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. LoveLogger was awarded the “Asia's Top 50 Apps Award” (winner lists) from SingTel, Singapore and the Winner of "Red Herring Asia Award" for Technology Innovation. I designed and developed the complete UI/UX, architectural framework, and web cloud hosting for the LoveLogger website, successfully scaling the platform from zero to over 80,000+ users before its acquisition. LoveLogger 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.

In 2013, I founded Coworkable, an early pioneer in the coworking space industry. Coworkable is a global network and community for discovering and renting affordable, accessible remote workspaces, shared office spaces, desks, business centers, and meeting rooms. Coworkable gained significant recognition in the startup ecosystem, being selected as one of the Top Startups at the NASSCOM Product Conclave. I designed and developed the entire UI/UX, architectural framework, and web cloud hosting for the Coworkable website, successfully scaling the platform from zero to listings from 387 cities across 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region before its successful exit. Coworkable also forged strategic partnerships and collaborated with prominent organizations, including the World Startup Fest, Coworking Europe Conference, Global Coworking Unconference Conference (China), Startup Weekend, BarCamp Bengaluru, YourStory TechSparks, Coworking India Conference, World Office Expo Conference, BITS Pilani's Conquest Entrepreneurial Center, SAARC CXO Conference, Devspace Conference by VIT & Computer Society of India, STARup Summit, Tomorrow's India Conference, and the Construkt Startup Festival, among others (view full list).

I have also launched and scaled a couple of other startups, sold a few, and had a few fail. My passion lies in building innovative solutions that drive impact and create meaningful connections in the tech and business world.

A Certified Yoga Instructor & Practitioner, an avid Travel and Culture Photographer, documenting my travel journeys, discoveries, and recommendations in my photography journal 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
VIEW MORE OF MY AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS

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. I designed and developed the complete UI/UX, architectural framework, and web cloud hosting for the LoveLogger website, successfully scaling the platform from zero to over 80,000+ users before its acquisition. 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.

In 2013, I founded Coworkable, an early pioneer in the coworking space industry. Coworkable is a global network and community for discovering and renting affordable, accessible remote workspaces, shared office spaces, desks, business centers, and meeting rooms. Coworkable gained significant recognition in the startup ecosystem, being selected as one of the Top Startups at the NASSCOM Product Conclave. I designed and developed the entire UI/UX, architectural framework, and web cloud hosting for the Coworkable website, successfully scaling the platform from zero to listings from 387 cities across 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region before its successful exit. Coworkable also forged strategic partnerships and collaborated with prominent organizations, including the World Startup Fest, Coworking Europe Conference, Global Coworking Unconference Conference (China), Startup Weekend, BarCamp Bengaluru, YourStory TechSparks, Coworking India Conference, World Office Expo Conference, BITS Pilani's Conquest Entrepreneurial Center, SAARC CXO Conference, Devspace Conference by VIT & Computer Society of India, STARup Summit, Tomorrow's India Conference, and the Construkt Startup Festival, among others (view full list).

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 Current Reading List: Books

❝ If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.❞

books
Do Purpose
David Hieatt
books
The Future of Humanity
Michio Kaku
books
Goodbye, Things
Fumio Sasaki
books
The Space Barons
Christian Davenport
books
Atlas Obscura
Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton
books
The Culture Code
Daniel Coyle
View My Reading List

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:

EMAIL ME

image

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...”

EMAIL ME

53 Interesting Twitter Links for Fun, Geeks !

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Twitter needs no introduction, checkout few of the Interesting Twitter links for fun, geeks:


TwiTunes is an AppleScript for Mac OS X that posts the current iTunes track to Twitter:

http://tint.de/twitunes-applescript


Ubuntu Deskbar plugin, script to let's us to post twitter messages from the Ubuntu Deskbar

http://philwilson.org/blog/2007/03/post-to-twitter-from-ubuntu-deskbar.html


Twitter Perl command-line status Script

A Perl command line status script to answer the age-old question from the comfort of the command-line, via twitter.

