வணக்கம் தோழா / नमस्ते दोस्त / Hello Buddy!

लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनो भवन्तु

Lokāḥ Samastāḥ Sukhino Bhavantu
May all beings find happiness and freedom. May my actions help bring joy and liberation to everyone.

I am Balakumar Muthu, an International Award-winning Entrepreneur, TEDx fellow, and Technologist, who received the Top 50 Asia Innovation Award from SingTel in Singapore, Top 100 Startups Award from NASSCOM, Java Master Award & Duke's Choice Award from Sun Microsystems and BenQ Siemens Germany, and Red Herring Asia Award for technology innovation.

With over 17+ years of experience in IT/Software Consulting, with a particular focus on Japanese companies and strong expertise in Design & Product Engineering, UI/UX Web Design and Development for various B2B / B2C startups, SMEs, Enterprises, and several Fortune 500 companies. I specialize in architecting, designing, and building web applications to address both technology and business challenges across various domains, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), E-commerce, Online Marketplaces, Social Networking Services (SNS), Blogging platforms (CMS / Wiki), Usability/Branding, Cloud Computing, Enterprise Apps in Ed Tech, Retail Tech, Prop Tech, Med Tech, and Logistics Tech.

As an entrepreneur, my journey began in 2007 when I founded LoveLogger, the world's first private social blogging platform for pairs, which received a massive response from Hong Kong, Japan, China, and South Korea, accumulating over half a million users before its exit. It was featured in many prestigious internet magazines, including Yahoo! Japan, MSN Japan, Infoseek, Japan.Internet.com, Livedoor.com, Sina.com and various other popular Asian publishers. I have also launched a couple of other successful startups, sold a few, and had a few fail.

An avid Travel & Culture Photographer, documenting my journeys at CasualWalker.com, which is ranked as one of the Top 75 Travel Blogs in India. Additionally, I am a Travel & Culture Media Reporter and have been selected as the Official Honorary Reporter for the Korean Culture and Information Service of the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism.

I enjoy meeting new folks and replying to all emails, so feel free to drop me a line and say hello to balakumar.muthu@gmail.com

Awards & Recognitions, I have received


Selected at Google India - Interview as one of the Top 5 Finalists out of 16,000 + people applied. Created Google Kids – a search engine for kids prototype for demonstrating during my Google India Interview.

My Startup was selected as one of the "Top 100 Startups" to get showcased at NASSCOM Product Conclave (NCP), Asia's largest platform for Product and Startup Companies to connect with Software Product leaders.

First Prize Winner of "Java Master Award " contest, conducted by Sun Microsystems and BenQ Siemens Germany.

Received Sun Microsystems Duke's Choice Awards - 10 Year Celebration of Java Technology and Sun Microsystems appreciation for my contribution to the early versions of Java Platform.

My Previous Startup LoveLogger, the world's first Collaborative Blogging & Private Network for Pairs, which received a great response from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and China. LoveLogger was awarded the “Asia's Top 50 Apps 2011 Award” (winner lists) from SingTel, Singapore and the Winner of "Red Herring Asia Award" for Technology Innovation. It was also featured in many popular magazines & portals from Japan, Korea, and China. This product was launched even before the current popular pair apps like Pairy, Between, Hey, Cupple.

TEDx Fellow and Mentor for NurtureTalent Startup Boot Camp at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

Selected as the Official Honorary Reporter for the Korean Culture and Information Service of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

I started tech blogging in 2002 during my early college days and listed as the 'Top 10 Tech blogger' by 'Blog Street India' and rated as the 'Top 50 Tech Blogger' by 'Blogs Top List'. My Tech blog is also listed as Favorite Blog lists at their Official Sun Microsystems Web Blog. My Tech blog posts have also been featured at Google Blogoscoped.com, Netscape.com, Java.net, Webpronews, Planet Mozilla, Linux Toy and few other popular blogs. Made my own blogging site at Yahoo! Geocities as geocities.com/i5bala (screenshots) in early 2002.

Early contributed member of World Wide Web Consortium (W3.org), W3C HTML 5 Working Group and Internet Society (ISOC) India Chapter.

Wikipedian contributed to more than 100's of Wikipedia pages in various topics in the Computer/Internet Technology category. Contributing writer of DeveloperIQ Magazine on the latest Web Technologies.

Curator of Casual Walker a Travel & Culture - Photography journal and guide, focuses on a wide range of visual stories - connecting Travel, Traditions, Indian Temples, Art Galleries, Culture, Events, Museums, Yoga & Vedas, Foods & Eats, Indian Dances, Wild Life, Hotels & Stays, and Nature and Living. It is ranked as the Top 75 Travel Blogs in India.

Co-organizer of Mozilla Firefox Party India, for the most early release of Firefox 2 and the IdeaCamp Pune. Regular to Tech meetups from BarCamp, BlogCamp, WikiCamp Unconferences to Sun TechDays, BEA Dev2Dev Days, Oracle Developer Forum, Google Developer Days and many other tech conferences. Attended Sessions with David Axmark, CoFounder & VP of MySQL and with Richard Stallman [RMS], GNU Founder Lectures.

Designer of DevCamp India Unconference Official event brand and WikiCamp conference India event brand, participated by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Being a big supporter of Linux - Ubuntu & Open source movement, organized the "Ubuntu Dapper Drake T-Shirts Contest" to create more awareness and interest for the early versions of Ubuntu Linux.

My Expertise & specializations


I specialize in most aspects of Web business, including strategy, creativity, design, development, and its growth. My strong expertise and experience include front-end development, UI/UX web design and usability, branding, content management systems (CMS), e-commerce, software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing, social networking services (SNS), Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprise apps in Ed Tech, Retail Tech, Prop Tech, Med Tech, Logistics Tech, and Food Tech, web security, firewall, user onboarding, typography, product prototyping, SEO, and Linux & open-source technologies.

My Personal Interests


I enjoy travel & photography, rock climbing, simple things — nature, reading. I love philosophy, art, culture, highly interested and passionate about the Indian, Korean & Japanese traditions, trying different flavors of tea, Wabi-sabi, Zen philosophy, making mistakes & learning from them, DIY hacks, and Western movies and Comics.

My Works featured at press / media


My works have been featured & covered by ZDNet Asia, Economic Times, British Council India, Times of India (TOI), Citizen Matters, Yahoo! Japan, MSN Japan, Infoseek, Japan.Internet.com, Livedoor.com, Google Blogoscoped, Netscape.com, Java.net, Webpronews, Planet Mozilla, Linux Toy, DeveloperIQ, Sina.com and many other popular Asian publishers. Java.net published my Java Duke Holiday Pictures from 1000's of submission.

My Travel & Culture Photography


Contact & Reach me


Want to work together, grabbing a coffee, or say hello? Good! personally, I have zero presence on Facebook or Twitter. You can ping and text me:

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Self - made man
the statue I greatly admire & the principle I strongly believe

“... left to his own devices, man will use his god-given talents to be creative, productive, & prosperous. Using free will, he will better his own situation and that of those around him, thereby influencing in a positive way his own destiny...”

Adding a Printer to Unslung (CUPS)

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A simple step-by-step procedure for adding a Printer to Unslung (CUPS). It is explained in simple terms and has lots of good information’s too. >>

Running a Jar File in JSP

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Running a Jar File in JSP seems to be relatively simple using the Runtime class as:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("java -jar /path_to_jar/myfile.jar");

iPod in NASA Space Shuttle!!

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Look at the iPod in space, free floating inside one of NASA's Space Shuttle over the Gulf of Mexico.

Nokia 770 Debian Linux-Based Tablet

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The Nokia 770 is an Internet tablet running Debian Linux on a 4.13" diagonal screen with a resolution of 800x480. It supports 802.11b and Bluetooth, using either to connect to the Internet. It sports a virtual keyboard, but will also include handwriting recognition. In addition to the Opera web browser, the 770 will also ship with a RSS news reader, an Internet radio, various media players, a PDF viewer, and Flash v6 compatibility. Think it supports all real latest technologies. >>

iGuy for iPod

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Meet iGuy the first bendable, posable friend for you and your iPod! Not only is iGuy fun, he's fully functional- offering great rubberized protection, docking capability, and screen protection for your iPod or iPod Photo. >>

Dogpile's Missing Pieces

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Dogpile search engine released a little Flash application, called as "Missing Pieces" that lets us query Google, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo simultaneously and see the overlap between results. Cool Designed tool and quite useful for search comparison.>>

Adobe Photoshop in a 3-D

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Joel Swanson has developed a COOL 3-D representation of the Adobe Photoshop interface. It’s looks GREAT and reminds me the Sun’s Project looking glass. >>

Netscape Browser 8.0 Released

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America Online today launched Netscape Browser 8.0, the first major update to its browser since Netscape 7.0 was released in 2002. Based on Mozilla Firefox, this latest release can render pages using either the Gecko or Internet Explorer layout engines. Other new features include Site Controls (per-site security settings), the MultiBar (a toolbar for personalised content), a new way of automatically filling in forms and a quick way of clearing private data like the browsing history. Unlike previous releases, Netscape Browser 8.0 is just a Web browser (no email application, newsgroups client or Web page editor), though it does include an integrated AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ client. >>

iDiddy for iPod

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iDiddy solves the problem of hand carrying our iPod and having to untagle our earbud wires. It's fashinable design is worn around the neck. Our earbuds are always convienent and tangle free. >>

