Somebody had recently emailed me if there are openings at Digité and quite accidentally (don't ask me how) I've lost the email and am unable to reply to it. Well, the answer actually is, yes. We are looking for good interaction designers, entry level or otherwise. If you're interested, just drop a line at nnair [ a t ] digite [ d o t ] com...
[PS: Current opening are only at our India Development Center, sorry for missing out on the details...]
A neat NY Times article by David Pogueon how you can save time by configuring various cool tech tools like speech recognizers, etc. The only problem is that people do not have enough time to do the configuring
Too bad I don't have enough time to read the whole article, so I'll just file it here for later... ;)
[NY Times Registration Required]
Nolan K. Bushnell, the creator of the Pong video game and founder of the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain, is innovating again. He is about to open a restaurant where the servers will have novel attributes: triple redundancy and backup batteries... [NY TImes Registration Required]
Interestingly I had the same idea of going on in my mind about a year or so ago. Guess an idea is worth nothing unless you execute it ;)
Been quite busy lately and spammers have pretty much destroyed this blog (so no more comments and trackbacks- not for some time at least, sorry), just checking to see if things are still working...
Just got back from a vacation, and caught this post on Joel Spolsky's site. The advice is really useful even if you're already a CS grad...
Interestingly, I just bought a book on Amazon and got π/2% off for using A9. Now that is a cool reason to search using A9...
Sorry guys, I've been out of action for the last couple of weeks. Had a minor back problem (early symptoms of a prolapsed disc) for which the doctor suggested complete rest. Now I'm tired of resting ;)
Hope to get back with regular postings soon...
At Digité We're conducting a small survey to determine the feasibility of porting our Project Management software to the Mac platform. The Mac Observer seems to have picked the link to our survey... It would be great if any Mac user reading this post can help us by taking the survey...
On a lighter note, just found this list of 1000 best movies ever made and I seem to have seen only around 300 of them so that is around 30%, not sure how I rate amongst all other movie buffs. It was also nice to spot a few Indian movies amongst them. There was Pather Panchali, Apur Sansar and Salaam Bombay. And a good thing that I've seen them all, at least that means I've seen the top three Indian movies... ;)
At Digité, we have an opening for a junior designer within the User Experience group. This would be a great opportunity to work on a truly world-class software product. If you're interested, get in touch with me (leave a message/visit our careers page/or use my presonal site)
Note: The current opening is in our Mumbai (India) office
The Job Posting is part of the extended entry:
About Digité
Digité, Inc. is a rapidly growing organization that offers global careers in
developing leading edge Information Technology solutions and platforms.
Digité provides its employees with an environment that is conducive to growth
and where they can prove themselves by working on some of the best technology
platforms available today and by providing solutions that facilitate the
operation of some of the top businesses in the world.
About the position
We are currently looking for User Interface/User Experience professionals to
contribute to an exciting new business concept and growth by strengthening our
Product Development team. Apart from an unique opportunity to build a
world-class software product, we also offer an attractive package that matches
leading software companies. In store for you are challenging opportunities,
competitive pay, Pre-IPO stock options, and most-of-all, a fun-filled work
environment.
Job description
Professionals with up to 3 yrs experience in reputed organizations or fresh graduates from reputed institutions with excellent track record and
qualifications in the following areas:
1. Visual Communication/ Graphic Design
2. Product Design
3. New Media/ Interaction Design/ UI Design
Graduates/Post Graduates from NID, IDC or equivalent with excellent academic
records would be preferred. Experience working on Enterprise level web
applications/RIAs would be an added advantage.
Areas of work
Application UI (Web and Client Server)/User Experience Design/Information
Design/Instructional Design/MarCom
Key result Areas
Ability to define product requirements
User study
Usability testing
Heuristic Evaluation
Information Architecture
Graphic Design, Information Design
Coordinating implementation of interface design
Software skills
Should be conversant with Graphic Design/Web Design tools like Adobe Photoshop,
Corel Draw, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Fireworks, etc.
Knowledge of DHTML/XHTML, JavaScript, XML & XUL would be advantageous
Experience with the print media will be looked upon as an plus point.
Soft skills
1. Passion to excel (absolutely must)
2. Curiosity.
3. Team player with excellent oral and written communication skills in English
language
I've been a long time fan of the Palo Alto based design firm IDEO. IDEO redefined good design by creating experiences, not just products. This article elucidates how it's now changing the way companies innovate...
