The Future of the Internet

I was surfing aimlessly and came across this video from the Most Powerful Women's summit.

Huffington concludes with the observation that the business opportunity on the net lies not in the content but the advertisement piggybacking on it, unless the content is wierd porn.

I find myself in agreement, not because of the rider, and I myself have hardly ever paid for any content on the Internet as a consumer. On a related note, Padmasree Warrior adds that folks pay for content when it served personalized to them. Point in case, Motorola selling ring tones (a couple of lines from a song) for two dollars (!) which has turned out to be a five billion dollar business. And the same folks wouldn't pay 99 cents for the whole song from itunes etc.

No wonder Googles revenues scorns at the maxim: What goes up must come down. What with all that advertising money rolling in!

MOTD

Heard on the local radio:

A man is incomplete till he is married ...
... and then he is finished.

Hear Hear!

Radio Tivo

So on the long drive to and fro Vegas I was wondering how cool would it be to have a tivo like solution for radio. So you can just start it for a station you like on a particular day or during a specific time slot whose host you like. Also you would be able to record talk radio programming which you would really like to listen to but cant due to some time conflicts. And on long drives you can just listen to certain songs again and again.

But I guess there will be some compicated legal issues with this.

Assuming there are, another idea would be to be able to "mark" and remember the song on some device integrated into the radio, allowing the listener to later purchase the songs on the list. The usecase being, that I often listen to terrific songs on the radio for the first time and would like to relisten, but trying to remember the song lyrics, finding out the song name from that and digging that around on the internet and then buying it ... ya right!

I think even the AM/FM radio stations (not just XM and Sirius) broadcast the song information (metadata) along with the songs, as is displayed on the dashboard on some of the luxury cars. Either this information can be used to remember the song or if not, wasnt there a google code project that would analyse audio and algorithmically determine its signature or some such?

Viva Las Vegas!

Adding to the list of long drives under my belt: drive bay area to Vegas Saturday, party with V and friends all night Saturday till 8 AM in the morning (!) and then drive back same day (Sunday) to the bay area. The ocassion being V's last crazy night out before he tied the knot. Total drive distance approximately 1100 miles mostly driving solo. Great fun, hallucinations of cop cars everywhere notwithstanding, since most of the driving was done ummm.. a "little" above the speed limit! Yes I am a sucker for cross country drives.

Actually the drive across from I5 to Vegas via highway 58 and I15 was pretty scenic. Vast expanses of mountains and deserts with a good amount of sunshine thrown in ... very beautiful.

After a night out on the town, I am so out of my shell and unintentionally I extrapolate that spirit onto other unsuspecting individuals, for example folks I run into in the elevator at work the next morning. I try to pass some funny remarks, tease or flirt if its a female and all this evicts are polite "hmmmms" and "ahhhhs" or just plain cold stares, which very effectively, albeit a bit disappointingly, put me right back into the work mind frame.

Random Pearls #1

Ruthlessness is a virtue. An emotional underbelly more often than not clouds clear judgement and blows issues out of proportion.

Cannibalization at Apple Inc.

The Apple world is atwitter. The iphone looks pretty cool actually. The way I see it, its the end of the standalone ipod era.

Currently the disk sizes are limited to 4GB and 8GB. Harder sizes would probably cannibalize the video ipods now where Apple is still making a lot of money. But it shouldnt be long before the disk sizes go bigger on the iphones ... along with the inevtiable - a regular price drop. Think back to the original digital cameras in 2000, the 1MP resolution cameras used to cost upwards of 500$! So in 2-3 years we should be seeing around 30GB or more iphones for 250$! Poor ipods!

By the by, note that flash drives are outpacing Moore's law by doubling every year! And becoming stronger as well, you can drive VW Beetles over them without data loss!

Apple, of course, knows about the impeding death of the big brother - the IPOD. It is time that they carved out a new niche market as well with the likes of Microsoft, Sandisk, iRiver etc crowding it in the personal digital music space. Of course IPODs have been marketed extremely well and they are way ahead in market share but one can never be too complacent in the hi-tec industry. To think that xerox was synonymous with photocopying when it invented it!

Talking of Sandisk, also check out this smear campaign on ipods.

In this era, picking up the market trends quickly is surely the way to mediocrity, the leaders virtually create the market where none exists. Apple surely has its act together thesedays.

The Apple TV device is out too, more on that later.

Project Management thoughts

Currently came across this proj mgmt tool called Scrum. It is nice but has its drawbacks. 

So let me pen (finger?) down some thoughts on what a simple project management tool can have:

•  LAMP based web app. 
• RBAC, who can add projects, who can add other users, modify schedules for what users etc.
• The point above entails user sessions.
• A primitive workflow - eg. user adds his tasks and timelines and an email is sent to the manager for approval before updating the db.
• Scratchpad for miscellanious ideas, thoughts, TBDs.
• Wiki integration.
• Atom feed server allowing folks to subscribe to important events/changes
• An integrated business calendaring system
• A known/unknown risks section

Other Funky stuff:

• A main page displaying newfeeds for related articles/projects in the industry from various news sources
  
• Reporting tools eg status graphs, can be per project as well as system wide, eg percent overshoot time for past projects
• Risk analysis tools (?)
• Integration with source code control and versioning systems (eg CVS) for software projects
• Keyword search/Advanced search
• Export to other tools such as Excel etc.
• Dependency tracking, which module depends on which etc.

Will add some more as I think further on this.

Custom Newsfeeds

So I was looking to write an app that will filter the newsfeeds from a particular server based on
some text search and not inflict me information diarrohea. Additional filter critera can be added on a per server basis.

A simple use case: craigslist has a newfeed for craigslist s.f. bayarea | cars & trucks. Since we would like to brand ourselves as a speed-addict, we would only like to search for new carreras being posted. If I subscribe to this feed, then my feed reader app will download all the feeds being fed by this server which will include the likes of corollas, contours and what not. Now since these cas will not be good for our thrill seeking self-esteem, we would need to do better. So the requirement for our newfeed reader is to filter out those items not containing "carrera". 

Turns out this is already doable in craigslist. If you search for carrera in cars and trucks, the resulting RSS link at the bottom right already  achieves similar. But all sites are not as savvy as our craigslist brothers.

The next thing we want to do is use additional filter criteria, for example find carreras posted after 1-1-07, under 50K posted by private parties. This can be done using the form on the craigslist website, which means the information is available structurally, and not just as free text. Our newsfeed reader app should be able to make avail of this information.

Will write something over the weekend and see what I get.

Converting to New Blogger.

Damn this new blogger, I converted to it and typed a long post on That 70's show it got lost. 

Well anyways the summary was that its the best sitcom ever and Eric's mom is probably the coolest.

ahan han han han han.

Happy 2007

2007 is HERE! Smack in the face! For some reason, this is different than new years earlier. Earlier the crossover used to be blurry. The last year would melt into the new one surreptitiously. At the yearend, I would find myself thinking for a split whether it was the current or the next year. But 2007 seems to be having its own personality, it hid under the covers completely and wham! came out with full force when it did.

2006 for me was a pretty dismal year, every which way you look at it. I havent been living it up. Never been more confused. As much as I try to run away from it, the urge to do something meaningful and impacting tightened its grip further on me like a voodoo spell. Yet I have no clue how to go about doing it. Part of the problem is that there are so many open avenues at this juncture, I have a hard time which one to go down. Yes, I want to go down one of the less traveled ones, but which one dear Frost?

For 2007, the plan, besides visting the dentist, is to narrow down the canvas which hopefully will give a sharper focus. Traditionally my problem with this is that I am somewhat of a happy-go-lucky person. A part of me rebels against attempting to plan out the whole of my life. Or to make a long term goal for which I strive for tirelessly. I would like to take each step in its own stride and then forget about it. I guess I am one of those attention-deficit, life-is-journey-syndrome nincompoops.

The flip side to being a rolling stone is that .. you gather no moss! And sometimes I wonder if I will catch myself thinking of ... ummm ... moss later.

Venturing into Apple Land

I saw some deals on refurbished apple products and I am now very tempted to get one of Mac mini, iMac or macbook. I like the Mac mini because its so portable, I can take it to my living room and hook it up to the TV and work with a wireless keyboard, record TV programming and burn it off on DVD etc. Cool, huh. The iMac is cool because it has more bang for the buck, faster HDD (7200 RPM), integrated monitor, larger disk etc. Also the whole thing just requires only ONE cable, the power cable from the monitor to the socket, wow! Of course assuming you connect with a wireless keyboard and mouse. The macbook is a laptop, but as with laptops, you get portability at the cost of slower resources and higher price. I already have a laptop from work that allows me to sit infront of the TV and work (and surf, email etc).

All of these of course are very quiet, which is a big issue with me. I want them to be running 24/7 in my bedroom and be as silent as possible. Normal out-of-the-box PCs dont give you that.