Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Gym
Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:
I joined 24-Hour Fitness because the salespeople don't slide notes across the table and say things like, "How 'bout this? Can you live with this number?" My answer to that question is always the same: "If you can't say the cost out loud, it's too much."
Some people avoid the gym for fear of others staring, but that's unrealistic because it means those others would first have to stop staring at themselves. Seriously, you don't want to come between the regulars and their reflections.
When a man falls in love with his own body, it's called an Adonis Complex after the Greek god of protein shakes. These guys develop their upper bodies until, like the Tyrannosaurus rex, they cannot reach their face.
"Hey, Bob. Can you get this itch on my chin? It's drivin' me nuts."
In the weight room they strain so hard, you can actually see their beards grow. I leave when they start making porn sounds -- all that grunting and groaning while the spotter carries on. "Come on, baby; do it. Show me what you've got."
When I bench-press, a machinist named Booker hovers nearby like an incubus, volunteering pointers. "I hope you know you're cheating your pecs with that exercise."
Booker demonstrates more painful ways to lift the weights, which brings us to Gym Rule #1: If you want to know the correct way to perform an exercise, the answer is, "Whatever hurts most." When you yelp involuntarily, you've got it!
I listened to Booker until that day I found him smoking Marlboros in the parking lot. After all the squats we'd been through! Booker averted his eyes the way Elizabeth Taylor might if you caught her giving marriage advice. So it goes.
You wonder why we don't take all this pushing and pulling energy and do something useful -- build a monorail or something. The treadmill extremists could power the whole city, clip-clopping along until management finally steps in.
"Sorry, Kitty; you've become entirely too thin. We're going to have to cut you off."
When did we become obsessed with xylophone ribs anyway? Our current Miss Universe has a size-22 waist, which makes her, technically speaking, a stick figure. Her boyfriend, also a model, reports four percent body fat. Can you see them rubbing around in bed? Talk about your fire hazards.
And why does Miss Universe always come from Earth? It's like the rest of the planets aren't even trying. Unless you count Tyra Banks.
Then you have the Spandex pants with the writing on the rear end. Ladies, what are you thinking? Don't you know how big men are on reading? One girl wore on her butt the Nike swoosh symbol, which in this case does not mean "just do it."
I prefer to jog al fresco. As comedian Daryl Rummens said, "I was going to join the gym but decided to use the ground for free." Maybe we should just build gyms on top of really steep hills. That way, by the time you reach the door, you're done!
I feel for people who frequent the gym but never see results -- men who can still pinch an inch on their forehead, women who could wear five-piece bathing suits. You wish they'd just say, "Screw it. I am in shape, and my shape is round."
I like to hang out in the steam room with the large, furry creatures who grunt but don't say much. It's like Gorillas in the Mist in there. Some brag about their steam-room stamina, which I believe calls for a sweat-off. Judges can stand outside while contestants stagger out and swoon in their little numbered vests. Last one out wins a pack of Marlboros.
For all the teasing, though, I've come to admire the simplicity of gymfolk. One guy wears a shirt that says, "I'm not smart, but I can lift heavy things." That's like one step away from enlightenment.
So I've decided to leave behind philosophy and current events in favor of my own upper body development. I will match wits with neckless men and use my sleeve as a nose rag. I will lounge naked in the locker room and dry my pubes with the bolted-down hair dryer. And if anyone comes near, I'll have them scratch this godforsaken itch on my chin.
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
How & What Mobile Phone Services does India use – Report
Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:
India is currently the 2nd largest Mobile Market in the world after China, adding nearly 10-12 million subscribers on average monthly.
At the end of April 2009, Indian Mobile subscriber base was pegged at 403.66 million, as per recent TRAI number.
Most of the Metro's and big cities have nearly come to a saturation point, however, the current phase of growth in Indian Mobile Market is in Rural areas that is now accounting for majority of growth in mobile space.
Having said that, I thought it would be interesting for our readers to know how 270 million odd Urban subscribers use their mobile phone
So here you go, some of the numbers may surprise you, while some may disappoint, but it sure makes a good reading.
Which Indian City Uses Social Networking maximum through its mobile phones?
Nearly 10% Delhi Mobile subscribers use Social Networking services on their mobile phones, followed by Mumbai & Chennai. No doubt, I see hoards of Delhites, tweeting from their mobile phones !
