Random Bytes...

Moving my blog to a new address...

2007-01-30T14:43:00.000+01:00

Folks,

I have moved my blog to a new address - http://www.raghucs.com

I have *not* moved all the posts from here but only moved the ones which had a reasonable number of hits.

From now onwards I will not be making any further postings here.

-Raghu

Update

2007-01-25T13:58:00.000+01:00

I am in the process of moving my blog here onto my domain and am busy working out where to host it to, to use wordpress or stick with blogspot etc.

Amidst all this I have not been able to make my regular quota of postings on my blog. Please bear with me for another week.

Thanks

5 Stages on the 'S' Curve as a Blogger

2007-01-19T13:54:00.000+01:00

I think that there are 5 important stages that a blogger passes through as he establishes and drives his blog up the popularity curve,

Stage 1 - Starting the 'S' curve
Almost every average blogger who starts blogging starts here. Key characteristics at this stage,

Minimal focus on the content itself (assuming that you are an average starter like me)
Drive is to post rather than worry too much about the niche / quality etc of the posting
Low to Medium exposure to other blogs in areas that you broadly want to cover
Getting people to read your blog is the only focus - monetizing your blog is hopefully low on the list.

Stage 2 - Beginning the Climb up the curve
As you make some postings and hopefully get some people reading your blog there are quite a few changes that one can see in the characteristics above,

You feel your have some people reading your postings and start feeling the pressure of living up to what ever expectations that you have created in their minds.
Meeting expectations means that you don't want to blog every idea that comes to your mind - some focus on content and quality starts coming in
As you have started blogging the exposure to other blogs in increasing - you pick ideas on how and what to blog - this some what conditions the mind
Getting more traffic and starting to monetize your blog become objectives for you.

Stage 3 - Climb past the tough incline on the curve
As you traffic and postings increase you are starting to both benefit and face the challenges from the increased readership

You have more people reading and hopefully contributing on your blog which makes idea generation for content easier
Network effects start kicking in and your avenues for monetizing the revenue increase - well of course more options means more complications too !
More people means more expectations - time that you might need to spend would increase and that makes it tougher
You chose your niche in Stage 2 and now your increasing set of reader condition and narrow it down a little further - you are somewhat forced to restrain yourself to what your readers want. Of course you can take the approach that you keep your niche and lose some readers on the way !

Stage 4 - Reap the benefits of the tough climb
Further down the road and its time to reap the benefits of the tough climb up the curve

Your network is so strong that it can sustain with minimal contribution from you - the day you probably stop spending time in building the network your simply slip back to the earlier stages
People look up to you as a thought leader in your chosen niche and you again get the chance to widen your scope - you are leading your network in addition to their guiding you
Monetizing your blog is much simpler now - any option you choose would mostly work with a little tweaking may be
You abilities in being able to network with the other thought leaders is put to a thorough test

Stage 5
Having been in Stage 4 for a while I guess the blogger needs to realize that it is time for him to either innovate or saturate. Some of the options that come to my mind at athis point for a blogger are,

Sell off and restart the journey on a new S curve
Get your users to graduate on a new S curve - could be a different focus (albeit related), an entirely new way of taking your network along

Of the millions of blogs that enter the S curve hardly a handful of them graduate through the various stages. Irrespective of the stage of your blogging career that you are in the following exhaustive list of resources should be of great great help to help you move further or at least not slip backwards !

Commenting on my blog - a request !

2007-01-18T14:28:00.000+01:00

I was reading Dion's blog today at the end of his posting I read his request for comment which read "Web 2.0 is about participation! Visitors are strongly encouraged to leave comments...".

The key point that stuck me was Web 2.0 is all about communication, interaction and collective wisdom. On my blog however, although on an average I get about 100+ visitors which is good news for me, but my readers hardly leave any comments for me which is not :-(

I honestly urge you to leave comments on my blog (anonymously at least) which will go a long way in,

Improve the quality of my posting - I am sure that I must have a long way to go before I can be confident and comfortable about the quality of the postings that I am making.
Improve the relevance of postings - If I get some comments on my blog I get a handle to work towards improving the relevance of my postings to my readers. It will help me not waste time on irrelevant posting that is not required.
Ideas for content - I must have read that comments are a source for blog posting ideas on almost all sites which provide some tips on this area. So folks please help me out !

Product Development 2.0

2007-01-18T14:06:00.000+01:00

Any blog that you visit on technology is talking about the extremely powerful Web 2.0 concepts such as harnessing the collective intelligence, focusing on end users/customers as co-creators, and turning the applications into platforms.

Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog that I track for write ups on this topic today had a posting titled "Product Development 2.0" and there were some interesting points that were discussed there.

For a young company which is launching itself into developing a product many of ideas / items listed in the note are probably ones which would not make a lot of sense.

I categorize the points that are listed into 3 broad areas and try to address why young companies might 'resist' or take longer the need to make the transition if they have to survive,

Stakeholder Interaction and Transparency
Product Development and Ownership
Definition of Competitive Advantage

Some of the points that I feel Dion has missed out in this transition into the Product 2.0 development approach are,

Risk Reward Structure - The 'firm' is taking most of the risk in terms of monetizing the product but with substantial support from its users etc. If users contribute at any stage - requirements definition, design, development, testing etc I am not sure if they would simply take the product and be happy ?
Segmentation and Targeted Products - If a firm wants to have multiple versions / tracks for different customer segments - how would we handle this in this model ?
Prioritisation and Sequencing Approach - I agree that collecting a database of intentions is a good idea and would go a long way in interacting with end customers but I think this should also be backed up with a very good process to process that database and ensure that reverse communication is done with the co-creators.

Tags: web 2.0, product development 2.0

How to be creative - ChangeThis Manifestos

2007-01-15T11:32:00.000+01:00

Today I read about a manifesto titled “How to be Creative” on Guy's blog and was very impressed at not only the specific manifesto but also with the idea. So I went to ChangeThis and read up a few more manifesto's.

So what is ChangeThis - read on how they introduce themselves just read their manifesto here.

I went through the following 5 manifestos before writing out this post

6 Tips to make activity tracking mind maps more effective

2007-01-15T10:47:00.000+01:00

I have been using mind maps towards tracking my several activity threads for the last few months. I must say that it has been a great enriching experience and I have benefited a lot in by this effort. Some clear benefits that I have realized are,

Gives me a clear view of my tasks and activities.
Allows me to plan better and keep myself updated of all threads.
Far lesser number of activities seem to slip between the cracks

Some of the tips that I mention below might prove useful to you folks in case you are also using mind maps for the purpose of activity tracking,

Don't completely delete threads which are closed from the map - Many a times tasks are closed but can open up and I would suggest to have a closed thread's branch under which all the activities closed (at least the important ones) can be placed month wise.
Load the mind map with information - Most of times action thread have mails, documents, presentations, views, discussions, MoM's associated with them. Without this information the mind map is not a complete information base that it can be. So remember to link up you mind map nodes with the information on them.
Tag your mind map branches and nodes with icons - In my understanding a mind map should not only provide you with a single interface to all your activity threads it can and should also provide you an idea of when and what that goes with the activities. Tag the nodes with the relevant icons to the best extent possible.
Branch dedicated to 'recurring activities' - Irrespective of the job you are doing you would always have a list of recurring activities that could occur daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly of yearly. It really pays off to organize all these recurring activities under one branch and review them as frequently as necessary
Highlight dependencies - In many cases one of your activities are linked on other activities on your map. Make it a point to link these together. This provides you a very good view of how your threads are dependent on each other and helps you a lot in prioritization of your activities.
Spread the word - Any project is team work and you getting more productive is only part of the success. The more and more people use this technique on your team the better it is for everybody. If you are convinced that mind mapping is a good technique, I would suggest that you use it for a few weeks and then take it on you to get at least 2/3 members in your project to get using it.

Top Trends at CES

2007-01-12T00:03:00.000+01:00

Well CES is winding down and was reading today at GigaOM a posting titled "Top 5 trends at CES" which are, Content Everywhere, Mobile TV, Location Aware, High Def, Storage Jump

When I read the posting to me it appeared that there were just one word which stood out - "CONTENT".

Well what is so unexpected about it after all a event usually makes an attempt to address the top of mind issue at that point in time, in the process further contributes to the trend itself.

I dont think anybody today argue's if or not content is king - further with user generated content catching up in all forms of content focus on content only will increase. So what are the top issues that one would face in the coming year (s) around this word CONTENT

1. Create, Store and Share Content both offline and online
2. Experience Content at each place in the most convenient way - Location aware content, Mobile TV, High Definition devices

So as is expected this area is mostly evolving and products released this year in these areas would go some way in hastening this movement. Read some of the CES press releases here

Tags: ces, mobile tv, content, user generated content

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

2007-01-11T23:27:00.000+01:00

I came across this brilliant compilation of visualization methods that exist in a highly innovative periodic table arrangement. You can have a look here “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.”

I have not yet gone through the table completely myself, but just looking at a couple of cells on the periodic table I am in highly impressed at the thinking behind the arrangement and the innovative approach.

In case you are interested to read a little bit more about how the creators of this artifact Ralph Lengler & Martin J. Eppler worked on this, you can have a look at their short paper titled "Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management"

Keeping my blog up to date - Monthly Review (Dec 2006)

2007-01-11T17:03:00.000+01:00

Was reading an interesting item today titled "How To Market Your Blog in 2007" at ProBlogger.net and it occurred to me that I have not reviewed my blog in Dec 2006. I did a quick review and here is a summary,

I took a quick look at the nature of topics I was blogging on and coupled with a study of the type of content that people are coming to my blog for, and I decided to re-look on the blogging categories that I was focusing on. I decided to prune down the list based on the following considerations for every blog post of mine,

Attract new traffic to my blog
Retain traffic on my blog
Get personal 'satisfaction' from writing that blog entry

Keeping in mind the above factors, I have decided the following as my focus areas,

Blogging Topics - Tips, Suggestions, Corporate Blogging
Indian Business Scenario - Indian Retail, Indian Telecom scenario
Telecommunication - Technology focus in this domain
Web 2.0 - Technologies, Business Models etc.
Mindmaps - Tools, tips, techniques
News - What is current in today's scenario, but focused on technology, business
Ramblings - Some random brainwaves that come to my mind with my spin on that
Others - a sudden surge to blog about something but does not fall into any of the above categories

Continue focus on 'commenting' on popular blogs and get traffic from them. Over the last few days/weeks I have been regularly commenting on JohnChow.com the benefits are quite visible. Last month 35% of my visitors were courtesy JohnChow.com . I propose to choose a set of 3 blogs this month to add to John's site to take this exercise forward. However, one point is that the traffic from JohnChow.com increased substantially after he added the top commentators segment on his blog, and I was thinking of starting commenting on popular blogs which have this feature on.
Over the few 100 blogs that I have seen there are a few initiatives that I liked and I propose to implement them on mine too,

Cover a blog a week. I will choose blogs which have a popularity and fall in my area of focus to start this exercise
Will make a monthly posting of the blogs that I liked in all what I saw that month
Target at least one interview to post on my blog per month.

On the advertising front, I thought I was using too many options and I have removed things which don't seem to work at least for me. Starting today I have removed Text Link Ads and the Amazon Affliliates Program - I currently have the following streams, Google Adsense, Chitika Minimalls, BlogKits and Adbrite running on my network.

Some quick facts ...

Daily Traffic (average in month of Dec) - 200 page views / day
Money Earned - Still not anything substantial, and I will keep it with me

Targets for this month - Push the traffic to at least 300 page views / day.

Apple Launches iPhone

2007-01-10T13:32:00.000+01:00

One of the most interesting and most Digged items in the web world yesterday was Apple’s Launch of the iPhone. I will not aim to give you any pointers to people covering this launch, simply proceed to any site that you like and am reasonably sure that you will find a mention of the iPhone. Well come on guys Apple is always known for its innovation and ability to come out with products which are strikingly different from what ever exists in the market at that point of time. Just think of the Mac, iPod and now the iPhone.

In today’s already over crowded mobile device market what were the drivers that Apple thought it can capitalize on to launch ‘another’ mobile phone. To me I see the following as the top factors

The rate at which people change their mobile is much faster than any product before – in fact it’s even faster than the PC’s also. Apparently people change mobile phones every 15-18 months and that gives Apple two benefits,

It’s target addressable market does not run the risk of saturating at least in the near future - new mobile users are increasing in some markets (BRIC countries for example) where as people are changing mobiles in some of the mature markets.

When a consumer keeps changing his or her mobile phone every 15-18 months who better than an innovative company like Apple to take benefit from this.

Although Apple has sold over 40 Million iPod’s and has been a hugely successful product for Apple – it needs to realize that the media is converging and users might move on to other products which support multimedia (voice, internet, audio, and video).

Below is how Apple describes its new kid of the block

“iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a wide screen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight hand-held device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone”

What I like about the iPhone,

As you can always expect from an Apple device the iPhone has an excellent design.
One of the most interesting features for me is the ‘touch sensor’ which in some sense removes the distinction between a portrait and landscape mode – this is great. Have not seen it in any ‘mobile device’ till date.
Supports convergence to a good extent – telephony, internet and features of its iPod all rolled into one device

What I don't like about the product,

The device is a quad band GSM Phone – In today’s scenario where 3G is the upcoming technology can’t understand the reasoning for this. Well yes the US in general is way behind on ‘mobile technology adoption’ and I guess this product suits most there
Touch screen – This is good for a low interaction device such as the iPod, but for something like a convergence device I think it might cause some problems to users
Cost – I sure think that it’s a costly device. But for such a product which company does not think of milking the market anyways
What does memory cost – why should at all anybody differentiate in price on a 4GB memory device and a 8 GB memory device.

What I would like in the coming versions,

GPRS, EDGE, and 3G support for sure
Lower Price :-)
More memory on the device – for the converged device I think 4/8 GB might be very less
Don’t know if it already has a USB port – if not having it might be good

Rise of blog culture - Top 3 concerns

2007-01-09T13:11:00.000+01:00

A few days back my wife was searching for something on the web and most of the top results were from the blogosphere. She was frustrated and told me that with the rise of blog culture was making her life on the web tougher. Triggered by that comment we started discussing if that was true and yes like always with the lot of positives that go with rise of blog culture there are quite a few 'negatives' too.

We could come up with the following 3 observations

Facts vs. Opinions
Most blogs in an effort to make 'content' original tend to give a spin to the event that they would have heard or read about. The spin could be in the form of a value addition, analysis or opinion or simply more data etc. Whatever be the spin, any event that occurs is covered by innumerable blogs and the search engines (including Google) rank them on the top of the heap which sometimes causes problems.

For example try searching for "Walmart Bharti JV" on Google and the posting I made covering the news (with my own assessment of course) comes as the first page. Is this good - definitely for my blog yes, but for somebody who simply wants to read the news item its bad news, because he has to strive that much harder before he reaches there.

Ranking News vs. Ranking Opinions
In today's era where user generated content is king I probably still want to be able to distinguish between top ranking news items and top ranking opinions. For example Digg offers me no such distinction where they separate the top of the heap data vs. top of the heap blog posts which makes my life tougher.

But looks like people are thinking in this direction already. In fact just today I came across this new site Blogg-Buzz which seems to be offering a Digg alternative specifically targeted towards blog posts.

The idea is that people looking for facts should go to a different place than people who are looking for highly ranked 'opinions'

Signal/Noise Ratio
Any event that occurs in the world in the blogosphere get multiplied many many times creating a lot of related content. Although some percentage of that might be very useful there would also be a lot of which that is not very useful and this only decreases the signal to noise ratio on the web which makes it tougher to catch signals amidst the noise. If one were to count the comments and discussion on blogs it would only further degrade the S/N ratio.

Blogg-Buzz - Digg alternative for bloggers

2007-01-09T07:23:00.000+01:00

When I started blogging a few months back obviously one of my top most areas of concern was that what can I do to increase my traffic. I tried many options,

Blogging on topics which interest me
Focus on a set of interesting blogs - comment and discuss my thoughts on those blogs
Take a shot at trying to post articles on Digg - yes a great option to have traffic on your blog

Traffic has no doubt increased, and coupled with some improvement in my blogging quality things are looking up. However, I started reading at John's blog a few other places that Digg could be quite undemocratic in banning sites etc and was on the lookout for other options and good to see that you have started one on those lines.

As I was looking for different options I came across a new option called Blogg-Buzz today which looks like a specific site targeted at providing a Digg like service to blogs.

