Monday
How A Search Engines Conflict Of Interest Can Keep You Away From That Perfect Search Engine
No its not the software stupid: Google shows off Gmail on Android
Nokia switches strategy, connects to internet
ValueClick executive joins a startup
Sprint ceo says Google android sucks
Amazing wordpress plugin to manage comments from desktop
I came across this amazing wordpress plugin called moderator. Its built on top of adobe air and needs the adobe air runtime.
Facebook shows some of its users the middle finger and goes ahead with redesign
I firmly believe you cannot keep everyone happy. Its essential to make some people unhappy. Its important to pick the people you are goin make unhappy really well.
Faceboook gets generous, releases thrift, scribe
First Microsoft live and now Mahalo: Another fool pays its users to spend some time with them
TuneCore gets $7 million
Yahoo opens itself with Yahoo open strategy
Sunday
Post Removed
I deeply apologise to anyone and authorities for inconvinience and possibly my immaturity. I encourage all bloggers to understand cyberlaws at their website.
Saturday
What do you get when you take a tech news site and minus "news" from it: Techcrunch
Once upon a time a read techcrunch, because they actually kept me in the know. I never commented, but i read it. Then the web grew up and i figured there is web outside of silicon valley, the web is in places where micheal arringtons will never report about because they have never heard of these places heck they have not heard of any place outside of palo alto.
Now when i visit them once in a while mostly courtesy techmeme. Its that friends promoting friends thing. that hope that if i send you traffic and you send me traffic, in the end maybe we can still get people to believe all the web is in silicon valley thing you know.
I still like techmeme, atleast they do silicon valley well. But in the recent past techcrunch is really trying hard to find something to write about. And then they make up stories that should be going on someones personal blog.
They recently reported about how google is using a competitors name to get traffic to its website and how it uses its own advertising platform to advertise itself.
So google is supposed to use someone elses advertising platform to promote its product and not its own because that somehow is unethical?
I tell you what is unethical, bad reporting is unethical, reporting for the sake of reporting is unethical.
Techcrunch, time for some self searching guys, maybe you can fire a people or two yourself. Why not firing is in, isnt it?
Google launches Gmail For Mobile 2.0 and it works
Google inc launched the new version of gmail for mobile. Sometimes its hard to believe we are trying this hard to please the consumers of free applications as developers.
There was a time when developers treated the free application market as a hobby something you do in your excess time and now we see the heavy weights fighting it out for the free applications. The free applications are as good or better than enterprise level applications.
So the only differentiation between a free application and an enterprise application is that a enterprise application comes with more fined tuned control for the enterprise while a free application is for a individual consumer.
Though something don't change much, years ago a company called gave operating system and software at throw away prices or free just to make it so part of a consumers life that it becomes a standard and then enterprises have no choice but to buy licenses for this application, a company called Google is dooing the same now.
I guess successful economics principles don't change much.
Friday
Wake up Mr. Shiv Raj Patil, Greatest Theat To India are not naxals, its your politics of region & religion
The evidence of how out of sync with reality Mr. Shivraj Patil, the home minister of India is that he thinks the greatest threat to the integrity of India are naxlalites.
Maybe this is ignorance or just the fact that naxalites are against the bad governance and not common people.
I am not a genius, but its easy to understand the greatest threat to the integrity of a country does not come from a few people unhappy with the government but it comes from the fact that masses are divided among themselves.
We all are unhappy with the government at some level, the difference between naxalites and a common man is that a naxalite take up arms and fight these politicians and police while we don't. I guess its easy to understand why.
The greatest threat to the integrity of India comes from the politics of division, of religion and region. I realise the two biggest parties themselves are fighting over religion.
But to start with i hope the two biggest parties of this country come together and kill regional politics sooner than later because if this is not done, there will be no nation, we will just have unUnited states of India.
We need a 180 degree shift in politics.
Another example of how regional politicians are of the lowest grade is when the congress was on the verge of extinction, people like Sharad Pawar and Sagma ran to Sonia gandhi to save it, when she saved it, they wanted to be the PM, when they couldnt be the PM, they just left the party.
Thats how small these regional politicians are. They have no ethics, no principle. Yet they are the richest politicians. Wake up Indians, you have been fooled long enough.
Sardar patel, i hope you were still alive.
Arvind Adiga Wins Bookers Prize
Arvind is a graduate of oxford university and a former Time megazine reporter. He is also the second youngest winner of bookers prize at the age of 33 after Ben Okri who won at the age of 32.
Michael Portillo, a former cabinet minister and the chairman of this year’s panel of judges, praised Mr. Adiga’s novel, saying that the short list had contained a series of “extraordinarily readable page-turners.” However, Mr. Adiga’s book had prevailed, he said, “because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure.”
Mr. Adiga said his book was an “attempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India — the voice of the colossal underclass.”