It was a lot of traveling over the last couple of weeks. After the wedding we traveled all the way from Bombay to Trivandrum, which is like the extreme south of India and hopped over to the Maldivian archipelago. Here are a few pics...
Over all it was a beautiful trip and thanks for all those who wished me for the wedding. The only problem with the prolonged stay away from a computer was finding out that my inbox had over 20,000 emails in them (no kidding.) I had put a catch all on the emails to my domain and spammers were sending spam mails to all possible email combinations. The result was that I had over fifty emails with the same spam message in my inbox. It was crazy!!! Good thing I got that sorted out, now to get back to work...
On second thoughts... ;)
Somebody in office just pointed me to this paper by Watts S. Humphrey. Processes are very important to companies, but it really does not cover how an individual developer attempts the problem, the personal software process (PSP) provides software engineers a way to improve the quality, predictability, and productivity of their work. Should be worth trying it out. Also it can have a lot of parallels in the design process too...
Note: There may not be any more updates for at least three more weeks. I'm getting married, and will be off to a Robinson Crusoe island for a week or so after that, so catch up with you guys later...
Greg Gretsch of Sigma Partners ponders over it in this AlwaysOn article:
“Silicon Valley is suffering a brain drain that is just going to keep getting worse. Historically the valley has been the beneficiary of brain drains from around the world. The diasporas of China, India, Russia, and others all came to sunny California to start their companies and make their fortunes. Companies like Juniper, QLogic, Exodus, and Silicon Labs are among the hundreds of companies that have generated billions in sales and wealth started by the best and brightest from around the world. Now, some of those great minds are packing up and heading home.”
Ok after the barrage of blog spam, it's now the task of spammers to blast us with spam. Over the last couple of days I've been getting multiple (in 100s) spam emails with subjects like 'Someone is interested in you,' 'Arrangement' and 'Surprise Invitation' which is forcing me to delete a lot of emails by just a simple scan. I may have missed a few legit emails in the process and in case you've written to me an not heard back in a while (I usually reply in a couple of days) then I'd urge you to use the contact section on my website, there is more chance of me reading mails sent using that interface...
Is this an ‘All Fool's Day’ joke???
According to this report Google is launching a free email service with 1 Gig of storage. Also Google's service, called "Gmail," will include a built-in search function that will let people search every e-mail they've ever sent or received.
Sounds too good to be true, especially considering that the news has broken out on April 1st ;)
Sometime back I'd blogged about the design rational behind the 'well designed' urinals at the Amsterdam airport, today, I received an email with an example of a horrendously designed airport urinal...
Come to think of it, the design is so typically Branson...
At Digité, we have an opening in the User Experience group. The following is the job posting, if you're interested, get in touch with me (leave a message/visit our careers page/or use my presonal site)
The Job Posting is part of the extended entry:
About Digité
Digité, Inc. is a rapidly growing organization that offers global careers in
developing leading edge Information Technology solutions and platforms.
Digité provides its employees with an environment that is conducive to growth
and where they can prove themselves by working on some of the best technology
platforms available today and by providing solutions that facilitate the
operation of some of the top businesses in the world.
About the position
We are currently looking for User Interface/User Experience professionals to
contribute to an exciting new business concept and growth by strengthening our
Product Development team. Apart from an unique opportunity to build a
world-class software product, we also offer an attractive package that matches
leading software companies. In store for you are challenging opportunities,
competitive pay, Pre-IPO stock options, and most-of-all, a fun-filled work
environment.
Job description
Professionals with 3-6 yrs experience in reputed organizations with
qualifications in the following areas:
1. Visual Communication/ Graphic Design
2. Product Design
3. New Media/ Interaction Design/ UI Design
Graduates/Post Graduates from NID, IDC or equivalent with excellent academic
records would be preferred. Experience working on Enterprise level web
applications/RIAs would be an added advantage.
Areas of work
Application UI (Web and Client Server)/User Experience Design/Information
Design/Instructional Design/MarCom
Key result Areas
Ability to define product requirements
User study
Usability testing
Heuristic Evaluation
Information Architecture
Graphic Design, Information Design
Coordinating implementation of interface design
Software skills
Should be conversant with Graphic Design/Web Design tools like Adobe Photoshop,
Corel Draw, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Fireworks, etc.
