Cool Stuff

So What Project! Krishna Govinda Live in Yoga Rave

2010-10-24T06:41:00.001-07:00

Radhe Radhe ...

2010-10-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

With Google TV, I May Never Leave The Sofa Again

2010-10-21T16:04:00.000-07:00

With Google TV, I May Never Leave The Sofa Again

I’ve seen the future and it begins on my sofa with Google TV.

It isn’t uncommon among geeks to have your PC (or Mac) wired to your TV. A decent audio-out cable, an HDMI cable and you’re good to go. With this simple setup and a few tweaks to your TV’s input and display settings, you can watch YouTube videos (or anything else)—and that’s pretty cool.

But Logitech’s Revue with Google TV takes the integration between television and the web to a whole new level. I was able to play with one for a few hours. Here are my five favorite things about the Logitech Revue with Google TV as well as a brief review of the functionality.

1. The Web—Only Bigger, Better and On Your TV

If you’ve ever wished that you could use the web on your 47 Inch hi-def TV, you’re probably going to want Google TV. Web pages are rendered quickly, clearly and with their full functionality right on your TV. (Although Hulu might be a problem).

Not only can you browse the web, but you can interact with it just like on your Mac or PC. This means you can easily enter text—whether that’s a tweet, a search term or even a full blown blog post.

For those of you wondering how you can possibly do this using your TV remote control the answer is simple—you don’t have to. The Logitech Review comes with a fully functional wireless keyboard that includes a touchpad pointing device that even allows you to scroll with two fingers just like on a Mac.

You can also get a smaller mini-controller that features a thumb keyboard and much of the same functionality. Get both and you can finally prove to your kids that a keyboard is faster than sending texts on a phone—maybe.

In addition, you can even control Google TV using Logitech’s Harmony technology with your iPhone or Android device but more on that in a minute.

2. Seamless Video Conferencing—although I put this second on my list, it really is one of the coolest features of this new platform. Not only is the video big, bright and clear, it also allows you to place calls to and from the TV via Skype and other video calling platforms as well.

In a prior post, John Biggs of CrunchGear worried that calling on Google TV using the Logitech Revue wouldn’t be as simple as it is using Skype. Well, he can stop worrying because it is. Click, connect, talk (and see); it really is that simple.

One other great thing about Google TV using Logitech’s specifically designed camera is that when your TV is off and you receive (but miss) a call, a light comes on that tells you that this has happened. While you can’t yet leave (or receive) a video voice mail, enough people have been asking for this feature that either Google or Logitech should add it later or an enterprising application developer will build an app for it without a doubt.

3. Your Phone is Now Your Remote Control—In my distant past when I wrote for MobileCrunch, I said more than once that eventually your mobile phone will become the remote control for your life. With Google TV this reality has come one step closer, at least if you have an iPhone or an Android device.

Logitech has developed free software that you can find on either the iTunes Store or the Android App Market that allows you to totally control the Logitech Revue (and thus your interaction with Google TV) with your mobile.

Not only can you navigate with a mouse, you can also use verbal commands for things like searching Google. While I was watching, people threw some pretty rough stuff at the recognizer but it seemed to work every time from what I could see. This is a far cry from other voice to text or voice to command interfaces. My host said “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and Google TV was actually able to get this right. Beyond this, the system even seems to be able to understand people with accents—even heavy ones.

Cooler still, using the built-in share function, you can start watching a video on your mobile and if you like you can share it directly to your Google TV and the video will pick up where you left off, only now it will be bigger, brighter and better.

4. Search (– DUH – It’s Google!)—You’d expect any television platform with Google’s name on it to have great search and the Revue does not disappoint. Not only can you search what is on TV and what’s on the web, you can also search your DVR as well as on any other networked storage device on the same subnet. Family photos will never be the same.

5. Android Apps—Okay I saved the most intriguing and potentially exciting aspect of Google TV for last. Google TV is built on the Android platform and many people, myself included, believe that we’re not only going to see an explosion in app development as a result, but also a quantum leap in what Android applications can deliver. Android apps are not expected to come out until 2011, but it will be worth the wait.

With the high bandwidth of your home connection (which is going to be a lot better than any current 3G network) as well as the much larger format your TV provides (not to mention the full fledged keyboard), Android apps have the potential to get very exciting indeed.

One potential app could be a fantasy football application that can run in a picture-in-picture display and can give you realtime updates on what is happening with your fantasy football team while the game is happening—plus with the video calling capability you can call and heckle your losing friend right in the middle of his ignominious defeat. That’s just one idea off the top of my head.

The Wrap Up

Google TV has been hyped an awful lot—by bloggers, analysts, and even some mainstream media. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t deliver. In fact, if anything I was surprised by just how capable, functional, fun and intuitive the Logitech Revue is, not to mention how much better Google TV makes plain vanilla television.