What I like about Blogg-Buzz

Simple and clean interface
Focus on blogs - but how do you propose to control submissions ?
Willingness to accept that its like Digg - at least that itself can give you a lot of publicity to start with

What I don't like about Blogg-Buzz

Web Page Design - Definitely can improve. The fonts at some places are not matching with their status on the page. For example the fonts on the tabs at the top of the page are too small
If the intent of having the Top Buzzers section is to grow your network and hence grow yourself, then I think it has to come out cleaner. The page in my information is too information heavy.
Many of the things are a little bit from what you might expect from a professional site - but I guess that will simply evolve.

I just became a member on the site and am hoping to use it in the coming days. Let me see how it works out.

101 Management Tips - Do these lists work ?

2007-01-08T20:25:00.000+01:00

A couple of days back I was reading an article titled "101 Management Tips" and liked the simplicity of some of the tips. I will not go into each of the tips but the tips were organized into the following categories

Self before Service is the Key - Manage Self first
Time and Tide wait for no one - Manage Time
The Human side of managing people - Manage People
Make every penny count - Managing money pays off
Just do it - Managing Tasks takes talent
Sourcing Sources - Manage resources resourcefully
They are the reason why you exist - Manage your Customers confidently
Change is inevitable - Manage critical and chaotic crisis
Aims and aspirations - Manage objectives objectively

Well after I read it I was really stuck by the simplicity of the rules themselves then why is it that this common sense tips are not commonly found.

Could think of the following reasons,

After all the everything is in the details and if that is the case the simpler you make the rules - this higher the chances of misinterpreting it
The interaction of person to person makes the environment so complex that applying these rules is a herculean task
On some rules the result simply depends on the tools you use - so you might be simply be unable to achieve a level of success irrespective of how well you might be doing things if you are using the wrong tools

10 Ways to Use LinkedIn

2007-01-05T14:21:00.000+01:00

I came across a nice article titled "Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn" and below are the 10 ways that he lists down of how one could use LinkedIn

Improve your visibility
Improve your connectability
Improve your Google Page Rank
Enhance your search engine results
Perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks
Increase the relevancy of your job search
Make your interview go smoother
Gauge the health of a company
Gauge the health of an industry
Ask for advice

I definitely agree to most of the points that are listed above so to a higher extent than the others.

Some of the important situations in which LinkedIn would help much more than many other sites on the web world are,

Looking for a job yourself or for your firm
Planning to build a start up - No better place than get to know about your contacts and what they are doing right now than LinkedIn
Do you have a product focused on the job market - LinkedIn is a great place to market it !

Although LinkedIn is one of the foremost 'networking' sites it has really maintained its focus and niche to remain centered around the "job area" which in my personal opinion is a great idea. In today's world obviously there is no dearth of networking sites and I would really want to be part of a niche rather than catch all site.

Making blog content 'effective'

2007-01-04T10:39:00.000+01:00

John Chow has made a posting titled "The Art of Creating Content" where he captures some ideas about how content on a blog site is all important and I agree with most of the ideas in his post.

Assuming that you have arrived at what to blog about let me try to present a simple questionnaire that I usually employ to assess if the content that I am generating is useful or not both to my readers and me.

Is this content original - as John says does it have my spin and a hint of personalization ?
Is this content meeting one of the two objectives - attract more visitors / retain a higher percentage of my existing visitors ?
Is the content current - Not always necessary but is your spin / personalization current ?
Does blogging about this content satisfy me - after all people see me via my blog ?
For a blog post anything above a few hundred words in my opinion is counter productive - so keep a check on the size

If the answer to any of or all questions is negative you might still chose to blog about it - but remember to ensure that at least a good percentage of your posts answer the questions above in the affirmative.

Now does the job of a blogger end after you blog about something - hardly the case. After you actually generate the content remember to ensure the following,

Content is clean and to the point - there are just too much on the web today and lucid and elegant writing will go a long way in keeping your visitors locked to your blog
If your content was generated as a result of an idea you saw on one or more blogs - remember to let readers on those sites know about your posting
If you think it might be worth of submitting to a Digg / Del.ico.us do it - you will get some traffic. As a beginner I want traffic be it from anywhere.
Follow up on the comments on your posting and ensure that you 'address' them in a effective and timely manner - always look for further blogging ideas there.
Keep a track of the ratio of posts at least on a weekly basis if it was targeted towards new visitors or retaining visitors - ensure you maintain a balance

100 AGLOCO members by the ViewBar Release

2007-01-04T00:11:00.000+01:00

Every time I think about the simple fact if or not I should push my network harder to add more member's on my AGLOCO network (currently at 18 members) - I always come up with a single argument my common sense simply says if you don't have to pay for it they why not give it a try.

I have taken it on me as a challenge to say that I will have at least 100 members on my network before the ViewBar gets released and for this I need help from you folks ...

So my readers if you are not already on AGLOCO get registered right now - follow this link to register

Have not heard of AGLOCO yet - read my posts here

Happy and Prosperous New Year 2007 !

2006-12-31T16:41:00.000+01:00

Best wishes to all my readers for a happy and prosperous new year 2007.

If you did visit my BLOG in the last week you might have noticed that there has not been a single posting since 22/12 - reason was that we were traveling and I did not want to let blogging come in way of that :-)

We visited Aachen in Germany and Paris during last week and came back tired and exhausted late last night.

I have almost completed my travelogue for our visit to Amsterdam last weekend and will post it soon. I propose to utilize some time tomorrow for writing down a little about our trips last week and from Tuesday onwards it back to work and regular blogging :-)

I should have probably put up a note before I went off on vacation but apologies for not having done that.

Wishing a great new year ahead for all of you.

Analysis on PayPerPost

2006-12-22T14:29:00.000+01:00

When I read about PayPerPost, it appeared to me to be a good idea simply because it gave me one approach to earn money (yes guys I dint start blogging for the sheer fun or anything like that). One of the blogs that I visit regularly is John Chow Dot Com and I saw that he had gotten active about PayPerPost and had even requested for a review of his site there. As is usually the case with me I started analyzing a little more about the concept of PayPerPost.

I think that PayPerPost has done a great job to identify a new 'breed' of advertisers - the bloggers. Every product in the market is trying to advertise to the visitors to a blog, but PayPerPost is trying to address the bloggers itself. Don't have any data but I think the blogging community is a reasonably closed community (more on this thought sometime later) - If you simply analyze a set of visitors to a blog the chance that the visitor is a blogger himself is very high.

So what does PayPerPost offer - If you look at a blogger who has his site running he is definitely looking at options of monetizing his blog by carrying advertisements of others. But the important observation which I think might have led to the PayPerPost business model is the discovery of the need / opportunity of bloggers using each other's blogs to drive up traffic for their co-bloggers.

But I think that there are some possible problems in the business model of PayPerPost which I highlight below. Feel free to contradict !

Top 5 problems that I see are,

Risk of having your blog become a parasite - After the initial hype bloggers will not use this simply because it might be easier to just get linked on high traffic site rather than write stuff about other blogs in the blogosphere - At least I might not want to simply write about other blogs on my blog !
To trust or not ? - There would always be a shadow of doubt in the mind of the reader of a PayPerPost posting. Surely the fact that the posting has been written for a fee will weigh on the mind, irrespective of the writer saying that it is his/her real view
More Traffic means more revenue ? - To the best of my knowledge there have been many items that I have read about the fact that traffic to a site from some sources do not translate into revenue for the Blog owner. For example I remember reading about how Digg traffic was not very useful for John (read the post here) - I also read a few comments on some blogs about the same being true for traffic from PayPerPost postings
Polarize the haves and have-not's further in the blog world - If you have a casual look at the criteria that people are setting in the opportunities that are being posted on PayPerPost its clear that it will be a good option only for blogs which have 'some' stature. I am at a loss to think such blogs might carry posts on other blogs - firmly believe that every blog has an identity and simply writing about other blogs clearly demeans that !
Fill the blog's with a lot of junk - If this model takes off and people start writing about each other I am terrified at the amount of junk that will fill the blogosphere. Already I feel getting at anything useful on Digg or any of the other page ranking systems is a little difficult and with the addition of a new type of useless content it will become tougher !

Top 3 changes which I think will work towards making PayPerPost a useful thing to have

Paid Comments - Have some control on what type of opportunities are posted - I would rather see people asking for reviews of specific posts rather than blogs in general. More on the lines of 'paid comments' for example might be useful
Targeted Opportunities - Post opportunities for specific 'blogs' - for example a opportunity for a set of 10 blogs to carry a PayPerPost posting
Innovative Pricing Schemes - Usually the first few PayPerPost postings on my opportunity are the most relevant. I feel the next ones will simply rehash the content in the first few and post it. Some options to avoid this - possibly a stepped posting fee model ?. I am sure one can think of many more ones like this

Tags: payperpost

John Chow Dot Com - Whats Good / Whats not ?

2006-12-21T21:42:00.000+01:00

Over the last few weeks John Chow Dot Com has been one of the sites that I have visited regularly. When I visited a few days back I saw that John has posted about his tryst with Pay Per Post here and here and that got me thinking a little more seriously of why I was visiting his site. When he asked for a review of what I think about his site I thought it would be a good idea to capture my thoughts.

Plus points of John Chow Dot Com

Nice and elegant design - particularly liked the change that he has made to blue color recently which makes site look more professional
Writing Style

Simple and Elegant style of writing - posts are usually of 'right' size
Great mix of matter, photos, advertisements
Particularly appreciate his update post style

John is a very responsive blogger - whenever I have made a posting on his site, more often than not the comment is addressed very soon

Minus points of John Chow Dot Com

Sometimes John gets very carried away with his topics and over blogs about them - for example, AGLOCO is something that John has taken up now. So what ?

Think his main theme of 'making money from a blog' usually takes a back seat too often in all this

Don't like the photos of his dinner visits at all - I still fail to understand why anybody would be interested in what he ate for dinner. I despise some of the photos considering I am a vegetarian !

Despite it being a 'paid post' I have tried my best to be candid about what I like and what I don't like about John Chow dot Com

AGLOCO - Aiming for the Tipping Point - 3 Things to keep in mind

2006-12-20T15:34:00.000+01:00

The first thought that came to my mind when I saw a mail from AGLOCO in my mail box today about their target to reach 10 Mn users on their network by end June 2007 was the 'Netork Effect'.

Wikipedia defines Network Effect as,

The network effect is a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service. One consequence of a network effect is that the purchase of a good by one individual indirectly benefits others who own the good - for example by purchasing a telephone a person makes other telephones more useful. This type of side-effect in a transaction is known as an externality in economics, and externalities arising from network effects are known as network externalities. The resulting bandwagon effect is an example of a positive feedback
loop.

If I were to summarize the key points of Network Effects, they would be

The service or product that the members of the network use must be dependent on each other for the effect to be most pronounced. For example a person entering a network of mobile users will be benefited (possibly by lower call rates) if his network is large enough.
In some instances the effect is true is not visible very clearly. For example if you consider a software product/platform like say Linux, the more the number of users enter the system the better the products and more the value to the entire network - which is probably the reason for it to lag behind Windows.
In any case one of the important drivers of the network effect is the entry of a new subscriber into a network inherently adding to the 'value' of the network. This is probably also one of the main motivators for a new entrant into the network.
If the network grows it would reach a point where the sheer size of the network (proxy for the value of the network elements) will influence decisions of both persons on and off the network one can say it has probably reached its tipping point

Now if you try to apply this theory to AGLOCO it appears to me that the value of the network today is purely notional. The 'n' number of users of AGLOCO literally dont have any value to offer to me as a new entrant. Yes when the ViewBar is ready, the 'advertisers' would see it as an opportunity to reach out to these 'n' users. Once this happens the users start seeing a value in joining the network as they can make money out of it.

With the ViewBar taking 7-10 weeks to come out, I believe that it might be very difficult for AGLOCO to reach its aggressive target unless they keep an eye on the following,

There might be a initial rush of subscribers into the network, which is normal in any new offering but I firmly believe that AGLOCO should not forget to retain the enthusiasm and momentum going of the people who are already on the network.
The network in its initial stages (with a lot of silent subscribers - AGLOCO could only list 2 in its entire list in its email !) and no amount of external marketing is equivalent to coupling it with marketing the growth story to the current subscribers.
Give me something different for supporting you in your Beta efforts - getting the first million is always the toughest - be it hard cash or subscribers

Update #1 from AGLOCO - finally !

2006-12-20T12:20:00.000+01:00

Before you go any further - if you have not already signed up sign up today - sign up here

It has been over 3/4 weeks since I signed up and I get a thank you mail today from AGLOCO - the first thought that came to my mind was that the ViewBar must have been released, but no....

I was really unhappy at what I got from them - nothing useful at all ! The theme of the mail was to support them to in their campaign to sign up 10 Mn customers by end of June 2007. Sure if I did not want to grow their network, why would I ever get on to the network in the first place.

But AGLOCO needs to realize two things - my route to make money needs two steps

The ViewBar needs to be released - a small note somewhere in the mail from them says that it will take them 7-10 weeks , which means they will take away 2.5 months of the 6 months they have to reach that target.
Get my people on the network to install and use ViewBar - the longer the delay in releasing a ViewBar the tougher my job as a member becomes,

I have to first work towards building the network without a 'real' story - but I don't get anything 'different'. What is the benefit of adding users today or after 6 months ?
Trying to add members today means I have to work twice as hard - once to get members on my network and then after that when they might have already forgotten about the registration, to get them install and use the ViewBar !

Is BlogKits working ?

2006-12-20T00:11:00.000+01:00

Read about BlogKits at several places and myself was looking forward to an alternative to Google Adsense which made me start using it a couple weeks back. Probably the jury is still out in deciding if or not BlogKits has been useful to the 99% of the users that Jim Kukral said it would. I definitely agree that it is probably a little too early to decide if or not BlogKits has made a difference but in my case it still has to bring in the first $$

If somebody who is reading this has answers to my questions below please help me out,

Can somebody tell me if you have really made money with BlogKits - would be more interested in hearing from people who were not making any money from Google Adsense. If yes please have a look at my site and tell me what am I doing wrong.
Is there any way in which I can control the ads or target the ads to a specific domain / segment - say for example I am writing quite a few wireless related posts and I want to restrict the ads to that domain / area - Is it possible at all ?

Tags: blogkits, adsense

Digg 2.0 - What's new ?

2006-12-18T18:41:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I made a posting to the Digg site and as most of you would expect failed to log even a single Digg. Nothing too bad about it, probably almost everybody starts this way. I simply reasoned that my content was not good enough to receive any Digg's and thought of writing more interesting and relevant content. Made a few more postings and still had absolutely no luck and started thinking why this was happening.

As may be a few other's was easily able to find a few holes in the way Digg works in ranking the pages that get submitted to Digg. At that point the sole thought that came to my mind was that Digg's way of page ranking as solely dependent on only one factor - 'how fast does a posting get its first few votes'. If you can log the first few votes, the rest is simply herd mentality after that. In more cases than not, its only a matter of time before such a posting moves up the ranking.

Did not really delve too much into that topic, but today as I saw that Digg was getting revamped was curious to know what changes one could expect. During this search exercise, I came across two more interesting posts titled "The Digg Economy" and "Will Digg get flanked?" today which I thought covered relevant points.

In the posting "Will Digg get flanked?" suggestions that are made out to Digg are,

Do not reveal the number of “diggs” accumulated by a story until after the story reaches the front page
Enable Diggers to make and/or see comments only after voting or declining to ever vote on a story.
Reward those who make constructive comments on stories, and penalize those who make disruptive and unconstructive ones - Although I agree with the 'rationale' that comments should be categorized as constructive or not, it would be extremely difficult to implement this and I feel this suggestion is not worthwhile.

In addition to not agreeing to the last point, let me add a couple of other suggestion possibilities -

How about having special voting rights for some classified experts - something similar to the special voting rights on company shares. One vote from these identified set can count for say 10 or 100 normal votes. If some body wants to complicate things the multiplier on any identified expert depends on how many of his voted posts in fact makes it to the top of the heap
How about having it necessary to get a few votes say 10 or 20 from identified experts before the post gets opened out to everybody else. A ranking system can be put in place to identify and dismantle experts on a regular basis ?

May be my suggestions are not easily implementable but I don't see a reason why it cant be tried. Digg is hugely successful and I would look towards Digg to make the great concept that it started off or at least popularized a better one too.

Two things that I look forward to a site like Digg - anybody else looking for something different - pls comment !

Dont want economies of scale (# of controlled votes being the unit of measurement) become a barrier for my opinion to be heard
Whatever be the logic / approach that is adopted, so long as I as a user of the site is able to vouch for the 'relevance' and 'usefulness' of the content I find at the top of the Digg heap I am happy !

Tags: digg, page ranking

India secure historic win against South Africa

2006-12-18T17:23:00.000+01:00

India stormed to one of their most memorable wins of all time amid historic scenes at the Wanderers, wrapping up a comprehensive 123-run victory on the fourth day of the first Test. This was a feat that not anybody really believed the Indian team could pull off particularly in its current form !

