MICROBAND

Fantastic - Microband ...Defn Must Read & Implement

State of the Blogosphere

Sirfy of technorati has some latest & interesting statistics on the Blogsphere....

- As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs
- The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
- The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
- About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
- About a new weblog is created each second
- 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
- Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day
- About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
- An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average

You can download his presentation here

Open Source Film Making

As a guy who delivers IT solution for a living, one thing that I have learned the hard way is that its best the get the user/customer closely involved in the development process, give him/her "a view" of the solution, in the prototype / first design/ final design / first development stages. Well looks like somebody decided to apply this process to movie making and with a little twist of the web2.0 age..."Participation", he is requesting inputs from the users/ readers of the blog...I think its way too cool an idea. Check it out here.

As a first step he has published the script (download here)....In IT parlance.. The URS (user requirement specification).

Metrics

A VC (Fred Wilson) has a post with the same title, which talks about the development of metrics to monitor thier investments, i found this article pretty thought provoking as i am currently implementing a BI solution for the MIS of a company and am able to relate to the metrices that drive this company. (More on this later).

Week of Wading thru 9000 Blog entries

In the begining of the week i had upwards of 9000 entries to read, so i am very please to say i am down to 0, its an amazing feeling....well the fact still remains that i have 600 flagged posts that i need to revisit. But its always nice to have a more reasonable number to plough through hope to do that tonight, lets see how successfull i am .

RemembertheMilk

Got to know about a new (web 2.0) To Do List Management Service from "Achievable Ends", Within 3-5min of registering and checking it out, this is the feedback i sent them:

Great job - Simple Registrtion/ Nice, Clean UI - More later as i use the product, but i need to do one thing move my outlook tasks here? - How do i do that? - Give me either a sync functionality/ a file import functionality. - thanks.

Rememberthemilk

Update: I want tags - Similar to categories in Outlook.

Yahoo Desktop Search Feedback 1

Please index outlook tasks / calender also! For people like me who live in Outlook...It is an essential feature!

Web 2.0 Mash Up Required - Blog Authoring

I was just writing an a post for the CIO weblog and was doing it via the web interface, its a movable type (Six Apart) Application. Well half way thru the post i was wondering if i should take an offline back up of the article just in case ....than i thought wont it be really cool if i could use GMAIL to author my blogs....with its Autosave feature..i wouldnt have to worry about this at all. Need to evaluate if there are better alternatives!

Am reading a white paper on RSS from Yahoo & Ipos. Listed below are the key findings.

Key Findings
• Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.
• 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.
• 28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe to podcasts.
• Even tech-savvy “Aware RSS Users” prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly, browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).
• My Yahoo! has the highest awareness and use of any RSS-enabled product.

What lessons can be learned from this(Napster) experience?

Never get too far ahead of the market. Creating new markets, new business models, and value propositions is very difficult and takes lots of time and money. Pioneers are usually unsuccessful, the fast followers make most of the money.
Understand who your customer is, what problem you solve, and how much they are willing to pay for it. Sounds simple enough but you would be surprised how many start-ups get excited about their technology innovations and forget about the basic business proposition.

Never start a business focused on solving a big company’s problem. They don’t know they have a problem…and they are probably right. That is how they got to be so big in the first place. The record labels didn’t know they had a digital distribution problem and were not interested in our solution to it.

Test your assumptions before spending lots of money. Interview your potential customers. Understand what their top 10 problems are. Don’t try to convince them that you have a solution to a problem they don’t know they have. Take a survey of 100 potential customers. Ask them to list their top 10 problems, without prompting from you. If you don’t see your problem area listed…move on to another problem.

Good luck on your search for The Next Big Thing!
- Don Dodge

Search Pattern

I have embarked on a small excercise to track all the searches i do it and how i do those searches...below is the first 10 of them.

Why do i Search

1. Getting more information about eric horvitz and OMM - Googglee - using search box built into browser.(opera)

2. Wanted to link to seth godins blog so needed to find it ...Googglee - using search box built into browser.(opera)

3. Rahman show to link to for blog post - Googglee - using search box built into browser.(opera)

3. Butler group - Read article on Wipro and wanted to check out other reports by butler group - Googglee - using search box built into browser.(opera)

4. Search for Innobase OY as a part of blog (CIO) - Googglee - using search box built into browser.(opera)

5. Wanted to do a site specific search with in CIO weblog - Google - Address bar / than google advanced search

6. EurOscon Details - Google - Address bar

7. AIX Commands - Google - Address bar

8. IBM Error code - - Google - Address bar

9. Search of What is written about JBOSS new realease - ICEROCKET

10. Specific AIX Commands. - Google - Address bar

How am i keeping track , Really simple, I maintain a note in the "Opera Notes" section, where i keep track of them.

