Here are our favorite blog posts for 2009.  Thank you to all of our clients, partners, and readers.

“Body Shopping”

Sandeep in conversation with Lakshmi Pratury

Let the touch-tweeting begin

5 Rules for Hiring Offshore Teams

School uses Monsoon software to help autistic children

Sandeep’s TED India Recap

Contractually obligated to get you laid

And, here are my 5 favorite posts from the past few years:

Time to Retire the Flat World Metaphor

Name Change: Monsoon Company

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I admit it; I wasn’t among the first on the twitter blog wagon. I put if off, for no good reason really; just like everyone else I haven’t quite perfected the art of bending the space-time continuum to my advantage. Then in the summer of 2008, I bought myself an iPhone and dove thumb-first into twitter.

Fast-forward to today, and I can’t help but want to touchscreen-activate everything and tweet every one of my “lightbulb moments” (eat your heart out Deepak Chopra!). Yup, my name is John Doe and there is a tech-junkie in me. Thankfully geek-chic is in, and with Monsoon Company’s latest product launch, my tech-junkie and I are walking the metaphorical red carpet together. Body by touch, brains by tweet.

We are proud to premier the very first Touch Twitter app for Windows7.

Get a taste…scratch that…get a touch here.

The first release of the app brings with it many of the twitter essentials: quick access to tweets via a full feed, the ability to search, post an update, and lots of following/followed views. Let the touch-tweeting begin!

We’ll be releasing an update to the app with a lot more touch-friendly features shortly. The ability to share photos, drag Twitterati (or whomever else you choose to follow) into groups, and save searches and trends, to name just a few.

The app is getting media coverage in almost every major tech outlet and blog. See what Laptop mag and PC World had to say.

To learn more about Monsoon Company’s recent touchscreen projects, follow the links below:

Top 100 colleges app for US News
Notes Application for HP
iPhone app for South by Southwest (*coming soon)

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This week, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute released two years worth of thorough research on the economic ties between the Bay Area and India.  We were excited to find out that the report features a short excerpt about Monsoon and Badmash.tv.

The focus is mainly on the entrepreneurs and students from India who have shaped industries like technology and farming in the Bay Area.  A few things I learned:

- Indian-owned farms in California’s Central Valley produce 95% of the state’s peaches (why peaches?).
- There are more foreign students in California from India than anywhere else.
- In 1910, there were a total of 6,000 Indians in the US (imagine how tight that marriage market was)
- In 1990, 23% of Silicon Valley’s engineers were Indian.

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You could listen to Gary Vaynerchuk:

Too many people don’t want to swallow the pill of working every day, every chance they get.

I hate to disappoint here, but if you’re looking for an easier time here, you’re barking up the wrong tree. There might be a little flexibility to your day should you be at liberty to devote yourself full-time to building your personal brand, but otherwise, assuming you’re doing this right, you’ll be bleeding out of your eyeballs at your computer.

- Gary Vaynerchuk “Crush It”

Or you could listen to Tim Ferriss:

Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.  The options are almost limitless for creating “busyness”.

Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory.  Enter the world of elimination.

- Tim Ferriss, “The Four Hour Work Week”

Both books are inspiring in their own way, and I suspect the answer is somewhere in between.

Happy Friday.

I haven’t put out a comic for a long time (been mostly working on my animation studio), but here is one that we finished a few weeks ago and just never bothered posting.

The thing is that I’m seeing Tim Ferris speak tomorrow.  While I’ve always found his approach to personal outsourcing exaggerated and horribly misleading (although I’ve read that the hyperbolic “4-Hour Work Week” title wasn’t his idea), I do enjoy his blog and find his constant personal experimentation fascinating.

So, this one is loosely based on a blog post about outsourcing his dating life.

We’ll call this comic strip The Sourcies for now and see if it sticks.  The artwork is by Aron Bothman (of course).  I wrote it along with one of my Monsoon partners, Ankush Gera.

I’ve been realizing lately that it might be time to button up our company, if only just a bit.