The other authors that were shortlisted were Irish writer Sebastian Barry, 53, whose book “The Secret Scripture” is the story of an Irish patient in a mental hospital sharing her shocking family history with her psychiatrist, “Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh, “The Clothes on Their Backs” by Linda Grant, “The Northern Clemency” by Philip Hensher and “A Fraction of the Whole” by Steve Toltz.
According a kerry walterz a reviewer of Adiga's book on amazon.com,
The plot centers around Balram Halwai, a laborer born and raised in a small village utterly controlled by crooked and feudally powerful landlords. The village is located in 'the Darkness,' a particularly backward region of India. Balram is eventually taken to Delhi as a driver for one of the landlord's westernized sons, Ashok. It's in Delhi that Balram comes to the realization that there's a new caste system at work in both India and the world, and it has only two groups: those who are eaten, and those who eat, prey and predators. Balram decides he wants to be an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel tracks the way in which this ambition plays out.
You can find more information about The White Tiger and buy it on Amazon.com
Congratulations Arvind!
Thursday
Recession Comes Home To India: Let The Layoffs Begin
Pepsico. has laid off 3300 employees.
Satyam laid off 400 workers and have given notice to another 4500.
Stock Markets are under 11k down from 21k in January. Beat that.
Most companies have stopped hiring, more layoffs expected. RBI has taken some serious preemptive action.
ICICI is closing down branches. HDFC and other institutions are seeing a decline in demand.
Malls are less crowded, airports are emptying. But the ones with jobs are still ok. There will be no 50% offs in most shops this festive season. And its money saving time anyways.
But the worst affected will be the new graduates of this year and the next when they come out with no jobs in sight.
Tough times ahead. Didn't someone say Indian economy is decoupled from US economy?
Updated News: Jet Airways takes back its fired employees. According to the chairman of the company Naresh Goyal, he has listened to his conscience, while the avitiation minister jumped into to take credit by saying he asked Goyal to take back sacked back employees.
It seems the truth is political pressure arising from the coverage of the sacking and the effect it will have on the salaried class and the upcomign elections.
Wednesday
Orkut On IPhone, A "Time Waster's" Dream Come True
Unlike most people who cannot seem to find enough time to do things that are really important to them, like read a book, meet an old friend, spend time with family, these people always have excess time. Lucky them.
Orkut.com recently wrote a blog post about this new feature where you can access your orkut.com service from IPhone and they called it "Orkut on IPhone: A Socialites dream come true". Sometime, or most times, i wonder how do people make time to scrap each other the whole day.
I have also seen people scraping each other when they could easily IM(both being online), or email, or call.
Sometimes i feel people use messaging on social networks in cases when they "sorta want to be in touch" but not "too much".
I mean hey i messaged you, once, on orkut, i like to stay in touch you know. Its like an excuse, a formality.
People who really care would much rather have a meeting, a call, an IM or email. And in that order.
This is one reason why marketeers do not want to reach masses on social networks, they don't want to reach out to this segment of consumers, they sorta, don't wanna be in touch with you much you know, but hey maybe they will scrap you. Just maybe.
The Power of Motivation
In school, we were never taught how to deal with motivations. We were taught what motivation is but still we never took time out to understand it in its entirity, no one ever taught us what it is, where it comes from and what it can do for us. Or maybe they didn't know.
But than you grow up and see one motivation makes a terrorist out of a regular man, and another makes a Gandhi. There are countless other examples where individual motivations led ordinary people to become extraoridianry. Some extraordinary in a good way, others in not so good way.
Some became billionaire philanthropists who gave away their wealth to end world hunger, others blew up bombs under the pretext of saving their religion. One motivation led a women to leave her country and serve the poorest of the poor in a foreign land another led a man to invade a foreign land.
One motivation led the man to space, other led him to a plane that would crash and kill hundreds.
Yet we never worried about understanding motivation, for its just a word, for what happens is not because of motivations, its because of luck.
Our obsession with randomness has never let us really understand this amazing word motivation.
But its time, we rid our selves from the mistakes of our teachers. Spend some time understanding motivation, not just our own but everyone else around us and the guys in guantanamo bay and the missionaries and the mercinaries.
Try to understand your motivations today, while you are at this, try understanding how motivation is different from inspiration, aspiration and instigation, if it is.
Watch your motivation, because my friends, it can take you places. Literally.
Sunday
When Capitalism Isn't "That Capitalistic" But Socialism Still Sucks
Friday
Western Man Has Stopped Evolving
Monday
Aren't There More GTD Blogs Out There Than Readers?
On last count Google blog search turned out 1,818,289 blog posts mentioning GTD, there is a whole bloody website by the name of GTDtimes that has many contributors writing on the same topic.