Installing Fedora Core on the Mac mini

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Installing Fedora Core on the Mac mini, seems to be very simple with this tutorial by Colin Charles from. >>

Dell Tech Force Movie

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Watch the Dell Tech Force Movie to check out the alligience of PC megacorps who try to take on the future??!. >>

Xopus Browser Based XML Editor

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Xopus, a browser based XML editor is completely written in javascript and relies on the MSXML ActiveX component and is therefore not working with FireFox and Opera. It offers different views for editing the xml but the main feature is the WYSIWYG XML editor. This is provided by on-the-fly transformation of the xml using an xml specific xml stylesheet. Besides text it is also possible to include other content like images or multimedia. >>

Google : Personalize Our Homepage

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Google Personalized Homepage, allows us to customize our Google home page with Gmail, Stock Market , BBC News, Google News , Weather , Wired News , Slashdot , Movies, Driving Directions and lots of things to personalize the google to our taste and it's still in beta. http://www.google.com/ig

Google Desktop Search Enterprise Edition

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Google Desktop Search for Enterprise helps you easily manage the ever-growing mountain of information located on your computers and includes key standards-based administrator features that provide enhanced security, centralized configuration and easy company-wide deployment. The new enterprise edition features are a big deal for IT administrators:

Centrally control user features and preferences
Encrypt all user data and search index files
Easily deploy using the included installation package
Test new versions before distributing
The optional Premium Support package offers consultation deploying Google Desktop Search, guaranteed response times for any issues and early notification of new versions.

desktop.google.com/enterprise/download.html

50 Fun Things to do with iPod :)

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Here are a few dozen things you can do with your iPod besides listen to music. It sounds quite interesting and useful too. >>

Overview of UML : Tutorial

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Found an interesting tutorial on Overview of UML from IBM Rational Software. It briefs about software modeling, model-driven development, MDA, UML requirements, philosophy, and structure. Highly recommended for beginners and explained in simple terms. You can download the .ppt file from HERE!.

Dodgeball was acquired by Google

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Dodgeball is a new service which can tell you which of your friends are within a ten block radius of where you are. On May 11th dodgeball.com was acquired by Google. Once you’ve signed up and registered your cellphone number with them, it only works in NYC, Boston, LA, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Now Dodgeball is in right hands and going to be spread all over the world by the power of Google. >>

Store Wars!!

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Watch the interesting Store Wars :) . >>

PocketParty Boombox for iPod

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PodGear’s new PocketParty Shuffle is a new speaker system that turns an iPod shuffle into the world’s tiniest ghetto blaster. The iPod shuffle simply plugs into the top of the PocketParty via the headphone port. The device has two speakers and a status light on one side. It’s not clear if you’ll be able to control the iPod shuffle’s playback options with the PocketParty controls. >>

Using Skins in Swing Applications: Java

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Using Skins in Swing Applications is relatively simple, I have tried lots of skins and it’s quite interesting to change the Look and Feel. Look at a sample application with customized skin and default swing skin.

Google Content Blocker

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Google Content Blocker effectively blocks all Web site content, leaving only the advertisements. After we install. When it find a site that has content, it will block that content so we see only the ads. It all happens automatically. >>

Windows PC Design Competition

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As Windows celebrates its 20th anniversary, it conducts a Windows PC Design Competition for students, developer to win $125,000USD. For those, who fell [like me] windows is buggy; why not try to change that. If you are a MS guy, it’s definitely for you and entry starts from May 18th. >>

ASCII Matrix

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My friend Prashanth, pointed me to this very cool interesting ASCII Matrix. We can also increase the frame rate as needed. >>

Apple releases iTunes 4.8

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Apple just released iTunes 4.8 for both Mac OS X and Windows. According to the brief release notes, version 4.8 includes new Music Store features and support for transferring contacts and calendars from our computer to our iPod.

iTunes 4.8 also adds new video features, including the ability to drag and drop movie clips from your computer into the iTunes Library for easy cataloging and organization. Clips appear with a new movie camera icon in your library. >>

Blogger on the Go Mobile

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Google have launched Blogger Mobile. All we need to do to use it is send an email or MMS from our phone to go@blogger.com - and that's it. They automatically create our blog, and whatever text or photos (or both) we send in the message becomes our post. Hey, that's really GREAT Google!! >>

Google.org

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Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google. It is currently working on staffing as well as defining the goals, priorities, and principles of Google.org. I think it will used for some social focused purpose. >>

Setting Wait Cursor: Java

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First import the Cursor class and next set the cursor type for the container and check for the operation and show the wait cursor, when the operation is done change the cursor to the default cursor.

