Republic Day Post

Today happens to be India's republic day. There's not much going on for me today apart from a get together for the building society.

There's been not much happening this week. I noticed on twitter, there were posts about facebook dying off in 2-3 years. I wouldn't be surprised if facebook was to stagnate within 5 years, there's only a handful of people on facebook that I want to stay connected to and most of them I already have on Skype. I guess google plus will still be around as its a nice way to keep track of bloggers who are on blogger.

I got back into trading metals, will try it for another 2-3 months and then see if the trading system stays profitable. The mental pressure has been very high for the first 2 days since I restarted trading metals. I'll still be looking at the start up scene and where I can help out. 

Third weekend in Jan

Well it's actually a Monday. I didn't really feel like writing on Sunday.

I joined the UX India group on Facebook and Linked In. Before that I joined the UX UAE group to see how UX (user experience) is being adopted in the country that I was schooled in.

My idea for a start up in 2012 has started to resurface. In 2012, the last idea for the start up was too restaurant specific. I'm now thinking of an app closer to yelp (the original inspiration for the app) where people can discover the latest products and services (including events) that are available within their locality or nearby.

My ultimate goals are to match consumers with providers or products or services that they need. Google helps quite a bit here but it depends on someone having quite a but of technical knowledge to develop a website to place the information on. Yelp goes a step further by allowing less technical reviewers to place information on a site. I'm thinking of developing an app that solves missing parts of the puzzle such as ranking popular products of a shop or popular event personnel (DJs or singers.)

Google, Yelp and review sites do a great job of helping consumers to connect to product and service providers but there are some areas where they just seem to overlook or may not have noticed problems worth solving.

Week 2 2014

That interview I went to was a mismatch. I put my total experience on jobsites such as Naukri as 6 years when the amount of sales specific experience I have is closer to 6 months.

Updating the amount of experience I have in a specific field and having a user experience profile as my default job profile still led to some business development job recommendations and even a call to shortlist me as a business development executive.

While I'm still open to business development and retail sales offers, I'm also eyeing jobs connected to user experience or customer development (along the lines of Steve Blank's definition.)

I started an occupation specific blog at http://stevejbayer.wordpress.com/ where I blog about start ups, customer development and user experience. There's also a http://uxkerala.wordpress.com for light ux posts that businesses, professionals or students in Kerala may be interested in.

I'll blog weekly here on blogspot for casual blogging every weekend (or a day later like today on Monday.)

Shifting to a sales career

I've been primarily working from home since early 2007. That's over 6 years of working from home. Since the start of the new year (2013/2014,) I've been looking for jobs in the retail sector. I like selling things especially when a customer really needs those items.

I accepted a job interview for selling financial products. My last occupation as a self employed, derivatives trader was linked to the financial industry and it is an organic move to shift over to selling financial products when financial trading doesn't work out.

I'm looking forward to moving into an office or shop atmosphere. Working from home can be quite stressful in the long run (not meeting people or at least my handlers face to face can't be healthy in the long run) and is probably why I didn't respond to some long term, remote employment offers that I received while being a Drupal themer.

I'm slightly breaking my new blog post every Sunday routine by posting on a Saturday.

Last Sunday of 2013

I haven't really done much this week apart from going out for Christmas lunch.

I've been spreading the word that I may start a mini department store to my online group. Andrew mentioned that flipping scooters in India might be profitable.

My cousin Enric Bayer got married today so I went for his wedding. Out of 20+ cousins, there are only three boys with the Bayer surname.

Quitting Derivatives Trading

I started financial trading in Indian markets in April 2011. Last week, I decided to quit trading derivatives as positive returns seemed to be permanently elusive.

It'd be nice if I could start a fund with the 4-5 stocks that seem to be long term earners. Had derivatives trading been successful, I'd have liked to be able to seed fund start ups (Kochi's start up village makes it easy to find new start ups.)

I'm now looking for a job. The search query that I'm using is "business analyst." I'd like to use the term information architect but the jobs connected to that title are few and far between in India and most queries end up leading to the term technical architect.

I'm also looking at starting up a small sports shop or maybe a small department store.

Blog every Sunday?

I've rebooted my blog multiple times.

I'll try to blog every weekend now.

Apart from going back to an older version of my trading system, I haven't really done much this week. I tried to get Christmas pudding yesterday but wasn't too successful.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I offered to help out with information architecture of sites for free for start ups in the #startups channel on freenode irc servers. Dave of http://fledglings.com took me up on that offer and I gave a few navigation and interface tips for their child care tracking app.

I'm still trying to sink into the fact that I found out that I have Scandinavian ancestry from my mom's side in 2010. That makes me a German Scandinavian Portuguese Malayalee/Keralan  Indian.

Here's Jessica Simpson (who probably has Scandinavian ancestry since she has a European surname that ends with the letter n although the Simpson name was formed in Scotland) most famous song 'With You' which I recently re-discovered today: