:: Sense - The Way I Sense ::

Got this through Jeremy’s blog, A pic that finds itself on the US Govt’s FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) website !! Funny, but I thought so damn true in an Indian context….We get hit regularly by floods/drought year on year and still what do we get to see….The familiar veil of it-took-us-back-completely…Hell…With ever-increasing pollution and damage to the ever-thin eco-fabric, things *are* bound to get worse….Sometimes, it sounds tragically funny when a single spell of rain can throw life out of gear completely…I’ve seen that happen more than once in Hyderabad and now its the same in Chennai today…

And in a manner that vindicates the image , the rains have hit hardest a colony in Chennai that was housing the victims of the tsunami…They have again been rendered homeless

No…am not talking of the dreaded four letter word Have better things in life to do

Now with the sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL for $25million, does one need further proof that blogs have kinda arrived big time…Ok, $25m may not be much, many non-existent dotcoms had raised multiples of that during the boom…But hey, this is a first…For those that came in late, Weblogs Inc is the entity that operates the popular tech blog Engadget along with a host of other blogs…More than the sale amount, Like this analyst points out, its not just about companies vying in for ad inventories, but it also is a lot about the quality of the inventory…And in their rush for getting a slice of the pie, bouyed no doubt by google’s figures, companies need to be extra cautious before they shell out their advertising dollar.

And yea, Do read this excellent write-up on men and making money with the video ipod

Some stuff that should happen asap

Some stuff that should never happen

Some stuff that was bound to happen

Some stuff that is increasingly happening

And some stuff that will happen due to a lack of appreciation of increasingly happening stuff

And then, once in a while we come across such decisions by a bunch of Norwegians who, with all due respects, probably have been ostriches in their past lives !!!! Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to an organization that has not once, but repeatedly, failed to neither detect nor discourage proliferation across the world…Today it really isn’t the stuff of Tom Clancy novels if one were to read of back-pack nukes !! And a major part of the blame, if not entirely, rests solely with the IAEA for not baring its fangs !! But then, strange are these times and stranger are the people that man these

If ever you had a doubt on Google’s PR prowess, it was at its best last two days when it announced that *landmark* deal with Sun Microsystems….Most of the media went agog with rumours that M$ would now be pressing the panic button and that the end of days has now, truly, begin !! Analysts suddenly saw immense *value* in getting a link to JVM from google toolbars !!! And not to miss out on the action, one of our desi channels did a comparative feature on StarOffice and M$ Office and one of the crucial points that they mentioned was that StarOffice was easily available for download…And providing links to these thro’ the toolbar would result in more downloads !!! And btw, Staroffice is the paid version of Openoffice, the free open-source version…That was conveniently left out !!

However, what i found really interesting was the manner in which the US stock markets reacted to this deal…Google was down and Sun was up..Not really tough to see, as the only tangible part of the announcement was that Google would be buying a lot of Sun servers !! If ever there was a case written on how to keep the media machine running overtime with nil costs to you, it would definitely have google right near the top, of-course with the honorable exception of the britneys or beckhams who just need to sneeze to make news

Heck, talk of PR, half the blogs in the world, more than any other traditional media, right now have been talking of google in the past few weeks !! Now THAT speaks a lot !!

Dell has always been a shining example of how to make direct sales work !! So I thought it was indeed pretty surprising that henceforth, for a few budget models, the word free delivery doesn’t really span the last mile !! In one of the silliest interpretations that one can see out of the jargon that is spewed out of marketing departments, Dell’s free delivery would now mean free delivery upto the local post office !!! Customers would then have to pick it up from there… Of-course, as always this is being touted as a feature !!

I was just wondering if those folks picked up a thing or two from bus operators in interior Tamilnadu. The last time I travelled in a bus from Nagapattinam to Trichy, I was told it was a non-stop bus…Only after enduring what should be a 90 min ride for close to 180min, did I ask that guy and attained nirvana at what he said , non-stop meant no stops between two stops !!! Of-course, his two stops were dynamic variables