KACHARAGADLA

June provides a lot of distractions – end of school year activities, summer vacation planning – but also provides a natural inflection point for our annual goals. If your company has an official annual review process, now would be a good time to see if you’re on track to meet the company objectives and expectations. But for your own objectives – the career, relationship, health, finance and other critical goals you set for yourself – you also want to ensure you’re on track. Here are seven questions to guide your personal mid-year review: Are you halfway to your goal target? If your goal is a sales target, then you should be approximately halfway to your quota. If you intended to lose 10 pounds, then you should have lost five. If you wanted to put aside $5,000, you should have $2,500 in your fund. If you’re not halfway to your target, is there a legitimate reason to believe you’ll catch up in the second half? It could be that your sales pipeline is bursting and most decisions ge

Who hasn’t struggled to stay awake through a three-hour meeting, or left a department-wide pow-wow wondering what the point was? It’s amazing how many bad meetings we have to suffer through at work: Each month, people spend about  31 hours in unproductive meetings , and the U.S. spends a whopping  $37 billion  on salaries for hours spent in unnecessary meetings. As someone  running four growing companies , I have long understood that time is my most valuable asset. I also happen to have ADHD, so sitting through long meetings is extra difficult – especially if they lack focus. That’s why I’ve developed a framework to ensure every meeting I attend – or lead – is worthwhile. Make meetings more productive … and maybe even fun. Photo by Jeremy Jude Lee. Here are  10 quick tips to ensure your meetings aren’t time-wasters. 1. State The Objective How many times have you gone to a meeting with only a vague agenda and sat through a discussion with no end in sight?  The mo

AP Genco proposes to add 11,210 MWby 2022 The AP Transco will invest Rs. 8,521 crore in the next two years to strengthen its Extra High Voltage Transmission Network and increase power availability in the State. Likewise, the AP Genco will invest Rs. 65,249 crore during 2016-22 to add additional capacity of 11,210 MW, according to AP Transco CMD and AP Genco MD K. Vijayanand. Substations Addressing the press here on Tuesday, he announced the financial results of AP Transco and AP Genco for 2015-16. Mr. Vijayanand said that Transco proposes to construct 88 substations and 3,794-km line length during the next three financial years. The substations with the voltage levels of 132 kV, 220 kV, 400 kV would be constructed. Transco had also drawn up plans to construct 400 kV level ring main substations around the Capital region. These substations would come up at Eluru, Chilakaluripeta, Gudivada, Tullur/Inavolu, he said. Mr. Vijayanand said that the RTPP stage-IV, Na

Close to 2,500 sub-stations will have Points of Presence from where cable operators can take optic fibre to households. Andhra Pradesh is perhaps the first State to have obtained a telecom licence and it can issue phone numbers starting with the ‘797’ series from August this year! It indirectly got the opportunity to start an internet based telephone service ‘without requiring any further registration’ after it obtained permission from the Telecom Ministry for starting its own IPTV — Internet Protocol based Television network — as part of its Fibre Grid project. Although it primarily aims at providing affordable net connectivity in every corner of the State, “the government can provide free telephone services within the region through internet which means you can also skype and have video calls,” explains S. Harikrishna, Executive Director of A.P. State FibreNet Ltd, the special purpose vehicle. Tenders floated Tenders have already been called for making ava

C isco Systems designs, makes, and sells the routers, switches, and other networking equipment with which businesses connect their computers, manage data centers, and access the Internet. Since its founding in 1983 as a maker of multiprotocol routers, it has survived every market change through aggressive acquisition, sometimes of competing technologies. John Chambers, who led much of Cisco’s growth, retired as CEO in 2015, after 20 years, but continues to serve as executive chairman. Jason Pontin,  MIT Technology Review’ s editor in chief, spoke to Chambers in India, where he was conferring with Narendra Modi about the prime minister’s campaign to bring Internet access and services to the country’s vast population. What are the challenges in giving online access to nearly everyone in the world? The number one objective is that people who make the investment in digitization, whether they are governments or service providers, get a reasonable return. Some programs have not mov

With apologies to  Bill Clinton ’s electoral guru  James Carvell : it’s all about the content, stupid. That’s why  Microsoft   MSFT -0.22%  has just made one of the boldest moves in its history by spending more than  $26 billion on LinkedIn . In an age of hyper-connections, the acquisition – which values  LinkedIn LNKD -0.18%  at $196 a share – is a smart one. It needs to be after a series of high-profile failures, such as Microsoft’s  doomed $6 billion acquisition of the Nokia  mobile  business . This new deal means Microsoft can embed LinkedIn with Skype, its email system and other Microsoft enterprise products so that, in the words of  one Silicon Valley expert , it will be able ‘to recreate the connective tissue for enterprises.’ SAN FRANCISCO, CA – MARCH 30: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers the keynote address during the 2016 Microsoft Build Developer Conference on March 30, 2016 in San Francisco, California. The Microsoft Build Developer Conference runs through Ap