I din't watch the match so don't really know what happened on the ground but some comments !

Ganguly seems to be finally applying his mind to the game - guess that is the only thing that can enable him play longer in the Indian team.
If there is one player in the Indian team who is performing in almost every test match in the recent past it should definitely be Kumble. Kumble once again for the umpteenth time in his long career led an efficient mop-up operation and assisted in putting to rest a 14-year history of never winning a Test in South Africa. Good for Kumble and the team.

I don't think that this would change the fortunes of the team too much and the next test is as unpredictable as this one was before it started, but at least this win gives the team a thread of hope to play the remaining one day matches.

Trip to Amsterdam

2006-12-18T16:59:00.000+01:00

We visited Amsterdam over the weekend - a quick whirlwind trip it was, but both me and my wife were happy that we did cover all that we planned to. Definitely liked the city but a tad costly though !

I propose to write a slightly detailed travelogue in the coming days - interested in reading it, pls drop me a mail and will share it with you when I am done.

Free Calls for life - Applying the Blue Ocean Strategy

2006-12-18T16:49:00.000+01:00

Was reading one of the new blogs that I stumbled upon, I read upon a posting which introduced me to what they call the Blue Ocean Strategy.

One of the standard approaches that companies have long engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation.

"Yet in today’s overcrowded industries, competing head-on results in nothing but a bloody “red ocean” of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne contend that while most companies compete within such red oceans, this strategy is increasingly unlikely to create profitable growth in the future. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, Kim and Mauborgne argue that tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating “blue oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for growth . Such strategic moves—termed “value innovation”—create powerful leaps in value for both the firm and its buyers, rendering rivals obsolete and unleashing new demand.

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY provides a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant. In this frame-changing book, Kim and Mauborgne present a proven analytical framework and the tools for successfully creating and capturing blue oceans. Examining a wide range of strategic moves across a host of industries, BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY highlights the six principles that every company can use to successfully formulate and execute blue ocean strategies. The six principles show how to reconstruct market boundaries, focus on the big picture, reach beyond existing demand, get the strategic sequence right, overcome organizational hurdles, and build execution into strategy."

In summary the central idea is to create a new uncontested space in which to compete, rather than simply trying to “leverage” competitive advantage to compete against existing players.At least the first time I read this, it appeared to be a great concept to me. I have not yet read the book (adding to my list though) but tried looking at some examples of what companies might / can do to go this route

Can companies actively employ "Corporate Blogging" as a KM tool - Rather than a red ocean approach of fighting with competition to retain the knowledge of the highly mobile resources they can deploy a "blue ocean" strategy where users are allowed (even mandated possibly) to blog. A resource belongs to a company but the blog for the period the employee spends in a company A belongs to company A and so on. - Don't even know if this sounds silly - but just thinking aloud
Keep a common bench across all the Indian Software Vendors simply separated by Technology / Domain. Anybody can draw from that bench rather than everybody having a bench of there own.

If you are interested to read a more 'professional' application of the Blue Ocean Strategy read the posting titled "Gold from straw: profiting from “low-value” customers"

Death of the mobile as a communication device - Mobile 2.0

2006-12-14T19:38:00.000+01:00

If I have to choose one dominant thread in all of what is happening in Web 2.0 - I would go for 'user generated content'. If one agrees to the fact that there seems to be a dramatic shift in balance of power from the consumers of content towards the generators of content. Needless to say, the next obvious question would be the 'how' of content generation and dissemination would also become equally important.

In my personal opinion, at a time when the mobile is not even fully seen a stable receiver of 'content from the previous generation' (professional created and edited content) the rise in user generated content is making mobile's evolution as a device all the more challenging.

Where is the mobile headed to ? User generated content (UGC) is strong enough it simply means that the mobile starts playing a very important device for two activities which it is barely used today

Content Generation - In the UGC world, in my understanding anything that happens around you in your day to day life is a possible content you can share and leverage. That being the case, what better than a personal device you can carry with you to capture that. Content capture devices which are both personal and mobile, such as audio and video recorders have existed for a long time but their usability in todays context has diminished to a large extern. You simply don't generate / capture content always for personal use !
Content Dissemination - The immediate step once I have captured is how quickly can I share it with the world around me. Although the web is evolving as a platform in the true sense of the world, all I need is simply a handle to get on to the platform and share the content. What better suited than a mobile again.

As a result of the above reasons, I feel that we will soon see the death of the mobile as a plain communication device and start evolving into a communication device plus as a partner for content collection and dissemination.

Should the device manufacturers focus on this trend that I mention - most definitely yes, simply because the market is big enough

A cursory look at reports pointing to the people who are 'generating content' the major source still remains secondary sources around the web. A mobile 2.0 device will give these content generators a great chance to scale to the next level to generate original content where ever feasible.
Most of these users already might have a mobile 1.0 but there appears to be a great chance to elevate them to use a mobile 2.0 device (more suited in the web 2.0 world for content collection and dissemination).

Shirt and Tie Combinations

2006-12-13T17:37:00.000+01:00

Today morning as I first decided to wear a white with cross back stripes and a black pant but getting match a tie from my smallish collection it was quite a difficult task. Have been in situations similar to this before, for example

When I buy a shirt how do I buy a tie that matches with it and the vice versa situation ?
I have a shirt and you have to decide to wear a tie with it, what is the best choice (assuming that 2 ties go with it) ?

So decided to do some basic search about how to match shirts and ties ! Let me share what I have found along the way today - anybody does not agree with something feel free to contradict - after all these are just suggestions !

Repeat colors in each pattern - If you happen to choose your shirt first, just note the dominant colors. When you are ready to pick your tie, choose one with accents that use the same dominant colors from your shirt.

Graduate checks outward - Getting a tie to match a checked shirt is a much more difficult task than with a plain shirt. The rule to follow in this case is to always wear smaller checked prints on your body and larger checks around your neck. Again, make sure you pay attention to color and choose a shirt and tie in a similar color palette. Remember that the checks becoming larger from the shirt to the tie is a better choice. Also remember to keep your trousers in the same overall color scheme.

Vary weights between patterns - Don't choose two patterns of the same size as it will just look confusing. So for a look that’s easier on the eyes, make sure one piece has a chunkier pattern than the other.

So in summary, some shirt patterns in shirts like checks and stripes which are formal and classy, but it is difficult to find matching suitable ties. It is not advisable to have similar patterns in shirt and tie but if you have no other choice or just wish to keep it same at least take care that the patterns vary in size. If a tie does not go well with the shirt and trouser its not worth wearing it at all.

At the very basic level, at least pay attention to the color of the tie and make sure that at least one shade of your tie is the same as your shirt or trouser color.

Google Finance changes front page design

2006-12-13T15:43:00.000+01:00

If you use Google Finance to track your portfolio you might be interested to know that the front page has been changed. The page has 5 sections now,

Market Summary
Today's News
Sector Summary
Recent Quotes
Top Movers

The other pages such as detailed information page for a stock has not changed and stays the same.

Signals that I pick up from this change,

Google still probably looks at what clicks users of the web page are doing and ensure that at least a good % of them find what they want with minimum number of clicks.
The information that has been added is definitely useful and am happy about the change. However one of the things that I have always liked and appreciated in all Google sites is the brilliant use of real estate. Most Google sites have an uncanny ability to keep only what is accessed for on the front page and everything else hidden. As far as I can see the current content on Google.com/finance is probably the maximum on any Google page. I would strongly advise that Google should refrain from adding any more information on the finance page.
Possibly Google can look at adding commodities information also on the finance page

AGLOCO - How much longer for the ViewBar ?

2006-12-11T12:36:00.000+01:00

It has been over 3 weeks since I registered to AGLOCO and I got about 16 members into my chain since then. Well my efforts are still on to get more people, but are my efforts at full steam - definitely no !

I read John's post titled "You Rank In The Top 0.03% Of All Members" and this made me check my account for my ranking. I was in the top 1.89% of the users on AGLOCO and this was quite not the number I intended to see. John with over 1400 members is in the top .03% and me with my paltry 16 members am still within the top 2% of the users.

I tried to understand this number a little bit and I came to some of the following observations

1. As John says 80% of the users on the AGLOCO network are not literally 'working' to enhance the network in any way. They are just dead weight at least in so far as enhancing the benefits of the network goes.

2. If this is the case I disagree to John's point that he will have to harder to retain his rating. I think it depends on what type of users get added into the system as a result of new additions. If all that gets added is the dead weight, even without doing anything his rating will continue to remain more or less at the top

3. Is the delay (I dont know if its a delay simply because the AGLOCO website says nothing) in coming out with the ViewBar might simply take off the sheen in the whole additions and hype that AGLOCO has received in the last few weeks.

4. If I need to get my referrals install the ViewBar after they have forgotten about the whole thing it will be very possible that my conversion rate would be no better than say 30-40% of my network size.

5. One benefit or getting the ViewBar out early would have been that I could have used real time data of the earnings to get more referrals into my network. No better that real $$$ to make a statement

If any of my readers are still without an AGLOCO account - Register yourself NOW !

BlogKits challenges Google Adsense - David vs. Goliath ?

2006-12-07T18:09:00.000+01:00

Sometime back I was reading John's blog where there were some discussion which questions the usefulness of some Google Adsense for low traffic sites.

My blog fell into the category that Jim termed low traffic sites where he claimed 99% of the blogs fell into - so my best option was to just try the alternative that BlogKits was offering rather than question it. It was not available at that point of time and was just plain talk, but finally it appears that it has launched today.

I went to their site and tried the Adsense calculator on the site to see what best earnings that Google Adsense can earn for blogs in relation to the traffic that they attract. Here is what it says,

Less than 100 visitors / day - $0 - $3 per month
300-1000 visitors/day - $9 - $30 per month
1000-5000 visitors/day - $300-$1500 per month
> 5000 visitors/day - $3000-$15000 per month

This translation between traffic and adsense earnings is spot on for my blog. Is it the same for the others also ?

It invites bloggers whose traffic is too low to be able to monetize it effectively with Google Adsense to try BlogKits free for 30-60 days. BlogKits promises to deliver a big jump for the blogs in the first and probably second category above. If or not, BlogKits can deliver its promise - I don't know and time will only tell.

But some questions that are on my mind

If the entire model of BlogKits is to help blog sites with low traffic to monetize their sites - do they have a viable proposition for the advertisers to make money as well.
BlogKits is heavily dependent on the low traffic blogs - although they are targeting a section of bloggers, if this is successful I don't see why it would not be useful for the other 1% of the bloggers - anything in their model which will make it 'not useful' for that 1% ?
How effective the strategy of Jim was or will be in taking on Google Adsense the way he has. Very few people would disagree that purely from a market leadership standpoint Google Adsense is right on top and questioning its ability to make money for bloggers is a great way to pull the limelight on yourself - good job Jim.But this is not without a few risks though,

Minimizes possibilities of iterative improvement to his approach
Only one chance for success - nobody will believe a challenger to Google Adsense more than once, assuming that they did it the first time
Even if we assume BlogKits succeeds how much of an earning can it make from the 99% of the blogs that garner probably less than 1% of the total traffic - initial hype might attract a few advertisers, but what happens after that.

Once a blog starts getting traffic it might find Google Adsense a better alternative and they might just switch - so would BlogKits just end up creating customers for Google Adsense?

Swivel is Live

2006-12-06T14:18:00.000+01:00

Definitely agree with Michael Arrington that the Swivel website is probably one of the 'freshest' ideas that I have seen in the recent past. My initial comments are towards how interesting it is !

If there is one site where you can have some fun and still pick up some 'information' I would vote Swivel 7 or 8 / 10.

As I read the post one statement "I already see a lot of fairly useless data included on the site, which makes the good stuff harder to find. As the active community grows the better data will hopefully rise to the top via the rating and feedback system" got me thinking towards identifying the key factors that would decide how successful it is.

1. What is the ratio of visitors to a site contribute (you can probably term them as active) by feeding back / ranking the data and content they see. My hunch is it should not be more than 10-20% for the top sites.

2. In the way page ranking works I think the relevance and correctness of the ranking any data / content gets is dependent on only one factor - how fast does it get its first few votes. After the first few votes are in, its only a matter of time before that content moves up the ranking. Some possible suggestions to make the ranking a little more relevant and useful,

How about having special voting rights for some classified experts - something similar to the special voting rights on company shares. One vote from these identified set can count for say 10 or 100 normal votes. If some body wants to complicate things the multiplier on any identified expert depends on how many of his voted posts in fact makes it to the top of the heap
How about having it necessary to get a few votes say 10 or 20 from identified experts before the post gets opened out to everybody else. A ranking system can be put in place to identify and dismantle experts on a regular basis

3. In my view the above two possibilities really aggravate the situation when we move into more complex data forms like graphs, tables etc which is exactly what Swivel is trying to do.

Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

2006-12-06T08:08:00.000+01:00

Over the last many years that I have been browsing I have always liked some page designs and not liked some. What are the key mistakes that web page designers do when they come up with pages are summarized well in here. Give it a read.

So what are the top mistakes and what do I think about them ... read on below

Believing people care about you and your web site - I do agree to a large extent that your visitors at your web page are looking for a solution to their problem (whatever that might be) at your site.
A man from Mars can’t figure out what your web site is about in less than four seconds - As a website designer I think one of the most important aspects that you need to figure out is 'what do my viewers want' and 'what they might want'. Agreed this is not science, but put your best judgment and ensure that all the items in the definitely want category can be assimilated by visitors in less than 4 seconds. It should also give a good picture of what your page does. My example for this would be Google - My hunch is 90% or even more of the people who visit www.google.com want to search something so that is the prominent thing on the page. But yes you as Google might also want then to go to GMail, Google Docs etc and so they can take a much less important space on the page.
Mystical belief in the power of Web Standards, Usability, and table-less CSS - I don't build web pages but I build other software and the situation there is the same. Skill in using any technology (the bleeding edge ones included) for building a page is simply to be able to project to the business user what impact it will have on him - will it increase revenues, decrease costs, get more customers, retain customers better etc etc.
Using design elements that get in the way of your visitors - Golden rule of making a sale at work - "Never do anything that gets in the way / delays a sale"
Navigational failure - My suggestion here would be to make a flow analysis of how users can get to different points on a page. At every point users are more probable of taking some routes than the others. The more probable ones should be available more prominent and handy as compared to the navigation via less traveled routes. Definitely web pages should find a way of collecting this route information and make necessary modifications on a continuous basis. Case in point is the recent change on the Google Mail page for replying to an email. Earlier one needed to go to more options and then reply which I guess users found it problematic (at least I did) and bang came in the change where you can now reply directly as your read the message.
Forgetting the purpose of text - After all the barrage of multimedia on several web sites I think that it is time we moved back to a simple text approach. Simply put suggestion would be - add any pictures, video and all the jazz if required by your visitors and not for any other reason
Too much material on one page - The only thing too much material on a web page can convey is that you as a designer don't know what your user definitely wants and what he might want. The signature on Gina Trapani's page conveys it all about the fight for brevity - "If I had more time I'd have written a shorter letter". Translating it to web page design one would probably say "If I knew my visitor better I'd have created a cleaner page"

There are a few others that are discussed on the original post here. But as a 'user' I think the ones I have mentioned above are the key ones.

Software Outsourcing - Top 3 issues

2006-12-05T21:23:00.000+01:00

Given the way IT outsourcing started to India it was natural for us to look at ourselves in the eyes of our customers in the biggest markets and try to change ourselves to keep them happy and satisfied and give us business. Good starting point, but even today asking a question of what problems are plaguing the Indian IT Industry I guarantee you that there is a higher probability that you will find answers of what we need to do and how we can improve to serve our customers better.
Well great thinking but I don't totally agree with this approach as I believe that outsourcing to India is as much a need for our customers as it is for us. Added complexity is also of course that the outsourcing destinations are now across the globe which means that both outsourcer and the outsourced need to work together to make it a success.

So what do I propose to do I will try to highlight the top 3 issues and how in my opinion we can look at it from both sides. Limited by my knowledge I will look at the issues with India as the outsourced destination.

Issue 1 : Engineers don't see the big picture

Well I definitely agree that it is definitely a good scenario to have when the customer and the offshore vendor see the same big picture while most times the customers' feeling is that the Indian teams somehow missed the big picture.

Yes Indian team's rotate fast, transitions are the name of the game, utilization ratio of its engineers is a key handle for bottom line management but is all that alone responsible for the situation above. I think that is not the case. If we just take a quick poll of the % of project teams working in India who are aware of their customer's road map for that market / product my hunch is it would not be higher than 15-20% (somebody has data to disprove this - I would love to hear that). So if the customer does not involve a offshore team in the road mapping process he needs to be aware that he is building the 'implementor' mentality and that is all he will get.