http://polydistortion.net/sw/twitter/wd


Catch-up Your Favorite Celebrities on Twitter


Britney Spears http://twitter.com/britney

David Beckham http://twitter.com/davidbeckham


Tom Cruise http://twitter.com/tomcruise

Pamela Anderson http://twitter.com/pamelaanderson


Robbie Williams http://twitter.com/robbiewilliams

Angelina Jolie http://twitter.com/angelinajolie


Madonna http://twitter.com/Madonna


Simon Cowell http://twitter.com/simoncowell

John Travolta http://www.twitter.com/johntravolta


The Queen http://twitter.com/thequeen

Tom Hanks http://www.twitter.com/tomhanks


Snoop Dog http://twitter.com/snoop

Ben Affleck http://twitter.com/benaffleck


Cameron Diaz http://twitter.com/camerondiaz


Bradd Pitt http://twitter.com/bradpitt


Jeniffer Aniston http://twitter.com/jenniferaniston


Johnny Depp http://twitter.com/johnnydepp

Leonardo DiCaprio http://twitter.com/leocaprio


Lindsay Lohan http://twitter.com/lindsaydeelohan


Naomi Campbell http://twitter.com/naomicampbell

Paris Hilton http://twitter.com/pariswhilton


Tweetbar

Tweetbar is a cool Twitter sidebar for Firefox and Flock.

http://mikedemers.net/2007/03/19/announcing-tweetbar/


Digg_All

Get all the latest hot Digg news updates on your mobile

http://twitter.com/digg_all


Python Twitter

A Python wrapper around the Twitter API.

http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/


TwitterPostTwitterPost allows us to easily post to and read from our Twitter feed plus a whole lot more. http://www.railheaddesign.com/downloads/software/TwitterPost.dmg

Chitter

Chitter is an iChat plugin that integrates iChat with Twitter. If we use Twitter and have a Mac, this will make our life much easier.

http://www.roflsoftware.com/download


Twittersearch

Another script from twittermap that allows us to search through users twits

http://twittermap.com/search


GeoTwitter uses Google Maps API and Twitter API. The most recent updates are fetched from the public timeline and mapped once every minute.

http://geotwitter.org/


Twitish a twitter shell written in Perl for Linux.

http://toufeeq.blogspot.com/2007/01/twitish.html


Twitteroo

Twitteroo lets us to send Twitter tweets from our desktop

http://rareedge.com/twitteroo/


Scripting Twitter with curl

cURL is a very versatile command line utility which is designed to script web page interactions

http://www.sakana.fr/blog/2007/03/18/scripting-twitter-with-curl/


TwitterBox

A Twitter client for Second Life users

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/twitter/


Google Talk Widget, To Twitt from our homepage with this Widget.

http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2007/03/google-talk-gadget.html


CricTimes

Crazy about Cricket, catch up the real action ball by ball at

http://twitter.com/crictimes


Gtwitter

A Twitter client for linux

http://cde.google.com/p/gtwitter/


triQQr v0.2

A Twitter Client for Windows

http://triqqr.de/


Twadget

A Windows Vista sidebar gadget

http://arsecandle.org/twadget/


Chris Forbes Twitter Badge

A simple JavaScript badge that shows our latest twits

http://chrisjf.blogspot.com/2007/03/chris-forbes-original-twitter-badge.html


Twitgit for TwitterRead your friend’s most recent twitterings from Dashboard Post status updates right in the widget

http://ben-ward.co.uk/files/widgets/Twitgit.zip


Twitterami, uses Frappr to see Twitter friends on a map.

http://www.twitterami.com/

MyChores keeps track of our household chores and send automatic Twitter posts whenever we complete a task

http://www.mychores.co.uk/


Twapper which lets us to keep up with twitter on our mobile phone browser. It has built in image support for flickhttp://m.30boxes.com/twapper


Mail2Twitter

Mail2Twitter is a free service that allows us to post tweets through e-mail, and the most important, from any email-enabled mobile device. http://www.mail2twitter.com


| Tweet
Updating our tweets through Quicksilver

http://soylentfoo.jnewland.com/articles/2007/01/22/tweet-update-twitter-via-quicksilver


WHERE, attaches our current GPS location to our tweets

http://www.where.com/


Twitter Weather, get weather updates via twitter

http://romeda.org/blog/2006/12/weather-by-twitter.html


Twessenger

Twitter add-in for Windows Live Messenger. Twessenger automatically updates our messenger Personal Message at regular intervals to reflect our latest Twitter tweet.

http://kunal.kundaje.net/twessenger/Twessenger.zip


Visual Twit a simple Twitter posting client for Windows

http://profnano.org/code/VisualTwit.zip


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