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...”

My Happy Diwali Wishes to You!! :)

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Regards,
Balakumar .M

iBelieve : iPod Fashion with Passion!!

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The iBelieve is a $13 cap and lanyard for the iPod shuffle that turns the player into a cross when hung around our neck. Cool idea with "fashion with passsion" for the god!! :) >>

Nokia E61 Smartphone

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Nokia Introduces E61 smartphones, which gives mobile professionals a competitive edge, increasing productivity, and enabling more timely responses and the ability to make important decisions. The Nokia E61 is optimized to provide superior mobile email performance, with the ability to view and edit attachments and still deliver uncompromised voice functionality. Good wide screen. >>

Ten Most Feared People in Sports

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FOXSports listes ten most feared people in sports, which includes Roger Federer in 9th place, Inzaman-ul-Haq in 3rd place and the first place goes to Mike Tyson not just for boxing, but also for bitting Evander Holyfield's ear off in the summer of 1997 ;). >>

Flock : Yet Another Mozilla Browser

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Flock is a Mozilla-based browser, and looks and feels a lot like Firefox which is a good thing indeed. It packs a bunch of new features, mostly built around bookmarks, blogging, and photo sharing. It is build on variety of sites, services, and add-ons. We have to wait and see what it has in the browser space. >>

My Blog Worth is ...


My blog is worth $9,597.18.
How much is your blog worth?


My blog, i5bala.blogspot.com, is worth $9,597.18 :) and Check out this little applet using Technorati's API which computes and displays our blog's worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.Although, It's value is not perfect, or maybe even realistic, but it is still very interesting. You too can check your blog and know it's value. >>

Attended IBM DeveloperWorks Live Session!!

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Yesterday, I attended the IBM DeveloperWorks Live Session on Migrating and developing new applications for Linux. The Whole session is full of real-time demos on how to basics like Samba to XAD and How to convert Microsoft codes like VB, MFC to Linux-based.

They also explained about the Rational Software development tools, Bridging Technologies. Although the session was just for 4 hours, I have learnt lots of cutting edge technologies with GREAT demos. Finally, every one of us were given IBM Software Evaluation Kit DVD which has DB2, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli, WebSphere Software for Linux Platform. I Just LOVE to attend such interactive sessions. You too can order the DVD for free of charge at:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/linux-speed-start/


Thank you IBM :)

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Balakumar Muthu

rCard : Next Generation Business Cards

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rCard is not just another business card, But it is an card with little LCD screen, rechargeable battery, up to a gig of flash memory, a USB port, and navigation buttons, the rCard lets companies build their sales pitches and promotions right into the card. It also has enough processing power to perform simple applications, so companies can use them to give away little games or build them into larger promotions or sweepstakes events. >>

OpenOffice 2.0 released

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OpenOffice 2.0 one of my favourite multiplatform and multilingual office suite is released. With it's new features, advanced XML capabilities and native support for the OASIS Standard OpenDocument format. >>

Attended Macromedia Studio8 Launch in Chennai India

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Last week, I received an invitation for attending Macromedia Studio8 Launch in Chennai India. The speaker explained about the products included in the Macromedia Studio 8:

Dreamweaver 8
Flash Professional 8
Fireworks 8
Contribute 3
FlashPaper 2

Contribute and FlashPaper are bit new to me. FlashPaper seems to be very useful to convert documents, presentations, spreadsheet and other files into Macromedia Flash documents or PDF files with one click and Contribute allows designers and developers from web maintenance, allowing others to very easily for static web contents.

Now Dreamweaver supports RSS feeds, PHP5 and has a well made O’ Reilly references for JSP, XML, XSLT are some of the new features seems highly i4mpressive.

The Studio 8 offers rich functionality and cross-product workflows to create, code, and collaborate quickly. As a regular user of Macromedia products for all my web developments [Dreamweaver] and design [Fireworks] works, I could find lots of useful tips and new features through the sessions.

I demos are really COOL!! :)

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Balakumar Muthu

Apple's New iMac G5 Very COOL

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Apple's new iMac G5 with 17- or 20-inch featuring Front Row software and Apple Remote. Very Slimmer than ever, the gravity-defying enclosure also houses built-in iSight, SuperDrive, wireless and the easy-to-use software that brings it all together. But the Mighty Mouse is sold separately. Apple says iMac G5 was born to entertain. It always “think different” and entertain us, all Mac users like me will accept this!! >>

Google 2084!!

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Just look at what Google is going to search in 2084. But, even now Google already supports most of the searches given in the list. I strongly believe, it won’t take much time for Google to do such searches, must be within 2035. Google will also enable us to search the Information’s in other planets too, why not??, even in 2005 we are able to search the earth with Google most accurately. So there no doubt, that we will be getting much more powerful search in 2084. What do you feel??

Kill Our Television

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Just visited the “turnoffyourtv.com” website, it really made me think and how most of us are wasting our time and highly addicted to Television. Although watching TV is useful to some extent, we need such space to keep us away from TV. As Steve Jobs said:

"You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."

Is there is any site like turnoffyourpc.com ??? ;) >>

Google Reader!!

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Google Reader makes it easy to find and subscribe to online feeds to help users organize and stay up-to-date on the ever-increasing amount of web information they consume on a daily basis. Provides a very clean and seems to be like a real-time desktop application. I tried it, it's really Co0l!!>>

Why I Hate Apache Web Server [No, Not Me ;)]

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Read on this PDF, explains why generally normal users faces some problems with Apche Web Server. Interesting to read. >>

Java and Google Toolbar Teamup!!

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Sun has announced an agreement with Google to distribute the Google toolbar along with consumer Java downloads from java.com. They will be adding some options to the Windows JRE installation from java.com. These options will allow downloading and installation of the Google toolbar as part of the Windows JRE installation. It will be options. If someone doesn't want these tools they can easily opt out and still download and install the JRE. Hope to except lots of Great things happens between Sun and Google. Cool na!! :) >>


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