If this situation has to change our people need to change too but so do our customers !

Issue 2 : Adapting to Cultures

When ever a fresh engineer travels to a customer location outside the country he definitely goes through a cultural orientation. That is great - Indian companies want to support their engineers in making their movement to a outside location smoother. I also appreciate the efforts by us to understand the cultures of the countries that our customer's work - celebrate their festivals, declare Christmas vacations etc etc.

What I definitely not appreciate is our partners not at all appreciating our culture - Try answering some questions below and you might get a sense of what I mean

How many project/product releases are planned during the Diwali/Deepavali and how many during Christmas ?
How many instances do you folks have where your on site counterparts have changed their 'vacation plans' ? [ Simple my customer might possibly plan one vacation for a couple of weeks together in a year where as a Indian might plan the same 2 weeks of leave spread over 7 festivals in the year - well folks its a cultural issue and customers need to appreciate it !]
How many times have you received gifts from your onsite partners during Indian festivals?

Issue 3 - Generalists vs. Specialists

One of the biggest concern of a European/American customer is that the association of a Indian engineer in a particular role/domain is very short. I personally feel that this is an area where we need to work first in sorting out the issues before customers can do anything. Simply put competition and lack of urge for a laid back life is not in the psyche of the Indian Engineer - all through his school, college life he is pushed hard by peer competition and there is always a reward for performance - so why not in work life ?

I don't have an answer for how this can be resolved, but unless we collectively try to address this it will have a cyclic impact on the first point !

Corporate Blogging - Support it or shoot it down ?

2006-12-05T15:01:00.000+01:00

Before I even move to address the question "should companies support or oppose corporate blogs" let me define it first. To me corporate blog simply means a communication channel between customers, employees, management, internal departments etc. No organization is devoid of tensions and problems between the various stakeholders and if all the luxury I can have is to use one word to solve these problems, my pick without a second thought would be 'COMMUNICATION'.

So if this is the case they anything which works as a communication channel should be a good thing. But I don't know if the answer to that question can be laid out in black and white. As is the answer to any management problem the answer is - 'it depends'

So let me put some thoughts on what are the pros and cons of having corporate blogs

Pros

Blog is owned by one or a small group of people but always build in a collaborative and participative manner. If run a spirit where everybody taking information and feeding information back into the blog works as a team a blog is definitely bound to succeed.
A Internal blog can serve a multitude of situations in a corporate environment

Teams working on a project have different levels of IT knowledge but still want to communicate - A project blog is a great solution
A Blog is a good solution where ever it is necessary to promote dialogue and find lateral ideas outside the team
Thinking of a knowledge management system - try to approach it via a blog !

A Blog can serve as a simple approach to get to anybody in the organization to collect comments and thoughts.
Capturing ones thoughts via writing it down is probably one of the most beneficial ways in my opinion - simply because it crystallizes the idea further and also becomes the written memory of the organization.
Customer communication is one of the areas where companies always have a problem - what do disclose and what would be that would interest the customer is always a tough question to answer - well the solution is simple, put the customer in charge and let him decide what he wants.
Blog's are a great way to collect feedback and what my users (employees - managers, employees - internal departments, organization-customers etc) think. A blog is probably a great way to capture all the data and draw conclusions from patterns of additions etc.
Want some drive and competition - throw in a page ranking system on any of the blogs where you want that and I think it will work very well.

Cons - it does not take too much of digging around and talking to a few people to identify that all the benefits might not be as easily realized without risks. A company needs to be very well aware of the risks it run to realize the benefits that have been identified above. Ed Yourdon puts down a pretty exhaustive list in his post "What a Company’s Blogging Policy Says to its Employees". Although I will not make any attempt to discuss each of them I believe that all these concerns/risks stem from the following areas and what counter-arguments to this might be,

Fear of the unknown - although most time companies don't know what damage a corporate blog can cause but fear that it might lead to employees putting the company in bad light, disclose secret information, disclose mistakes that the company would like to hide etc etc
Trust on employees - Employees are always a source of information if or not you allow them to blog. Trusting them should come irrespective of a company having corporate blogs or not
Impact on productivity - If you don't have corporate blogs employees will just take other options, it is probably have your bloggers associated with your brand name rather than with external entities
Multiple communication channels with external entities - this is probably something which I agree, so have a tighter control on who gets to blog on pages which external entities can log on

Net net, I strongly believe that corporate blogs should be something that should be allowed. After all one glance of applications and tools that work on and around blogs to ease out the information in blogs is tremendous.

Corporate blogs are a great success at IBM, Adobe... my next step is to get a little deeper into the why's and how's of this.

Tags: corporate blogging, ed+yourdon, blogging

Swivel - the all new Internet Archive of Data

2006-12-05T13:47:00.000+01:00

Swivel Co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as "YouTube for Data” If you trying to understand what the company does that must be a great one liner explanation. Swivel is to data what YouTube is to video. You can probably share anything which you think would make sense to somebody other than you - stock prices, your investment strategy, what trends you see for the mobile telecommunication world, commodity prices etc etc. Once the submission happens other viewers of that data can rate, comment, bookmark. Automatically this means that there is a ranking that is put on each piece of data that gets in - well yes so probably it does a little more than YouTube.

Before I move any further let me try to see how different this would be from the other page ranking sites

Page ranking sites usually accept text content where as Swivel apparently accepts content in all forms
Swivel probably generates or at least promises to generate patterns from all the data that gets in. The only pattern that page ranking sites generate is a cloud view of the nature of pages getting in - I personally think that a cloud view of data has limited usage.

So is Swivel going to be all success - I don't know about that but can see a few back breakers - your comments folks

Most data is typically tied to the ‘environment’ in which it is collected but uploads on this archive will be devoid of this environment. Without this critical piece of the puzzle how valid would the patterns that emerge be - how useful would they be ?
Data, whatever it might will have a zillion ways of representing it - both conceptually (graphs, tables, figures, plain text) and in computer formats. In my belief trying to extract any form of patterns must of course nullify the difference in formats but not spread across conceptual data forms.
Assuming that this idea really takes of in a big way and people might start basing their ‘decisions and choices’ on this huge internet archive and pattern generator. Is this necessarily a good thing to happen - am doubtful. Yes the collective intelligence of lots of people is probably behind my decision but my creativity is definitely lost !

Should Google look at 'acquiring' Swivel also - first top of the mind reaction - "yes, but probably after they have some traffic".

Internet Explorer vs. Mozilla Firefox - What does traffic on my site say ?

2006-12-04T23:47:00.000+01:00

I was just looking at the statistics on my web traffic today and found a interesting fact today - 90% of my traffic uses Mozilla as the web browser.

(At this point another interesting statistic that pushes Microsoft to the place where it is in the desktop market is that about 70% of my traffic uses Microsoft Windows. The remaining 25% is split between Mac and Linux variants)

Although I made the browser switch about a year or so ago, the above statistics made me a little curious of what exactly people think about Mozilla and why it is grabbing market share from Microsoft Internet Explorer at a furious pace.

Some statistics first ....

Open Source Free Browser
Nearly 60 to 70 million users (Wikipedia) - and still growing fast and furious
Capturing Market share at the rate of 1-2% percent per month - just my guesstimate may be even more !

So what makes Mozilla really tick - Top 5 reasons

Its Open Source - everybody hates to be controlled after all
Has reached a critical mass of downloads - easy to download and start using no need to buy it !
Tabbed Browsing - makes the web faster and more efficient. You can concentrate on reading a page without the confusion of having to switch between windows. While you're reading a page, links you have opened in background tabs are loading so when you're ready to read them, they've already finished loading and you don't need to wait.
Customize - Set up your toolbars the way you want them. Have just a thin strip with everything on one bar. Have a set of toolbars with every option available within reach. Firefox's toolbars are fully customizable so you can have it the way you like it. Firefox even lets you create new toolbars. Third party extensions often add Toolbar items to the Customize Palette as well.
Most Extensible. Firefox's user interface can be extended by developers using industry standards such as XML, CSS, JavaScript etc, as well as complex C++ add on modules. Examples of such extensions include everything from relatively simple utilities to advanced tools such as a JavaScript Debugger and Document Inspector. A full list of existing extensions is available at update.mozilla.org. Extensions are easily installed.

Yes yes these are key points but what I think is the biggest reason simply is that - at a user level people are simply bored of using Microsoft Internet Explorer and chose the best alternative. It just happens that the alternative has now made such a splash that people are using it more and more as the main stream option.

Starting a business of your own? Here’s a smart way to save money on essential software

2006-12-04T20:56:00.000+01:00

Have you had the experience of opening a company of your own - if you did you would know that one of the golden rules of survival is 'spend only what is absolutely necessary - until you have found somebody who can pay for what you do'

Is this a new rule - absolutely not. It must have existed since times immemorial, only probably the way it was applied has been changing

Office 1.0 - Ever since the computers have come in the mantra has been to minimize the extent of human intervention as far as possible so that you spend lesser money.

Office 1.5 - As we moved into the era of open source alternatives the push was not only use computers instead of humans wherever possible but also use the 'free options'.

Office 2.0 - But in the last few years the availability of software applications on the internet for all 'office activities' has drastically increased and the push now is to use online applications on computers instead of humans.

So what are the pros / cons of Office 2.0 over its predecessor ?

Pros

You not only save on 'human capital' you also save on hardware - most of the processing happens on the web so a simple computer with a 'faster' internet connection will serve the need.
Access your data anywhere.
Smaller office space - why do you need it at all ? everybody just works from home :)
Easy to share and collaborate
Data is safer - at least from hardware crashes, computer disk problems etc etc.

Cons

Data is not 'secure' - its out on the web after all
24*7 availability is not guaranteed - the application website might go down - but if I can get a decent % of uptime what does it matter
Fragmented data - if you keep your documents on different websites getting a single view of your data might just get complicated

Before I end this post let me give a summary view of the various options for some of the activities in a typical office environment

Office applications - A complete office suite at ThinkFree or standalones like Writely, Google Spreadsheets and Thumbstacks.

Online Storage - Well Google Mail itself gives close to 3Gb. If you however need more you can try Streamload or XDrive

Collaboration - CentralDesktop and 37signals

Utility applications: Office 2.0 also needs mix and-match applications that merge various other online applications to give a single interface with interconnectivity between them. For instance, there is ShareMethods that merges many online tools giving you a search tool, word processor, customer management suite, and a presentation tool in a single package. Then there is a whole range of applications available online, right from small applications such as FreshBooks that lets you create invoices, to entire customer relationship management suites, such as Salesforce.com for a fee.

Google invests in Meraki

2006-11-30T20:33:00.000+01:00

Just read a posting on GigaOM that Google has invested in Meraki Networks.

Meraki says their goal is to enable a grassroots movement of small wireless ISP's by providing them everything they need to get started. Towards achieving this Meraki aims to provide an integrated package of software, hardware, and management services that make it possible for everyday people to build mesh networks and become Internet service providers. Meraki's platform is an afforable and simple way to connect communities, apartment complexes, or business districts to the Internet at low cost. Meraki has the following support

Those goals match to what Google has been stating about their plans for their WiFi networks — deliver wireless broadband for cheap and outside the confines of the current telco/cable industries.

But why does Google want to do something like this is what I fail to understand - why does a company specializing in search and data related solutions bother about the acceptance and ease of wifi solutions. I personally think that Google is wasting its money and resources in promoting resources of this nature

Assuming that all goes well with a company like Meraki what can be achieved does'nt look attractive enough to me at least for Google to invest.

Creation of communities of web connections in a mesh format in a easier manner. Well this would have been necessary possibly a few years ago but not with the range of web community applications I think this is an absolute waste of time
Google will just get more users (possibly of adhoc networks) - but is that something that Google lacks at this point of time ?
Yes of course there is the possibility that intra mesh communications can be perceived by the users of that network as a safe arena to share information. But is attacking the hardware manufacturers who might assist be an approach for Google - I don't think so.

Options for online mind mapping

2006-11-30T18:29:00.000+01:00

Over the last few weeks that I have been blogging if there is one tag cloud that I have been exposed to it must be web 2.0 and I tend to agree that we would see more and more of the move towards a virtual desk. Key source of content generation would be through communities on the web and collaboration with the web as a platform is something which is here to stay.

That's looked very good at a concept level and there are innumerable applications where this is already seen. From my recent postings it should be obvious that I am currently using mind maps for my day to day working - both office and personal life. So I went to the web to search for online mind mapping solutions and it was not very surprising that I just found one such service from Mayomi. Anyways not be discouraged by this, I went ahead and registered myself there and at the very least I can summarize what I found there as a interface not ready for professional use.

So that led me to think a little deeper on why in the first place I did not firstly find more options and secondly something more ready for large scale use. Let me try to explain why

Mind mapping is a very nascent concept without any widespread acceptance as a better tool for several activities that we do. There also seems to be no agreement on the fact that it would be tool for productivity improvements.
Point #1 could either be seen as a opportunity or as a hurdle. Looking at the scenario it appears that people look at it as more of a hurdle than any opportunity
Lack of standardization in creating and saving maps. If a company comes up with this offering but I cant move a map created there into another website or product the acceptance of this will be limited

Anyways would love to hear somebody starting a website where this service is provided - are you listening folks ?

The Long Tail of Entertainment Industry

2006-11-29T20:34:00.000+01:00

In my previous postings about YouTube Mobile , YouTube vs. TV - Google monetizing the acquisition and Information overload problems from UGC - RSS 2.0 I made a effort to describe the type of impact that User Generated Content is having on the Internet.

Today as I started reading about The Long Tail, I came across this report titled "Entertaiment Industry - The Long Tail - Aggregation and Context and Not (necessarily) Content are King" which gives a very good summary of how the entertainment industry is evolving as a result of The Long Tail.

A definite must read !

The Long Tail of English usage

2006-11-29T20:17:00.000+01:00

As I started reading the Web 2.0 mindmap, I got myself introduced to The Long Tail today and will definitely read the book with the same title by Chris Andersen.

Before I could look towards getting myself a copy of the book, I quickly went to Wikipedia to check about The Long Tail. Possibly common knowledge that the most common place occurrence of The Long Tail distribution occurs in the English language. For example in standard English, the word "the" is the most common word and other short words such as "of," "is," and "have" are also quite common. These common words are vastly more common than most other words. The rare words are the long tail in English vocabulary.

Are you interested to try out what rank words on your english vocabulary are - Go here to access WordCount for a simple and elegant interface to check this out. Also remember to check QueryCount on the same site here - checkout for yourself what words people are check for usage frequency.

The book itself titled The Long Tail was ranked the best of 2006 by Amazon - Is on my reading list and its right up there :)

Top 10 Editors' Picks: Business

Topping our list of the best business books of 2006, The Long Tail started as a short magazine article. When Wired editor Chris Anderson originally published his December 2004 piece arguing that technology had fundamentally changed profitability equations by lowering distribution costs and increasing viability of virtually unlimited product choices, he didn’t realize the seismic shift he'd trigger. Companies' views of and approaches to market segmentation have flipped dramatically. Anderson's concept of many mini-niche markets making up larger mainstream ones points to the importance of the "tail" in statistical distributions--and the increasing length of those tails in industries as diverse as media, clothing, and food. This book springs from a much deeper follow-up look that Anderson took while on sabbatical from his journalism job, and contains many helpful insights for businesses looking to spot the proverbial diamonds in the rough. See more editors' picks and customers' favorites in our Best of 2006 Store.

What is Web 2.0

2006-11-29T12:36:00.000+01:00

That is a difficult question to answer for most of us - yes going through the mind map that I posted here will definitely help. But if there is one summary thought that would reduce your struggle with trying to describe the concept of Web 2.0 and the result of an always-on, always-connected culture that would be

Web 2.0 is how multiple industries are coping up and evolving at the intersection of Internet as-a-platform, to support the shift in consciousness towards the community comprising of customers, employees and all other constituents. (slightly adapted from pdf here).

Go here for a good document on "Rise in Participation Culture"

What is Web 2.0 - Mindmap view

2006-11-29T12:05:00.000+01:00

After I made my last posting I was looking for examples of large scale mind maps that people are working on and I came across this brilliant compilation of what web 2.0 is and will be on a mind map - I am reposting the download link here for the benefit of my readers

The map is organized under the following branches

Introduction
Basic Themes
History
Technology
Product Vendors
Enterprise Web 2.0
Cultural Issues
Trends - 10 years from now
Conclusions
References

Download the latest map from here.

