| Vaidehi Bhashyam Mehta | — @mehta_vaidehi

Young people aspiring to be content writers regularly send me articles to review. I appreciate their efforts.

Beyond that, there’s little to appreciate in them. Most are mundane and very boring. There’s no originality; they swipe from the Internet quite unabashedly. Control+C and Control+V build the bulk of their articles. They are very minimalistic when it comes to punctuation, including the use of the upper case. Apostrophes, when used, are more like decorations to create plurals and, often, just dispensed with for possessives.

For example: “Kumars code’s are superb….”

The title of this blog is self-explanatory. In this post I am going to tell you what is wrong with the way people—especially those under the age of 40—write today, my understanding of why this is so, and how it is quite simple to make them better.

Exceptions:

Of...

| Sankar Nagarajan |

The key to minimising your business risks during Cloud Migration is understanding the Cloud Service Level Agreement.

If you are an enterprise looking at moving your IT operations including business software applications to the Cloud , evaluation and monitoring of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of the Cloud service providers as a part of your risk management plan is crucial to your business outcomes.

Recently, in the press, was news about a massive Cloud services outage in Alibaba Cloud hit businesses—both small and large in size—in North China hard.

The primary objective of the SLA-based risk assessment of a Cloud Vendor is to ensure high availability of your IT operations on the Cloud so that your business continuity is taken care of in a predictable manner with low financial risks.

Illustration

Amazon Web Services (AWS) with its cloud compute SLA...

| Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi | - @dodosamuel

Wondering why Influx did not do a social media post this year on 08 March? Here’s why…

Per Influx tradition, the ladies took themselves off for a company-sponsored lunch on Women’s Day. While we were out, our CEO decided to pen us a letter. Having stuffed ourselves silly, we returned to office to this treat:

Dear Ladies @ Influx,

I hope you all had a lovely lunch without us noisy boys around. :)

The world decided that on 08 March, we will celebrate International Women’s Day to express our gratitude to the women of the world. And so, today, we celebrate you—celebrating the social, economic, cultural, political and, of course, personal achievements of women.

You know how they always say—there are angels around us protecting us from harm every single day. I look around at my life and background and all I can say is that’s what in many...

| Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi | - @dodosamuel

This is a re-post of Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi’s blog, Musings of a Biker. The post appeared on 02 March 2019 as a response to the recent capture and release of Wg Cdr Abhinandan Varthaman in Pakistan.

Dear Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman,

Thank you for your service
and Welcome Home!

There is a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes as I pen this.

What has happened with the Indian military services and the Pakistani military services is something that I will not comment on. Purely as facts are often not as clear as they seem.

Social media, and our actual media, is adrift with various theories and accusations and what not. Therefore, I am not qualified to make comments. Most importantly, I was not there to know how and what happened and, importantly, will never be able to understand the stress and emotions that you and your family...

| Sujith Subbiah |

A few days after I joined Influx Worldwide, I was working on resolving a bug when I was drawn into a conversation. The discussion was about providing server-costings for a client’s ticketing website — they were looking to migrate to one of the popular cloud platforms. After looking through several sheets, reading through numerous blogs and meeting with some high-profile people, we presented the client with the numbers.

These numbers were for a classic web server architecture (a few high-spec computers somewhere inside the data centre of a cloud platform) and I believed they were ideal, considering the number of screens involved and volume of transactions handled per month.

The story continues

A few weeks passed and I gained a little more understanding about the cinema domain. I felt there was a lot of disconnect between how the ticketing backend system were...

| Gopinath Premnath | - @thambi_balo

Virat Kohli’s average impact against the seamers is 2.16m away from his stumps in the current series against Australia, which is the most by any visiting batsman ever in an Australian Test series.

Rafael Nadal has saved 70.46% of the breakpoints when serving and converted 45.57% of the breakpoints while receiving serve in the 2018 tennis season.

Lionel Messi has 14 goals and 10 assists this season which is the highest in all leagues in Europe despite him missing more than a month of football.

These are just a few intriguing statistics — amongst a whole lot of other statistics — that I have read this past week.

Stats Stats Stats

Statistics has been a key element of modern-day sports for over the past twenty years. It has not only become an integral part of strategy but has also enhanced the viewer- and engagement-experience of sports fans...

| Harish Anand Thilakan | - @TheSharck

After the success of our campaign, Making Cinemas Great Again, aimed at the US market, we took the opportunity to attend the Emerging Cinema Markets Conference in Istanbul last week to announce a unique programme to bring the latest in digital design and technology to cinemas in Africa.

We titled it It’s Showtime For Africa and announced that any cinema that originated from, and operates in, any of the African countries would be eligible to work with Influx and gain access to our full suite of products, including ticketing websites, mobile applications, kiosks, food and beverage ordering systems and more — at no cost at all. Click here to get in touch with us for more information.

The proposition

We will work with the qualifying cinemas to help set attainable business targets and dedicate a full year to achieving those targets. In the event of...

| Vaidehi Bhashyam Mehta | — @mehta_vaidehi

In the course of your career, you will have written, read and replied scores of emails. So, it is essential that we understand the fundamentals of business email writing.

We write business emails to:

• ask for information
• share information
• exchange views and opinions
• fix meetings

Every email is different from the next in many ways, but here are some common points to bear in mind when you are writing one:

1. Start with a good subject line

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, if you want your email or message to be read, your subject line should draw the reader’s attention.

Pitch Meeting - (name of client) - 10 a.m., (date) makes better sense than Meeting or Pitch.

2. Keep it simple

You want the recipient of your email to understand your message, and understand it fast. You don’t want to confuse the reader, so keep your writing simple...

| Daniel Anandaraj Garnipudi | - @dodosamuel

The past couple of weeks have been a somewhat stressful with incredible deals having to be delivered at work. Of course, there have been stress-related outbursts. Every outburst turned out to be related to some other factor and the reason for the outburst was just a culmination of, perhaps, many small things which added to my stress.

Stress, if not managed correctly, can lead to unwanted pressures. And such pressures, like slowly growing pimples, will get bigger and bigger till they explode.

I am not talking about “chronic” stress that could lead to depressions, but rather what is termed as “acute” stress – stress related to pressures of the recent past or near future and — importantly — the present. A review that perhaps didn’t go as well as you would have liked, a big event coming up in your life, or even being late to work due to...