My Wuw!!!!

I was listening to some old techcrunch posts on blogbard radio when I came across some of Michael Arrington’s interviews with US presidential candidates. He asked all the candidates their PC versus Mac preferences. Here are their responses.

Mitt Romney:

” I have a PC. My sons have a Mac and swear by it, but I have a couple PC’s. 3 out of the 5 boys I believe are on Macs, and they swear by them, but I’m a creature of habit, I’ve got my PC. “

John McCain:

” I am illiterate. “

Mike Gravel:

” Well, I gotta tell ya. I’ve been PC all of my life, and then lo and behold, this year in order to do some video streaming, responding to people’s questions, I bought a Mac. So, I’m sitting in front of a Mac. And if you can imagine at my age, having to conquer both. I sit in front of my Mac and I’ve gotta think twice as I take a step, because I think in terms of a PC. So, I’m an equal opportunity kind of guy. I own a Mac, and I gotta tell you if way back when people tell you “You gotta get a Mac it’s better than a PC”. Well, I’m prepared to give testimony that it is more intuitive than a PC, but the PC has universality. It’s a little bit like the beta and the other device. The other device won out, but the beta works better. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles. “

Ron Paul is most likely a Mac fan. He is an iPhone user.

If you know the preferences of other presidential candidates, drop me a line or share it in the comments.

Despite all the hype created around how the likes of Ustream, Joost and Kyte are promising to change television programming as we know it, for quite a while, I have found these services quite uninteresting, the quality of content not quite to my taste. This all changed when I wanted to watch the 20 - 20 world cup cricket final between Pakistan and India. The match was available only on pay-per-view on dish network. Even though I was willing to pay the utterly high price for the service and the one year contract that goes with it, the dish company could not provide me the service because of the unfavorable direction in which the balcony of my apartment faced!!!

Not willing to give up cheering for my team in the finals, I searched Yahoo answers to find out if I could watch the match online. I was very happy to find out that some kind soul was broadcasting the match live on ustream. Now only if this service worked flawlessly!! I had to try for over 45 minutes, literally speaking, to connect to the match stream. Once connected the quality of video was jittery for sometime and then it stabilized. The audio quality was acceptable and had no jitters. Thanks to ustream, I was able to watch the world cup final, including the presentation ceremony.

Will I use services like Ustream again? Probably yes, because I know they do have programming catering to audience, considered too niche by mainstream media companies. Here is my wishlist for ustream.

- Please make the experience more pleasant. Waiting for 45 minutes to connect to your favorite program leaves bitter taste.

- Please, please, please do something about the video quality. Just try watching a popular sports match yourself and you will know what I am talking about. The video quality is utterly jittery, not to mention the low resolution and other artefacts.

- Please do something about irrelevant advertising on your channels. What’s the point in showing advertisements created for UK businesses to audience in US.

- Please, please, please provide more programming for cricket, field hockey and international languages.

I am sure you can charge premium as high as the pay-per-view channels in regular television, if you can guarantee the same quality of video and seamless experience. I am pretty serious about it. The mainstream media is not serious about catering to fans of field hockey, cricket or programming created in other languages. The audience interested in this kind of programming has the means and the will to pay for it, if a company were to offer it. The long tail for the market interested in non-mainstream programming is bigger than the long tail of advertisers being catered to by the Google’s and Yahoo’s of the world.

I am pretty confident that the company that caters to this non-mainstream TV audience will grow to be as big as Google or Microsoft, I guarantee it!!!

An year ago whenever I googled for queries which existed in some post in an arcane news group, Google would find it. However it looks like google is losing that edge.

Try out the following query on google.

“Internal buffer inconsistency. flushbits <> ResvSizeError: MAX_HEADER_BUF too small in bitstream.c”

It would return zero hits.

Then try out the same query at Yahoo search. You would be pleasantly surprised how relevant the only search result Yahoo returns.

This is the third time within a week, where Google has flagrantly lost to Yahoo for my search queries. I am seriously considering switching my default search engine now.

When you can’t find something at Google, what do you do? Do you try other search engines? Have you had any experience where one search engine totally beat the rest left and right for your queries? Please share in the comments.

