Idea is NOT a machine thing

“Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, that is way great spiritual giants are produced.” - Swami Vivekananda

The above thought of Swami Vivekananda holds good is every field and should not be considered as bounded around only spirituality.


Idea is not a machine thing. This sentence seems to be somewhat messy in first reading but leave that and let me know about your thoughts. What is running in your mind, right now? An idea or a thought ? It's the human mind which generates an idea in form of thoughts. If you don’t have any ideas running in your mind then please finish this article and then each thought of yours will pop up as an idea for sure. How many of you can sit and meditate on a new idea? Do you have an idea? Or let me frame in this way, do you have your own idea about any thought around you. Aha! You have one, Congratulation! friend, but where can you share it? These are the questions which you should ask yourself before reading further. Many of us are already sharing our thoughts socially on "Socially" and I am not an exception too.

Each idea follows the simple rule of evolution - "Upgrade and Update”. This way new idea generates and great mind like yours start receiving more blood. The people, like you and me, who are part of digital word are following a kind of "Digital Culture" and no doubt we are good followers and free advertisers. In this digital world, you are already part of someone's idea and you are literally living with those ideas which were not yours, but of the think tanks sitting in Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Honda...etc who are continuously making your phones, gizmos, computers, cars and everything without which you will not be considered as a complete human being. These products define your life and how you spend your time. Someone shows you a cloud and say there is a fairy that fulfills all your wishes with a touch of your finger in this magical device. Come on! kid just 5oo$ touch the sky. Well, the fairy behind the cloud is nothing but ideas manifested in a form of smart machines and applications running on it. Idea sells. Let’s meditate on one of them for a while without internet (without googling around, disconnect your internet and then think..) and your mind will stop working. All the flow of fresh blood into your brain will stop and you may start searching F1 and F5 buttons in the mirror on the wall near you, like me. Moreover, if you could sustain that pressure of processing on these ideas for a while, you will probably end up crashing into your bed within two minutes. Shutter down!! and shutdown!!. This is what happened to me when I started thinking about "Touch Screens". Can you believe how a mind reacted against an idea of “Touch screens”? Mine switched off itself.

Thus, now an idea not only controls a machine, in fact, it controls a human mind (like mine, it shutdowns!) virtually hiding behind a dark cloud which you cannot see. There are advantages and disadvantages of this but it depends on you how you use those external ideas for your own ideas. Innovation can be cooked in your kitchen if you have the right tools and a correct approach. Let's get out of the war of Microsoft and Sun; Apple and Adobe; who are restricting innovation to languages’ and platforms for their own profits. A new idea will sprout in one mind and will keep igniting other minds for sure to make our lives simpler and easier. Therefore, look around and replace whatever is complex because if you would not do it now then somebody else would. The real fun is who does it first is known as an innovator.


For instance, suppose you have a web based phone (everyone already has) capable of using 3-G network and a third party platform which can be used as an engine for multimedia streaming ( audio, video , fax etc . processing ) which can be used for developing various applications. What you can do with it?? Any ideas?? Think for two minutes, you will feel thoughts popping out. Still, no ideas, please read below:


Dialogic launched a contest to check out innovations on its platforms. Those who don't know about Dialogic let me introduce what dialogic does. Dialogic provides various engines for voice, fax, video and other media streaming which serves as platforms for various development works round the globe. It claims “making innovation thrive” as per its tagline. The Innovator Contest from Dialogic provided following tools for the contestants companies 1. web based Telephone 2. 3G Network and 3. Dialogic platform(open-standards).


The grand prize winner was Almira Labs from Spain. They won for an application that allows 3G mobile phone users to take as many videos as they'd like and then retrieve them by video calling the Video Notes service. A variation of these applications allows 3G mobile phone users to quickly and easily send video messages to multiple recipients at once. This application is ideal for the hearing impaired community or helpful in countries where patients live far from their doctors so doctors can "see" the symptoms. The runner-up was CreaLog from Germany, who developed an application they call "Cabfish," a location-based taxi ordering application for the iPhone. This Voice Portal application is available in more than 40 languages and allows a customer to order a taxi by simply pressing a button on his or her mobile phone. The GPS position of the mobile is sent to a server, which converts the position into a postal address. Then, the Voice Portal calls a local taxi station (in the local language) and the ordering result in displayed on the customer's mobile phone. Honorable mentions include Bay Talkitec from India for their Mobile Video Yellow Pages application, Calltech from Columbia for their "Click to Call" Facebook application, and EGTEK Co., Ltd. from Korea for their voice analyzing "Love Meter" application.

Irony is, I knew about Dialogic capabilities but I could not think of any such ideas when I posed the same question on myself which I posed to you. Is something wrong with my thinking patterns?


No doubt, all the above mentioned companies are core product based companies and their business pattern, life style and cultures are quite different from a service based company like Keane but, Keane is already part of a family called Knowledge Based Industry. If you are not updating yourself in this industry you will be outperformed by someone smarter. As per my business acumen, only two things sells in this Knowledge Based Industry "Innovation" and "Quality of Service". Innovation is the faster way to capture the mood as it takes less time than “QoS”. I hope now by this time your will have some idea what I was trying to convey. Please remember idea is not a machine thing. Look inside yourself, look outside around and it is already there in your mind, your own new born idea.