Author: Rahul

BusinessWeek has a “Best of the Web” Special Report on what is now commonly termed “Web 2.0“. It does a pretty good job at outlining the exciting “two-way” nature of the coming web. Here are a couple of quotes from the article to give you a good idea of what the future holds:

By the millions, they’re gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized article and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search for on the Web site del.icio.us. They’re producing their own entertainment on video, social-networking, game, and photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo’s Flickr.

For a vivid illustration of what can be done,

Some enterprising folks are playing Web deejay. HousingMaps.com injects housing listings from Craigslist into Google Maps, so people can visualize a rental’s location.

And in summary,

Says Siva Kumar, president of the shopping search engine FatLens: “Where one site starts and another ends will increasingly be seamless.”

An important point about Web 2.0 that Rajesh Jain makes:

The Web finally breaks free from the browser. (See Widgets, Web-enabled desktop-like applications, Mobile applications, etc.)

To type in this blog post from my 6670, and i must say that this is a pretty well-constructed application. However, since Blogger introduced the “email to blog” feature, using any other interface to post is becoming kind of redundant.

From my mobile phone! I’ve composed this on the email client on my 6670, then emailed it to my blogger email address. This is simply amazing! Connectivity at its best!

Here it is!

What can I say? This thing has *everything* in it! Except for an FM Radio, that is

Here’s the Nokia India product page. Here’s an extremely detailed review of the 6670 on MobileReview (for God’s sake, they’ve even taken it apart!) The Indian model, though, comes with a 64MB RS-MMC card as opposed to the 32MB that the site mentions.

The Nokia 7610 is the “lifestyle” version of the 6670. It costs a full Rs. 5000 more, and doesn’t offer a single extra feature other than (admittedly) very cool looks. MobileReview has noticed an interesting point about Nokia’s marketing strategy:

Nokia has manufactured similar products not once and that is due to the use of the same platform. Most often the differences concerned one or two functions and design. Nokia 7210 may be considered one of the first experiences, the model is extremely fashionable and then the release of business phone Nokia 6610. Except for the design the devices were as like as two peas in a pod. But the price for Nokia 7210 was always on a high level while 6610 got cheaper dynamically. They accounted on the fact that users who need functionality will choose the business model and those who like the design will pay extra for it. In principle the scheme was right and the company even applied it again for smartphones.

Will have more to say about this phone in future posts – for sure!

A colleague and I were talking about books yesterday when the topic veered to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. She had read the book as part of her school syllabus, but couldn’t quite remember the story. While digging up information about Pygmalion, we came across a description of The Self-fulfilling prophecy, or the Pygmalion Effect. I’ve reproduced part of that writeup here. The part in italics is particularly insightful.

As it is known and taught today in management and education circles, the notion of the self-fulfilling prophecy was conceptualized by Robert Merton a professor of sociology at Columbia University. In a 1957 work called ‘Social Theory and Social Structure‘, Merton said the phenomenon occurs when “a false definition of the situation evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.”
In other words, once an expectation is set, even if it isn’t accurate, we tend to act in ways that are consistent with that expectation. Surprisingly often, the result is that the expectation, as if by magic, comes true.

An ancient myth
Magic certainly was involved in the ancient myth from which the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy takes its other common name. As Ovid told the story in the tenth book of Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion, a prince of Cyprus, sought to create an ivory statue of the ideal woman.
The result which he named Galatea, was so beautiful that Pygmalion fell desperately in love with his own creation. He prayed to the goddess Venus to bring Galatea to life. Venus granted his prayer and the couple lived happily ever after.

A modern update
That’s where the name originated but a better illustration of the “Pygmalion Effect” is George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, in which Professor Henry Higgins insists that he can take a Cockney flower girl and, with some vigorous training, pass her off as a duchess. He succeeds. But a key point lies in a comment by the trainee, Eliza Doolittle, to Higgins’ friend Pickering:
“You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will, but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”

The bottom line?
Consciously or not we tip people off as to what our expectations are. We exhibit thousands of cues, some as subtle as the tilting of heads, the raising of eye brows or the dilation of nostrils, but most are much more obvious. And people pick up on those cues.