My Few Complaints: As with many brand new product (the one I tested was still in beta), there are a few bugs to be dealt with. The first problem is how Google TV handles Flash. Some pages that render partially or completely in Flash don’t display properly and in one extreme case, a page I was trying to browse that renders fully in Flash crashed the unit completely. The Logitech team told me that they were aware of this issue and that it was being worked on, but as of last night it was still a problem.

Secondly, while the interface is fairly intuitive that cannot be said for every feature. Out of the box some features, and especially advanced features like contolling the camera via the control keyboard, might not be that easy for a first-time user (and especially one that isn’t really tech-savvy) to figure out.

That said, I found the whole experience to be a lot better and a lot more interesting then I had anticipated prior to actually getting my hands on the unit. I’m not much of a gambler myself but I’d be willing to bet that Google TV has a good chance of finally changing the way we interact with our televisions.

The Galaxy Tab Hitting Verizon Wireless November 11th For $600 Straight Up

2010-10-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

Hmm it could have been cheaper ...

Verizon Wireless Puts Samsung Galaxy Tab™ in Stores in November
BASKING RIDGE, N.J., and DALLAS, Oct. 20 /PRNewswire/ — Verizon Wireless and Samsung Telecommunications America (Samsung Mobile) today announced the highly anticipated Samsung Galaxy Tab™ will be available Nov. 11 for $599.99. Running on Android™ 2.2, the Samsung Galaxy Tab features a brilliant 7-inch touch screen; robust HTML Web browsing experience with full support for Adobe® Flash® 10.1 for video and mobile gaming; and a 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird Application processor.
“This is an incredible time in mobile technology, and as a company we’re excited to add the Samsung Galaxy Tab to our portfolio,” said Marni Walden, vice president and chief marketing officer for Verizon Wireless. “The Samsung Galaxy Tab brings together the reliability of Verizon Wireless’ 3G network and the power of Android 2.2 to deliver on our promise of providing consumers and business customers with a host of options to help manage their lives.”

Popular mobile applications, including V CAST Music and V CAST Song ID, VZ Navigator®, Slacker Radio, Kindle for Android, BLOCKBUSTER On Demand® presented by V CAST Video, and the exclusive golf game, “Let’s Golf,” will be available on the Samsung Galaxy Tab. In addition to text, picture and video messaging, the Samsung Galaxy Tab will also feature V CAST Apps, Verizon Wireless’ mobile storefront offering hundreds of applications for businesses and consumers at launch.

Verizon Wireless customers can add a monthly access plan beginning at $20 a month for 1 GB on their Samsung Galaxy Tab. For additional features and specifications on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, visit www.verizonwireless.com/galaxytab.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie Resigns

2010-10-18T21:02:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie Resigns

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Monday via an internal memo that the company’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, will be resigning from the company shortly.

Ozzie will shift his focus toward Microsoft’s entertainment properties “following the natural transition time with his teams but before he retires from Microsoft,” Ballmer said, without citing any dates. “The CSA role was unique and I won’t refill the role after Ray’s departure,” Ballmer added.

Ozzie became an employee of Microsoft in 2005, following its acquisition of Groove Networks. He became the company’s chief software architect in 2006, after Co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates stepped down from the role to spend more of his time on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — which he began doing full-time in 2008.

In October 2009, he founded the FUSE Labs (Future Social Experiences) division within Microsoft to develop more social, web-based products, such as social aggregation tool Spindex. He also been credited with driving many of Microsoft’s software products, such as Microsoft Office, to the cloud.

The full letter is below:

“From: Steveb
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010
To: Microsoft – All Employees
Subject: Ray Ozzie Transition

This past March marked a significant milestone for the company when, in a speech at the University of Washington, I sent a message to the world that we’re ‘all in’ when it comes to the cloud. In that speech I noted that Ray’s Internet Services Disruption memo nearly five years ago, and his work since, stimulated thinking across the company and helped catalyze our drive to the cloud.

As a company, we’ve accomplished much in the past five years as we look at the cloud and services. Windows Live now serves as a natural web-based services complement to both Windows and Office. SharePoint and Exchange have now decidedly embraced the cloud. And by conceiving, incubating and shepherding Windows Azure, Ray helped ensure we have a tremendously rich platform foundation that will enable app-level innovation across the company and by customers for years to come.

With our progress in services and the cloud now full speed ahead in all aspects of our business, Ray and I are announcing today Ray’s intention to step down from his role as chief software architect. He will remain with the company as he transitions the teams and ongoing strategic projects within his organization – bringing the great innovations and great innovators he’s assembled into the groups driving our business. Following the natural transition time with his teams but before he retires from Microsoft, Ray will be focusing his efforts in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments. We have tremendous opportunities in the entertainment space overall, and I’m excited about what we can accomplish. Beyond that, Ray has no plans at this time. While he’ll continue to report to me during the transition, the CSA role was unique and I won’t refill the role after Ray’s departure. We have a strong planning process, strong technical leaders in each business group and strong innovation heading to the market.