Knowledge of DHTML/XHTML, JavaScript, XML & XUL would be advantageous
Experience with the print media will be looked upon as an plus point.
Soft skills
1. Passion to excel (absolutely must)
2. Curiosity.
3. Team player with excellent oral and written communication skills in English
language
CNN reports that as U.S. jobs move abroad, more Americans are willing to work overseas:
“Robert Dunn first spotted the warning signals three years ago, after the dot-com bust.
That's when his Las Vegas-based company, Creative Healthcare Solutions, which provides Internet technology services to healthcare clients, started seeing jobs being awarded to companies in India and China.
Instead of protesting against the offshoring of work that might have gone to U.S. firms like his, Dunn, 55, has decided to get in on the game.”
Two years ago, I decided to come back to India after having worked in the Silicon Valley. I was one of the few back then, but these days I'm seeing a lot more people coming back to India. And now this. Maybe soon people in India will soon start complaining about this phenomenon of 'reverse brain drain' ;)
“Yahoo said yesterday that it would start charging companies that want to ensure that their Web sites are included in its Web index from which research results are selected.
The practice, called "paid inclusion," has long been a part of many search engines including Microsoft's MSN search function and Ask Jeeves. But Google, which last year surged ahead of Yahoo to become the No. 1 site for searching on the Internet, disdains the practice as misleading.”
Hmnn, not sure if paid inclusion really makes a lot of sense to people. Sponsored links are much better in my opinion...
Cool, Digité just made news on Yahoo! Financial News that's amazing, we've got loads of press coverage recently and the response at the NASSCOM event was tremendous, looks like the product is starting to get noticed...
Jesse, thanks for your wishes...
Digité the company I work with has just started sales operations of our software that helps manage IT outsourcing initiatives, here in India, and looks like the news has been covered pretty well in the media...
Mathematik and dynamical-systems are two great places to get some javascript based visual effects for games. Should be useful for flashers too...
[via Metafilter]
E M E R G I C . o r g: Drucker on India and China
Joshua Marshall has excerpts from a Peter Drucker interview in Fortune:
India is becoming a powerhouse very fast. The medical school in New Delhi is now perhaps the best in the world. And the technical graduates of the Institute of Technology in Bangalore are as good as any in the world. Also, India has 150 million people for whom English is their main language. So India is indeed becoming a knowledge center.In contrast, the greatest weakness of China is its incredibly small proportion of educated people. China has only 1.5 million college students, out of a total population of over 1.3 billion. If they had the American proportion, they'd have 12 million or more in college. Those who are educated are well trained, but there are so few of them. And then there is the enormous undeveloped hinterland with excess rural population. Yes, that means there is enormous manufacturing potential. In China, however, the likelihood of the absorption of rural workers into the cities without upheaval seems very dubious. You don't have that problem in India because they have already done an amazing job of absorbing excess rural population into the cities--its rural population has gone from 90% to 54% without any upheaval.
Everybody says China has 8% growth and India only 3%, but that is a total misconception. We don't really know. I think India's progress is far more impressive than China's.
Joshua leaves us (and the policymakers in the US) with an interesting point to ponder: "Think how much of our broad, long-range foreign policy thinking rests on the premise that China is the rising economic and military power? What if the premise is wrong? Or what if India, nearly as large a country in population terms, is another rising behemoth?"
E M E R G I C . o r g: Prahalad on Indian MNCs
The Economic Times has an interview with CK Prahalad. Excerpts:
Take Wipro, TCS and Infosys as potential models of what multinationality means. You will find their cost, given the size of their global operations, measured in terms of people working abroad, is incredibly low compared to traditional MNCs like GE, IBM, Siemens or Philips. The reason is fairly simple. They have no legacies to change, they re starting from zero. And they were under tremendous cost pressure from day one, so they had to develop new ways of communication, co-ordination and management. That s quite unique and different from building standalone, country-by-country organisations with their own infrastructure and then changing it to global business management.The new MNCs like Wipro or TCS are all multi-focal companies where the key manufacturing operations are in one part of the world but the customer-facing operations are in another part of the world. Their revenues may come from a part of the world where they don t necessarily dominate. It s a very different configuration from what the traditional MNCs had to start with. Not only will Indian MNCs emerge as a major force, but they will have the opportunity to rewrite the book on how to manage global operations. They will show us how to create low cost, highly effective, real-time systems. The good news is we are starting with real-time 24/7 as a starting point.
