:: Sense - The Way I Sense ::

And before I even realized, its been a coupla years since I started blogging ! Not bad, I should say, for I did not really think I would last thus far But yes, in the true sense of the word, mine might not be a blog at all. I don’t really talk much on personal life or work life, although I have been intending to do for quite a while. To me, it’s more an indication of what I was doing at a particular point in life…Sometimes more, sometimes less, But at the end of it all, something to sit back and read later and smile….Hopefully, it shall go on ….

Just in case you’ve missed, M$ has finally taken the wraps off their digital music platform, Zune. And this has in turn created a flutter in the market. Analysts predict that this is likely to antagonize M$’s partners such as Creative, iRiver and many others and many in the blogosphere have already made it sound like a project gone horribly wrong. If you look at media/blog/analyst coverage on all things M$ and google, its kinda interesting. When google says it is building a toothpick, people predict the next renaissance in the toothpick markets, otoh, when M$ makes an announcement, one only finds dooms day predictions for its product, and not the market. Definitely, while google may still be struggling to reduce spread of revenues from search ads, it has made sure the buzz factor is at resonance ! Personally, I think Zune definitely has enough potential to shake up Apple’s stranglehold on the market, and more importantly, it gives M$ a toehold into a consumer’s digital media landscape.

Closer home, you simply cannot miss this amazing & exclusive interview with the God of Marketing, Dr.Philip Kotler, published right here on PaGaLGuY ! I had an opportunity to go to his seminar here at Chennai, Courtesy Great Lakes, and its not tough to see why he is named one of the world’s top management gurus ! The interview was done by Allwin, who has now headed to Wharton. All da best pal !

So some wise souls sitting up there thought a few websites were spreading anti-national sentiments. And in typical babudom style, bring up a circular/note banning a dozen odd websites. And it so happens a few happen to be blogs hosted on blogger. And our dear ISPs in their over zealousness to play pally with the regulator go overboard and block the entire blogspot and geocities domains. And then, all hell breaks loose ! They hyper-inward looking blogging community starts the censorship bandwagon, and very soon mainstream media picks its up and its all mayhem. Right from /. to BBC, everyone compares India with China and rues about how democracy has failed us as a country repeatedly !

As I see it, its a case of a foot-in-mouth on part of the ISPs, and if I could, a very large foot ! was the extreme reaction from blogosphere really justified? Is bungling up considered censorship ? I know many might not agree with my understanding of the situation, but what the heck. I still consider India a democracy

No, I am not moving on with blogging and life That’s the title of a competition that was recently held to promote an eponymous budding travel community. And what better person to win it than our friendly neighborhood Journalist Apurv ! The guy’s currently travelling on a pre-determined route and blogging about it at OKTataByeBye. His pictures and depiction have been a treat to the eye. Do check it out. While his postings sure do make the site come alive, I was more than a tad disappointed at how a site that intends to build a community actually promoted the whole event. The noise levels on the blogosphere were negligible, to say the least

India, as an online business, is still in its nascent stage. There is an acute lack of good sites/communities on a variety of fields and that essentially opens up a wide range of sites that one could get into. Communities have been hard to come by, since the Indian populace is unique in that it tries to look for alternate grounds once it sees the first signs of any monetizing of communities that is inevitable after a time. Questions are raised on credibility, feasibility and veracity once communities start looking at raising monies. India still does not have your Weblogs, Inc style chain of blogs where user-generated-content is pretty high. People still have a very push-pull relation with websites where they either subscribe to feeds/newsletters or just browse around to sites that offer what they need. The interaction levels, are abysmal, to say the least ! Elsewhere, building communities around blogs written with an attitude seems to be a sure-shot way of off-setting some of the concerns of members on credibility ! Of-course, Content still rules and thats the reason why blogs such as Gizmodo/Engadget still attract the kind of premium rates for ads that many other full-blown sites can only dream of. No wonder, Weblogs found a suitor for $25million a while back ! Sure will be interesting to see if and when someone comes up with communities on these lines

This week had some very interesting news coming in from the Oracle of Omaha ! It’s not everyday you come across someone who gives away over 85% of his wealth in charity. Its not the sheer billions that it translates to, but in absolute terms, 85% means a freaking lot. Personally, I am not sure, I can take a decision of that magnitude. But what the heck, It was his decision and I am mighty glad that people like him actually are around in these days of brazen money-driven lifestyles. However, I was thinking something else with regard to these huge sums. And a reporter at LA times has already done a very good report on that. With such abundance of private money, would Governments start shying away from what is essentially their *duty* ? Some of the points raised in that story are indeed interesting, and more importantly, worrying

The Tech blogging world has been seeing some changes of late. Om Malik, he of GigaOm fame, has left Business 2.0 to create a web 2.0 business out of his insanely popular blog, and has snapped up some early seed VC funding too. Om has been one of the authors whom I’ve followed for quite a while, and somehow that did not come as a surprise. OTOH, Scoble runs what is perhaps the most popular blog by any Microsoft employee. His reach in the blogdom is something that M$ as a company can only dream of and his call-a-spade-a-spade attitude has won him many an avid reader. And it was with much surprise that I read about his plans to move on to an absolute podcasting startup. Bob has single-handedly, arguably, generated more positive PR for M$ than what their entire PR team has done trying to give twists to stories and events.

Of-course, reaction from regular visitors to these sites has been diverse, but what I thought interesting was the fact that yet again, blogs have come to the fore-front in terms of how they defined their authors, particularly when they are hugely popular blogs. These two saw merit in making their blogs,and with it, their audience, an integral part of their career plans. While their blogs would still be definitely interesting to watch out for, it will be interesting to see how Bob is able to retain his enormous readership, and influence, now that he isn’t at the company that everyone loves to bitch about ! Om’s blog on the other hand, should grow even more interesting now that he has some monies and as he says, a few ideas.  Any takers for my blog?

Well, what have you ! Who wud have thunk this was possible. PG.com growing big enough to host pan-India competitions along with such partners as GoAir ! But, yes, here you are and its possible now !  And yea, just in case you belong to the species that still doesn’t have a blog , fear not, for there are many other ways of getting a free ticket. Just head to http://www.pagalguy.com/gopagal !

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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…..

I’d taken a self-professed oath that I wouldn’t blog on google for a few days. But hafta break that. WSJ has this op-ed praising google. The commentary basically extols all that is good in google, identifying the usual culpris of 20% time, flat hierarchy and the like. Nothing unusual. But what’s surprising is the author himself. He of core competence fame, Gary Hamel ! Now. Hamel is universally acknowledged as a guru in strategy and for his varied theories. As such seeing someone of his stature going overboard on google definitely is surprising. While google surely has a lot of things going for it, it also is having to contend with more than its share of business dilemmas. Ofcourse, sitting on huge piles of cash does help in allaying fears The Op-ed immediately saw more than its fair share of criticism… Paul kedrosky of Infectious Greed and Om Malik of Gigaom, have both pointed out the pointlessness of Hamel’s over-the-board praise…Google’s good. It might be a damn good company. But end-of-day, it still is a company with a set of disparate products that needs to identify ways of generating more money and increase shareholder value. In all this web 2.0 rush, viewing every other development/company through a google-tainted lens, isn’t exactly the ideal situation. I may be weak in identifying core competencies of companies, but for a person like Gary Hamel to be dishing out unreserved praise for a company whose core competency, to date, seems to be to not have one, is pretty interesting

And yea, the customary launch of a new product by google is here.

ps: Amazing quote by Hamel in that piece , While fidelity is a virtue in marriage, it’s a handicap in business.