While Ray will be onboard for a while, I’d like to thank him today for his contributions to Microsoft, both as a leader and as a long-time Microsoft ISV. As an early ISV, Ray contributed significantly to the early success of Windows. Since being at Microsoft, both through inspiration and impact he’s been instrumental in our transition toward a software world now centered on services. He’s always been a ‘maker’ and a partner, and we look forward to our continuing collaboration as his future unfolds. Ray has played a critical role in helping us to assume the leadership position in the cloud, and positioned us well for future success.

Please join me in thanking Ray and wishing him well.

Steve”

Techmate

2010-10-18T06:13:00.000-07:00

Places i visited upto now ...

2010-10-17T13:22:00.001-07:00

Asia

India: Abu

India: Ahmadabad

India: Bangalore

India: Delhi

India: Jaipur

India: Jamnagar

India: Jodhpur

India: Mumbai

India: Porbandar

India: Pune

India: Sirohi

India: Surat

India: Vadodara

India: Veraval

Caribbean

Virgin Islands: Saint Thomas

Europe

United Kingdom: London

North America

Canada: Niagara Falls

United States: Boston

United States: Bushkill

United States: Cape May

United States: Chicago

United States: Delaware Water Gap

United States: Devon

United States: Edison

United States: Fort Lauderdale

United States: Fort Wayne

United States: Jersey City

United States: Key West

United States: King of Prussia

United States: Los Angeles

United States: Miami

United States: Mountain View

United States: New York

United States: Philadelphia

United States: Portland

United States: Providence

United States: Quincy

United States: Richmond

United States: San Francisco

United States: San Jose

United States: Tampa

Get your own widget

GeckoGo

Google In-Page Analytics Provides Visual Context for Traffic Data

2010-10-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

Google In-Page Analytics Provides Visual Context for Traffic Data

This awsome.

When looking at Google Analytics reports, sometimes it’s difficult to visualize how visitors navigate on a given website page. To make this visualization easier, some users keep the website open in another browser tab so they can reference it while looking through reports. Others rely on the Site Overlay report in Google Analytics, which, admittedly, hasn’t worked as well it could.

Today, we’re happy to share with you a bit of what we’ve been working on to address this problem. We’re releasing a new feature into beta: In-Page Analytics. With In-Page Analytics, you can see your Google Analytics data superimposed on your website as you browse.

Take In-Page for a spin and let us know what you think. In-Page Analytics is still in beta, so some things in the report may not work perfectly yet. There’s a lot left to do, but there’s even more that we want to build going forward. In-Page is currently available for all English users of Google Analytics. We also have a demo video that walks you through the feature and how you might use it.

You’ll find the In-Page Analytics report in the Content section in your Google Analytics account, and it replaces Site Overlay. You can read more about In-Page in the Google Analytics Help Center. Let us know what you think and how you’re using it!

CommonWealth Games Opening Ceremony - New Delhi, India

2010-10-16T16:25:00.001-07:00

Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook

2010-10-16T16:02:00.000-07:00

Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook

Twitter was valued at one billion dollars in its last round of financing, but we believe it may in fact be severely undervalued relative to Facebook because Twitter’s value proposition is less obvious.

Facebook has utterly dominated the definition of the “social graph” to the point that conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley says that they have “already won social.” Few analysts seem to notice that the particular definition of “social graph” promulgated by Facebook—people you already know in real life—is not the only possible social graph. In fact, Facebook’s future revenue will actually be built on top of another social graph: the social interest graph, aka Pages & Likes.

Twitter’s social interest graph is potentially a huge cash machine that will lift the company out of the red and into the black . . . (Naval certainly hopes so).

An interest graph differs from the “people you know in real life” social graph in that it is:

Built on one-way following rather than two-way friending
Organized around shared interests, not personal relationships
Public by default, not private by default
Aspirational: not who you were in the past or even who you are, but who you want to be
It should already be clear that the interest graph lends itself brilliantly to commerce.

This explains in part why Facebook is potentially very lucrative: it owns the somewhat-buried interest graph constructed through all of the shares coming from our Facebook friends. As its News Feed grows, so will Facebook’s version of the interest graph. The interest graph makes itself most explicit in Facebook Pages, which also works on the principles of one-way following, shared interests, public streams, and aspirational relationships.

But Twitter is in theory even better positioned than Facebook to capitalize on the social interest graph. Its keys components are:

The composition of the social graph
The value of the data flowing through it
The volume of the data
By excelling at all three, Twitter is demonstrably superior to Facebook Pages, at least, along specific axes related to revenue potential.

1) Twitter’s social graph is inherently interest-based.

Facebook, as we noted earlier, maintains two separate graphs from the user perspective: a social graph and an interest graph. For most Facebook users, the former is vastly more important than the latte—no one joined Facebook so they could follow Justin Bieber’s Fan Page. Twitter’s graph by contrast is fully interest-based: people use it to stalk celebrities, not to stalk ex-girlfriends from high school.