We are inventing so many things we don t take credit for. Take call centre operations. Few people know what it takes to train young Indian men and women who have strong accents, to speak English as if they were born in Ohio. We ve developed accent neutralisation capabilities. And we train not one or two people but a hundred thousand people to take on a persona
for eight hours a day which has nothing to do with reality. In other words, we efficiently play-act and that s the innovation.
MetaFilter: Tommy, you're permanently expelled!
"Want to get arrested? Walk home with me." It's LawForKids, the site devoted to giving the kids the education they need about drinking and other kewl stuff through the aid of really, really, really crappy cartoons. Plus, enjoy the intellectual and grammar-rich discussion on hard knocks in Juvie, plus Flash games about being a good citizen. Not sure about discouraging kids from crime, but I sure as hell want to stay away from a life of web design now.
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Scripting News
Rolling Stone interviews Steve Jobs.
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PubDate: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 23:37:39 GMT
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If you're wondering what's up with the blog, well, I'm really sorry for the lack of updates the last couple of days. I'd been traveling around the country making a few presentations to a few key customers and had a number of users lined up for user testing of our software, so in the process I was unable to devote time to posting updates. Hopefully things are under control now but hey, you never know...
If Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google were to have a blog, this probably what it would look like...
Very funny :-)
MetaFilter: Procrastination Research Group
I've been meaning to post this for the longest time.
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theOTHERblog: Jason Salavon - Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades
Via plasticbag.The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture. ...
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With Google going IPO soon the NY Times looks at a possibility of a Microsoft takeover of the web search company.
“According to company executives and others briefed on the discussions, Microsoft - desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business - approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover.”
So you reckon Google could go the Netscape way if big bad MS becomes its rival?
Diwali is the Indian New Year. The festival of lights and a time to deck yourself in the very best. So, I could not think of a more apt time to give this site a makeover (not to mention the fact that it is also a long weekend.)
Let me know what you think of it. I may have missed out on a few styles and templates since this is a semi-rush job. Also, to everybody, a very happy and prosperous Diwali.
The Directorate of Audio Visual Publicity (DAVP) in India is known for coming out with some of the most drab advertising in the country, so when recently it started releasing Full-Page Color ad with the 'India Shining' theme, it did look like some other creative minds were at work. According this report, the ads were developed by Grey Worldwide. Nothing brilliant about the ads, but it's certainly refreshing to see them, nonetheless (personally I like the Indian Oil ads more - reads like Agnello Dias' copy, not sure though.)
Rajesh also points to a NY Times article about the Indian Economy and how ten years after the de-centralization, the results are showing...
This NY Times article explores how people are buying gizmos they never use. I've done it myself. My list includes my iPaq, a 20G removable hard drive, an extra webcam and my MP3 player (to a small extent - since I'm mostly on my computer anyway) And by the way, I'm really conservative in what I buy and also use a lot of gizmos on a daily basis, but I know a few people who just have tons of such stuff just lying around. Are you one of those?
I'm not sure how many of you are old enough to appreciate and be interested in vintage computing. But if you are, here is an opportunity you cannot miss. Only 20 protype Commodore 64s were built. This is probably the only survivor. 5 more hours left, then it will be gone...
Joel Splosky gives you run down on Unicode and how to develop Intrnational Applications...
Matt Stephens and Dough Rosenberg have a bold critique of extreme programming.
Quote:
“There's a lot to be gained from learning about XP, and agile practices in general. However, many feel that XP has taken things too far. By taking things to the opposite extreme, we're just introducing a fresh set of problems. The optimum solution, then, must lie somewhere between these two extremes. That is fundamentally what Extreme Programming Refactored (XPR) is about.”
theOTHERblog: Interview with John Scully
As I look back on things that I wished we would have done differently when I was at Apple, I think one of the biggest missed opportunities, and it was on my watch, so I feel responsible and disappointed that we didn't do more with it, was Hypercard. It was created back in 1987 by Bill Atkinson, Apple's first software programmer. We could never figure out exactly what it was. What it was, was the belief that everyone should be enabled to make the computer do what they wanted it to do... a hugely ambitious aim that seems to have waned lately... ...