Which Social networking site is most favoured by Indian Urban Mobile Subscribers?
Okay, we know Orkut is the king in India be it web or Mobile, but what in the world is "Mycantos", which accounts for nearly 4% of urban India using it?. I am also surprised that twitter does not find any mention here – Isnt it part of a Social Networking Phenomenon?
Which is the most favoured Mobile Search Engine by Indians?
Nearly 18.5 million Indian Urban Mobile subscribers used their mobile phones for searches, with Google taking the numero-uno position with 5.76 million followed by yahoo with 4.58 million.
Which mobile site is used daily by Indian Urban Mobile Subscribers?
Again, no surprised here – the winner is Google followed by Yahoo. Nearly half of Urban India uses Google daily on their mobile phones.
Which IM application does Urban India use on its Mobile phones?
A quarter (25%) of all urban Indians who use IM over their phone do so from an application that came preloaded in the phone.
- Pre-Loaded IM Application – 25.7%
- Web Browser for IM – 19.1%
- Third party downloaded IM app – 16.8%
Which is the most popular IM service used by Urban Indian Mobile Subscribers?
Aha…surprises here – Yahoo! Messenger has narrowly edged Google's Gtalk to become most popular messenger service with urban Indian mobile users, with a 18.3% market share followed closely by Google Talk (17.8%). Nice to see Yahoo beating Google, atleast somewhere :). I am sure though next few months will see Google coming to No.1.
Which Indian Mobile service provider offers the most reasonable prices, Reliable Customer Support and diver range of Products?
The state and Government run companies seem to score well in reasonable offerings column, while MTNL and Vodafone score in the reliable customer support offering. Aircel followed by Airtel top when it comes to offering its subscribers diverse range of mobile products.
Do Indian Mobiles subscribers participate in Mobile Contests?
Offcourse they do, that too in large numbers!
Almost 60% of Females have participated in 1 to3 SMS contests and though this is higher than their male counterparts, in frequency of participation males outshine females.
And what is the source of these SMS Contest? offcourse, it is dominated with TV. all reality TVs, song and dance shows choose their winners via some or the other SMS contest and India just loves it.
have a look
86% of all SMS contest originate from TV, followed by Newspapers and Internet.
Mobile VAS services report
Here are some numbers on how Urban India uses the Mobile Value Added Services offered by Telecom providers.
SMS Based Value Added Services
Nearly 56 Million urban Indians used a VAS related SMS subscription service in March/April 2009 – out of which Reliance Mobile CDMA accounted for a quarter of all subscribers to VAS SMS subscription service, followed by Bharti Airtel (18%) and Vodafone (14%).
Which is the most popular SMS service used by Urban India?
This number actually surprised me – I had thought News and probably Jobs would garner most votes, but NO – it is Jokes that used by 52% of Urban Indian Mobile users followed by Astrology.
Once conclusion I can definitely make from these numbers is that majority of mobile users in India fall into Age group of 16-25 years !
Which are the popular VAS options that Urban India likes?
No surprises here – Unlimited Internet Access & better offers on SMS bundles are the two VAS options that Indian urban mobile phone users look at while deciding on a service.
Which is the most popular M-Commerce Activity for Urban Indian Mobile phone users
Nearly 98 million of all mobile users have used mobile phones to recharge their card or pay their phone bill –The second most popular M-Commerce activity is buying movie tickets (39.67 million)
Which is the most popular VAS service used by Urban Indian Mobile Phone User?
"Finding out who called" and "informing people when busy" are the two other most popular Value added services used by Urban India. Missed call alerts is used by almost 110 million urban Indians while Talk/Voice SMS is used by almost 80 million.
Note: The above graphs / numbers are created by www.vitalanalytics.in. (let us know if you have any questions on these numbers)
Comments
- June 23, 2009, Siddhesh writes: Good analysis, Arun. Some interesting figures there. Any particular reason why MTNL is rated so highly? Also, social networking on mobile puts interesting figures too.
- June 24, 2009, India doesn't like anything Chinese. But China likes Indian spices | China, India writes: [...] That's not it. BSNL has recently imposed a virtual ban on Chinese equipment manufacturer following the advice of DoT. Huawei and LTE are the leading telecom equipment manufacturers of China and the world and DoT do not want them to be operating in sensitive zones. Sensitive regions are the areas having borders with China, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan. A major blow for the telecom companies trying to operate in world's fastest growing telecom market. [...]
