rahul gaitonde dot org

Today, to shame the slobs among us, we’re reading about the morning routines of CEOs. (Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO “rises at 4:30 a.m., spends an hour on email, reads most of the news online, and then does an hour of either cardio or resistance training each morning. This allows her to get her son ready for school and drop him off, and still get to work by 8 or 8:30 in the morning.”)

Also, in California,  when budgets to monitor children in school get tight, what does the state do? Attach RFID tags to them. And debate endlessly about the implications (“If RFID records show a child moving around a lot, could she be tagged as hyper-active? If he doesn’t move around a lot, could he get a reputation for laziness? How long will this data and the conclusions rightly or wrongly drawn from it be stored in these children’s school records? Can parents opt-out of this invasive tracking?”)

Finally, how do you, a startup, turn your expensive-rental office into a money-spinner? (“We put together a one-day agenda, charged about $300 a person, and sold about 30 seats. Suddenly, we found ourselves with $9,000 in additional revenue. Our monthly rent at the time was $2,500. In one day, we just paid more than three months’ rent. That was a light-bulb moment. An office can be free — and even a profit center — if you start thinking about your company’s byproducts.”)

In non-tech, the IIM Kozhikode Director writes about the ‘untold’ story’ of an MBA (“Every day you may have to make critical multiple choice decisions about time management. One student describes this as follows: (a) have bath and breakfast both (becoming rarity in campus), (b) bath but no breakfast, (c) breakfast but no bath, and (d) neither (becoming an alarmingly regular option).” – there’s more to the article than this nugget, of course)

Also, an indignant column in the Guardian about Kabul’s bars for expats. This is scarily like the Shah’s Tehran in the years leading up to the ‘79 revolution. (“Congratu-effing-lations. We have just managed to isolate Afghans from us even more than before. Not only have we invaded their country and torn it to shreds, but we have also created a segregated, imperialistic society – one in which Afghans are third-class citizens in their own country, invalidating an already marginalised population further.”)

Finally, a slide show of spectacular traffic jams around the world. Where there’s a wheel, there’s a way. Except that it’s backed up. For miles.

Flock, a ‘social’ browser that’s been around for some time, has a new beta release with some noteworthy features.

I think this is outstanding, though: like Chrome (Flock is based on Chromium), it searches-as-you-type, matching your bookmarks, web history, top websites – but also searches your social network – in real-time. Find which of your friends – whether on Twitter or Facebook or Flickr – have just posted about what you’re searching for – while typing. Look:

Dan Gillmor in Salon, about what telcos are doing to handsets running the ‘open source’ Android OS:

The emboldened carriers have started loading all kinds of “crapware” — apps from partner companies that can’t be removed in standard configurations and that can slow down the devices. (For that matter, Google itself has done this with the Nexus One and Android, by putting unremovable apps into the operating system updates.)

Then there’s this complaint on The Consumerist:

What I am writing about is Verizon’s deplorable, and borderline unethical, inclusion of scads of bloatware and adware applications on this device, which in and of itself is a disgusting practice by an OEM, be it smartphones, desktops, laptops or any other related type of device, but made all the more unacceptable by the fact that there is no possible way of removing said applications. Dare I remind you that these devices we purchase from you are our property? To do with as we see fit?

But Open Source software’s Achilles heel has always been distribution. As long as the software relies on intermediaries for getting into the hands of the general population, its very open source nature leaves vulnerable to being meddled with – in ways not exactly beneficial to the ‘end user’.

Back in July last year, I’d written about open source projects:

- Commercial entities, each with its own USP will pick, modify and integrate portions of the project into their own products. This is what’s happening with Firefox… its best features and technology will probably find their way into more popular commercially-backed browsers…

And/or the vanilla Open Source product will have adware/spyware/stay-foreverware/bundleware tacked on to it. This is what’s happening with Android.

And it’s too much for most folks to get rid of stuff like this – ‘jailbreak’ your Android phone, download ‘plain vanilla’ updates – not the ones from your carrier, and suchlike. Even for the tech geeks, it’s a fight, and it’s annoying. There’s no easy way out of this – whether closed-source (Windows Mobile, RIM) or open-source, whether PC or mobile – new devices have always shipped with unsolicited rubbish. BUT

A smart carrier will very soon have an opportunity to endear itself to vast numbers of Android refugees by simply not loading crapware. By golly. What things have come to.

