I went to Harvard

Yes. I went to Harvard. I also went to Brown, Yale and Princeton. And if you're wondering about the significance of these 4 universities, they are 4 of the 8 Ivy League universities. The colleges everyone would like to go to, but few get in.

Many believe that graduating from any of these universities ensure a successful career. In fact, it seems like dropping out from any of these universities ensures even greater success. As shown by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both dropouts from Harvard.

My sister Mabel was visiting and has a list of things to do. She's always wanted to, or so she says, go to an Ivy League College and so decided to do just that. Albeit visit them. And so we did a 2 day trip and went to Yale, Harvard and Brown. Mabel had visited Princeton on a previous trip and so now has completed a visit to half the Ivy League colleges.

 Yale

 Harvard

Brown

 

Princeton

She has 4 more colleges to go to. I'm guessing we'll visit the remaining 4 during her next visit. The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. The term Ivy League has connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and social elitism. There's an extremely well written wiki page that gives information on everything you've ever wanted to know about the Ivy League Universities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League

Getting a patent

Last month, we were finally granted a patent and a few days ago, we received the document from the USPTO aka the Patent Office.

Our patent is the product of work done in the financial space whereby financial data was extracted from multiple electronic documents/reports (see some samples attached) and stored in a database.  From that converted data someone could do any analysis they wanted at any detail level they needed.

Data extraction happens in real time and access to it is instantaneous.  Continual use of it against new documents/reports expands the databases and informs the historicals.  More importantly the data can be massaged and manipulated any way you’d want to view trends, implications, test theses and outcomes, etc.  It is the mechanism, speed and accuracy that makes this unique for those who need information quickly to get ahead of a curve.

If you're interested in knowing more, you could read about it at :
http://www.google.com/patents/US20090234818

In view of getting this patent, several people asked me about how difficult it was and what the process was. We initially filed a provisional patent on March 12, 2008. So it took us over 6 years to finally get it. But that's not the point of this blog. Its about how easy it is to file the provisional patent, which will give you a patent pending status and a year to figure out whether or not you want to pursue the patent. This is really important as you can go out and find out whether your idea is invest-able, before embarking on the main patent process which can be time consuming and expensive.

You can do it yourself by going to the patent office website,
http://www.uspto.gov/

Have a look at the process itself,

Check out "Getting a Patent in 5 steps"

or you can use cost effective online legal portals like legal zoom, which make it fairly simple.

http://www.legalzoom.com/patents/provisional-patent-application-overview.html
All the best.

Finally a real author in the family

Seems like we finally have an author in the family. And its not me. Its Freia who has started writing for NYU Local.

NYU Local describes itself as
"We are NYU’s blog. Student-run and independently funded, our goal is to deliver all the discussion-worthy happenings in the school and city we call home. The site is conversational, the setup straightforward, and the information useful. Read our daily blend of original reporting and insightful commentary to learn about what’s happening at your university, in your neighborhood, and around the country. We’ll help you feel pretty damn connected to a school with no campus.

In the past five years, our alumni have moved onto prestigious jobs at publications including New York 1, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, MSNBC, Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. So check us out!"

And I'll let you check out Freia's writings at :
http://nyulocal.com/author/freia-lobo/

Be Nice

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from a close friend's father. It was a 1 line mail, "I would like to meet you". He lives in Delhi. I'm currently based in the US and live in Mumbai.

Last week I was on a work trip to Mumbai. I had planned to visit my friends Dad in Delhi over the weekend. And I made the trip last Sunday. I flew into Delhi in the morning, met him for a few hours and then headed back to the airport. As it turned out my flight back was delayed and U spent more time at the airport than the rest of the trip, but that's an entirely different story.

What was interesting was that no one seemed to believe that I was going to Delhi to meet a friends Dad. Everyone was convinced that I had some other work or meeting or agenda in Delhi. Anil, my friends brother put it in an interesting way, "How can anyone fly to another city to meet a friends dad based on a 1 line email. I wouldn't do it."

I thought about it and reached the exact opposite conclusion. Why wouldn't someone spend a day to fulfill a wish of someone who they;re close to, especially when the real cost is almost nothing. I guess its how you look at it.

In my view, being nice to whoever you can, whenever you can is always a great idea. Life has a way of coming a full circle. I've found that on many occasions the people we've been super nice to may not only not reciprocate, but sometimes be super nasty and try and harm us. And this leads several people to stop being nice or at the very least be selective about their niceness.

The way I look at it is that whilst this may be true, there are several occasions when strangers do nice things for us or amazing things just happen. I have no idea how, but its happened to me multiple times. So I'm going to continue being nice. Brings a smile to many people. Including me.