- June 24, 2009, Harpreet writes: Amazing facts ! Great Job.....Would love to read more abt these in future as well.........
- June 25, 2009, ghosh writes: Good report! But keeping in mind the total GPRS/data enabled handset users, as per industry reports, total GPRS/data users in the country would 9m across( IMAI report 2008). That essential means if we take the total users in 4 metros- its about 64m and out of which users of Social Network services is about 4.2 m. Which would mean approx 48% of the total GPRS / data handsets enabled users use their handsets to access social networks. Or in other words it means out of every 2 data users approx 1 users user uses their handsets to access social networks. This looks a tad high. Even if we double the data users from 9m in 2008 to 18 m in 2009(not likely) even then it means 29% users using their handsets to access social networks. of data users use their handsets to access social networks. Given the current state of congestion for voice calls on various networks it seems though possible might be unlikely.
- June 25, 2009, Arun Prabhudesai writes: Ghosh, you got the maths perfectly I must say. However, if a user has gprs, I am sure most of them will use for 2 things...email & social networking, so 48% although a bit higher is comprehensible. I will put this question across to the surveyor and let me see what he has to say.. Update: Here is the reply from the surveyor
To answer your comments around social networking, Social networking sites can be accessed via sms as well, you dont necessarily need gprs enabled handsets to access the same, the numbers we have take that into account
- June 26, 2009, Venkat writes: Can you help me make sense of the "SNs favored by Urban mobile subscribers" number? The number on the graph is not clear - is it 11.4% or 21.4% (31.4%?) for Orkut? Question 1: Hard to believe that Orkut is almost (at least) double Facebook's usage ON MOBILE in URBAN areas? That's an interesting insight if it is true. If the biggest player here is 11 or 21%, does this mean that there is a very long tail of SNs being accessed from mobile? (The graph obviously doesn't cover these 100 or so players with less than 2% share of the mobile SN usage pie.) Venkat
- June 26, 2009, Arun Prabhudesai writes: Venkat, Thanks for dropping by..here is your answer
The number is 11.4% for Orkut, facebook though increasing is still behind;( http://tr.im/pQRD ) article on business week, that further solidifies this. Anything under 2% we do not track, due to the low usage we will not be able project the numbers reliably.
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13 year old kid reviews a 30 year old Sony Walkman
Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:
BBC Magazine gave 13-year-old Scott Campbell a gen-one Walkman in place of his MP3 player for a week, then gathered his impressions on the device:
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.Giving up my iPod for a Walkman (Thanks, John!)Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.
I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day
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Friday, June 19, 2009
CUSAT: 1.69 per cent pass engineering supplementary examination
Date:18/06/2009 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/06/18/stories/2009061852330300.htm Back
Kerala - Kochi KOCHI: Engineering colleges affiliated to the Cochin University of Science and Technology have put up its worst performance ever in the B. Tech supplementary examination 2009, with only 23 out of the 1,358 students passing the test. The pass percentage, according to official records, is a mere 1.69. Nine out of the 21 affiliated colleges set another record, with all the students from these institutions failing to clear the examination. The colleges include College of Engineering, Adoor; College of Engineering, Poonjar; College of Engineering, Kidangoor; College of Engineering, Karunagapally; College of Engineering, Trikaripur; TKM Institute of Technology, Kollam; Sarabhai Institute of Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram; College of Engineering, Cherthala; and M.G. College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram. Seven colleges had the record of having one student each passing the examination. The colleges include Model Engineering College, Thrikkakara; College of Engineering, Kallooppara; College of Engineering, Thalassery, Co-operative Institute of Technology, Vadakara; Toc H Institute of Science and Technology, Aarakunnam; College of Engineering, Attingal; and College of Engineering, Kottarakara. College of Engineering, Munnar, had the distinction of having two students clearing the examination. College of Engineering, Chengannur, was in the third position with three students passing. The colleges that figured top in the list include School of Engineering, Thrikkakara, and Cochin University College of Engineering, Pulinkunnu. Four students each from these colleges cleared the examination. Out of the total 1,358 students, only three students won distinction while 19 got first class marks. © Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu |
Ranjith Ravindran
http://cleartext.blogspot.com
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Mr. Mohammad Said Al Zaabi explained: "I couldn't wait until the next morning to pick my N97 up!" He had pre-ordered the device last week, when the booking campaign was kicked off in the UAE.
