dont's comments

This is awesome - you should make yours an UI wrapper for existing well entrenched systems

Depends on what kind of companies you want to work for.

I don't think that the infosys's of the world care very much.

However if you do something cool - most product companies will definitely treat that as a plus - the benefit that you'll get will vary from being preferentially interviewed to being hired outright for your project. However, this requires your project to be something significant and in the general line of business of the company.

That said, I would argue that you should do this project for your own benefit and not for the college's or your future employer's. Pick a reasonably difficult project and the amount that you'll learn would be way more than you've learnt in 4 years of engineering school.

I highly recommend contributing a module to an open-source project as an option

I tend to see the software world as divided between "Tools" and "Platforms"

Platforms are systems that enable a large number o similar behaviors -- Google is the search platform, Amazon the shopping platform, Windows is a platform as is MS Office. Platforms tend to be a winner take all business, as there are significant advantages to scale as well as strong network effects.

Tools on the other hand do one thing and one thing well. Most products start off as tools - then there are 2 ways to go, either become a platform (eg: facebook) or get bought by a platform (eg: flickr).

I don't see how dropbox is going to be worth $5B as a file sharing tool, nor do I see any platform buying them at that price.

So my question really is -- what is the dropbox platform gonna look like? What do the investors know that we don't?

The OP is ill informed.

Devices are meant to be landscape oriented because our field of vision is landscape oriented - and it feels natural to have most of your field of view occupied by what you're primarily engaged in.

This is the reason books are landscape oriented once opened, so are newspapers (broadsheets both when opened and folded, tabloids when unfolded)

Also our shoulders are about 1.5-2 feet apart - so portrait orientations are uncomfortable to hold.

Columnar rivers of text, when laid out correctly (without requiring a vertical scroll) on a landscape oriented tablet "feel" natural -- and is the right thing to do instead of filling empty spaces with attention stealing widgets.

Infact you can attempt similar multi-column layouts on the web, albeit with limited success, like on most of the apple.com site and the erstwhile International Herald Tribune iht.com site (before it got merged into the NYT site)

Invoice Factoring or "Receivables Securitization" only happens when the receivables are well established. That is, when the invoice has been generated and accepted by customer.

No legitimate funding exists before the invoices are crystalized. Definitely not for "FUTURE" invoice

Talking about the talent that is sitting on these (very) long benches...

First, lets look at how Microsoft structures its business in India. Even the mighty Microsoft follows a stratified talent pool system. They have 2 companies / teams here. The one that builds their products is called Microsoft R&D and the people there are _GOOD_. Whereas all their global internal IT systems needs are supported by Microsoft IT Services, which is staffed by simpler developers who are not good enough to contribute to products, but can cut all the HTML needed as well as make all the CURD applications that the business operations need.

Indian IT companies are no different, they have a small cadre of excellent developers, who form the core of their teams, and are very busy -- even now. The rest of the millions are poor developers, not algorithmically sound, but can make simple CURD applications.

Its this second layer that fills up the benches. And they are not going to be valuable contributors to any of the projects you've picked -- (unless of course you want coded an Add/Update form on the project's website ;)

If you look at the biggest revenue earners for Indian IT you'll realise its this kind of internal CURD applications. Why should an Indian IT company hire super smart developers, when it makes more by hiring (_and billing for_) many warm bodies who'll hand code stuff because they are not smart enough to create their own frameworks?