Twitter’s graph reflects the power-law distribution of human nature. Social hierarchies are rigid and constraining, and slow down the flow of information. On Facebook, unless you are one of his 5,000 closest personal friends, you aren’t going to find out what Mark Zuckerberg likes. But on Twitter, when Demi Moore tweeted at a suicidal kid, she used the power-law distribution—aka celebrity—to help save a stranger’s life.

Twitter’s interest graph seamlessly accommodates whales, including celebrities, professionals, and increasingly businesses. By contrast, it is downright painful to maintain concurrent presences on the dual Facebook graphs—Facebook’s lack of tools to automate Profiles and Pages wastes energy, goodwill, and time. Twitter has no such ambiguity, and as a result it is growing its own kind of lightweight business-related engagement.

2) Twitter connects strangers, creating more value for all.

Twitter data is all assumed to be public by default. Therefore it can be indexed, crawled, searched, and aggregated. Value can flow across the graph to people who don’t know the original poster.

When strangers communicate with each other, they are much more likely to be short-term transactional: ask questions, report news, flirt, buy something. Friends communicate more over the long term, building a relationship over time. Therefore, from an advertisers’ perspective, a Tweet is much more likely to be valuable than a Facebook share.

Businesses make money by connecting strangers. Even on Facebook itself, the most promising applications are there to connect strangers—Zynga, Zoosk, BranchOut, TopProspect. Facebook itself has struggled to allow strangers to connect in commercially-relevant ways: even now, Pages don’t allow users to talk to each other so much as potentially allow businesses to blast news or cupcake offers at their followers.

A follow is the ultimate opt-in. There is no clearer statement of interest on the Internet today, because you are giving permission for that person or entity to push data at you as much as they want as long as they’re interesting to you. Interested intent + Opt-in = The dream of every marketer.

3) Twitter’s usage model encourages volume.

Facebook Pages are rarely visited after an initial “like.” Community behaviors have not developed around Facebook’s interest graph. Many users consider all Facebook Page messages to be of low value—akin to spam—and therefore do not welcome higher volume.

You can pick up a follower from anywhere on Twitter, and they can drop off at any time, so you must keep the quality and flow of messages high to be successful. Other users on Twitter won’t put up with your lame tweets just because they went to junior high with you . . . you have to find some interesting “hook” to grow your audience, and you must keep the flow of information coming to keep them, not just place mirrors beside mirrors to make it seem like beautiful content goes on and on.

Now that we’ve analyzed the massive potential value of Twitter, it’s time to address the undeniable operational and structural missteps by the company to date. To take advantage of these opportunities, Twitter must fully embrace three things: third-party developers, Google and Microsoft, and the Open Web.

1) Embrace third-party developers.

Unfortunately, Twitter has lost its way with developers. Six months ago it was a critical piece of infrastructure that everyone wanted to use as the messaging layer for their applications. Now Twitter has turned its back on third party developers because the company thinks it is necessary to own the major clients (web, iPhone, Android, iPad). Hopefully the elevation of Feedburner’s Dick Costolo to CEO signals a shift back to the correct strategy: Don’t monetize the client, monetize the feed.

Here are three things Twitter could immediately do to mend fences with developers in a way that’s also good for the company:

Embed ads in the search results and tweet stream API calls so any startup using the recently-opened firehose can monetize for Twitter and themselves too.
Make the client attribution published with each tweet more prominent again to promote different Twitter clients.
Open the graph API so any startup can innovate on the basis of Twitter’s extremely high-quality follow-based interest graph. For instance, one could imagine building a very accurate spam filter using Twitter’s graph.
These moves would not hurt Twitter at all, and in fact would kickstart their platform efforts versus Facebook Connect. And they’re very much compatible with promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends—and the accompanying tools.

2) Embrace Google and Microsoft

Twitter has significant common interests with these two companies. They can help Twitter solidify its infrastructure foundation, invest a half billion dollars to make sure the company has the cash to scale, promote Twitter heavily as the open social network, and help Twitter monetize hugely as full-fledged partners.

3) Embrace the Web.

Twitter has the ability to power the open Web versions of Facebook Pages and Facebook Places, and that’s where the real money is. Don’t make brand advertisers have to think—provide a clear, open alternative to Facebook where they can promote their own Websites and brands instead of on Facebook Pages, and the dollars will start to flow.

The real money comes from two places: search and brand advertising on an open alternative to Facebook.

Memo to Twitter: with search, do not grow a brain. Partner with the best at Google and Microsoft (see Facebook-Bing), and you’ll get great AdSense, AdWords, display ads, and mobile ads without having to run all the infrastructure—and manage all the people!—to do it. They should be willing to give you 70% of the revenues now that you’re doing a billion searches a day.