He became increasingly intrigued by the N97 when he started hearing about it through the news and the ads that were highlighting the booking opportunity. "I went online to find out more about it, and got really excited about the Internet experience promise, and also the memory capacity. Being able to access applications through Ovi also played a big role for me. I have always been a Nokia user, as Nokia has consistently delivered on its promise. I'm in the process of fully exploring my Nokia N97 … and saying goodbye to my E90."
According to Nokia Partner Retail Sales Manager Siddharth Jham, the Lower Gulf team put together a very impactful pre-order campaign. Siddarth adds: "We ensured that the first availability of the device was through the Nokia Stores, to provide consumers with an environment in which to experience the Nokia solutions to the fullest."
http://cleartext.blogspot.com
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Fwd: Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?
Ranjith Ravindran
http://cleartext.blogspot.com
Yesterday's Google I/O keynote highlighted the power of HTML 5 to match functionality long experienced in desktop applications. This morning, Google plans to announce an HTML 5-based application - still very much in the early stages of development - that represents a profound advance in the state of the art.
Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the original creators of Google Maps, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Google Wave. As Lars describes it, "We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?"
That is exactly the right question, and one that every developer should be asking him or herself. The world of computing has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our applications bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the tools we take for granted. It's perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Google's Sydney office over the past two years, had the code name Walkabout. That's the Australian aboriginal tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the songlines and learn the world anew.
In answering the question, Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.
It turns out that Jens had the idea back in 2004, when Google first acquired the company that became Google Maps. As Lars tells the story:
We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.
As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point....
We started with a set of tough questions:
Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
- Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
- What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?
Responding in Context
Let's say I want to communicate with someone. I start a wave, just as I might start an email message. The recipient(s) see an incoming wave, just as they see an email today. Where the magic starts is with replies. In email, you have the choice of including no context, only a portion of the message you're replying to, or the whole thing. In the first case, you need to go back to the original message for context; in the second, you have wasted copies going back and forth. Come into the middle of a long thread and you may be replying to a discussion that has already moved on or covered the point you want to express. But what if there were only one message, shared in the cloud? Now, your comment on the second paragraph is attached directly to that point in the conversation. There are no redundant copies of portions of the message, as replies are seen in context.
As you can see in the screenshot below (click to enlarge), a Wave inbox looks much like an email inbox. But look to the right, and you can see how the replies are embedded right into the middle of the original message, so Stephanie's question about what camera Jens used for his photos appears right in context.
Now, you might ask how well this works for long, complex messages rather than the short one shown in the demo. I don't know the answer, but I suspect that Wave will be even stronger in that case. Our experience with collaborative editing of book manuscripts at O'Reilly suggests that the amount and quality of participation goes up radically when comments can be interleaved at a paragraph level.
Is it a particle or a wave? It's both.
First generation email/IM integration let you see when someone was online, and opt to instant message someone rather than send them an email. Wave simply erases the distinction.
If both people are online at the same time, a wave acts just like an instant message -- except that you see each character as it is typed, just like in subethaedit. "In our experience, a lot of time in IM is spent waiting for the other person to press 'Done'," says Lars. (However, it is possible to set Wave to hold your messages till you are done.)
A key point here is that Google's relentless focus on reducing the latency of online actions is bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world experience of face-to-face communication. When you're talking with someone, you know what someone is saying before they finish their sentence. You can respond, or even finish their sentence for them. So too with Wave.
The real-time connectedness of Wave is truly impressive. Drop photos onto a wave and see the thumbnails appear on the other person's machine before the photos are even finished uploading.
Step by step playback draws a cheer
Let's say you are added to a conversation (a wave) that has been going on for a long time? You can be added at any relevant point, not just the end. But even cooler, you can do a playback of the entire evolution of the conversation.
But wait: there's more! Let's say you want to edit your message (or even a message that was written by another participant in the wave). Yes, you can. The original author is notified, but every participant can see that the message has been modified, and if they want, can replay the changes.
This leads to a change in behavior: conversations become shared documents.