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Dan Gillmor's eJournal: Remembering the People Who Give Back to the Net, and All of Us
The Internet has become a grossly commercialized Wild West in so many ways. But the community spirit on which it was founded is alive and well. The Net depends on the same spirit that motivates volunteers in the physical world: a commitment to solve problems and make life better for those who might otherwise not have the resources or expertise.
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O'Reilly Network Articles: From NEXTSTEP to Now: An Interview with LaunchBar's Norbert Heger
When LaunchBar was announced as a winner in the second Mac OS X Innovator's Contest, we received lots of positive comments from readers who were fans of this software. Like so many good ideas, the concept for this software has been around for a while. Its roots go back to 1995 and NEXTSTEP. Norbert Heger describes those early days and the evolution of this terrific Mac OS X application.
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Joel Spolsky shows off his swanky new office...
So when a geek designs an office, amongst other things, you get 20 power outlets per programmer, snake trays and cubicules designed for pair programming!!!
CRN Magazine's list of top 25 innovators...
Macromedia's Kevin Lynch figures at number 9...
Quote:
Quoting Lynch:
E M E R G I C . o r g: Entrepreneurs as System Thinkers
EntreWorld has an article by Michael Gerber:
All successful entrepreneurs possess one fundamental ability, one fundamental quality, one fundamental skill, one fundamental interest, without which they would never be successful entrepreneurs possess the ability to perceive the world as a system.What is a Systems Thinker?
A Systems Thinker is one who intuits and sees the whole of a thing, the entirety of it, the one-ness of it, the integrated unity of it, as opposed to merely the sum of its parts.
A Systems Thinker transcends the world in order to transform it.
A Systems Thinker is an inventor as opposed to an engineer.
A Systems Thinker sees purpose in everything, and sees the system as the realization of the purpose.
A Systems Thinker sees meaning in everything, and if not, pursues everything until the meaning becomes clear, until the System reveals itself in all its glory.
A Systems Thinker is possessed by the meaning of things.
I agree with Gerber - entrepreneurs definitely need to see the bigger picture, see things as a whole rather than a collection of parts.
When Steve Jobs decided to name his company Apple, after the Beatles Record Label, little did he imagine that they would be at loggerheads with each other a few decades later...
Excerpt:
The complaint addressed the use of the word Apple and Apple logos in the computer company's downloading of music from the Internet, Apple Corps said.
Just came across this utility on book blog that uses an algorithm to guess the gender of the author. Right now it seems to have less than 50% success rate, and it kept guessing that I was a female for every piece of writing I tried, except one. So that was just a 25% success rate...
[via The Gadget Guy]
I'm sure everyone has been rejected at interviews, but does a rejection warrant the creation of a blog exclusively for the purpose of describing the interview process? This guy seems to feel it does...
No matter how disgruntled this guy is, the blog happens to be an interesting look at the way Accenture is going about recruiting in India.
A friend of mine who works there was mentioning they want to expand to 10,000 consultants by the end of the year. If this is how they are hiring, I would like to wish them the best...
Do you have an insatiable need to buy/read books? Did your parents behave the same way? Not sure if the biblio gene skips a generation, reading the comments on Jeremy Zawodny's blog and going by my experience -my parents own none, grandparents are relatively avid readers- maybe it is so...
Seriously, why not? At least we will get a laugh out of it before dumping it into the trash.
Freshmeat reviews seven spam filters and compares them for Precision, Recall, False Positives, False Negatives and Correct Classifications. The filters compared are:
It misses out on popfile though...
[via Slashdot]
...and more such interesting stuff is up on Raymond Chen's blog
[via Joel on software]
I mean the SoBig F. I lost count after deleting 20, I've been deleting one every 30 minutes or so...
John Wehr of the XMLq and Full Browser Layout fame has some nice pictures of the New York Blackout on his site...
This one in particular seems like it's out of Life Magazine...
[via Boing Boing]
It's I-day here in India. Wishing all Indians a safe and happy I-day...
Sim D'Hertefelt, the site owner, just made a post on a mailing list:
InteractionArchitect.com was launched in 1999 and has become a well-known and respected website and brand name in the domain of usability and interaction design.