Let’s say you can’t yet get the dime per search average that Google has spent a decade optimizing. Even if you only average 2 cents per search, that’s $20 million in revenue per day. Your cut? $14 million a day. That is real money: roughly $400 million a month, or $5 billion a year. And it grows as your number of searches and average revenue per search grow.

In addition to that, look to brand advertising increasingly moving online. TV money wants to move to the Internet, but right now Facebook Pages are the only place brand managers can make big spends. Come up with a cost-per-follow model similar to Facebook’s $1-per-like model. Heck, maybe even rev share with the consumers who are following, and give new users a tangible answer to the oft-expressed question, “Yeah, Twitter, I don’t get it… WTF?Who really cares?“

If Facebook’s revenues are $2 billion and its valuation is $35 billion, then a Twitter with a potential $5 billion in annual revenues is massively undervalued. Twitter employees and investors understand the potential, as evidenced by the fact that there are currently many unfilled bids on the Sharespost secondary market for shares at a $4.5 billion valuation. If Twitter can improve its execution and learn to play well with others, this valuation will prove to be laughably low.

Boeing 747 N173UA Low Pass - San Francisco Fleet Week 2010

2010-10-16T14:58:00.001-07:00

One of the best bollywood item song of the year - Munni badnam hui

2010-10-16T14:35:00.001-07:00

The Mumbai monstrosity: The first $1 billion home?

2010-10-16T12:52:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is not what India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was talking about when he called in 2007 for India's business leaders "to eschew conspicuous consumption."
The Daily Telegraph reported Thursday that the richest man in India, who is also the fourth richest man in the world, just moved into what is likely one of the priciest pads on the globe: a 630 million pound ($1.08 billion), 27-storey-tall monstrosity in Mumbai.
Here's what Mukesh Ambani, head of Reliance Industries, and his brood got for that price tag, according to the Telegraph: A health club with a gym and dance studio; at least one studio; a ballroom; guestrooms; a 50-seat movie theater; and three pads for helicopters (to fly over Mumbai's legendary traffic) and underground parking for 160 cars (in case people simply must drive in Mumbai).
It has more space than the Palace at Versailles and takes 600 staff to run, the Telegraph reported. Ambani dubbed the home Antilia after a legendary island in the Altantic that may have driven Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors to search for cities of gold in the Americas.
Why does 53-year-old Ambani's home cost so much? Location, location, location. The Guardian newspaper says it cost $70.4 million to build, but Mumbai's soaring land prices have driven the estimated price up many times that.

Facebook use can lower grades by 20 percent, study says - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets - Back to School - msnbc.com

2010-10-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

Facebook use can lower grades by 20 percent, study says - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets - Back to School - msnbc.com

Does the "F" in Facebook stand for an "F" in school? A new study says that college students who are on Facebook while studying or doing homework wind up getting 20 percent lower grades than students who don't have the social networking site in visual range, or even running in the background on their computers or mobile phones.
The study, reported in the Daily Mail of Britain, was done by Netherlands psychologist Paul A. Kirschnera of the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies at the Open University of the Netherlands, and Aryn C. Karpinskib of Ohio State University. It will be published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
Kirschnera told the Daily Mail that his team studied 219 U.S. university students between ages 19 and 54, and found that Facebook users had a typical grade point average of 3.06, while "non-users" had an average GPA of 3.82.
The psychologist said the study wasn't about whether Facebook's good or bad, but goes more to the stereotype that younger people are fluid multi-taskers —sending text message, listening to music, reading a book, all at the same time, for example — without any problems. (Driving and texting at the same time is, of course, being the among the most dangerous multi-tasking activities anyone can do.)
"The problem is that most people have Facebook or other social networking sites, their e-mails and maybe instant messaging constantly running in the background while they are carrying out other tasks," Kirschnera told the newspaper.
"Our study, and other previous work, suggests that while people may think constant task-switching allows them to get more done in less time, the reality is it extends the amount of time needed to carry out tasks and leads to more mistakes.
"We should resist the fashionable views of educational gurus that children can multi-task, and that we should adapt our education systems accordingly to keep up with the times."
Among the comments to the story was this one, from "I'moverhere" in Britain: "Believe me, if it isn't Facebook, it's something else. There's always something ready to distract a bored mind. While you're at it why not do a similar survey relating to consoles, television, texting, radio, football practice and staring into space?
"Having said that, Facebook does take up a lot of time due to society's increasing dependence on computers for education. Even in 2004 when I was doing A levels, I would get information from a book rather than Wikipedia. This instant-satisfaction-minimum-effort society has a lot to answer for.

"Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!" - WSJ.com

2010-10-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

"Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!" - WSJ.com

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. The answer is: None of the above. The winner is Nokia, whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cellphones.

Y. L. R Moorthi

The reason is that cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling standalone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all.

Try this. Who runs the biggest music business in India? The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel earns more than music companies do by selling albums.

Airtel is not in the music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of a competitor is difficult to detect and even more difficult to beat. By the time you have identified him, he has already gone past you. But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy, you couldn't be further from the truth.

