It has become a familiar story in India, Bangalore in particular. Fly-by-night companies, crop up in shiny new technology parks, lure fresh engineering graduates with the promise of a world class training and a lucrative job, in return for a security deposit, and then disappear without a trace (and of course with the security deposit). […]
Orpheus Cloud – Our fraud management tool in the cloud.
It’s been two weeks since we hosted our fraud management solution in the cloud. It is purely for demo purposes, and the feedback so far has been positive. I thought I should share with you some of the thought processes that went into hosting the solution in the first place. We announced a free trial […]
PBX Fraud – Fast catching up as the mother of all frauds.
According to the 2011 Global Fraud Loss Survey conducted by Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA), the top two fraud types in the Telecommunication industry are Subscription Fraud and Compromised PBX System Fraud (circa $10 billion in combined dollar loss). While PBX fraud has been around for many years it has only taken centre stage as […]
Big Data – Is this the end of the road for traditional Data warehouse?
Data Warehousing is close to my heart as I’ve spent a significant part of my career building, modelling or architecting large and complex data warehouses and analytics systems. If I am not building one, I am certainly using one. Finding the data sources, cleaning and loading them into structured star schemas and deriving intelligence has […]
Attrition – How bad can it be?
As a start-up, how do you deal with staff attrition? I thought I didn’t have to write about this for a good few years but there you go. A few thoughts on how we must let go and build a relationship even after the contractual connection has ended. It was just another normal week in […]
Our office – A place where we enjoy each other’s company.
I thought I’ll write about where we are based and a bit about our neighbourhood. We are in a place called HSR Layout, a leafy suburb south of Bangalore, about 20kms from the city centre. We spend our time here designing and developing our products, finding and learning new technologies, cracking problems, figuring out how […]
Scientific Management – Taylorism at its best.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the pioneers in scientific management, argued, a century ago, that management shouldn’t be an art; instead a carefully selected set of scientific principles that should focus on systematic collection of knowledge about work processes, creation of tried and tested procedures for performing tasks and ruthless application of workforce efficiency. By […]
Choosing Technologies – How difficult can this be?
Like most start-ups, there comes a time when important decisions are made on the choice of technologies for product development. Where there are a plethora of options, the straight rule of thumb is to go with whatever the team collectively is familiar with. However, if a team is yet to be formed, it makes things […]
Expenses Fraud – Train your eyes to spot the red flags.
Expenses Fraud may not be as big as other forms of occupational fraud but nonetheless it’s a soft target and considerable damage could be done, at short periods, if not nipped in the bud. According to a report by ACFE, a typical organisation loses about 5% of its revenues to occupational fraud and 15% of […]
Statistical models – Should we trust them for detecting fraud?
Statistical models are ubiquitous, from predicting the next wind direction in the Atlantic to whether you are about to buy a Beatles tune from Amazon. Statistical models have also been used widely to predict fraud among mobile subscribers. The object is to eliminate fraud as soon as it occurs. However, more often than not, legitimate […]