What you get:
- The domain name InteractionArchitect.com
- The design of the website, including source files that allow you to modify the site's design: Macromedia Dreamweaver template, Adobe Photoshop files
What you don't get:
- The content (e.g. articles)
What I (hope to) get:
- A year's salary that will pay for a long desired sabbatical to study and write
Any takers? Mail him at: sim.dhertefelt@soc.kuleuven.ac.be
Looks like Google's PageRank is acting unstable. I could have sworn that my site had been bumped up to 6/10 but now it looks like it is back to 5/10. That is in less than a few hours...
Splitpeasoup explains the meaning of the song "Brim Full of Asha" (by Cornershop) on Kuro5shin...
If you've heard the song and couldn't relate to the lyrics, you'll find this an interesting read...
Early this year I had a layover at Amsterdam and noticed these interesting urinals at the Amsterdam Airport. Maddog looks at the design rationale behind these urinals. Interesting...
The AlwaysOn Network's interview of Vinod Khosla, Founder Sun Microsystems and a VC with KPCB:
Here is a list of official Google parodies The list itself is in Flemish, I reckon, but just click on the links, the renditions are really funny...
As a follow up to their Foreign Policy article about India and China, Huang and Khanna have this follow-up interview with Harvard Business School. Makes an interesting read.
[via Emergic]
It's not about MM Flash, but it's the latest sub-culture. Flash Mobs are not so random groups of people who turn up and dissipate within a matter of minutes thus making 'mobbing' kinda like a performance art. They use the internet (of course, what else?) to notify others about the next gathering, and now there is even a blog that keeps a track of the latest Flash Mobs. Interesting.
The SJ Mercury and Bloomberg have both reported so, and people on Sand Hill Road seem a little more positive...
This should be a good time to launch your startup idea, if you've got one.
Ever wanted to search for some real important piece of information on the Microsoft site? Well, good luck, 'cause MSDN is probably the most unruly site as far as navigating is concerned.
The good news is that Google comes to the rescue. You can search for MS related content on Google at:
http://www.google.com/microsoft/
Other Google micro-search-sites include:
Linux search: http://www.google.com/linux
BSD: http://www.google.com/bsd
Mac: http://www.google.com/mac
and of course
Uncle Sam: http://www.google.com/unclesam
Don't know how many of you have experienced the Indian Monsoon. It's just great, and right now it's just awesome outside. It's pouring, cats, dogs and cows. Just got back from a weekend in Pune (a city just outside Bombay) and on the drive back we had almost 0 visibility because of the rains.
Amazing ;)
After years of seeing a lot of negetive press, it's nice to see India get some good press. This article in the San Jose Mercury News is one.
Also Scoble seems to spotlighting Indian Bloggers. He's just listed Rajesh's blog in this post
Google Zeitgeist - Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google - Wonder how I missed this before...
"...I see he's blogging from India. I think he's the first tech blogger that I've read in India. Soon I think I'll complain that some blogger in India has taken my job. .."
Have you ever needed an email... NOW? Have you ever gone to a website that asks for your email for no reason? Just type in any email ID with @mailinator.com. Go to the mailinator site and the email will be waiting for you. Not setup forms, no nothing...
Now that is cool concept
This definitely calls for those crazy cell phones that can teach you cellphone etiquette
You are Neo, from "The Matrix." You
display a perfect fusion of heroism and
compassion.
What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
:)
A recent study found 428 times more bacteria on the average desk than on the office's toilet seats says this article on Business 2.0. It further goes on to explore the hazards of working in the new economy.
Makes you wish you were born in an earlier and much gentler time...
A friend of mine who wanted to buy a camera asked me my opinion about which digital camera he should go for. After telling him what I though I advised him to also check other opinions on CNET and Eopinions too. It has become a standard practice for me to check for opinions - "Word of Mouse" as this NY Times article calls it. And in the future its influence is going to simply increase manifold. Be it through CNET, Eopinions, Amazon or personal blogs, the word is spreading at the speed of thought...