Nokia has reportedly acknowledged that it missed the smart-phone bus. It admits that Apple's iPhone and Google's Android can make life difficult for it in the future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, it is that there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails.

The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) in this context is: "What is tomorrow's personal digital device?" And, a related question: "Who is my competitor?"

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways for international flights in India? Singapore Airlines? Indian Airlines? Maybe, but there is a more interesting answer: The videoconferencing services of Hewlett-Packard and Cisco.

Senior information technology executives in India and abroad were compelled by their headquarters to use videoconferencing to keep travel costs in check. Of course, there could be a rebound in travel. But to think that the airlines will be back to their previous business post-recession is something I would not bet on. In the short term, yes. In the long term, it is a resounding no.

Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware, where prices consistently fall. Between 1977 and 1991, prices of the now-dead VCR crashed to one third of their original levels in India. PC prices also dropped. If this trend repeats itself, then videoconferencing prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then.

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The film gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan etc). That was when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50-over cricket.

Then came the Indian Premier League and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs, reducing the game to the length of a three-hour movie. Cricket became a competitor to film. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If the IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, films would have to sequence their releases so as to not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned, both are a three-hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!"

One final illustration. Some 20 years ago, what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? An alarm clock, that monster of mechanical springs. It had to be physically wound up every day. It made so much noise that it woke you -- and the rest of the colony. What do we use today? Cellphones. An entire category of clocks practically disappeared without warning.

The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.

—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore

Harvard gets biggest international donation in 102 yrs, from Tata Group - The Times of India

2010-10-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

Harvard gets biggest international donation in 102 yrs, from Tata Group - The Times of India

BOSTON: India's Tata Group has given a whopping $50 million to the prestigious Harvard Business School here to fund a new academic and residential building on its campus, the largest gift received by the institute from an international donor in its 102-year-old history.

The gift comes from Tata Companies, the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and the Tata Education and Development Trust, the philanthropic entities of the Group.

It comes days after Anand Mahindra, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Mahindra and Mahindra Group, gave USD 10 million to the Humanities Centre at Harvard. A Harvard alumnus, Mahindra gave the gift, the "largest" in the Centre's history, in honour of his mother Indira Mahindra.

Ratan Tata, Chairman of Tata Sons, attended Harvard's Advanced Management Programme -- one of three comprehensive leadership programmes offered by the Harvard Business School's (HBS') Executive Education -- in 1975.

He had also received the School's highest honour, the Alumni Achievement Award, in 1995.

The School said it will use the USD 50 million gift from the Tata Group to fund a new academic and residential building on its campus for participants in its broad portfolio of Executive Education programmes.

HBS hopes to break ground for the building, which will be named Tata Hall, next spring. It is expected to be open for use by late 2013.

Calling it a privilege and a pleasure to "give back to Harvard a little bit of what it gave to me," Tata said he hoped the new facility would encourage and inspire future leaders to take advantage of the executive education offerings at HBS.

"The Harvard Business School is the preeminent place to be exposed to the world's best thinking on management and leadership and we are pleased that this gift will support the School's educational mission to mold the next generation of global business leaders," Tata said.

Expressing "deep appreciation" for Tata's "generosity," Harvard Business School's Indian-origin Dean Nitin Nohria said the "historic" gift comes from an organisation "revered" for its significant economic, civic and philanthropic impact.

"The Tata Group is widely respected for integrity and innovation, not just in India -- where it produced both the first indigenous car and the 2,000 dollar Tata Nano automobile -- but in a variety of business lines across several continents, from cars to hotels and from tea to information technology," Nohria said.

In Pictures: The Next Decade's Fastest-Growing Cities - Ahmedabad, India - Forbes.com

2010-10-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

In Pictures: The Next Decade's Fastest-Growing Cities - Ahmedabad, India - Forbes.com

This is the largest metropolitan region in Gujarat, perhaps the most market-oriented and business-friendly of Indian states. Gujarat's policies helped lure away the new Tata Nano plant from West Bengal (Kolkata) to Sanand, one of Gurajat's exurbs. One Indian academic, Sedha Menon, compares the state--which has developed infrastructure more quickly than its domestic rivals--with Singapore and parts of Malaysia. Per-capita incomes in Gujarat are more than twice the national average. India's seventh-largest city has a population of roughly 5.7 million and is expected, according to the U.N., to grow to over 7.6 million by 2025.

Harvard vs. Stanford: Which builds a better entrepreneur? - Oct. 12, 2010

2010-10-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Harvard vs. Stanford: Which builds a better entrepreneur? - Oct. 12, 2010

When you think of the world's best business schools, you inevitably think of two great rivals: Harvard and Stanford.

For decades, Harvard has long been known as the West Point of Capitalism, the breeding ground of the corporate elite, while Stanford has smartly used its Palo Alto location to serve as a highly productive incubator for Silicon Valley.