Love Opera Speak

I downloaded the "Voice/Speech Module" for OPERA....Tested it out today...Its pretty cool!

Browser is the new Operating System.

What is most important to Microsoft when making acquisition decisions?

What is most important to Microsoft when making acquisition decisions? People are the most important factor in any acquisition. Microsoft looks for talented engineering teams with vision and passion and experienced management teams. Second is technology and IP that can add value to an existing Microsoft product. Third is the opportunity to acquire stand alone products for existing customers. Examples include Visio, Hotmail, and Vermeer. Another, more rare, decision point is the opportunity to enter whole new markets. Great Plains and PlaceWare are excellent examples. - Don Dodge.

Investmest & Acquisition list of Microsoft - Are there any Indian Companies (from India) ?

As per this note ...a school...threatens blogger into quiting

This story has lots of moving parts, but I'll try to tell it as simply as possible. An longterm IBM-India employee Gaurav Sabnis followed up on his personal blog on his own time with new information on an India Uncut magazine article that revealed the India Institute for Management and Planning (IIMP) had vastly overclaimed its academic performance in recruiting ads for new MBA candidates.

Gaurav's writing seems moderate and credible to me, and certainly was did not appear to be inflammatory. IIMP first responded with a silly legal letter which Gaurav posted. When that didn't work, IIMP, who buys a lot of IBM computers went to Gaurav's boss and verbally rattled sabres. IBM chatted with Gaurav who then offered to put a disclaimer about his views being his own and not his employers, which did not satisfy the school who most decidedly did not act with the graciousness one might expect from an allegedly highly credential academic institution of higher degrees.

Instead, the school threatened IBM, telling them that if Gaurav was not fired immediately, a student protest would be held and students would burn their Thinkpads in protest. Gaurav wrote that he wished to keep his right to free speech, yet wanted to do nothing to embarrass his employer.

So he resigned.

Source Naked Converstations

Cant beleive this really happened!

Musical Show in the Evening

I am off this evening to the Rahman Show, for those who are not aware, Rahman is one of the leading music directors PAN India.

Everyone is an Expert

Just finished reading Seth Godin's new eBook "Everyone is an Expert"....It is insightfull in a simple way, It helps conceptualise...how Web2.0 is really going to change the way we use the WWW.

Its a must read for everybody interested in Web2.0...More on this later.

Update: Seth godin has embarked on an initiative (Squidoo) to enable the vision that he set out in the e-book, check out the blog here

Google RSS Reader

Okay...first it was MSN with start.com ...now we have google with its AJAX RSS Reader - I am checking it out right now!

Update: Google RSS reader just doesnt work for me! - Fri i got around to importing the OPML file into it...but it hung half way through the process and subsequently the app is just not working i am getting a blank screen/ a loading screen.

Making sure outlook mails dont spoil your flow

At the to done blog there is a post by Bob Walsh, On the topic of how GDS 2 can be used to avoid outlook mail alerts from hampering your Getting things done routine, Bob good post but a couple of points, first if these mails keep getting shown in the sidebar, i am sure there is a tendancy to get at them as they come in, but i think you have hit upoon the right model but you need to do a little more coding/stuff, Basically Integrate with the "Microsoft Outlook Mobile Manager's Priority Engine" - which is a part of Microsoft Research, this built-in priority engine functionality sets based on your actions/selections(learning system) priorities/scores to the messages. Thus if your program is able to tap into this engine than it could be set up to display only the really important(high score) messages in the Google Sidebar.

Check it out at the Microsoft Research site, Channel 9 Video with a member from the research team & PDF on the engine.

More later.

Update: AVC wants something similar, lets ask scoble if he can get us some help so that we can go ahead get a hack in place.

For the Book Lovers/ Collectors

Here is a Web based Application "Library Thing" , I am still groking the functionalities available on the site. - Pretty Cool

More on Personal MBA.

In the past I have put in a couple of posts on Personal MBA on this blog, Well now there is a site & wiki for tracking personal MBA, check it out here & here.

Infectious Greed

Last weekend i was in Chennai, And heard there was a sale at LANDMARK (pretty big book store) and so there i was trying to squeeze out 15-30mins to go and pick up some books...well i did..i bought two books "Crossing the Chasm" & "Infectious Greed". I have started with the latter, and thus far its been pretty interesting reading.