Was going through Micah's blog and came across this post that suggests 'paid book review' that will help you get a review done for a book from somebody whose opinion you respect. Interesting concept. One of the things I found was that on searching for a blog's neighborhood information on Blogstreet was a list of books mentioned on a blog you like. Most bloggers mention books along with a note or two about it, so this might be an alternative (and free) way for Micah to get what he's looking for
I've never run a company and I have never been involved in any kind of due diligence, but going through David Hornik's post on Venture Blog, something did not strike me as right. Here's what Hornik looks for in a company:
As I said, I have no experience in running a company, maybe I should shut up and listen to what is being said here, but the one point that strikes me is Hiring Forcast. Here hornik is simply referring to 'head count'. In my experience working with software startups, the one thing I've learnt is that it is not the quantity of people but the quality of people that matters the most. Great companies are born with the help of great people, I do hope when I finally decide to open a firm and look for venture, VCs will be evaluating companies a bit differently....
How many times a day do you use phrases like:
If they are part of your daily vocabulary, chances are that you work as consultant. So it was not a surprise when Delloite & Touche Consulting developed a software that isolates such bullshit from Word files and PowerPoint presentations and translates them into plain English.
Looks like they have finally decided to recontextualize mission-critical e-business...
;)
PS: Thanks to Dack for the Web Economy Bullshit Generator
[via NY Times]
My sister is getting married, and I'll be away for the next five days...
Catchya later...
Can you become a Google Hacker by reading a book? Not sure, but looking at the examples it looks like you can definitely improve you information finding skills from reading this O'Reilly book.
By the way how important are these finding skills for you? Jeremy Zawodny rates it as one of his key skills, and so do a lot of other people...
Personally I believe Google should not be the only place to look for things, maybe you could list down your favorite "Memex", apart from Google...
Here are a few of mine:
Justin Frankel the creator of the legendary Winamp has decided to quit AOL over the leaking of Waste the file-sharing program that Nullsoft developed.
Are you a software startup looking for VC funding? Make sure you read this article before approaching one...
Just came across this experiment on the Kalsey Consulting site Adam Kalsey has asked 11 people to write about their early computing experiences and we can add trackbacks to the post to make this a collective anthology. Here is my story (by the way, this story is set in a far different India than what you might be aware of):
First PC
The first real PC I used was in my Engineering Class, it was a 386 running DOS and had BASIC,PASCAL and ForTran. Cool, now I had more languages to work with...
But after that I did not touch computers for three years (I was doing Mechanical Engineering) until my final year when I wrote a program that did Structural Analysis using the Finite Element Method- I concentrated mainly on the graphic display aspect of things...
First brush with the Internet
Again were quite behind on this, In 1994 I got myself an account that provided a shell based access to the internet. I could check email using PINE, and use TELNET and 'browse' using LYNX. Cool, eh? Moved on to TCP/IP and Mosaic about a year or so later...
First brush with Flash
I downloaded a trial version of Flash 1 in 1996. Been addicted ever since...
So what is your story?
If you had just visited my site a few minutes before this post, you'd have been greeted with a login box that asked you to enter a username and password.
I did not put that on my site, and if you'd read the screen more carefully, you'd have noticed that the screen was for onRelease.org. The erstwhile Flash blog.
Looks like Aral has put the entire site behind a password, so this login screen will come up on all sites that use Aral's 'no war' counter...
Too bad, I liked the counter. Not that I'm political, but I'm anti violence and that counter was my silent protest...
Anyway, whatever is going on with Aral, I hope it is for the best...
I'm getting Spam/Junk/Virus emails from microsoft.com email ids. Obviously I'm deleting them right away, but is anybody else getting the same?
Do you Systemize or Empathize?
Take the two Flash based tests to find out what your Essential Difference is...
I seemed to score pretty high on both...
EQ= 52
SQ= 42
That classifies me as B Type brain. Hmnn..
The results of a Borland Survey are out. And the verdict is:
Most programmers do get average sleep...
| Hours Sleep | Count | Percent |
| under 6 | 13760 | 16.32 |
| 6-8 | 60636 | 71.91 |
| over 8 | 6808 | 8.07 |
| I never sleep | 779 | 0.92 |
| no choice | 2328 | 2.76 |
:)
[via Emergic.org]
Alberteinstein.info is a site that holds digitized images of some 900 Einstein papers as well as a searchable list of 43,000 documents in the Albert Einstein Archives. Calling it a storehouse of information, might be an understatement...
[via NY Times]
This Meet-the Makers interview with Jeremy Allaire makes a very nice read. Some very intersting thoughts on his vision of the future...