import java.awt.Cursor.*;

Container c = frame.getContentPane();
. . .
c.setCursor(Cursor.getPredefinedCursor(Cursor.WAIT_CURSOR));
. . . // some operations
c.setCursor(Cursor.getPredefinedCursor(Cursor.DEFAULT_CURSOR));

No Internet Explorer in Mac OS X

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Apple has not included Internet Explorer in OS X Tiger. Microsoft has discontinued the browser since most Mac users have switched to Safari, and now presumably Apple has decided that IE is so out of date that it’s not worth including. Also, IE for Mac hasn’t been patched in months. >>

Wishes from Mr. Marc Cenedella, President & CEO of TheLadders.com !!! :)

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After my Google Interview, I have received lots of wishes from number of persons, but I am really PROUD and HIGHLY HONORED :) to receive wishes from Mr. Marc Cenedella, President & CEO of TheLadders.com, one of only 3 firms with 5 partners named to the Forbes Midas 100. TheLadders.com, has more than 180,000 subscribed readers and send out over 3,000 $100K+ jobs in

Sales http://www.salesladder.com
Marketing http://www.mktgladder.com
Finance http://www.financeladder.com
HR, IT http://www.upladder.com

Their newsletter is very interesting and packed with insider tips on interviewing, networking and resume writing. It’s really worth registering for the TheLadders.com Newsletter.

He is also previously SVP, Finance & Operations at HotJobs.com, which he sold to Yahoo! last spring for $436 mm and M.B.A. with High Distinction from Harvard Business School, where he was named a Baker Scholar [WOoooooW].

Mr. Marc Cenedella, blogged about me and wished for my Google Interview stating:

....I think this guy REALLY deserves a job at Google, and once he's a bigwig there, I'll gladly come over to have some Lamb Vindaloo with him!! ... Good luck Balakumar! ....

source: http://www.cenedella.com/stone/archives/001651.html

It gets me GREAT pleasure :) to get blessed by BIG Think Heads like you :). Thank you Sir.

----
Balakumar Muthu

Google Web Accelerator

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Google Web Accelerator, helps to load web pages faster. It is designed for Broadband Web pages load even more quickly on DSL and cable connections. Works on IE 5.5+ and Firefox 1.0. The beta version is available for users in North America and Europe. Think we too will get it soon. >>

Sega's iDog :)

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iDog from Sega a cute looking virtual pet. When plugged to iPod, it starts dancing and doing a light show and moving his ears in time to the music. It's mood changes depending on how we interact with. It look so COOL!!. >>

Where do He Want To Crash Today?!!

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I don’t why all the people, always link Crash and Windows?, I strongly feel any kind of system, whether it’s computer system or human system will have a crash. We must ready accept the crash and the system my ready to recover :).

Soldiers in Baghdad with iPod and iBook!!

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Think what keeps the Soldiers Cool in Baghdad :). Look at the ipod, ibook G4 along with various weapons they carry in the field like K-MP5,AK47, and M4 Carbine. >>

Star Wars Asciimation Java Applet

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Want to look at the whole part of StarWars? have a look at the Asciimation Java Applet. It's really a cool and very hard try and whoever did it, hatsoff to you man. Click on the applet for faster refresh for the action. >>

Creating Accesskeys or Short-cuts for Websites!!

Accesskeys allows us to navigate our website without a mouse, using keyboard shortcuts to our menus. It is accessed using alt+accesskey in windows or ctrl+accesskey in Mac. It works well in Firefox and IE, hope it must work fine with other browsers too. Creating Accesskey is simple using "accesskey" attribute as follows:

<href="http://i5bala.blogspot.com/" accesskey="B"/>Balakumar<a/>

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Although accesskey is added to the letter 'B', there won't be any underline for the letter 'B' by default to visually indicate it as a accesskey. For this using the CSS, the emphasis tag is styled to give underline for the letter 'B':

<a href="http://i5bala.blogspot.com/" accesskey="B"> <em>B</em>ala<a/>

Now add the following styles in the tag:

a {
text-decoration: none;
}

a em {
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
text-decoration: underline;
}


The final result would be:

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Hope it is useful for beginner level. Got any other ideas just drop in your comments.

Browster Search Preview Plugin

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The Browster plugin provides an instant preview window which saves you time when you search. It works with Google, Yahoo, etc., to speed up the search with its preview. >>

Adobe Reader for Mobile

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Adobe Reader for Symbian OS software lets you to view Adobe PDF files on Nokia 6680 Smartphones and, Nokia Communicator 9500 series. We can download Adobe PDF files to your Symbian device from the Internet, as e-mail attachments, or from our desktop. >>


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