3 Problems with Mind maps

2006-11-29T11:00:00.000+01:00

Over the last month of using mind maps I have come to realize that they have some restrictions. I will list three of them which I feel are important, but will love to hear more

Linked to the creator(s)
Mind maps are excellent aids in a number of situations - brainstorming, problem solving, activity tracking, note taking etc etc. But one major problem with mind maps is that they are very closely tied to the creator(s) of the mind map. It is only the creator(s) who can extract the maximum value from the map that he(they) have created. Reason for this is very simple in that the source of the map is the thoughts on the mind(s) of the creator(s).

Even if you look at the suggested guidelines for mind mapping by Tony Buzan (as below), it becomes rather obvious that mind maps are more a work of 'creativity' than completely rule based.

Start in the centre with an image of the topic, using at least 3 colours
Use images, symbols, codes and dimensions throughout your Mind Map
Select key words and print using upper or lower case letters
Each word/image must be alone and sitting on its own line
The lines must be connected, starting from the central image. The central lines are thicker, organic and flowing, becoming thinner as they radiate out from the centre.
Make the lines the same length as the word/image
Use colours – your own code – throughout the Mind Map
Develop your own personal style of Mind Mapping
Use emphasis and show associations in your Mind Map
Keep the Mind Map clear by using radial hierarchy, numerical order or outlines to embrace your branches

Sharing them is difficult
As a project manager, just imaging a situation where as a request for project status you get back a mind map. For the creator all the information is there on the map but as a person outside this map creation process, it becomes extremely difficult for you to get any valuable information.

Most of the uses of mind maps and even the sample ones I found on the web are tuned in on the idea the the creator and the reader are usually the same. If the objective of the map is also that it will be shared, then the creator(s) need to put in special attention to this aspect when creating the map.

I am not too sure about the features supported by all the mind mapping software but it should be easy enough to get a summary view / presentation view of a map. If this can be optimized I personally think it will go a long way in making the use of mind maps more acceptable.

No standard
If you look back at the past, one of the key drivers for faster acceptance and adoption is the presence of a standard. The 'creative' nature of mindmaps automatically rules out the possibility of getting a standard form of creation of mind maps.

Don't know if this is feasible, but I think there should be some rules which are just agreed upon which will push up the usage of mind maps.

Information overload problems from UGC - RSS 2.0

2006-11-28T17:53:00.000+01:00

Information overload was always a problem in the internet world, but the trend towards web 2.0 and user generated content come a few other problems too,

With the tremendous increase in the number of hands working on 'adding information' the rate at which the data addition is happening is also extremely high
Quantum of data that is getting added on just about any topic you can think of is tremendously high.
Content which used to come into the internet in the earlier era was somewhat validated and reviewed content but UGC thrives on peer reviews - this only means the ratio of 'useful' to possibly 'useless' content is falling and will continue to fall further

So did life get tougher on the net and nobody is doing anything about it - answer is a big NO. There are a range of solutions which exist for each of the points above which I will briefly discuss below

Rate of addition of data is increasing it only means that you need options to track where these additions are taking place and if you would be interested in the additions. There is a range of RSS feeders which are available which deliver changes to a set of sites (you choose them - which is a onetime effort though) to your site. But is this sufficient as a end user - probably not because you might not be interested in everything that a website adds. So you would need filters the additions to see what have been added in areas which you are interested and only deliver them to you. This is where companies like Blastfeed comes into play. Filtering is still in the early stages and am hoping to see lots and lots of innovation in this space as we move ahead.

The input into the whole business of receiving and filtering feeds is providing a list of feeds to track. So how does one arrive at that ? You fall back on content ranking sites like Digg , Slashdot Furl etc. All that these sites do is provide the community that is generating the content a platform to rank the content and then ensure that peer ranked content is found more easily and readily than the others. So automatically a pyramid of highly ranked content at the top (hopefully averaging the opinions of a large number of users also means that the relevant of the content that ends at the top is high) and 'useless' content at the bottom.

The large amount of data only means that people will look forward to players who aggregate content for quick and easy view of users. These players might employ some intelligence of their own - players such Digg , Slashdot , Furl or just aggregate information by grouping RSS feeds such as OriginalSignal , Popurls.

But in summary solutions to handle the information overload are in plenty and as we move forward these solutions will only become more and more efficient and user friendly.

YouTube Mobile , YouTube vs. TV - Google monetizing the acquisition

2006-11-28T17:06:00.000+01:00

I had mentioned two possible options in my earlier post here that Google could employ to monetize the acquisition of YouTube and am happy to see that both those options have been implemented.

Context Setting

In the earlier era, broadcast companies used to invest millions of dollars to create high-quality content shows and make their money selling advertising space during those shows and by licensing that content to a variety of local channels. That distribution model is changing as people turn to the Internet for their programming.

The situation in which the broadcasters are today is somewhat similar to what the print media publishers were a few years ago when the internet became popular. The print media publishers survived that change by embracing the move to internet by adapting their content and distribution to include the internet as a another channel.

As the scenario changes some top of the mind questions that come up are,

Can the broadcasters adapt and change their advertising revenue model and the distribution model to the changing scenario ?
Will the broadcast companies continue to control the television set and the cable box, user generated content will rule the Internet video world of YouTube and Google Video.
Is there a future for high-quality video content on portable media devices - can device advances catch up with the speed of user demand ?

and many more ...

According to Albert Cheng, executive vice president of Digital Media at Disney-ABC Television Group, the proliferation of options to the consumer will bring the cream to the top, even on portable devices and over the Internet. "Once you change the distribution model, you can only increase consumption. And great shows will definitely reap the benefits of all these distribution opportunities," he claimed. By contrast, he said, mediocre shows that people watch simply because "there's nothing else on" will suffer.

CBS, one of the first networks to deliver original, high-quality content to the Internet, agrees. According to David Poltrack, president of CBS Vision, "we're discovering that you can make money by building short-form programming off the show." He thinks bite-size, shorter content offerings that build off the prime-time television show are the way forward.

YouTube vs. TV?

With this changing scenario becoming a reality, one would only be led to assume that broadcasters would clamor to embrace the medium. The fastest way would obviously be partner with a player with a well established user base. Who better in today's scenario than the likes of YouTube which is exactly what CBS has done.

For starters the key driver of YouTube as a brand is its 100 Mn (or whatever that number is now) members. Two reasons why I think these people go there time and again is, firstly it allows you to upload your creation and give your a easy access to others creations and secondly it helps you get a immediate audience for the content you upload. The very fact that this is user generated content means some level of aggregation / ranking becomes necessary. Well this is nothing new to this but exists with all user generated content which is why sites like Digg are a runaway success.

Does it make sense for CBS to approach YouTube and deliver content to the 100 Mn odd YouTube members - definite YES.

Does the same amount of value addition happen to YouTube - could be a YES/NO. If or not there are changes to how YouTube manages UGC will be key here.

As more broadcasters sign in to YouTube, I would think YouTube will just be so so similar to the TV in its earlier era, replete with channels for each broadcaster, money from advertisements etc. The only possible difference would be YouTube would own both the user generated content the consumer (am assuming the last mile access would become a commodity) and the broadcaster owns the content that it delivers to the consumer.

YouTube on Mobile

Who can ignore the power of the mobile consumer today ? YouTube has understood this and has tied up with Verizon in the US in an agreement that delivers clips through Verizon’s V Cast service. I really have nothing further to comment here other than just saying that as mobile TV becomes more of a reality this space will only further heat up.

Players like YouTube would would have access to networks of users and content (albeit user generated) would be extremely well positioned to address this move.

Using Mindmaps - 5 Tips to help you start

2006-11-28T16:22:00.000+01:00

We have been trained and retrained to think in a way that we cant apply directly to create and use mind maps. So lets agree that this can be a difficult first few attempts to move your activities and thinking into mind maps. But, based on what I have realized let me give you 5 tips which I feel will smoothen this transition.

Tip 1 - The tool does'nt matter too much when you start
Don't waste too much time thinking which is the best software to use. For a starter all software's are more or less the same. The mindset change in thinking is higher importance than the tool - you can always change the tool at any point. Just download Freemind and start !

Tip 2 - Keep it simple
When you start creating mind maps remember to keep the idea simple. Some possibilities I can think of

Map any one task on your place this day/week
Prepare for one meeting / discussion using a mind map

Tip 3 - Update regularly
When you map anything you need to remember that it is a live document. Don't create a map and forget it. Make it your companion and track your work through the map. Even if you think you cant manage that, spend at least 5 minutes everyday to update the day's happenings into the map

Tip 4 - Map goes out of sync is not useful
If you are using a hard copy as I had suggested earlier ensure that your soft copy remains in sync. You should have quite a bit to update into your map every week. If that is not the case give your map a rethink. Also remember if you dont update your map every week, your map will quickly go out of sync and getting it back to reality will be a big hurdle to cross.

Tip 5 - Implement the feedback process
If you have to collate information / send any report about the task you are using a map to work and track ensure that you use the map to construct it. If you need some information which is not in the map that should be a lesson learnt in your next map.

Even if you have everything on your mind somehow the first map does not flow onto paper. But don't worry one of my readers sent me this brilliant link of maps which I am sure will serve as just the right catalyst.

Paperless Offices - Still Elusive ?

2006-11-27T16:13:00.000+01:00

One of the important changes the office has gone through in the recent years is probably the thrust to move to its paperless avataar. So has this move been successful to the extent ath was probably conceived sometime ago - well the answer at least to me is a big no. Use of paper in offices has definitely come down but I still definitely see paper being used and that does not seem to change all that fast.

Factors assisting the move towards paperless offices...

Paper is used more and more as a medium for sharing and discussions rather than for storage. Again I would say that the extent to which this statement is true differs in different parts of the world. Europeans seem to still employ paper as a storage medium as compared to the Americans.
With the evolution of Web 2.0 and drive towards online collaboration platforms for text, graphical objects, web pages etc the need to share hard copies on paper will further reduce
The fact that each paper that we use and waste kills a tree (or at least part of it) is becoming more and more of a concern all over the world.
The quality of paper has been increasing considerably which means that if technology allows us we can reuse a sheet of paper for printing more than once

Factors holding back the move towards paperless offices...

People have been used to use of paper and as any other habit this will also die hard
Paper just like to feel, mark and carry information on paper
Advances in technology also means that we can get more and more real life prints on paper with colors etc and this attracts people to print what they see on a computer on paper also
New users of computers (which is a sizeable %) fear the security of their e-data. They feel more relaxed everyday when they go to bed at night with paper printouts.

Although all in all the paperless office seems like a elusive target, one advancement today by Xerox labs (albeit still in the lab testing stage) could help us strike a middle path betweek a paper and a paperless office.

Read here for further details.

Mind maps - Tool towards enhancing your productivity

2006-11-27T11:32:00.000+01:00

If you have worked for a while I am reasonably sure that you would have hit almost all the following situations

Tons of notes - but cant link the data / extract what you want when you want
Can see the links between discussion points - leads to a non optimal decision
Making a presentation and you get pointed 'why have you not considered this ?' - thought about it but got missed ?
Started a work weeks with 10 threads - completed 5 at the end of the week leaving you wondering how the others slipped ?
Just had a promotion and are finding the level of information overwhelming ?

I can go on and on .... but the point of providing this list is simple - if you want to avoid these just get to using mind maps.

There are a multitude of resources on mind mapping on the net and you can find them here and here and here and here. In this post I will try to summarize one survey I found on mind mapping and found it interesting.

Primary mind mapping software programs

Mindmanager - 72.6%
Freemind - 10.4%

Conclusion - Like any other product people would like to try a free application before moving into a paid software to manage mind maps. This in my understanding reflects two things

Freemind has a great chance of gathering market from Mindmanager - I would love this being a fan of Opensource software platforms.
The information availability on mind maps is relatively low which makes people to take route through a free application to get convinced about the relevance of mindmaps

Top 5 applications of mindmap's in today's context

To Do Lists (58%)
Preparing for Presentations (58%)
Making Notes (56%)
Problem Solving (53%)
Project Planning (52%)

Conclusion - The range of applications for which mind maps are being used only implies that essentially mind maps can be used for anything and everything. Its only a matter of realizing the need for that and able to map the activities. A approach with such a broad range of applications is definitely bound to catch on

Time spent per day on mindmap's

> 1 Hr - 40.4%
1-2 Hr - 33%

Conclusion - The large % of people seem to be spending only 20-30% of the work day on mindmaps which probably means that it still remains a support system and not a mainstream activity.

Top 5 benefits from mindmap's

Clarity of Thinking
Manage Information overload
Improved Productivity
Better organization of tasks
Visualize information relationships

Conclusion - No other type of program enables you to record your ideas, thoughts and knowledge and rearrange them up with the flexibility that mind mapping software enables.

Top 3 hurdles for widespread acceptance of mindmap's

Lack of adequate knowledge of mindmapping
Acceptance of mindmapping by others
Software not easy and intuitive

Conclusion - Seems to be a difficult issue which needs an all round effort to ensure better acceptance and mainstream usage of mindmap's

The survey itself covers a few more topics and ideas. Pls go here to get a copy of the complete pdf of the survey results.

Chinese manfacurers take imitation to the next level

2006-11-27T00:57:00.000+01:00

Have you ever visited China ? Until last year I had always heard stories of how people were all impressed at the range of imitation merchandise that you get to buy in China. You ask for and get imitations of a Mont Blanc, Omega, Rolex, Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Panasonic and what more its at a fraction of what the original sells. My rhetoric always was that its simple enough to weed out the imitation from the fake - is it not after all why you pay for the original. One visit to Hong Kong last year to my aunt's house was enough to make me realize that if most of us cant anyways differentiate between the original and fake - why not just go for the fake ?

Quality and durability might be question marks in your mind - but after all with the ownership duration of most products (particularly electronics) going down this also might soon cease to be a reason why people might not just buy fakes.

Nearly 30-60% of most manufacturing is done out of China which has made "Made in China" a brand in itself. So this puts them in a highly enviable position to churn out fakes. As if pirating products which existed in the market was not a big enough problem, recently I came across this article here from which it appears that they have now gone one step further (after all innovation also has a role to play!). The Chinese seem to be faking the products even before the manufacturers can introduce the originals and this makes the originals look like the fakes ! Ripping apart an existing product and imitating is one level of piracy - but getting the specs of a product before the original product is on the shelves means outright theft.

It is foolish to think that China itself feels good about this. The efforts that one gets to read about what all China seems to be doing is huge - but the effects don't seem to be seen - you need to work smarter folks! I say smarter because whatever the decision makers seem to be doing or saying they are doing the manufacturers themselves don't seem to be following !

What might be the problems of piracy for China ?

If anybody reading this post feels that there is a Chinese 'brand' speak out - I for one cant think beyond Huawei
Even if there are Chinese brands - they graduating to the next level as a credible brand is a definite no no
People are happy to buy a "Made in China" product of an international brand more reading than just a made in China product.
Chinese are one of the biggest consumers of most of the products they imitate - which means even if you imitate you might need to meet the quality standards - so is it a big benefit to imitate in the first place. After all given the size of the markets for most products in India and China any international manufacturer will anyway reduce the price and play the volume game

Would definitely love to hear some comments.

Earn money from your blog - Free Tips (Update 2)

2006-11-23T23:11:00.000+01:00

Folks if you read my previous update one of the things I did mention is to zero in on a small subset of blogs which overlap with your blog content. Always had observed that whenever the number of items becomes high in any product / service a new breed of options which aggregate and segment information will definitely emerge and was surprised that I could not find that happening with blogs.

Lucky for me that I did not have to search for too long - it ended just now when I read about this posting on TechCrunch about such a aggregation service from Original Signal. The post mentions of a few other options but frankly I would choose Original Signal - two reasons,

I think the coverage is better
Presentation is extremely simple, elegant and well designed - for me any day simplicity scores !

So folks if you have started blogging recently your top questions probably are,

What do I blog about ?
What are the other top bloggers blogging about?

Yeah yeah I know that you have to have a focus on what you want to blog, but lets be practical it hardly starts that way. I believe that you would usually 'discover' your niche and learn to stick to it - but until then you need some help on what to blog on and I feel pages like Original Signal do a great job at this.

Hope you have a great blogging experience...

Commodity Trading

2006-11-23T21:28:00.000+01:00

If you already invest in stocks and shares and would like to start investing in commodities to broaden your portfolio of investments I am putting down some basic points of commodities trading.

Wikipedia defines a commodity as,

"In the original and simplified sense, commodities were things of value, of uniform quality, that were produced in large quantities by many different producers; the items from each different producer are considered equivalent. It is the contract and this underlying standard that define the commodity, not any quality inherent in the product"

In common terms items such as gold, silver, agricultural commodities, metals, crude oils etc are the popular commodities that are traded in todays world.

So commodity trading is nothing but trading in commodity derivatives - either futures or options. In the Indian market there are currently 2 major commodity exchanges NCDEX (National Commodity and Derivative Exchange) and MCX (Multi-Commodity Exchange).

Why should you invest in commodities ?

First reason is because you can - in recent years trading in commodities has been made possible at levels where most investors can afford.
Like any other form of investment this is a avenue for diversification
Most stocks and relates derivatives are mostly driven by factors in the local market - company performance, supply demand. But commodities give you an option to make investments where prices vary due to international factors
Trading in commodities derivatives is a far better option than trading in its physical form

Simpler to manage - storage, disposal
Gains are higher (you pay for only the margins)

If you are interested in investing in commodities proceed to ICICIDirect (my personal suggestion as the best platform for online trading)

My experiment with using mindmaps - update #1

2006-11-23T15:33:00.000+01:00

For the last month I started using mindmaps actively for managing all my office and personal work and I must say that it has been of great help. Yes it was quite a burden to put all the information in verbose form on one map - but I did that and that I must say was half the battle won ! I use a full expanded form of this map on A3 as my companion in all my meetings and discussions. All discussions point during the week get synced up and the map get cleaned every week.

Pros

1. Extremely helpful for tracking activities - chance of losing sight of a thread is minimal
2. Any day you want to generate a one page summary of your work thus far on a activity this view will come in handy

Cons

1. A lot of motivation is needed to get it started primarily because it a change in our way of thinking
2. Time and patience to keep your working paper copy and the copy on the computer in sync is necessary

What features might be helpful on the product I use
(at the moment I definitely don't want to graduate out of the free version I use)

1. Can I link task lists with a map element - I agree I can still do it but I cannot attach dates, reminders to that
2. Generate some reports out of my mind map - pending activities for a task for example, my action items as on a given day etc.
3. Mark and print parts of the mind map is another feature that I found missing

Will add more as I use the mind maps further. Read my previous post on mind maps here

Get paid for your browsing the internet

2006-11-23T08:08:00.000+01:00

Well I am sure most of us (including myself) have read this posting or similar ones umpteen number of times - so your first reaction would be to ignore it as a hoax.

If you were around during the internet bubble in 1999-2000 you might remember a company called AllAdvantage which distributed money to its members for using the web - distributed about $100 Mn and then went down with the burst.

Why I am tell you this is because they are back now as Agloco and they work like this

AGLOCO is a global community which belongs to the members of the community itself. In other words there might be millions of internet users who might eventually become owners of the network itself. Objective of the network is to capture the value generated by this community and return it back to themselves. The 'return' of value could be either in cash / stock of the company. AGLOCO aims to list its stock in the future.

How does it work - Each member of the AGLOCO community downloads a viewbar (yet to be made available) and then continues his normal life as a internet user. Along the way he generates a lot of revenue for the network and hopefully for himself. Key points are that users are not asked for any personal data and porn / adult sites are excluded.

The more people join AGLOCO™ , the more value the community will generate for itself. The company believes those that build the community deserve more: your own profits become larger the more people you refer. You can accumulate hours not only from your Internet activity but also from those who you refer, and their referrals to. Curious to understand how much you would earn from this - first register yourself and then check out this calculator.

Folks this is a definite win-win proposition and would urge you to go ahead and register yourself - Please remember to use my referral link here

The Six Stages of Blogging with Adsense

2006-11-22T22:22:00.000+01:00

What are the typical stages that a blogger goes though ?

Just read a nice piece titled The Six Stages of Blogging with Adsense‘

Stage 1: Sign Up
Stage 2: Watching and Waiting
Stage 3: You Consider Click-Fraud
Stage 4: You’ve Been Slashdotted/Dugg
Stage 5: Google Whore
Stage 6: Normalcy

I would suggest reading the entire piece,

Great job Steve (http://hmtk.com/blog)

Free Application to send/receive large files - Pando 1.2 Beta

2006-11-22T16:15:00.000+01:00

How often have you faced problems in sending large attachments via email ? Most corporate networks block email attachments beyond a certain size and this might put you into a fix.

Dont worry any more, you can e-mail files as large as 1GB with Pando, a free P2P app that overcomes the 10MB file-size barrier inherent to most mail servers.

Pros

Inherent integration with mail programs such AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail. Users can continue to attach files normally and Pando jumps in to send it in Pando style if it sees that they are too large
There's a Skype plug-in for sending files to your contacts in Skype
Its free !

Cons

The whole thing works only if the sender and receiver use Pando. Well this is not a big problem afterall (or may be it is - if your office computers don't allow you to install stuff for example !)

Interested in giving it a try - Download Pando 1.2 Beta

Systematic Investment Plans (SIP)

2006-11-22T14:17:00.000+01:00

I am sure many of you folks already have made SIP investments. But at the risk of rejection I will repeat the benefits of doing this

1. Power of Compounding - Give your funds more time to work for you
Most of us always wait till the n'th moment to make the investments. Assuming that you cannot shift your goals (children's education, marriage etc) the longer you delay planning for this, the greater will be the burden on you to meet those goals. In simple terms it only means that the more delay there is the lesser time your money has to work for you and that only means your input needed for a expected output will increase. On the other hand, you would be surprised what you could achieve by saving a small sum of money regularly at an early age.

2. Input Cost Averaging - Invest as much in the peaks as you would in the troughs
You need not average your investments if you can invest at the bottom and sell off at the top. But when do prices go up and when do they go down - you just cant guess this, and that is where averaging comes in. So the best bet you can take is invest at regular intervals (keep the intervals as small as possible) and you can automatically see that your average price over any good period of time (2-3 years) would be close enough to the lowest price.

3. Discipline pays off
Unless there is a strict pattern in sticking to your investments any investment you start will fade away very soon. Murphy's law will ensure that whenever you need to make an investment you will have a more pressing need for that money and your will delay your investment - delays are always an added burden !

So in summary folks if you have not already started investing in a SIP do it today (I invest in a SIP with Reliance Mutual Fund)

I just received an email in the morning from ICICI Direct about mini Gold and Silver investments and I definitely did find that interesting too. I am seriously thinking of making some SIP investments into commodities - start would definitely be from the stars Gold, Silver, Oil !

Flickr has an opinion on most popular cameras

2006-11-22T11:48:00.000+01:00

Flickr makes an interesting addition on its web page - It is giving statistics of which devices (top end, point and shoot and mobile cameras) are being used by people to upload photos onto its website.

Some thoughts on this enhancement...

High levels of traffic (not saying that they had a shortage) to the site purely to try out how a upload any user makes to the rankings. The best part of this enhancement is that it must really have been something which hardly cost anything to implement - after all the users give all the details on their photo meta-data fields.
From what I know it must probably the first usage of meta data to collect usage patterns
If they have to make any viable business case on this there is a lot of work to be done - a few hurdles to cross in my opinion are,

Can they restrict this analysis on what data they have and not make changes to the upload process in the greed to collect more data - this might just push away users
Why should I share data with an entity - two reasons firstly its my private data as to which camera I use and secondly I don't get back anything for my data !
My belief around publicly available information is the more the number of people who have it the less important it becomes - how will Flickr ensure usefulness of data and still keep it public

Earn money from your blog - Free Tips (Update)

2006-11-22T10:35:00.000+01:00

In addition to the monthly review (read yesterday's blog on this) of my experiments to drive traffic on my blog, I would also like to share my lessons learnt along the way as frequently as feasible

Suggestion for today - One of the experiments that I am trying to get traffic onto my site is to get a fraction of people from high traffic blogs to visit mine from there.

It will be beneficial to keep the following in mind as you take this approach

Only focus on blog's that share a similar interest as yours - start where you feel the overlap is maximum
Keep this list as small as possible - definitely not more than 5-7
Don't do anything which is unacceptable in the blogs from where you are trying to attract visitors - Even if you cant attract visitors you at least don't have them reject you !

Free Translation Network - Cucumis.org

2006-11-21T15:59:00.000+01:00

I have been working in Europe recently and was facing a difficulty in following things in Dutch. Was using sites like Free Translation for my basic day to day activities. But just today morning was reading TechCrunch and I saw that a website Cucumis was covered.

TechCrunch says, "It is a community site for people who speak at least two languages and want to trade translation services. Translate text to earn points, then spend the points to have text translated into one of 22 languages. As a user’s reputation grows they earn “expert” status and receive more points for translations. The service itself is free, and Cucumis is a one-man project."

I went ahead and registered myself and played around a little with the web site. Definitely agree that the site is not very well designed and needs a lot of rework etc. But well that is not he objective my post here.

This is definitely useful service and I can think of quite a few ways of getting this network to generate revenues

1. If people can buy points and use that to have their requirements translated - the site owners can make money
2. Can translators 'bid' for translations and the site owners can make money as an intermediary
3. If the strength of the network grows fast enough, and the statistics suggest rate of match between a translator and translated as high enough some real time services like the mTranslator can be thought off (read my blog on this here)
4. People who know some language combinations might be tougher to find and so those combinations might be charged and not free as it is currently

Want to earn money from your Blog - Free Tips

2006-11-21T15:39:00.000+01:00

I have now been actively blogging for a month and I realized that I haven't earned much or I should say nothing :( Is there any shortage of sites which offer free advice on what you should do on your blog to earn money.

I went through some of it and what do I propose to do - Just add to all the free advice available ? Yes but with a small change - every month going forward I propose to choose three areas where I will focus on making my blog earn money for me. I will review it at the end of the month and share with all of you if / not it made any impact on my earnings from my blog. Will plan for the next month and so it continues...

Current visitors to my site hover around the 50-100 per day mark. My target for December would be to push this to about 300-400 visitors per day.

Well probably ambitious but don't mind giving a try - my focus areas / approaches to achieve this in December are,

Blog 'original' content
I don't think any blogger can ever have an argument against this piece of advice. But is it just sufficient to write and post original content and hope that people will come there to read it. I will definitely try my best to write rather than copy content (also don't believe this is the right thing to do). Before you create content (could be your views, opinions) on any topic key thing is to see if the world is looking for it. Obviously the world is not always looking for things on which you can comment so I propose to define a wide enough set and wait for a event to blog on rather than just plain blogging on anything and everything.

Despite all this #1 worry on my mind is why would somebody ever come looking to my blog for the 'original' information I have written about. Yes, may be some of them will just land here but bottom line is I cant just laze around for people to come to my blog but I will need to do much much more than write fresh content. This thought leads me to my second approach

If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain
Wondering why I dropped this quote here? Well if users don't find my blog when they look for information best approach is provide the link to them where they go to get that information. Where do bloggers usually go - to the most popular blogs. What's new with that piece of information - nothing much I guess. But why on earth would a popular blog ever mention my blog on his - but I need to figure on his blog and the best way to do that would be post 'comments' on his blog.

If you blog often enough, you get noticed by the large number of visitors coming to the popular blog and I would hope some percentage of them would 'try' to find out a little more about me. Blogs' itself survive because of the power of a network and I see this as a good way of utilizing this network to funnel some traffic into my blog.

Yes of course if you have not already done it pls address the options like Technocrati, Slashdot etc.

Treat my visitors well
After all the pain and struggle it is very necessary to ensure that users who come to your website come back again and again. What can I do better for this

Keep my posts spaced out well, want somebody to come back as often as they want to. Will try my level best to stick to 1/2 posts per day
Give my visitors a complete view of happenings. If there is a interesting event in my focus area, I will provide links and information to this
Keep my design clean and simple - too much clutter will drive away people anyways (just my belief - feel free to ignore this)

Don't know if all this will make me meet my target above, but well how can I just say it wont without giving it a try. So wait for an update towards the end of December on if / not it made any impact.

Innovation in the Silicon Valley of India (Bangalore)

2006-11-20T18:57:00.000+01:00

Don't know how many you already read the snippet in the Times of India today about how students from IITB have filed for another patent. This time its not on technology but on iChess (inverse chess). Over the years as I have been working in the same city in several software companies I have heard many many times that Indian companies have to graduate to develop products and not just get stuck providing software services (the cliche'd move up the value chain approach).

In my opinion making this a reality is definitely becoming easier for Indian firms - why ?

1. One of the key arguments why Indian firms cannot produce products was that we are not close to where the markets exist. Well one area where I think this argument is failing to hold is in Telecommunication. With over 100 million consumers and fast growing, we will very soon need to have products targeted for the Indian consumer and who better than we ourselves to design it.

2. At a more fundamental level, concept of software as a service is catching up. At a basic level this means that the whole world is a local market and gathering what a customer wants and delivering it to him can be done out of anywhere. I think its only a matter of time that Indian companies will have product offerings that are delivered on the web.

3. There is surely a tipping point beyond which innovation feeds itself. With the number of high technology firms in Bangalore I feel it definitely in a positive flow where growth is feeding into innovation

Free copy of Vista - not for long !

2006-11-20T18:41:00.000+01:00

Thinking of getting yourself a free copy of Vista at the web cafe round the corner - sure you can do that but Microsoft says it may not work for too long. Read more details about this here.

Recently read an interesting post about why piracy is not bad for the industry here and as mentioned there one of the key reasons which resulted in the phenomenal rise of Windows as compared to UNIX was its easy availability. I however also think that coupled with this easy availability the simple and friendly usability features of Windows did go a long way in influencing users. However, I think that this no longer really plays as important a role as when Windows 95 / Windows 2000 came out. Linux installs today are far more user friendly and easy to start working with. So this being the case to whom is the availability of a free pirated version of Vista benefit - the current windows user rather than a user who already has Linux installed on his PC.

At a more fundamental level, I don't think even Microsoft is too bothered about the release of Vista for the sole reason that more and more services are being offered on the web as a service and the impact that Vista can have on changing or altering this is minimal.

Free web page annotation

2006-11-17T11:42:00.000+01:00

After I read about the posting on this topic on Techcrunch I did some reading of the area around Web annotation. Below is a summary

Wikipedia definition : "A Web annotation is an online-annotation associated with a web resource (typically a web page). By using a Web annotation system a user can add, modify or remove information from a Web resource without actually modifying the resource itself. The annotations can be thought of as being applied on a layer on top of the existing resource. Any particular annotation layer is visible to users who share the same annotation system and can remain transparent to all others"

Web annotation space is a relatively crowded space - some of the services which support collaborative annotation are TrailFire and Diigo and Stickis.

Just tried out Fleck which Techcrunch notes a new entrant.

Pros
1. Simple and elegant interface
2. Anyone can use it without creating an account or installing a browser plug-in.

Cons
1. Works only with Mozilla as of now - will surely change in the near future
2. Very minimal set of annotation tool tips - why cant I have things like different shapes for annotations, color options etc. All options that users have on document editing software would be expected
3. No linkage to blogging tools - even when they do how will it link is a question

Can you have alcohol when you are on antibiotics ?

2006-11-15T19:50:00.000+01:00

You have a party this weekend - but you think you should not drink because you are on antibiotics - you are wrong !

"Antibiotics have been one of the greatest success stories of modern medicine - up there with the discovery of vaccination, and the discovery that you shouldn't mix your drinking water and your toilet water. Like all drugs, antibiotics can have their bad side effects, but their benefits are enormous. Even so, some people wrongly believe the opposite. And in fact, lots of people also wrongly believe that you should not drink any alcohol while taking any of the antibiotics"

… So half a glass of an alcoholic beverage of our choice would be fine with most antibiotics.

Downloading YouTube video's - Whats the fuss about ?

2006-11-15T12:37:00.000+01:00

Sequence of events on TechCrunch are as follows,

1. TechCrunch posts a note on how to get YouTube video's on a iPOD
2. TechCrunch receives a cease and desist note saying that this illegal under the YouTube 'Terms of use'

Now I will leave the details of the posts aside and put down what I purely think (pls note these are purely my personal opinions)

At the outset lets see how YouTube collects the data that it is trying to cover under its terms of use - it is uploaded by the users of the website - some of it is of course 'original', but well all of us know that a good percentage of it is probably not.

When people upload content on to the website, I don't know if there is a specific clause that says YouTube owns the rights to this content. On original content, it is the right of the owner to do what he wants, but I would suggest nobody should ever pass on these rights to YouTube - the simple reason being they don't earn anything for that rights that they passed on. On the content which is not 'original' the person who is uploading the content cant even pass the rights in the first place.

So on any form of content on the website, there seems to be a problem in YouTube owning the complete rights on the content. If this is the case, how can it ever block people from downloading content and redistributing it.

I always believed that the major problem for Google is how it will avoid sites which will download and duplicate the content it has on the YouTube website? Well all that is needed for the whole website to crack is its network to crack. If not enough people upload content on the site and there not enough people coming there to view at the videos everything about the site is lost !