I was rummaging about my old drafts, when I happened to see this entry dated 14th June 2005. I have no intention of completing this, but it’s amusing to see how I was feeling back then!

Summer in Mumbai

Mumbai’s weather sucks big time. If we were to have a “Sucky Weather” exposition in India, I suspect we’d come in second, beaten to this ignomious title only by the Madrasis. Poor folks. I’ve heard the water situation there is so bad that the only guaranteed supply of water is your own sweat. As an aside, because of this, baths in Chennai are most economical. Start by simply applying soap to your already soaked body. And wait for fresh sweat to wash away the lather. Excellent, I say!

Back to Mumbai. The air is viscous as tar. My skin glistens with a perennial sheath of sweat all over. (That’s another reason why we Mumbaikars out”shine” everyone else). Rivulets of sweat compete with each other on my back in a furious race to my waist.

How do we deal with this? Well, we don’t. You see, ceiling fans on full speed simply whir ineffectively, cutting through the thick air like butter cuts through a knife. Perhaps those with air-conditioning might be slightly better off – but then they probably feel worse whenever they step out! In places where the heat is severe but dry, say Nagpur, you can always soak sheets in water and hang them up to cool things down (and that works a lot better than air-conditioning, by the way) Would that work in Mumbai? Of course not! The air is is so humid; you could hang dry sheets up and find them soaked in water. The average Mumbaikar changes his clothes six times a day since damp, sweaty clothes are no fun to wear. This is most unfortunate since clothes take longer to dry too. The urge to discard clothing altogether and roam about stark naked is strong. Scary. I am tempted several times to take a nice cold bath, but the tragedy is that the moment you step out of the bathroom, you’re drenched in sweat – again – before you can say “fresh as a daisy”!

Well, I’ve made it to the print medium!

My article titled “Winning where Netscape failed”, on Google’s intermediate-term product strategy, is a Guest Column in the September 26th issue of Businessworld!

If you’d like to read it online, the URL is http://www.businessworldindia.com/SEP2605/column01.asp (Free registration required).

Feedback’ll be appreciated!

Ok – Lotus Notes 7 has finally been released, and – I’m SO glad to be an IBMer – I’ve already got it installed on my ThinkPad! It’s SO thrilling to be able to try out all of the cool features I’ve been reading for so long on Alan Lepofsky’s blog! I’m exploring R7 all I can as I write this – just finished migrating all my local databases to the latest templates. Expect a few R7-related posts in the days to come!

It’s indicative of the kind of excitement surrounding Notes/Domino: everyone’s known of R7’s new features for quite a while now, and is already – within less than a week of the release – looking forward to Hannover! I don’t want to hear “Notes is dead” ONE more time now! ‘Nuff said!

A month ago, I mentioned that I had become a huge fan of IBM’s Lotus Notes, which we use all the time for absolutely everything at IBM. If I could run ssh sessions from within Notes, I’d use it for my development work too! (I’m going to ask some of the Notes design guys here if that’s planned for Hannover!)

Here’s an entry about Lotus’ Formula Language from the redoubtable Alan Lepofsky. This is simply amazing! I’m going to give this a try starting today!

If any of you guys have any doubts whatsoever about why Notes is such a wildly successful product, just go through Alan’s blog. This is a treasure trove of Notes tips, tricks and advice!

Rediff.com has an interesting article about Arvind Thiagarajan, a 25-year-old Indian entrepreneur who, having come up with a revolutionary (I know that word is overused, but really!) technique for lossless data compression, went on to found MatrixView, a company “specializing in providing data compression and optimization solutions” for medical imaging . Two things stand out. One, the technique was so simple and straightforward that the scientific community was astounded to the point of being sceptical. Two, he set up a company whose products fell into a niche area dominated by imaging giants with huge research budgets and with expansive patent portfolios, with a technique whose own patent is still pending. That takes guts.

Most admirable. What isn’t is the reaction of the typical Rediff reader to this news article, instantly dismissing it as a “hoax”. But here’s another angle on this issue.