I mean isnt that getting a bit too much, if there was so much content to write about on this topic David Allen would have written 10 books by now. So what are these guys writing anyways?
Frankly it seemed to me they are all writing the same thing over and over and over again. I wish someone would tell them to stop. People are reading so much of this getting things done stuff, they dont get time to practise what they learn.
So what is this fad? Lifehacker hangover.
The popular blog style website that started writing about productivity online years ago and was probably the first ones to evanglise DavidAllens GTD method online has written about GTD and tools for long now.
There huge popularity has egged all other wannabes to think writing the stuff lifahacker writes about will get them popular. And then we end up with 1,818,289 blog posts and no readers. Its funny.
From what i could understand by reading Davids book is this
1. Take all incomplete tasks/ideas/actions outside your head and write them somewhere, anywhere paper or a word document or god frickin anywhere
2. Plan on how to complete each one of them by wriitng down next actions and keep completing them
3. Keep your bloody information documented so when you need them you can find them
4. Dont be a egoistic dog and delegate when you cant do something
GTD bloggers, please stop, find a new topic to blog. If you have no topics, Read more books. Write less. Fine?
Sunday
Google and Yahoo Ad Deal Delayed By A Month
The justice department is looking at the deal to see if it will create a monopoly in the online advertising market. Not yet, it wont.
If Yahoo marries Google, it would.
Will it happen? Yes.
FutureVision: Ni Hao, Welcome to Moon, This is year 2050 and this is Moon, Republic of China
US & Russia both have landed on Moon previously in an attempt to outsmart each other and wasted bilions of tax payers money for no real gains. Though they did setup international space station, they did not do it on Moon, which led to the speculation that there are aliens on moon already.
Come to think of it, setting up a space station on moon, should be easier than having a space station that is orbiting like satellites right?
If China does infact setup space station on moon, will they proclaim the land on moon as theirs. Space tourism will be a great revenue maker in the time to come and surely China would want a pie out of that.
But this will be a problem for people who have already bought land on moon. Apparently there are companies that are letting people buy land on moon and even sending them certificates of ownership. Gimme a break. Actually i want to know what is the current real estate price there.
But China isn't alone. It takes more than one fool to have a race right. India is launching its own mission to space soon called chandrayaan. I know people would argue that this is a display of our technological innovation(or russias?) but i just have one thing to say. Feed all first. Still got an argument?
But this is nomore a country thing, the popular payment processing company papypal's former co founder, started a company called spaceX, which had its first successful run in space recently.
Everything is ok, i mean China wants land on moon, good, they need it. Actually we need it too. Its ironical, Canada has so much land, no people, India & China have so many people, no land.
I just hope they dont find lot of natural resources there, specially radioactive material. If they do, two things will happen.
1. Moon will be abused to get all its natural resources.
2. Moon will becoming the dumping ground for radiactive waste.
And like we always do, we would not realise the implications of this on the enviorment till its too late.
But this is not the worse that could happen, i mean China loves cutting of access right? What if it cuts off our access to moon light?
Update: Did you know Google Inc. has moon contest of 30 Million Dollars?
Which is the best english accent out there?
I was listening to a oXygen tutorial here on youtube today and noticed the author was speaking in a very chinese accent(or japanese?)
Althrough i didnt understand much of it i enjoyed the accent a lot. if you havent yet taken a peep at the video, do it, its fun.
I prefer calling this accent chinglish(chinese+english). Its hilarious whenw e mix english with various accents. There is hinglish(hindi+english) which is in a league of its own. There is Inglish(Indian speaking english) which is what most Indians sound like in USA, which is again in a league of its own.
With so many verisons of english accent going around which literally make this language seem like a completely new language on its own, i wonder which accent is the most entertaining.
I wish there was a contest out there which lets net users vote for the best and most entertaining accent out there. It would be fun.
Till that time, i declare Chinglish as the best english accent out there, heck its a new language altogether better than english, china rocks.
Till later Zai Jian!(chinese - good bye)
Thursday
Don't be evil, what about being outright stupid?
So what happened here is this, i have bid a maximum of 0.04$ for a keyword. So ideally each click should cost me 0.04$, but Google has charged me anything from 0.04$ to 0.06$ for each keyword.
Its easy to understand by just looking under the Current Bid, Clicks, Avg. CPC, Cost columns for all keywords in the screeshot i am presenting below.
The question is if i have bid 0.04$ for each click, and i have recieved 1 click, how can the cost of one click be 0.05$. Or am i getting my maths wrong?
I have uploaded a screenshot you can click to see in full screen below. Take a look at this screenshot here
The bigger question is that this is not a startup company who has just started operations and facing some operational glitches, there have been billions spent on Google adwords, most by folks who are not that analytical or tech savvy to look at the data Google provides in great detail. How many millions have passed through to Google this way?
Incase i have just got something horribly wrong please let me know!