Have you ever wondered that your organization has more people to get the work done than people who do real work? Well that makes your effective employee strength(E.E.S) less than 50 percent.

Ideally you would like this number to be close to 100 percent. Realistically its not possible. Without going into obvious reasons for why you are never going to get close to 100 percent, I would throw some empirical E.E.S numbers. For a successful startup, this number is going to be somewhere between 60 and 85 percent. For a mid size company this number can be somewhere between 40 and 65 percent. For a large company it can be as low as 25 percent.

What is the E.E.S at the company you work for? Please share in the comments.

Today I was looking for a specific brand of a spice in the supermarket. The whole process included locating the condiment isle and once the right isle was located, I had to sequentially browse through umpteen brands of umpteen spices before I could locate the one I was looking for. And this is when I knew what I wanted. I wasn’t researching a recipe or something!! I wanted brand “Foo” of condiment “Bar”. Its as simple as that. This never happens when I know what I am looking for at the Yahoos and Googles of the world!!!

The retail supermarkets need to innovate a bit and make it a little easier to find things. By innovation I don’t mean a gigantic search box!! It can be as simple as wrapping up the technologies that power GOOG-411 or FREE-411.

Here is how it works:

You go to a store and if you don’t know where you can find what you are looking for, you go talk to a humanoid machine who knows where it is. No need to find the sales person or stand in the customer care line!! You don’t have to be a computer whiz to use it. Its just like talking to the grocery store clerk.

The problem I have described in this post belongs to ‘limited domain search’, which is a lot easier and tractable by the current state of the art speech recognition capabilities. In other words, what I have described above is definitely doable and NOT science fiction.

Does it really make economic sense for the retail supermarkets to invest in such technologies? What else could make your shopping experience easier? Please share in the comments.

The success of MySpace and Facebook has opened doors for plethora of websites targetting niche audiences ranging from cat and dog lovers to web sites for baby-boomers, cooking lovers, sports lovers, professional women etc. Some of these niche websites like catster and dogster are actually profitable and have come up with unique ways of monetizing their traffic (I would write on creative ways of monetizing some other time!!!)

Now back to the topic for this blog entry. My first introduction to social neworks happened over 7 years when I was in college. There was this website called egroups (now yahoo groups), which came up with a solution to create personalized groups. Within a month I was a member of couple of groups. We had a group for our wing, a group for our department and a group for our cricket team. These groups formed over 7 years ago, when the word ’social networks’ wasn’t even coined, are still active. Can a general platform like egroups provide all the functionality that these niche social networks provide? Definitely!!! And yet there seems to be a rat race among entrepreneurs and even the big players to come up with specialized solutions for extremely specific needs, which are very well served by the egroups of the world. How many of these will thrive 10 years from now? Only time will tell. My prediction for the future of social networks is consolidation. There will be two or three big players who would provide the kind of solution that egroup provided 8 years ago. The rest will either get acquired or simply go to the ‘Techcrunch Deadpool’!!!!

If you think that specialized social networks are bound to stay, please share in the comments.

Today I was googling to figure out how I could create a perl binding for a C library that uses strings. After wasting two hours browsing through google results, I decided to give yahoo a shot. As I was typing in ’swig string’ at yahoo search, I noticed it offered me a list of autocomplete options in a drop down menu. One of these options was ’std string perl typemap’. I selected this option and the second link in the search results was what I was looking for. Within 15 minutes I had sample code and full solution to the problem I was trying to solve.
As an experiment I tried using the ‘google search box’ at the top of my firefox browser since it also has a similar ’suggestions’ feature. To my surprise google’s suggestions were utterly lame and it ran out of suggestions after I typed in the first two words.

This doesn’t happen very often. Even though google continues to be my favorite search engine and my home page, I am really glad to find out that there are reasonably good options besides google as far as search is concerned.

After dilly-dallying for a while, I have finally decided to enter the world of online blogging, offering my words of unsolicited wisdom to anyone willing to read/listen.

I will blog about almost everything under the sun, ranging from the next disruptive technology, the next billion dollar startup, your grouchy co-worker, the bozo boss, rising gas prices, the organic food fad, google versus yahoo rivalry, and once in a while I will spice it up with the taboo and the forbidden!!!

Watch out for more posts here!!!

Until then,

Ciao.