevance.  I have been casually trying to answer this, but have always felt that this subject need to elaborated.  Through the slide deck, I have tried to provide a perspective on this subject. RDBMS to NoSQL. An overview. View more PowerPoint from Girish Raghavan Hope it helps. P.S:  Some of the slides ended up looking very busy. My apologies for that. This is a result of trying to balance between content (without sufficient audio explanations) and managing the size of the deck.

In the last post I talked about Gamification and different concepts behind Gamification.   In this post I intend to cover why Gamification has become important. Let us accept it.  Today we live in a world which is increasingly becoming online.  More and more businesses  are moving online and one of the prime focus for these businesses is to sustain and improve the engagement levels of its users.   Gamification acts as key driver in increasing the engagement level. Before we delve into how Gamification impacts engagement; let us try to understand what "Engagement" means.  The dictionary definition of Engagement which would applicable to this scenario will be " emotional involvement or commitment". Given this definition - the first aspect to analyze is what drives this involvement and commitment.  The generally accepted hypothesis is that it is "Motivation" that drives commitment which implies that Motivation is the key contributing factor to increa

Is traditional IT dead in the world of Cloud computing? This was an interesting question posed in a conference that I attended over the weekend.  I found the question very intriguing and got me thinking about it.    Let me start with a confession. Have been a great champion of Cloud based services and strongly believe that Cloud computing holds lot of promise and value.  But the question brings up an very interesting point.  Is the role of traditional IT dead and is cloud computing  the primary way forward. So let us look at what defines Cloud computing.  I am not going to get into the definition, If you just search on the "Cloud computing definition" on goggle, you would get myriad definitions. But my view is that there is no universally accepted definition on the same. One can find some of the definitions of Cloud computing here .   But there is a broad consensus on the benefits that Cloud computing can offer: Caveat : The discussion below primarily foc