:: Sense - The Way I Sense ::

And you thought lawyers were amongst the most meticulous people when it comes to the clumsiest of paperwork, thing again ! Slashdot had a good discussion on how the original firm that filed a case against Apple for the Ipod Nano’s scratch-loving nature is now filing a case in a convoluted series of steps against the very plaintiff on whose behalf it had supposedly filed the case in the first instance. While there are a lot of other peripheral details to this intriguing turn to the case, best of all has to be the fact that the original plaintiff says that all the Law firm had as his words were his blog posts ! He claims the firm filed case based on his blog post without even bothering to verify till after they have filed ! Surely, desperation can cause people to do strange things

Yes, indeed, the lines are as blurred as they never were. I am talking of the line where computing devices start morphing into personal electronics and lifestyle accessories, the line where things with chips are not an object d’ attraction but an object d’ desire, the line where the next customer is not your archetypal geek who digs into slashdot and hardocp or anandtech, the line where storage capacity is defined by the number of MP4 videos that you can store and not by the number of bits that it can take. Indeed, its a sign of the times that vendors and customers alike increasingly want to bury.

I just had a look at CNET’s photo-feature on Apple’s new retail store in NYC and frankly, was left wondering. Now, here’s a company that all these years made a product that was appealing only to a group of mac fanatics, so much that its customer group has been termed a cult more than once ! And today, it seems their sales/square foot is a multi-factor of other retail stores such as Target… Its funny and interesting for a variety of reasons. Hardly a decade back, if one wanted to buy a computer, you usually had to scout high and low for a vendor that was willing to accomodate even the barest of requests…Finding a 486DX2  was an art in itself, and finding a vendor who knows what he sells, an even bigger art ! And what have you today ! Well, not much has changed actually Vendors still are as clueless as they always were..OEMs are clueless about what to package and what not to in a desktop/laptop…But one thing that has definitely changed is the customer….Companies increasingly do the right thing by empowering the customer in buying what they deem fit, and that speaks volumes of self-inflicted education that people have subjected themselves to, so they could be spared of the sales pitch that they encounter And for all the other neophytes, rejoice, Apple’s opening up right round the corner

PG Meets are always a special ocassion, particularly the All India variety where you get to meet new junta everytime around. There have been three thus far and I’ve had the pleasure of being at all of ‘em. The previous edition at Mumbai was as much fun as it was an incredible learning experience. And this time was no different. Indeed, the entire trip to Mumbai over the weekend was a lot of learning in ways more than one ! While I’ve come to terms with the rapport that people seem to enjoy with purrfect strangers at such meets, indeed is a pleasure to see how communities are slowly, but definitely, transcending virtual walls, more so, in a country like India, where trust ranks high up on the list of abused words ! The internet is still an emotion-less entity, but the manner in which the people using it come to life outside the online coterie is very well a matter of surprise

As usual, was put up with the wonderful host that he is, Allwin. Roaming around Mumbai with him, Apurv and Rohit, and getting interesting tidbits all the while on the city, sure is a nice experience. Seriously, while enough keystrokes have been spent on Mumbai’s wonderful cosmopolitan culture, to see pieces of it in action was damn surprising. Hotels where you need to wait for an hour at 11:30PM to get a table, beaches where parking slots are full at 02:00AM !! Some city that ! 

Getting to see the insanity that prevails at PGHQ, the work being done there and the crazy ideas that keep coming out of the gang there is something that brings a smile. Some of the ideas coming out of there are, truly speaking, revolutionary, in an Indian context where the web is more an extension of the offline physical world and is not treated as a medium in itself that probably surpasses the reach and influence of the printed word ! All in all, a trip that was worth every single hectic minute of travel and next-to-nil sleep. Looking forward to many more in the future…..