One of the points he makes is the eminent death of the browser. With Office 11 and InfoPath looking like Microsoft's steps in that direction, I really wonder whether the next generation of software will be nothing more than an extended client-server model. Where the client is a web-veneered Office based Application and the server residing somewhere else over the Internet...
One important step taken by Macromedia in this direction is the announcement of Macromedia Central. But it's too early to make predictions yet...
On the internet, as anywhere else, public opinion does matter a lot. So if your site/web article has a lot of following, chances are there would a lot of references to it on a number of websites. This in turn would give it a high Google ranking...
That is not bad, but can you really use this to give new meanings to already existing terms? Geoffrey Numberg seems to think so. This article in th New York Times goes on to discuss the pros ands cons of having an "uniquely democratic web"...
The article concludes by saying:
But one of the most important sites that Google uses for its Page Rank is DMOZ and because this is human controlled (supposedly by experts/followers of a particular field), there might be more truth to Google's search results than Numberg actually leads us to believe.
Media Labs Asia, the high profile collaboration between the Indian Government and MIT Media Laboratory decided to shut its doors on April 30th. My office being right next to the Media Labs' Mumbai office, I might miss my neighbors. Not too sure if rural India feels the same...
Media Labs Asia, the high profile collaboration between the Indian Government and MIT Media Laboratory decided to shut its doors on April 30th. My office being right next to the Media Labs' Mumbai office, I might miss my neighbors. Not too sure if rural India feels the same...
I had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Rajesh Jain who is running Netcore these days. Most of the talk revolved around what Netcore was up to. Which is a lot. After all, Rajesh is a person brimming with ideas.
Affordable computing is a wonderful idea that Netcore is focusing upon, and it has a lot of potential in a country like India. The concept is a simple extension of Moore’s Law. Given that processor speeds are expected to double every 18 to 24 months, you can gain access to old computers for almost throw away prices (the monitor costing the bigger portion.) Now this relatively slow computer is used as a thin client while a much better computer acts as the thick server, and does all the number crunching. This is a bit like of combining Larry Ellison’s ‘Network Computer’ with Jeff Raskin's original dream of the Macintosh. And what Ellison will really like about this, is that it runs a non-Microsoft OS.
In fact, the entire system leverages Open Source technologies to the maximum. It runs on Linux, uses openOffice and similar open source applications. So for around Rs. 20,000 ($400) Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can have an completely integrated solution.
But Rajesh sees the main potential in delivering this technology to India's large rural population. There have been a number of initiatives aimed at rural India (a lot of them conducted by Media Lab Asia) but none have really made the difference. Could this be the one to?
The other thing that Rajesh is passionate about is blogging. We talked a bit about developments at sixapart and shared our favorite blogs. Rajesh also runs blogstreet, a site that keeps a track of blogs and links to and from it. It uses this information to rank blogs and create blog neighborhood information. So when you search for a blog on blogstreet, you’ll also get information on all the people who blog-roll it. There is also a visual view to all this information, which is really cool.
And finally there was the Linux based, blog aggregator. Very cool stuff. I’ve put Rajesh’s Blog on my must read list, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he’s up to next…
Google decided to bot this page on Saturday, the 15th Feb and it being the web black out day, the bot was presented with this page, a flash version of my apolitical protest. The bot seemed a bit too offended with my page and now there is no reference to this site on Google. :(
While Flash naysayers might put this up as one of Flash's biggest disadvantages, the truth is that with some amount of help from Macromedia, Google should be able to index flash files. In fact there is a prototype on Google that does this but the results are terribly unpredictable. Now, if someone at Google/Macromedia could take this up a bit more seriously, Flash developers will have something to really cheer about.
Cheers
Nav
CHris MacGregor of Flazoom has devised an ingenious way to deter email harvesters from using posts on the websites to generate email databases. CHeck it out at Flazoom.com
CHeers
Nav
Sure you all know that. So for the first couple of posts I’m going to reuse some of my posts from Flazoom, so that I have something up here for the moment.
“Why another blog?” I asked myself. Aren’t there enough out there already? True, but then the lure of installing movable type on my server was just too much, and two hours later, here I am typing my first post on my very own blog. Crazy, I never thought I would join the ‘blogathon’, but here I am. Wonder how long the fascination will last!
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