Harvard is hoping to change that simplified view.

"There is a great myth about some other institutions and the degree to which they represent entrepreneurship," says William A. Sahlman, who teaches entrepreneurial finance at Harvard. "It's total fiction. We have a higher proportion of our faculty and a higher number teaching entrepreneurship than other schools have faculty."

The Harvard offensive has kicked into full gear today with the publication of The Intelligent Entrepreneur, a book by author Bill Murphy Jr. on three successful Harvard MBAs from the class of 1998 who turned down safe jobs at big companies to launch their own enterprises.

Written with the cooperation of the school, The Intelligent Entrepreneur also touts Harvard's deep commitment to the field and quotes many of the school's professors, who, according to Murphy, "see the entire discipline of entrepreneurship as necessary, life fulfilling, and at times almost spiritual. They're not just teaching business strategies and processes; they're inspiring students to embrace a way of life."

All of this has come at a time when the job market for MBAs is weak and more students have become interested in starting their own ventures.

The vast majority of MBA students, of course, still rush headlong into high-paying jobs in consulting and finance to help pay down their tuition debt. But professors at both schools say that more than half the graduates of Harvard and Stanford end up running their own companies within 10 years.

Ask Stanford Dean Garth Saloner about his school's strength in the field and he holds nothing back. "Our entrepreneurship curriculum is stunning," he says. "Our courses are taught with a faculty member and a practitioner. And our students are in Silicon Valley and at a university where they are within walking distance of every other school -- in medicine, engineering, design -- so they can work with other students on ventures to change things in many fields."

At Stanford, one of every four electives is in the discipline and 95% of the students take at least one course in entrepreneurship. Just down the street from Sand Hill Road, known for its concentration of venture capitalists, Stanford draws on many VCs and startup entrepreneurs as lecturers in its classrooms. Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) founder Andy Grove and ex-Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) CEO John Morgridge are among dozens of well-known entrepreneurs who have taught at Stanford for years.

Harvard's history of entrepreneurship is quite different. For many years, the school had so thoroughly defined itself as an academy for the corporate elite that it dismissed entrepreneurship as a subject unworthy of serious study. As an HBS account of its own history put it, entrepreneurship at Harvard was seen as a "personality defect," and the typical entrepreneur was considered "a chronic malcontent."

All that changed in the early 1980s when Howard Stevenson, a veteran HBS professor, returned to campus to develop a full-fledged curriculum in the field. Even so, it wasn't until 1997 that Harvard finally started its first business plan competition, only after prodding from students and over the objections of some faculty. Earlier this year, 110 teams participated in the competition.

"Last year we had 35 companies start right out of HBS," says Sahlman. "We had more business plans then at any time in the history of our competition. One reason was that the job market is not so great. The second reason is that the cost of doing certain kinds of businesses has gotten smaller. So if you're starting a web-based startup, it's going to cost $250,000 to $500,000, it's not going to cost $10 million."

Unlike Harvard, which has a separate department of entrepreneurship, Stanford has no dedicated faculty. Instead, the school teaches the discipline by pulling from traditional disciplines in marketing, finance, and organizational behavior.

Stanford doesn't have a business plan contest because the school views its mission as more "educational" and not as a launch pad for startups, says Linda Wells, executive director of Stanford's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

"Our geography is a huge part of the benefit," says Wells. "We live in an incubator. Everything you would want to start a company is here, except for funding, and we have venture capitalists as lecturers and relationships with many angel investors."

If Harvard lacks location, it makes up for it by throwing formidable resources at the field. The school has its own building devoted to the subject, the $25 million Arthur Rock Center, named after the HBS alum who invested in both Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) and Intel.

Harvard boasts 35 faculty members who teach the discipline, the second largest faculty group at the school. All first-year MBAs at Harvard must take a course in entrepreneurship and can choose from almost two dozen second-year electives on the topic -- pretty much the same number of courses that Stanford offers. Harvard says its alumni make up nearly 25% of the entire venture capital industry.

As a percentage, more Stanford grads (about 15%) are likely to either start companies or immediately work for startups than Harvard grads. Indeed, nearly 10% of Stanford's graduating class launch companies right out of school, versus about 4% to 6% at Harvard -- numbers significantly lower than during the 1999 dot-com-era boom.

"In 1999, everybody and their brother was starting a company," says Wells.

If anything, Harvard simply wants to break the myth that it is merely a breeding ground for corporate chieftains, investment bankers and management consultants. As Murphy concludes in his book, Harvard has gone through "an impressive process of reinvention."