New Blogger - Top 5 questions

2006-11-15T10:31:00.000+01:00

If you have started blogging recently. Then I am reasonably sure that you might be facing questions like the ones below

1. How do I change my template into a 3 column format ?
2. Want users refer your post on the popular site such as Digg it or Del.ico.us ?
3. Want to modify your format and you want a step by step guide ?
4. Get your recent posts on your Blogger Beta blog ?
5. Want more jazzy things on your blog and a place where you can get a step by step guide for doing this ?

Don't simply go googling all around the web - just proceed to Hackosphere !

Feedback : Mail me

Are you diabetic - wear contact lenses ?

2006-11-14T16:10:00.000+01:00

Are you diabetic and you use invasive ways to check your sugar level regularly - well a good percentage of the worlds population probably already says yes or will say yes in the near future. You cant probably change the fact that you are diabetic very easily but what can help you ?

- A continuous display if or not your sugar level is in the normal range/slightly high range or dangerously high range
- You can do this in a non invasive manner

Well that is what you might have very shortly. Check out this article

Links : Science Daily

Google CEO says Mobiles should be free

2006-11-13T20:37:00.000+01:00

"Your mobile phone should be free," Schmidt told Reuters. "It just makes sense that subsidies should increase" as advertising rises on mobile phones.

Schmidt's comments imply that Google sees a high adoption rate for mobile Internet access with a concommittant drop in handset prices. The average price for a handset in the U.S. has fallen 30% in the last year, according to pricegrabber.com. And in some markets, consumers are adopting mobile Internet access faster than PC-based access.

Well everybody can definitely see why Google does not think that Mobiles users should accept mobile ads which might in turn make mobiles free. Google is working on several applications such targeted towards mobile devices such as text-based advertising on cell phones, a java-powered Gmail app, traffic maps and geolocation.

My data - Always free for all ?

2006-11-13T20:20:00.000+01:00

In the last few days with Web 2.0 Conference in focus the number of companies who have been launching applications on the web are increasing at a furious pace. What is the underlying assumption in all this - my data is available for access in a public manner in a good percentage of the ones.

Just saw that there are a small percentage of companies Multiply and Vox for example who are focusing on allowing a restricted access of my information to a network where I decide who is in and who is out.

Read the article at TechCrunch for a comparison between Multiply and Vox

Downloads - Mozilla : Skype

Free high end mobiles - Not very far away !

2006-11-13T16:00:00.000+01:00

Was thinking on what might be the impact of the exploding number of mobile users and I did come up with some thoughts. Would love to get your feedback on this.

1980-1990 (shift it by a few years forward or backward depending on where you are in the world)

Mobiles were probably just getting introduced, and it will not be hard to realize that during the initial years owning a mobile was itself a big thing. Nobody used it for anything other than just making calls and it was used for necessities only. Landlines were still probably the preferred mode of communication.

1990-1995 (shift it by a few years forward or backward depending on where you are in the world)

Mobile usage became more rampant, and people were spending more and more time on the device. It started getting used as a device to remain in touch rather than just being used only when a need came up. Text Messaging started picking up too. In summary people started spending more and more time on the device.

What did this do - the calling minutes and text messages that users sent out was able to subsidize for the device itself. Operators were able to come out with schemes where device would be offered free if the subscriber could commit a certain usage for a reasonable length of time. Well well, I agree that churn was also an important factor in driving these schemes but the I still think that usage was able to subsidize the device to a large extent.

Today (2006)

Device capabilities are going up and more and more devices are moving to support multiple forms of media support and communication support. Can calling minutes still subsidize the device - a definite no for the high end devices. But in my opinion the day is not very far when advertising for example can subsidize the high end devices. Some challenges would definitely have to be tackled before this can become reality

a. People need to master the art of marketing to the highly segmented mobile user group.
b. Advertising on a small screen is a big big challenge
c. Difficult to decide if there is a need to pay for ad's on a mobile device - the price / device will fall anyways - the time to market pressure will always play on all participants in this chain (price of a Razr is now a fraction of what it was introduced at)

Download : Mozilla : Skype

6 Secrets and Myths about Salary

2006-11-10T11:42:00.000+01:00

Did you go through a salary negotiation recently ? I am sure that you are feeling that you got a raw deal at whatever the figure or jump you got. Dont worry you will learn with time :)

Came across this interesting link about secrets and myths about salary levels. Check it out...

Secret 1: Your pay doesn't necessarily reflect performance and seniority
Secret 2: There's more raise where that came from
Secret 3: When you're told they can't pay you more now, budget may not be the issue

Myth 1: Your pay is all about you
Myth 2: Bosses pay more if they like you
Myth 3: You can't negotiate severance

Downloads : Free Browser - Mozilla for a great browsing experience : Skype 3.0 BETA

Stikkit - Sticky Notes Reborn

2006-11-10T10:02:00.000+01:00

O'Reilly Radar highlights this article on Stikkit here. I have just copied a smalla extract below for quick reference,

"At the Web 2.0 Summit Launch Pad, Rael Dornfest and Michael Buffington launched Stikkit, a slick new site for organizing your life. The basic concept is simple: take notes in your browser instead of scrawling them on sticky notes and tacking them to your computer monitor, your desk, your cubicle walls, etc. But packed inside the simple metaphor of a yellow note pad is a rich user experience. The genius lies in extracting todos, calendar entries, contacts, bookmarks, and tags from the text you feed it. When you type in something that looks like an address, it extracts the address and stores it in your address book (or "my peeps" in stikkit-speak). Anything with a date is added to your calendar, and any bulleted item goes onto your todo list. You can tag any item, simply by saying "tag as foo" or the more convenient @foo"

The company has already started registering for trying out their BETA product. If you are already very interested and want to register and try out go here

Though I definitely agree that there are some nice features like peeking, stikking as I browse etc, personally, I don't think this will really not make any fundamental change in the way things work !

Reasons I think so,

1. Why do people stick notes up on their computer, door, desk ? It is *not definitely only* to remember the things they are putting up in the note itself. One of the key drivers is for ensuring that it strikes their memory when it has to and when its apt. It is more about timing the reminder rather than just being a reminder. If everything I wanted to remember goes into a web site yes its all together at one place but, I have to open it and then figure out if I have completed all my things. Compare this with having a clear and clean desk and being sure that all things are taken care of !

2. To what extent would one go dependent on a device is a big question. I would rather be happy making out lists on small chits of paper and carry it with me rather than open a device (yes to access the note on the web !) to look up for my jobs to do !

Feedback please

What is Web 2.0 ?

2006-11-09T19:55:00.000+01:00

Many of you might be wondering about the question what exactly is Web 2.0. The article by O'Reilly at the following link is the best summary I have seen till date. I keep reading it over and over again and each time I glean something new from that.

Everybody agrees that in today's world the web touches every one and every bit of the way we do business. All of you will benefit a great deal in just reading this article irrespective of the kind of work you do and in what domain you work.

Will make an humble effort in the coming weeks to put down what I understand from the article.

Google delivers mass mailing worm for free !

2006-11-09T11:36:00.000+01:00

Google 'accidentally' sent out e-mail containing a mass mailing worm to about 50,000 members of an e-mail discussion list focused on its Google Video Blog, the company said Tuesday.

Google said in a statement, posted late Tuesday night, "On Tuesday evening, three posts were made to the Google Video Blog-group that should not have been posted. Some of these posts may have contained a virus called W32/Kapser.A@mm -- a mass mailing worm. If you think you have downloaded this virus from the group or an e-mail message, we recommend you run your anti virus program to remove it,".

What is happening here - Problems of a company growing too fast ?

Google has been regarded as a company by the nerds for the commoners (i remember having read that candidates go through 8/10 technical rounds before getting selected) - and if such a thing happens from them I can only think of two reasons

They wanted to do it - am sure this is not the reason !
It just happened - Given the quality of people working there the only possibility is that there was some process flaw. But well Google really needs to tie up things and do it quick.Google has seen a growing number of technical glitches lately, something observers are attributing to the company's break-neck growth over the past few years. One month ago, hackers found a way to publish a fake post on Google's official blog. The company also experienced service disruptions with its Blogger service recently that have left some users fuming.

Feedback here

Downloads : Mozilla - a good browser : Skype 3.0 BETA

New (free) visual collaboration platforms

2006-11-09T09:42:00.000+01:00

When Google launched its Google Docs application with the facility where two users could communicate it definitely was in tune with the users expectations, atleast I thought so. A year or so later, though I don't have any hard usage figures, I have not really heard too many people who have really started using the collaborate feature there (you think otherwise ? would like know, please mail me ). Trying to address the question why is a not the objective of my post here, as I still trying to understand why !

However, today at TechCrunch I read that two companies ConceptShare and Thinkature are looking at taking the collaboration to the next level. Both companies are aiming for products that let users create shared visual workspaces that can be marked up and chatted in. Among other's visual designers, graphics designers, architects, cross border teams would all be particularly interested in getting know more about this. For someone planning events or otherwise looking to stop emailing or faxing visual objects back and forth - one of these two services might be just what they are looking for. Among the two products, Thinkature is simpler, free and available now. ConceptShare is more powerful, subscription based and due to come to market in a few weeks.

As companies in the IT domain are talking of a multinational approach - get things done where ever it makes maximum sense for both the supplier and the customer to get it done - cost, proximity, efficiency, language factors might all play a role. Looking at the working of these companies, I am definitely sure that a feature like visual collaboration is something that would offer a lot of benefits to teams which are not colocated. But dont think if corporates would be even willing to consider anything like this for sensitive company data on the free internet. ConceptShare, Thinkature - Are you folks planning something for these enterprise needs ?

Links : Feedback : Thinkature : Concept Share : TechCrunch

Downloads : Mozilla - a good browser : Skype 3.0 BETA

Skype - "The world can talk for free" - Version 3.0 BETA

2006-11-09T09:19:00.000+01:00

I have been using Skype for some time now and I really like its performance. I have used Yahoo, GTalk as well for voice communication and I somehow find the Skype experience much better. I also SkypeOut regularly all over the world and though I pay a few cents / minute more I still prefer that just for its call quality.

So Skype released its 3.0 BETA with a bunch of new features - Am yet to start using :)

Start Skype'ing today - Download Skype 3.0 BETA here.

Click here for feedback

Free application at 'Samurize' - Show text files on the desktop

2006-11-09T00:00:00.000+01:00

How many times has your daily worklog, grocery shopping list, todo's, project ideas stored in text files lost somewhere on your hard disk. At least it has happened to me quite often and I presume it must have happened to you too.

What Samurize does is for you is - you can embed that information right onto your Windows desktop automatically with this free Windows system monitoring software.

Does this application sound interesting to you - check out the following link !

Free access to my data on central storage - What do I get ?

2006-11-08T16:04:00.000+01:00

Was just contemplating how things were evolving - my mails are on a web based server, my documents are saved probably on a web based server, my friends are all probably somewhere on the net, my search patterns can easily be captured. Well in short my entire identity can be probably constructed from my data on the web.

Well yes this could be a security threat and all that, but I see it differently. Companies like Google , Skype , Yahoo etc are making money by placing context specific advertisements by gleaning off the data that I have stored on the central servers. For example I open a mail on GMail , a content specific ad is placed on the side, I click it and somebody else makes money.

What did I get for storing my data on the central server. I agree that I did get convenience, I clicked on the ad because I found it relevant etc. But did get the best deal for what I was looking for - possibly not ! For taking the risks of putting my personal data accessible to everybody on the central servers I did not even get the comfort that I got the best deal - rather dismal.

Anyways that's how things are working and it will probably only get more and more acute, so I will learn not to complain but look at options of making money from this very 'data'

Am definitely not alone in thinking on these lines - somewhat explains why the number of sites where user generated content is stored is shooting up - Blogging sites, sharing content.

Comments welcome

Links : Wireless Watch : TechCrunch

Download Mozilla today - Its a great browser : Get your download of the day

3 reasons that differentiate a mobile market from others

2006-11-08T15:29:00.000+01:00

The number of mobile users over the last few years has faced tremendous growth and is over 2 billion users and almost knocking on the doors of 3 Bn users. The set of mobile users are significantly different from what markets companies have been addressing thus far. It has a number of factors which differentiate it from the other markets of which I think the following 3 are really key

Any company which can get access to the mobile user means that any advertising done via the mobile is definitely reaching its end point. Lack of surety of this aspect was one of the major disadvantages of a TV, Radio or any form of Print Media. Mobile changes this whole equation and offers the potential to establish a dedicated link between the sender and receiver of information. So the challenge seems to shift from getting to the right person to getting the right information.

A mobile is a personal device and knowing a person can mean I can tunnel more and more relevant information to the end consumer. This would have benefits in all forms of push information be it advertisements, request for support or anything else. So the challenge is not towards designing information based on broad segmenting of say for example channels / programs but on actual information of the person who is using the mobile.

Most of the phenomenal growth that is happening in the mobile world is from markets like India, China etc. This is throwing up a new challenge where new consumers are getting available, but they are not following the curve that advertisers and companies are used to. These consumers have taken a leap and offer a whole lot of information about themselves which most firms dont even know how to use it.

On the same note came across this interesting write up - Metrics and Trends by J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D., VP & Chief Analyst, Mobile & Wireless , Frost & Sullivan

Links : Wireless Watch : TechCrunch

Download Mozilla today - Its a great browser : Get your download of the day

Free (well almost !) Products - Visit Jellyfish.com

2006-11-07T21:07:00.001+01:00

There is a reverse action every day at Jellyfish.com. The everyday smack sale has a different item each day - give it a shot tomorrow !

So how does it work, to quote TechCrunch - " Here’s how it works: an undisclosed quantity of a particular item (today it’s an 80 gigabyte Video iPod ) will be put up for auction, starting at its regular price and falling in price every few seconds. Users watch the price fall, torn between letting it fall lower and buying the item at the current price before the mystery quantity is sold out. There’s a forum for real time communication and the psychology sounds just nuts"

Just went and checked out the website and it seems interesting. The interface is clean and simple and it seems to offer value to buyers. Am airing my first reactions - feel free to comment...

1. Everybody who would be watching the auction would have a reserve price and if the price falls below that his propensity to go ahead an buy it would increase and this would only mean that items which are in demand (typically products just off the shelf) would most probably get sold at a price closer to the start price.

2. If I am doing a product launch I would be encouraged to use this route for my 'test marketing' studies or controlled product launches. Why do I think so,

Based on how the price moves after the reverse auction starts would give the company a great understanding of the acceptance of the product and the price that it has set for it.
The real time communication medium that it supports is where the company can get tons of valuable information that is going on in a buyers mind as he decides to wait or buy the product.
Companies can also gather good information about the kind of promotions that would work and the ones that may not for the product in question

3. I really dont think that this approach would work for products which are in the market for a long time / for which price discounts are available on other sites.

4. The duration of the reverse auction is extremely important. If its too short or too long the right price discovery might not happen. I would suggest that Jellyfish would be better off providing this as a B2B service to companies for test marketing at product launch or study effects of promotions which are planned rather than as a service to the end consumer.

Links : Jellyfish.com : TechCrunch

Download Mozilla today !

Transformer Design - Is this an obscure topic to blog on ?

2006-11-07T19:11:00.000+01:00

Over the coming days on my blog you will find write up's covering various aspects of transformer design. Focus would be to demystify the 'art' of transformer design as my father chooses to call it.

Transformers cater to a extremely wide range of electronic and electrical needs and effectively classifying the several types of transformers in itself is a major task, and this is what the first article would focus on.

Once we are done with that we would try to focus issues in designing each type of transformer.

Mail me for any further details / suggestions.

Download Mozilla today !

Google's Page Rank and Digg's Algorithms

2006-11-06T19:22:00.000+01:00

Have always wondered how Google's Page Rank works. Recently as I started using Digg started thinking of how items make it to the front page.

Was searching the web and found these two interesting posts, read them and thought of sharing with you folks - Check it out

Page Rank : Click Here
Digg Algorithm : Click here

Topix.net - Enough muscle to take on Google Applications?

2006-11-06T15:11:00.000+01:00

Just read a post on TechCrunch about Topix getting funded with another Mn 15 USD. What does Topix offer that Yahoo! News and Google News dont?

As TechCrunch mentions, "A few things. When Topix relaunched in August, the company said its index had grown to include 50,000 news sources - 10 times more than the Google News and 7 times as large as Yahoo! News. Topix has topical pages, has strong search by zip code, integrates relatively active forums and visualization. The year long time line displayed with every search is a fast way to skip to a particular date in a news search and shows the context of the point in time you are skipping to. Try using the timeline on Topix and then try to accomplish the same result with Yahoo or Google news search. Topix also has the most extensive support for RSS"

With Google Maps and Google Earth I think Google can create a great offering by providing localized content in a fresh and interesting manner in which other probably cant. Possible options which I can think of,

a. Allow the user on the map. You can even keep track of the places where the user has visited. Just keeping track of this can throw up interesting information about the end user which Google can probably use

b. The user can probably set filters based on topic and the news related to this at different places in the world can be marked out for him the map for example.

