March 2006
13 posts
Reading “Naked Conversationsâ€â€¦
Just started reading Scoble’s Naked Conversations. Very interesting read until now (just finished the 3rd chapter!). Scoble’s book seems to be quite popular among NUS students. The library has allowed me to loan the book only for a week and very much in line with the Singaporean affection for fines, I will be charged at the rate of $1/hr for any delay in returning!
A few interesting...
Tim Berners Lee on mashups
Mash-ups are called Web 2.0, but they are data integrations - taking a piece of display technology like a map application and doing a handcrafted data integration. I’ve yet to see a mash-up that uses semantic Web data and crafts it - the fact that everyone has their own mash-up tells the story.What I’ve always wanted to do is take an arbitrary thing, a data file, and if it’s got...
Nokia India uses blogs as part of market research
Corporate India analyzes content on blogs and online forums as a form of research.
Conversations with Dina According to Dina Mehta, Nokia India hired AC Nielsen ORG MARG to conduct web-ethnography (webnography) based on blogging sites and online discussion forums to get a feedback on its fashion series models. Through web search engines, the research firm used a simple methodology of...
Random news on startups
globeandmail.com : Old media makes itself new Traditional media companies are on a ‘.com’ buying spree supposedly! That’s good news I guess for people like me :) Plug&Play - Incubator/Office space for startups Interesting idea. My dad told me he saw loads of such office space providers for startups when he recently went to California and supposedly even in...
Content delivery kiosks by IBM in Aus and NZ
I just finished reading this article ::: Digital IQ Magazine :::. This is something I thought about and written about in my blog long time back. Mobile data charges are very expensive. People are not going to use expensive OTA transfers to download rich media content because they already paid quite a lot for the content itself. This I think can be an attractive medium or a sales channel to sell...
Last.fm Player rocks!
It’s official - my self-imposed Windows stint ends tonight! I’m back to Kubuntu. How long did it last? 2 months approx. Why in the first place did I switch to Windows? To try out some cool Windows-only stuff and also partly because I borrowed my dad’s new Dell laptop which came with Windows XP installed. Why the switch now? Inspite of having McAfee AV Scan running all the time,...
Update on Indian online travel space
When the Indian online travel space gets heated up with new players attracting VC funds, what do the existing players do? They will also go in for additional funding to ramp up their operations so that they are stronger and tougher for upstarts to beat them. MakeMyTrip.com has just raised $6 million in its second round of funding, according to a report in VentureWire (sub. required). We will come...
Independent movie on the Kumbh Mela
inDplay - an indie or independent film and movie rights licensing platform and directory Heard about inDplay via some VC blog - apparently Eric Schmidt is also an investor. It’s a marketing platform for independent movie makers. Anyways that link takes you to one of the independent movies I found on their website - a documentary on the Maha Kumbh Mela by an American dude! Watch the...
Python: Generators, Coroutines, Continuations,...
I was watching Guido van Rossum’s State of the Python Universe 2006 talk at Google. And I came across this interesting feature in Python - support for generators via the yield keyword. It’s a very interesting idea and the worst part is it seems to have been existing for quite sometime now and I didn’t even know about it! So after a bit of searching in IBM dW, I finally found...
Web 2.0 monetisation?
Russell Beattie Notebook - WTF 2.0
Atleast one guy writes about what I’ve been feeling frustrated with in the past few months - the people building these web2.0 apps are very young (most probably just out of college) and most importantly, since building these apps doesn’t need a lot of upfront investment (apart from their time which they have anyways - they’re nerds after...
Copying a business model is not bad after all!
Read the article below! Read/WriteWeb: NZ’s eBay sold for $700M
I always used to have doubts if it’s worthwhile to just plainly copy the business model of a successful Silicon Valley company and make it available in some other geographical region. But, I guess the key is to choose a region which you know the best, which you think the original company would not enter anytime...
Seventymm.com - the Indian Netflix launches in...
Read about Seventymm.com in a blog - they just launched an online DVD rental service in Bangalore and are thinking of expanding to other big cities in the following months.
The Netflix model might work in India, but will have a few nitty-gritty operational issues in India. From their website, it looks like they’re going to deliver the DVDs themselves and not use the Indian Post or private...
Average SV pay = $70k
WSJ.com - Market Is Hot For High-Skilled In Silicon Valley Average annual pay in Silicon Valley hit $69,455 in 2005 Interesting article on WSJ which talks about how jobs in SV are becoming more and more high-skilled - people are moving up the value chain. Looking at the way companies like Google are hiring, it makes me wonder whether I should reconsider doing that PhD in CS afterall....