The World's Billionaires - Forbes.com

2010-10-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

The World's Billionaires - Forbes.com

The World's Billionaires

RANK NAME CITIZENSHIP AGE NET WORTH ($BIL) RESIDENCE
1 Carlos Slim Helu & family Mexico 70 53.5 Mexico
2 William Gates III United States 54 53.0 United States
3 Warren Buffett United States 79 47.0 United States
4 Mukesh Ambani India 52 29.0 India
5 Lakshmi Mittal India 59 28.7 United Kingdom
6 Lawrence Ellison United States 65 28.0 United States
7 Bernard Arnault France 61 27.5 France
8 Eike Batista Brazil 53 27.0 Brazil
9 Amancio Ortega Spain 74 25.0 Spain
10 Karl Albrecht Germany 90 23.5 Germany
11 Ingvar Kamprad & family Sweden 83 23.0 Switzerland
12 Christy Walton & family United States 55 22.5 United States
13 Stefan Persson Sweden 62 22.4 Sweden
14 Li Ka-shing Hong Kong 81 21.0 Hong Kong
15 Jim Walton United States 62 20.7 United States
16 Alice Walton United States 60 20.6 United States
17 Liliane Bettencourt France 87 20.0 France
18 S. Robson Walton United States 66 19.8 United States
19 Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud Saudi Arabia 55 19.4 Saudi Arabia
20 David Thomson & family Canada 52 19.0 Canada
21 Michael Otto & family Germany 66 18.7 Germany
22 Lee Shau Kee Hong Kong 82 18.5 Hong Kong
23 Michael Bloomberg United States 68 18.0 United States
24 Sergey Brin United States 36 17.5 United States
24 Charles Koch United States 74 17.5 United States

Maker's Schedule

2010-10-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

Our case is an unusual one. Nearly all investors, including all VCs I know, operate on the manager's schedule. But Y Combinator runs on the maker's schedule. Rtm and Trevor and I do because we always have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she's gotten into sync with us.

I wouldn't be surprised if there start to be more companies like us. I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or at least postpone, turning into managers, just as a few decades ago they started to be able to resist switching from jeans to suits.

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.

When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.

When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.

Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free if you're on the manager's schedule. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to "grab coffee," for example.

Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.

Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem.

Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost.

Outsourced on NBC

2010-10-15T20:28:00.000-07:00

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Aamir Khan and Deepika Padukone playing badminton

2010-10-15T20:17:00.001-07:00

Angry Birds available on Android for free, crashes company's website - CSMonitor.com

2010-10-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

Angry Birds available on Android for free, crashes company's website - CSMonitor.com

Beginning today, Rovio Mobile will offer the Android edition of its best-selling application for free, first through the download site GetJar.com, and then on the Android Marketplace. “We want to make Angry Birds available for as many people as possible," Rovio wrote in a press statement, according to the tech blog Mashable. By comparison, the full version of Angry Birds currently costs $.99 on Apple iTunes.

But the news of a free Angry Birds app was all apparently a bit much for the Rovio site, which crashed sometime this morning, and remains – as of about 1 p.m. – mostly out of action. "Oops! Due to the enormous traffic generated by the Android launch of Angry Birds, rovio.com is down," reads a note appended to the site. (The download links remain active – so you can still get your Angry Birds fix.)

Harvard gets biggest international donation in 102 yrs, from Tata Group - The Times of India

2010-10-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

Cricket loss makes Oz athletes take it out on washing machine - The Times of India

2010-10-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

Cricket loss makes Oz athletes take it out on washing machine - The Times of India

NEW DELHI: At the top of the medal tally and the undisputed champions of the Commonwealth Games, the Australian team, sadly didn't show any sporting spirit when their cricket team lost the Test series to India on Wednesday.

Enraged by the humiliating loss, some athletes, according to highly-placed sources in Delhi Police, went berserk, destroying electrical fittings and furniture in their tower in the Games Village on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Not just that, policemen posted there say they also shouted slogans against batting maestro Sachin Tendulkar, who played a pivotal role in ensuring India's victory in the Bangalore match, and flung a washing machine down from the eighth floor of their tower.

Their hooliganism started on Tuesday when Sachin scored a double century. "The house-keeping staff tried to stop them but to no avail," said a senior police officer handling security inside the Village. Stunned by the little master's stellar performance, they first damaged electrical fittings and fixtures in their block.

On Wednesday, when India brownwashed Australia 2-0 to keep the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, the Australian athletes reportedly threw a washing machine down from the eighth floor, said a senior officer. Mercifully, no one was injured.

Delhi Police, which received a complaint about this vandalism, tried to downplay the incidents to prevent them from snowballing into a diplomatic embarrassment for Australia.

On reports that some Australian athletes went berserk inside the Games Village after their cricket team lost the Test series to India, a senior officer posted there said that they have not received any complaints from Organising Committee (OC) which owns the property inside the Games Village. "Therefore, we have not registered any case," said a senior police officer.

Police spokesperson Rajan Bhagat said: "No complaint has been received. We have found a broken washing machine from the block where the athletes were staying. We are trying to establish as to how the machine reached there."

OC officials didn't pursue the matter. "We have not given any complaint and the matter has been sorted out after discussion with the Australian chef-de-mission," said an official. When asked whether the Australian athletes have tendered any apology, he declined any comment.