Links : Topix : TechCrunch : Google Earth : Google Maps

Switch to Mozilla : Download it here

Free file conversion - over 150 formats supported

2006-11-06T07:25:00.000+01:00

Is there a best and most acceptable format ? Probably there never was an there never will be. Competing standards are always the way technology has advanced and we only have to accept that multiple ways of storing content will co-exist.

Most of us just accept it and wait for somebody to help us do something about it but Zamsar did something about it. So well what is so different about this conversion there always were many places where you could do this. For starters I see two big differences - its free and its range is extremely good. Well these are good things to have, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating anyways and for that I have not converted enough on the site to comment.

Anyways I think its worth a try !

Links : Zamsar : Conversion Types : Zamsar Blog : Add a new conversion type ?

Google Earth (Release 4 - BETA)

2006-11-05T20:24:00.000+01:00

Just read an update on the Google Earth has released a new release. Since the last release in Sep 2006, this new version according to the site has several improvements in the areas of icon management by creating a new icon palette, added line and polygon drawing tools to the free version of the product. Also are added the ability to print search results and placemarks, made it easier to select icons that are overlapping.

In addition to this for the Google Earth Pro subscribers, the premium modules are now free and included in the basic annual subscription price itself.

Impact of Google has been phenomenal. People have gotten used to getting products from Google free of cost, that it is rather difficult to imagine that even Google can charge money for its products (Google Earth being the only one though). Anyways, it is good to see that Google is working towards eliminating this anomaly to the best extent possible if not completely.

Anybody who has not already started getting addicted to Google products, I certainly urge you to give it a try and then see for yourself.

Links : Google Products : Mozilla

Google and YouTube - Top 3 hurdles and Top 3 opportunities

2006-11-05T20:05:00.000+01:00

Ever since the recent acquisition of YouTube by Google we have been reading several articles of options in front of Google to monetize and have the $1.6Bn it paid for the acquisition pay off.

In my belief the road towards monetizing the YouTube acquisition would be a tough one - The top 3 hurdles I see which have to be overcome,

1. The kind of content that goes into YouTube is not always legal and readily monetizable. The content might already be copyrighted by other content producers and Google might get drawn into several disputes and fights about the veracity of the content it is trying to monetize in the first place. In summary, Google seems to have a big big problem on the supply side with content on YouTube

2. In all the ventures that Google has had so far - GMail , Google Finance , GTalk , Google Earth , Google Documents the content which goes on it is not under the direct responsibility of Google. Also, the content there is not available for public view and what users do is totally left to them. Probably, Picasa is the one application I can think of where user generated content is available for public consumption, but I never think that Picasa will become a main stream application for sharing pictures. So with YouTube, I think that Google is for the first time faced with a problem where it needs to own up responsibility of both the content that goes in and what is probably already there although it is user generated content. How this is handled is something that I would like to wait and see.

3. Google has no doubt been the undisputed leader in text search, and Google Adsense has been a tremendous success in generating revenue for both the advertisers and people who carry the advertisements on their web pages. But does Google have a viable model to monetize the video clips in the same efficient manner that it has with text search. If I were to translate it directly, I should probably be able to place ads relevant to the content on the video - is the technology to do this available if yes is it with Google - and can it put it into play?

Nevertheless, I am a great believer of the strength of Google at making things work and assuming that they overcome the 3 hurdles above, the following are my assessment of the top 3 opportunities

1. Needless to say one of the most attractive options in front of Google is probably to make the YouTube content available on mobile phones. With mobile TV already being considered I dont see any reason why Google will not be already considering this.

2. Are all the TV broadcasters happy with the routes they have to distribute content they generate. I dont think so. Would they have the strength and willpower to just ignore the 100+ million users of YouTube. In my belief, Google can easily work out a revenue sharing mechanism to help them get the viewership of its large user base and possible trade this for a rights to use their content.

3. If Google is able to get over hurdle 3, the biggest opportunity is to generate revenue by placing ads based on content in the video's that users are viewing and extent the usability of Adsense.

Saddam Hussein Is Sentenced to Death

2006-11-05T14:07:00.000+01:00

Just read and heard that Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death by hanging. Also read and heard that the world is applauding this decision of the 'people of Iraq'. Some thoughts on my mind,

1. Is death sentence the best thing to happen. For a man who tortured and killed many people in the past is a death sentence the best option ? He does not get to feel the pain that he put people through

2. For a long time nothing much happened in the Saddam case, but suddenly as we get closer to the mid term elections in the US of A things seemed to have hastened up a lot.

3. The fights between the Sunni and Shia's is already on the high side - How will this decision change the dynamics there ?

4. A repeated mention of the possibility of his appealing was mentioned on BBC. But how good will this process of appeal be and will things be really fair to him

"A picture is worth a thousand words" - Mind Maps

2006-11-05T11:24:00.001+01:00

Don't think there are too many people who have not heard the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words". As I see it, a mind map is probably just a pictorial representation of the thoughts in the mind. Our mind uses maps and links to remember most of the information we know. For example, if I were to just examine how I would remember a route to a place not many times do I use a take left, take right approach but use some landmarks as links.

Capturing thoughts in the form of mind maps would definitely do away with a whole lot of superflous information that we might have otherwise needed to transfer a thought onto paper. I have been attempting to use mind maps for a few weeks now - currently using a free mind mapping software to capture thoughts, ideas and action items at office (Details on Freemind can be obtained at - http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)

It has been quite difficult to capture the thoughts in our mind on a map. So, I would rather capture the line items (or probably the leaf nodes in the map) and then let the mind do the rest of the mapping internally.

Although I have'nt used maps much, at this juncture I seem to feel that we need to strike a right balance between the level of detail that goes into a mind map format and what goes as a simple linear format. For me there appear to be advantages in both approaches to do away with either method

As we go forward,

1. Need for agreement on using Mindmaps as a acceptable format - possibilities to embed mind maps in wiki pages for instance (Google/JotSpot - listening guys ?)

2. As mind maps start moving towards a more wider accepted usage, it may be necessary to arrive at a standardized format for mind maps (standardization usually further fuels growth)

'Bangalored" is now "Bengaloru'ed"

2006-11-03T16:27:00.000+01:00

On the 1st of November on the day the state of Karnataka celebrated its 50th birthday the chief minister of the state renamed Bangalore to Bengaloru. The legalities will now follow and the name would become official soon. Its not the first city in India to change its name - Trivandrum, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta have all changed names in the past, but I still fail to understand how this can make any impact anything - people or the way of working. People who identify themselves with the city will do so irrespective of the name and people who dont will never do so ! I am a kannadiga, resident of Bangalore ever since I was born and have always remembered the name of my city as Bengaloru and nothing else. Does forcing other people / systems to say the name of the city in a particular way make it any better at all - I don't think so.

Name changes and associated hungama around it are usually driven by various motives (possibly political) and I don't think provide the intended impact. Make the city a better place to live in lets get on with life.

Ah yes people tend to say that Bangalore was a great place to stay without all the IT companies around. Definitely agree to that, still remember the great days we used to play cricket on the roads but and now its quite a ordeal to walk on the roads ! But can a city avoid progress - cities across the world have never been able to resist growth and once the growth becomes un-managable it usually resorts to these tactics of saying that growth was a bad thing to happen to it. As a Bangalorean and also a IT professional, it definitely gives me pride when I read that 'Bangalored' is without a doubt understood as a alternative for 'outsourced'. But yes with that up's comes the down's of problems with infrastructure, traffic, high costs etc and personally I am willing to live with it.

My humble request is to take pride in the success our city has achieved and make it a global city and great place where people and companies would want to come more and more.

Mozilla a great success - What next ?

2006-11-03T06:55:00.000+01:00

Mozilla has been one of the greatest successes in the browser world to challenge the supremacy of Internet Explorer. Since it was available for download, it has been downloaded over 200 million times and 7 million users are getting added by the day now - mostly switching from Microsoft's IE. I myself made the switch sometime back and Mozilla 2.0 has not disappointed me.

With the huge success of Mozilla a given, its only time that the next big thing is thought about ! According to John Ross and his programming partner Joe Hewitt the top challenges in today's world for users to work and manage with data are

1. Big big gap between the desktop and internet. Users spend most of their time in transferring their data between a desktop and the internet and back. The data at the two places is still managed separately.

2. Data of different forms are managed at different places on the web. There is a best place to keep music, different best place for photos, something else for email and something else for communication and so on and so forth.

3. As a result of 1,2 a whole lot of people are getting behind in getting completely on the web and that is another big problem.

What is the solution ?

Ross’s answer is named Parakey. As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he’s building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he’s leading the charge with a simple battle cry: “One interface, not two!”

Parakey is not yet available but in case you seem interested in this product don't forget to register for updates on how this product is going to take shape and when.

Interested in more details - go to following link

How different is YouTube from Napster ?

2006-11-02T22:13:00.000+01:00

Remember Napster - the hugely popular music sharing site which shot to fame when it allowed people to exchange music freely ? Although it was not user generated content UGC in the spirit of the word, it could definitely be used as a platform to share music that its users generated.

Fast forward a few years, you have a company which probably just search+replace of music with video in the Napster business plan (ok ok with a few more changes may be) and launched YouTube - for Google's sake I would love to be proved wrong ! Anyways, YouTube is where people post video's possibly a mix of what they have generated and what is copied from various sources others can view and download it freely.

Content owners like CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal, News Corp and others are getting worried again at this blatant violation of content legality. Google somehow has to ensure that the content owners are satisfied and kept happy to ensure success of the 100 Mn plus YouTube videos that get distributed.

With Google behind you its not easy for YouTube to go down the same way Napster did. Google has already paid $10 Mn dollars to music companies and is now looking at $100 Mn upfront payments video and film to get the rights to distribute their stuff for 2 years. This strategy might click but definitely worth watching how the drama unfolds in the coming weeks and months.

Challenge to Google Maps ?

2006-11-02T21:27:00.000+01:00

Just read a news item stating that Ordnance Survey, the United Kingdom's national mapping agency, is opening up some of its code to allow developers to create Google Maps-style mashups.

Looks like the project will launched as a closed beta test with a minimum volunteers and will run for around three months before the Ordnance Survey - one of the world's largest map producers--makes a final decision on releasing the code.

Ed Parsons, Chief Technical Officer said Google Maps has been good for innovation and that there is room for all models in the market. "There will always be a market for closed-source data. I think the two will co-exist," he said. "I could easily see OS making use of open-source data or providing open-source data. We are not closing our eyes. There will be the person who wants to create maps for the parish council but the utilities, for example, won't use open source data."

I read that OS' mapping data is that it is more detailed for rural areas than Google's maps but would this really have an impact ? Yes there might be space for more than one player to provide mapping capabilities to players who want to create commercial applications around this but does this offering have enough muscle to challenge the hugely popular Google Maps - don't really think so.

GMail on Mobile

2006-11-02T16:23:00.000+01:00

Just read a post that Google is planning to make Gmail available on mobiles - what is new it always was and is accessible via the internet. Yes but Google's stated aim is that it wants to make the user experience (speed, look and feel etc) same irrespective of the device the user is using.

The aim is also to maintain most of the features like the ability to search through one's e-mail history, to organize e-mails according to conversation, and automatic synchronization so any e-mail read on the phone show up as already read when you sign on a computer the next time.

Why should Google be sopposedly doing this - tried hard but could not come up with too many reasons !

One of the thoughts that came to my mind was that users typically want to access specific official mail / get reminders etc as they travel. Options they have today like Blackberry are good and efficient at what they do, but how does Google aim to challenge these folks. Obviously they would provide this service / application free but how will they address concerns of security, cost of downloads etc.

As of today one of the things which I thought was weak in Google was its Calendar service. If a reminder comes into the GMail mailbox on a upcoming appointment it is of little use to me as that information is not pushed to me ! If it can deliver these over GMail on Mobile to the users mobile it might get a little more beneficial for users.

Pikeo - new kid off the block...

2006-11-01T18:37:00.000+01:00

As I was browsing today I hit upon a new application called Pikeo (http://pikeo.blogs.com , www.pikeo.com). This application has been developed as a beta product from France Telecom Research and Development LLC.

In short, Pikeo is an online picture tagging and sharing application that aims to help users build stories with the pictures that they have captured. As I was telling in my earlier post today, using pictorial markers is what the mind usually relies on and this will only mean that pictures tell better stories when you can actually merge them into your story.

The application is still in beta and registration in on invitation only (I dont have one as yet !), but I would definitely interested to try it out.

With the limited time I spent trying to figure out about Pikeo some thoughts that are top of my mind are,

1. Does one really need a 'application' to stories around photos - merging pictures into stories is possibly the best way to tell stories, with or without Pikeo - so what does Pikeo offer to me that makes this task simpler and more interesting ?

2. I might want to build all my stories around photos, but would definitely restrict sharing such stories to only members of my close and trusted members of my network. Does Pikeo distinguish this and if yes how does it differentiate between inner and outer cirles of my communities. [ On this point the thought of how communities are becoming more and more powerful vehicles to pass messages, a thing for which brands were build and thrived seems to be discussed in the book titled "Communities Dominate Brands" by Alan Moore and Tomi T. Ahonen - Am planning to read this book soon. You can check out the books blog at http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/ ]

3. I have my doubts if Pikeo has enough 'new-new' features to make this profitable ?

Google acquires JotSpot...

2006-10-31T17:34:00.000+01:00

Just read that Google has acquired JotSpot (http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=19473&hed=Google+Buys+JotSpot)

IMHO this makes a lot of sense for Google. Why do I think so ?

Nobody in the world questions the fact that Google is the undisputed leader in the internet search market. But I have read quite a few articles about how Google should start looking at other streams to monetize and not get dependent on search alone.

I dont think Google thinks the same way but is focusing its energies on creating ways and means of getting users to become more and more dependent on 'search' - I definitely seem to agree with this thinking. I think Google's approach for this is simple - get more and more users to colloborate and create a bigger information base on the internet.

Some of the steps that Google has taken in the last few months seem to corroborate my claim - acquisition of Writely, launch of spreadsheets, acquisition of YouTube were all towards providing users a framework to create information on the internet. The next logical step is allowing users to 'organize' this content on the internet and this is where I believe this latest acquisition of JotSpot comes in.

If all these steps go right for Google, more information should be available on the intenet organized in a logical form. To get to the right information people would hopefully put the search capabilities of Google to use and that again fuels the proven and tested model that Google uses to make money today !

Would love to hear thoughts / comments.

mReminders

2006-10-26T15:46:00.000+01:00

How often do you get promotional offers - a few times a day ? People are bombarded offers through all possible means via email,phones, pamplets, magazines, SMS alerts and anything else you can think of.

But how often do you use this information - I dont have any numbers but personally I dont feel too often. One of the biggest reasons for this is probably the timing when these offers come in. In most cases you are not looking for that information at that point of time and it probably directly reaches the trash. A focused approach is definitely more beneficial.

To make this promotional content more suited we can possibly focus on two key parameters - content and timing.

1. Google has probably mastered the art of getting the content right on the promotional ads. If I two parties discuss on a particular topic one of then is interested in what is being discussed and same is true for forms of mobile messaging as well. Why not push the ads based on what is being sent / recieved on mobiles ? Can extending the similar approach of placing ads based on content in email messages be extended to SMS/MMS - Are there privacy issues involved in this which is absent in emails ?

2. Push ads and promotional material based on where exaclty a user is at the given point of time. Based on the location of the user operators can push ads which the user can use where he is. Operators can present better coversion rates to the advertisers and better options for the user.

Folks what do you think - Comments ?

mTranslator

2006-10-26T15:45:00.000+01:00

Imagine you are travelling to a country for the first time. You have prepared yourself to handle the issues you might face including the cultural ones and consider yourself well prepared. Despite all this preparation one thing that they cant change much is the fact that local language is what is prominent no matter where you go in the world. Suddenly, basic things like reading sign boards, making a phone call, buying a coffee, travel in any form of public transport become difficult activities. In my opinion some factors which can aggravate this problem is high language diversity and the low level of acceptance and/or knowledge of English.

What do you think you want at this time ? Probably nothing more than an 'assistant' who can talk the local language and help you out.

In the current scenario where all over the world more and more services are becoming m-enabled, there is probably no better medium than a mobile to offer this service. To keep things simple, we could possibly look at a SMS based solution for the expected solution. SMS has been hugely successful with many billion messages exachanged and this service will only probably add to that - ARPU goes up for the operators and travellers have an assistant that they can reach at all points.

Folks what do you think - Comments ?