Archive for September, 2006|Monthly archive page
Grand Opening Ceremony
Leave a CommentOn a lighter note (to the previous post), the opening of the new wafer fab was accompanied by a Grand Opening Ceremony.
The ceremony started with the Company Communication Meeting by our CEO, Tao Chow, followed by:
1. Giving out gifts to the Recreation Committee members. I’m one of them 
. We got these little alarm clocks for our desks.
2. Presentation about new wafer fab.
3. 5-year anniversary for employees
4. Raffles
5. Recognizing new employees
It ended with some great food and fresh orange juice
-Prashant.
A new day at Excelics
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Excelics has just opened its new 4″ wafer fab at the DeGuigne office. Prior to this, we had a 3″ wafer fab at our Santa Clara office. Now, with the new and bigger wafer fab, production is expected to become more effective and efficient.
More importantly, it is an essential step towards achieving the revenue and profit projections that Tao outlined today in his presentation to the company. As of now, Excelics’ bottom line is still red. And the company is 11 years old. However, the future seems to be looking good and the management is confident of breaking even soon and being quite profitable by 2010.
I think they’re right. Although I’ve been here for less than a year, I can somehow sense a feeling of renewed hope around me. Something tells me that this company is actually going to hit or at least come really close to the ambitious projections that Tao has laid out.
In the 11 years of it’s existence, Excelics has been unfortunately hit time and again by unforeseen circumstances that the company wasn’t really prepared for. These included the Asian Economic Crisis as well as the Dot Com bust.
Now, however, sales have picked up again and we are at the border line of profitability. There has also been a greater investment in upgrading the facilities (new wafer fab), hiring more personnel and developing new products. The Transceiver, for example, that Excelics indigineously developed and started producing last year, has been a huge success. The demand is so high that Excelics finds it difficult to produce as many transceivers as the customers want. There have been some shuffles in the top management as well. My supervisor, Eric Casida, was bumped up to the CTO position and the old-CTO cum founder, RT Chen, was given the boot.
I will be writing my business case on Excelics Semiconductor pretty soon and in the process, finding out a lot more about this company. I guess my assessment would be more accurate at that stage and it would be interesting to compare it with what I’ve written now
-Prashant.
Second Life servers hacked!
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I got an email from Second Life today. It had a link to this article on their website.
Apparently, there has been a huge database breach at Linden Labs (the creators of Second Life). The hackers were able to access and steal the encrypted passwords and encrypted credit card information of all 642, 720 users of Second Life. Amusingly, Linden Labs mentions that users’ unencrypted credit card information was not compromised. Yea right! Is that supposed to make the users feel safer?
Anyways, Linden Labs has reset the passwords of all users. With Second Life growing in popularity in the recent past, this was just the thing that they did NOT need at this time. With the credit card information of hundreds of thousands of users potentially compromised, this could be a nightmare for the guys at Linden Labs.
Luckily, I had signed up only to check this thing out and so I never gave in my credit card information.
Prashant.
Innovate Incisively, a talk by Tom Buckholtz
NUSEA Mentorship is proud to present…
INNOVATE INCISIVELY
Gain Impact… Save Time… for your customers, company, and colleagues.
A talk by Tom Buckholtz, PhD., Business Advisor and Executive Coach.
Location: 465 Fairchild Dr Suite 207, Mountain View, CA (map)
When: Wednesday, September 13, 6:30pm
About the Speaker:
Dr. Thomas J. Buckholtz helps enterprises and individuals define and achieve business strategies, develop and market products and services, augment corporate culture, and work effectively. He anticipates that his GIST thinking tools will catalyze a global enhancement in business and personal effectiveness.
Tom has led a $1 billion business unit, corporate operations for startups, and automation endeavors. He helped pioneer several technologies. As a Commissioner in the United States General Services Administration, he served as co-chief information officer for the federal government’s 4,000,000-person Executive Branch and also as GSA’s CIO; his team catalyzed the early 1990s nationwide grassroots movement that spotlighted improving governmental service for the United States national agenda. He catalyzed innovation and $100 million in recurring annual benefits throughout Pacific Gas and Electric Company and established a new business practice in the world software marketplace. Tom authored Information Proficiency: Your Key to the Information Age. His concepts led to the creation of the Palos Verdes Estates (California, U.S.A.) Shoreline Preserve, a Rotary International service program, and two business practices that streamlined the U.S. federal government’s acquiring billions of dollars per year of information-technology products and services. Tom earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, after receiving a B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. He completed business administration programs at Stanford University and the University of Michigan.
For more information about Tom, please visit www.human-landscaping.com/buckholtz
The event is absolutely FREE of cost. Refreshments will be provided.
For further queries, contact Prashant at 650.483.8458
-Prashant
Launch of the Rainmakers Blog
We at NUSEA just launched our new blog – Rainmakers, a couple of weeks back.
Rainmakers will be the primary mouthpeace for NUSEA where various NUSEA members as well as guest writers will talk about:
- Entrepreneurship
- Business
- Marketing
- Updates from Silicon Valley
- Events in and around Silicon Valley
- and other random musings by aspiring entrepreneurs from Singapore.
This blog will be of interest to anyone associated with entrepreneurship, business, Silicon Valley and Singapore. Do check it out. We hope you enjoy it!
Prashant.
When kids write…
Kids say the darnest things… But that’s nothing compared to what they can come up with when asked to write!
Check out this list of metaphors and analogies that teachers from across America found in some high school essays…
Haha… this was perhaps one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while! My personal favorites are:
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
and
24. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
Prashant
Tags: humor kids high+school metaphors analogies
Finding confidential documents with Google
Want to find a confidential document using the Google search engine?
Well it’s a no-brainer actually…
Search for confidential: “do not distribute” on Google and voila!
I guess Q is gonna add the Google search engine to Bond’s arsenal of super cool weapons really soon…
Prashant.
Tech Tags: Google confidential search