Today, Lifehacker’s put together a list of the best Android apps. Very rich list, spanning multiple categories: Productivity, Internet, Media, Photography, Entertainment and more.

We also read about Dell’s ‘business arrangement’ with Intel, that was eventually deemed to be fraudulent accounting: Intel paid (bribed?) Dell with credit notes in return for exclusivity vis-a-vis AMD. Those rose to 38% of Dell’s entire operating profit in 2006 (“While almost all of the Intel funds were incorporated into Dell’s component costs, Dell did not disclose the existence, much less the magnitude, of the Intel exclusivity payments.”)

Finally, in “Now Playing: Night of the Living Tech“, the New York Times examines how ‘old media’ has always evolved to find a place alongside new media, instead of kicking the bucket: radio, turntables, email, movies, newspapers. Much recommended. (“People increasingly use text messages and e-mail to arrange telephone calls, which are reserved for more important, complicated dialogues. An unscheduled call from people other than family members, they say, is often regarded as a rude intrusion.”)

In non-tech, we read about misinformation spread about Obama by the loony Right – he’s a Muslim, he wasn’t born in the US, he, not Bush, passed the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or the Bailout, that Michelle Obama vacationed in Spain at taxpayers’s expense – and what it could do to American society (“…false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.”)

We also read about whether giving the finger – once so scandalous – has become so commonplace that it should be an acceptable part of social discourse (“Why? Why apologize for something that we now see just about every day? On streets, in stores, in schools, on the news. People are extending their middle fingers as a silent, but effective — sometimes too effective — way of saying “go to hell,” “up yours” or “(insert nasty-sounding verb here) you.”").

Finally, the Economist offers a skeptical profile of the ‘youthful’ Rahul Gandhi (who is actually pushing 40) (“A second, even more impressive vehicle, known simply as India, boasts wheels of state, and its chauffeur is respectfully called “prime minister”. It offers an exhilarating if often erratic ride (it belches smoke and lurches in unexpected directions, when it is not stuck in traffic). It is currently on loan to a loyal and honest retainer, Manmohan Singh, no mean driver for a man of his years. But this car is Rahul’s heirloom. It is just a question of time before he asks for the keys back.”)

For a brief couple of weeks last months, I was very active on Facebook – reading my news feed, commenting on status updates, viewing photo albums, like-ing items, accepting friend requests – all the normal stuff Facebook-ers do. And now again, I’m hardly ‘on Facebook’. What changed?

It turns out that during that time, I used my Blackberry Curve 8900 instead of my Nokia E71. And, by extension, a clever little Twitter & Facebook app named Socialscope. It’s the best app I’ve used for either Twitter or Facebook. It made ‘Facebook-ing’ on my phone a delight. When I went back to Nokia-land, there was no Socialscope – or any half-decent Facebook app for that matter – and I stopped using Facebook altogether. It turns out that even though I use a computer well over 8 hours a day, I rarely use the Facebook – or Twitter – PC website.

If it doesn’t have a great mobile site or app, I won’t use it. Whatever ‘it’ is.

I rarely checked/wrote email on Gmail until I bought Profimail for my Nokia. Or listened to much music until I purchased a 16GB microSD card for the phone and dumped all my music there. Or used Google Maps until I used it to find my way around Bombay’s western suburbs and Hyderabad’s chaos while driving.  Or read anything online regularly (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic) until I bookmarked all of them on Opera Mini.

Jean-Louis Gassée: The smartphone isn’t just a new genre, it’s nothing less than a reboot of personal computing.

It’s true. I have no “computer time” anymore in my daily routine. Any little sliver of time can be computer time now (I just linked to the flip side of this yesterday). And it’s also helped stop hour upon wasted hour of desultory browsing.

This is a big change, but it’s crept up on me these past years – it’s only when someone asked me about my short-lived flurry of activity on Facebook that I noticed. If you have a decent smartphone with a GPRS/3G connection, look back and see if your online habits have changed. You might just be surprised.