The screenshot below shows a simple example, as Gregory and Casey collaborate to produce a good answer to Dan's question. As Stephanie Hannon, the product manager for Googe Wave, said to me, "In Wave, you don't have to make the choice between discussing and collaborating."
As anyone who's used version control knows, a document with lots of discussion and edits can become pretty messy. No problem. You can export an edited wave as a new wave, and start over. "One of our design principles," says Lars, "is that the product of a wave can be as important as the original wave."
Nor do you need to include everyone in every part of a conversation. Essentially, Lars, says, "waves are tree-shaped sets of messages. You can shape a subtree, or a sub-conversation and limit the set of participants in any way you like."
Wave as a Platform
Wave is more than a product. As Lars explains:
The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.
Anyone who's followed my writing knows that I'm a huge fan of simple systems with extensible architectures. So I was excited to see that the team didn't lard lots of features into the core product, but instead added new features via the Wave APIs, much as they hope third party developers will do.
One useful extension, Polly (Poll-y) lets you incorporate polls into a wave. In the wave shown below, participants are asked whether they can make it to a party. Responses appear immediately in the wave. That's the way these things ought to work! No jumping to a website to see the results of an Evite or a poll.
(I should note that the ever-prescient Jon Udell showed how to hack existing tools to similar effect in his 2001 book Practical Internet Groupware. It was one of the books I'm proudest of publishing, despite its commercial failure. It was just too far ahead of its time.)
The API has been used to build a bunch of cool extensions: Bloggy, a blog client, lets you make a blog post as a wave. When people comment, they join the conversation. Spelly is a spell-checker that uses the entire corpus of the web as its dictionary. Linky is a link-recognition engine that is clever enough to recognize that the link you just entered is a YouTube video, or a link to a photo, and give you the option to embed the target of the link into the wave. There's even a twitter client - you can tweet into and out of a wave! And of course, buggy, a bug-reporting tool that can also be a participant in a wave.
Wave can also be used as the base for interactive games. For example, here's a real-time interactive chess game in Wave:
Open Source, Open Protocol, and Federated Wave Clouds
Google wants other providers to adopt Wave - the protocol allows federation between independent Wave clouds. The team hopes that Wave will become as ubiquitous and interoperable as email and instant messaging, not just a Google product.
I support this vision. The Wave team has done a great job, but for Wave to really succeed, it needs to become a new fundamental service on the net. An open protocol means that anyone can build their own Wave services - everything from Wave servers to Wave extensions. But open source means that people can push the envelope in adapting the service to new environments, devices, and use cases.
I'm hopeful that the industry will take up the challenge, and build on what is being shown at Google I/O this morning. Eric Raymond noted that every open source project begins with a plausible promise. There's no question that the plausible promise is on stage this morning. I hope the folks in the audience at Google I/O, as well as those at Yahoo!, Microsoft, and elsewhere, get on the bandwagon as well. I'm eager to move from email and IM to Wave!
Aside: The fact that this application was built using GWT and HTML 5 really emphasizes Vic Gundotra's points from yesterday, that web applications can not only match, but can even beat the functionality of native apps. It's not just HTML 5, though. It's the commitment to the lightweight nature of the web, to real-time, to lightweight components connected by open protocols rather than to monolithic systems.
Make it New!
Ezra Pound once wrote: ""The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth." And elsewhere: "Make it new!"
Even more than the application itself, I love the way Wave doesn't just build on what went before but starts over. In demonstrating the power of the shared, real-time information space, Jens and Lars show a keen understanding of how the cloud changes applications.
When I saw Wave for the first time on Monday, I realized that we're at a kind of DOS/Windows divide in the era of cloud applications. Suddenly, familiar applications look as old-fashioned as DOS applications looked as the GUI era took flight. Now that the web is the platform, it's time to take another look at every application we use today, and ask the same question Lars and Jens asked themselves: "What would this look like if we invented it today instead of twenty-five years ago?"
For more information
The following links may not be live until the end of this morning's keynote at about 10:15 am Pacific time:
wave.google.com: the eventual home for Google Wave. For now a place to learn more and sign up to be notified when we launch
code.google.com/apis/wave: home for the API, documentation and sample code.
waveprotocol.org: home for the protocol specs (draft), whitepapers and a discussion forum about the open google wave protocol
Update
The Google I/O demo of Wave is now available on YouTube. It's embedded below: