Thursday, September 27, 2007

Usability testing a funny insight - from slideshare



Slideshare is a great site kind of a youtube for powerpoint presentations. It is worth a visit every now and then.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

New Business Ideas: Cell Phone 2.0

Steven Teo writing in smallbiztrends.com has some pretty cool sites listed. From sending pictures of your food from your phone for nutritional analysis to giving you the nearest restroom location.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Emails that Expire

Rohit Bhargava in his blog posting : Idea Bar: Self Destructing Emails has an interesting idea about how to make emails that you need to receive but dont need to keep in your inbox for ever manageable.

The key question is here who should make this happen. Is it the reader of these emails or is it the sender of these emails.

My take: When you setup the account and agree to receive these notifications then you should have the option to set the emails to destruct and have the ability to choose the period you want to keep them. Blog software can have a default option for these notifications to just expire and delete.

Network Solutions Email has the ability to set your outgoing email to expire in minutes, hours or days.

Some interesting thoughts and discussions in these posts :

ThinkAbdul.com and on WebmasterWorld.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Hilary Clinton Needs a SEO

Hitwise reports that www.hillaryclinton.com is number 3 among websites for the key candidates of 2008 Presidential elections based on US Internet usage for the week ending September 15, 2007.Its strange that www.fred08.com is number one and I am not speaking politically. The page rank for www.fred08.com is 4 and www.hillaryclinton.com is 6.

read more | digg story

Washingtonpost.com launches a interactive fact checker

Washingtonpost.com, launched a new interactive feature that will examine controversial claims and statements made by presidential candidates involving important national issues. The weekly feature, called "FactChecker," will post topics, then invite readers to help uncover and verify the facts behind candidates' positions and statements. The Post also said that it plans to make "FactChecker" available as a widget for users to add to personalized web pages. Who is the first "Victim" See http://www.washingtonpost.com/factchecker .

read more | digg story

Sunday, September 16, 2007

TextBook Renting

I read this in the Newsweek and this will be useful when the kids go to college, two websites where you can rent text books and save money.

textbookflix.com

and

BookRenter.com

The websites will give you details fo terms and conditions of the rental.

Monday, September 10, 2007

MTV India On Direct TV again

Its funny that DirecTV starts including MTV India in ints package and never informs its customers. Heck ! tehy could have a got a lot of goodwill from subscribers like me. ANyway I was very happy that MTV channel is now back and its so cool that I can see ads that are targetted for a Indian audience. BRU Cappucino flavor who ever heard of this before.

MTV India makes me nostalgic. From 1992 to 1997 I enjoyed the spread of Stellite TV and the explosion of TV channels in India. It was truly a revolution, there was not even a law governing satellite TV when it started. If you were cosy enough with the cable operator you could ask him to swithc the satellite to a channel of your choice.

Well now I am at the mercy of Comcast and DirecTV. DirecTv is the better evil. They have moderately priced packages. I subscribe to Hindi Direct which includes Star Plus, Star One , Star News, NDTV, THe Cricket channel, DoorDarshan National.

When I signed up for the DirecTV Hindi Direct package it included a chanel called MTV Desi. This was a channel geared to the Expat Indian and Indian American population. Then came the devastating news that the Channel was being discontinued from DirecTV.

I love watching the comedy shows on both comcast and DirectV

Sunday, September 09, 2007

IE7 Ability to open 3 home pages

I am sure a lot of you may have already discovered this. Instead of s[ecifying a single homepage in IE7 you can specify multiple Pages to open in tabs. To do this you should follow these steps.

How to set multiple homepages in IE7:
1) On your browser menu click on "Tools"
2) Click on "Internet Options"
3) In the text box for the hoempage you can enter te URLs and press enter to add multiple URLs.
4)Click "OK" to save your settings.
Everytime you open your browsr all the homepages will open in tabs. If you need to customize the tabs further you can click
Tools>>>Internet Options and under the general tab click on "settings". You can choose to customize how tabs are created or opened.

Some good things with IE7.

New Senate Bill Aimed at Wireless Carriers

Problems with cell phone companies in the US:

a)No freedom to buy any phone and use it with a provider
b) You have to stay too long with a provider because of all the fees.
c) The monthly fees approach does not work as even if you do not use the cellphone often enough you still pay a lot of fees.The pay as you go approach is still not very good or mainstream. Again Tmobile excels- got a prepaid plan for my daughter which is 1000 minutes for 100 dollars and the minutes are valid for a year. If you renew again beofre thier expiry their validity is extended. But most companies seem not to care about customers value for the service provided.

A bill is being introduced to ease the pain for cell phone consumers. We should absolutely write to our senators to support this bill. Cell phone companies are stiffling creativity by selling locked phones. Though TMobile is pretty good with unlocking them

read more | digg story

Thursday, September 06, 2007

The Buzz about Cuill resembles Google

I remember 1998 when there was such a buzz about Google among the early adopters and thos with their ear to the ground on tech news. I switched my home page immediately to Google.

It looks like Cuill is generating the same buzz. According to TechCrunch.

They are already talking funding and some of the commenters have reported that Cuill is already crawling the web.

I am looking forward to the war of the engines. Specially one from Xooglers.

Monday, September 03, 2007

Flickr and many others

I spent a lot of time this weekend tryign to make sense of all the ways you can process, save, share photos. There was a time when photos simply meant taking the film to the grocery store and add them to a album and you were done.

Today as soon as you connect your camera you are faced with choice - Picasa, windows, Sony, Canon, all vying for attention. To this I added a new dimension _ PhotoShow by Comcast. COmcast lets you hav this cool Photo organizer and editor from SImpleStar for free for being a subscriber. I am impressed. I have all my computer pictures playing on my computer to nice music all day long with just 3 or 4 clicks. Comcast I realized has a lot of great tools now if you are a Cable subscriber. Photoshow costs $39.95 if you have to buy it.




I am a fan of Picasa, but there are other programs that I like Picnik, Jetphoto. I have subscribed to photo storage apps like Slide, RockYou and photobucket.

The Idea is integration being able to upload pictures to one place and then publish them to may places. I like the fact that I can add a picture to this blog using Flickr.

I will review the other software as soon as I can.

This is a test post from flickr, a fancy photo sharing thing.

AI generated summary of 60 minutes AI edition

In a 60 Minutes interview that aired on April 17, 2023, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing rapid...