Like many of our small devteam peers, Monsoon’s philosophy has long been influenced by ultra-agile companies like 37Signals and their Getting Real approach to design and development (these dudes are the closest things I have to heros in our business). Our clients usually find this approach deeply refreshing, especially when they have been served a steady diet of bullshit deliverables and even-more-bullshit invoices from large consulting companies.

However, I’ve been noticing lately that our scrappy, informal approach to design and development requires a level of trust and diligent communication that, while totally doable, is often just not as practical as a slightly more formal approach.

Let me be clear.  Agile development and Getting Real are a way of life at Monsoon.  They are ingrained in our daily processes and general approach to strategic consulting; and we have no intention of changing that core approach.

However, I am beginning to appreciate the value of deliverables such as well-executed Omnigraffle flows, simple information architecture diagrams, and even comprehensive application wireframes (300 page scope documents are purposely left out of this list).  We know how to build this stuff – most of us have bigco backgrounds, after all.  And, we have always built these when required (usually by larger clients), but now I’m beginning to realize, that in some cases, the effort required to produce these deliverables may simply be more efficient.

This is part of a larger acceptance that we are, regardless of our attitude & size, a consulting firm.  The Getting Real approach works best with 2 – 3 guys in the same room, on the same payroll, and with the same general mindset & understanding of technology.

In our case, we have a global team and an external client – this requires nuances to the process that have not yet been documented or championed, as far as I know.

So, we are gong to slowly bring a few of the [ironic drumroll please] Pillars of the Consulting Process back into our work.   This is not an admission that the Getting Real approach or agile development is flawed; rather, it is part of our learning process.  We are better integrating these models into consulting work, which seems to require that these approaches be tweaked, if only slightly.

Don’t worry – we’re not going Infosys on you, I promise.

I’m in Delhi for a few days, recuperating from the intensity of TED India. I met dozens of people who blew me away, slept about 12 hours total over 3 days, and somehow ended up giving two talks!  More on the talks (with video, hopefully) later, but right now, here is a recap of some of the TED experience.

The People

Due to writing/rehearsal time for my talks, I ended up missing more than a few TED talks, which was fine with me: I’ll catch them online, when they’ve been edited and produced for maximum enjoyment. Instead, I prioritized the time I had for meals and parties, where we got to sit down with people like Tony Hsieh, Nandan Nilekani Rohini Nilekani, Jacqueline Novogratz, Scott Cook, and others.  Many of those conversations were better than most of the TED talks I attended (especially an illuminating sourcing discussion with Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit).

Infosys

Most of TED’s attendees were whisked by bus (with police escorts) from the modern Bangalore airport to the Infosys campus in Mysore.  Those who left the country directly afterwards are going to have a very skewed perspective of where India is at.  The Infosys campus in Mysore is spotless and organized like a gated community in Orlando (it even features an Epcot Center dome).  You get this nagging sense you’re on the Indian IT version of the Truman show. While this was a great venue for TED (parties at palaces in Mysore, a beautiful outdoor Greek Theater, and fantastic venues for talks), it often felt contrived.

Sunita Krishnan

Sunita Krishnan is about 4 feet tall, which surprised me when I later met her in person, given her gigantic stage presence. She spoke of her work rehabilitating thousands of sex slaves and her own personal experience being gang-raped by eight men at the age of 15. Sunita’s talk was devoid of self-righteousness; instead, she touched the audiences with simple stories of joy and assimilation that she encounters every day in her work.  Make sure you catch this talk when the video is released.

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At some point during a challenging project, you inevitably find out if your project manager actually cares – could be during a looming deadline, a malware attack, or just an intense phase of development.

If you’re working with an offshore team, the distance doesn’t make your team leader’s concern (or lack thereof) easier to fake.  You’ll know if she cares – it’s unmistakeable.

Leaders who don’t care hide behind contracts, jump too quickly to “that’s impossible”, or question (inappropriately) business need.

You can increase your chances of success immeasurably by finding out how much your project manager cares before you hit that first fire drill.

One way to figure this out: create an intense deadline early, before the project is anywhere near its critical phase.  In most cases, you’ll learn something about the character of your team.

One of my favorite Monsoon projects of the year just went into Alpha.

Yea.

That’s all I can tell you right now.