The Corporate Weblog Manifesto

Microsoft strategist Robert Scoble's 'The Corporate Weblog Manifesto'

Will the 'small box' end [err bridge] the digital divide?

Boing Boing talks about Ndiyo, a project on thin clients. There is also a recent article in BBC about the non profit organization from Cambridge that is undertaking the project.

Making thin clients more user frinedly seems to be the new new thing! Rajesh Jain has blogged about the concept for a while. His new company Novatium [ a JV with IIT Madras] will soon release the product in India.

Snails are faster than ADSL

A techie's idea of humor -

Science Writer Ami Ben Bassat compares SNAP (SNAil-based data transfer Protocol(, Wi Fly TCP (Transmission by Pigeons) and ADSL. The results are summerized in the table below -

Technology	Kbps
V.34 modem	28.8
ISDN	128
ADSL	1500
Pigeons	2270
SNAP	37,000

the comments are a step ahead .. :)

Alcohol makes your brain grow

Thankfully the article says, extra cells might help with learning and memory and that more research is needed to explore the relationship between drinking patterns and their effect on the human brain.

PS - this is for my friends who find excuses to drink ;) Cheers

Bloglines

Finally I signed up for Bloglines [news feeds] and it absolutely ROCKS!
Preetam Rai has a useful step by step tutorial on how to use the service.

The Selfish Gene

An interview of Richard Dawkins, author of the Selfish Gene [ published 1976]

On humanity - our humanity is a form of virus in the genetic body?

On Religion - Religion, however, as a kind of organised misconception. It's millions of people being systematically educated in error

Am going to pick up the book today .. sounds interesting

Madness

Fast Company on embracing the lunatic inside you -

"You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it." -- Robin Williams (1952- ) U.S. Actor and Comedian

Post It Trivia

The glue that didn’t stick very well was called a failure until Art Fry, an innovative engineer at 3M came up with the Post-It's .. which went on to become a billion dollar product!

New York’s Museum of Modern Art featured it alongside the white T-shirt, the incandescent lightbulb, and 121 other icons of beautiful everyday design in its “Humble Masterpieces” exhibit.

Read more on The Rake

MIT Fab Lab

Far from India’s tech hubs —Pune at 80 km, is the closest—Pabal is home to one of six worldwide MIT Fab Labs, or fabrication laboratories that try to build ‘‘everything from anything’’.

Manned today by school dropouts and underprivileged children, the Fab Lab is a collection of high-tech tools that can be used to fabricate instruments of any utility and configuration.

Taking care of the present

A line from Rajesh Jain's series on TECH TALK: When Things Go Wrong: My Failures
"even as we continue to want to grow and have big dreams, we are not taking care of the present"
makes the point, that we need to take care of the present while we dream about tomorrow, in all areas of our life - business or personal.

Great New Product Ideas – DON’T Ask the Users What They Want!

Tom Evslim writes on how users only provide incremental evolution to a product not the idea that starts it -

"no survey or focus group will ever tell you what the next great thing is going to be. That kind of idea, that kind of product, comes from visionaries who understand a new technology well enough to dream up an unintended use and who are stubborn and skillful enough to implement what nobody even knew to want.

These are the products and services that change our lives."

Link

Effects of outsourcing

[Via Enginerd] Talking of the role Outsourcing can play in cultivating entrepreneurship, the MIT Technology Review has a very interesting article:

Big outsourcing providers like Infosys may not be fountains of innovation, but their presence will have—in fact, is already having—trickle-down effects. Outsourcing, many Indians argue, is training India’s next generation of tech entrepreneurs.

Long Tail vs. Bottom of Pyramid

Chris Anderson [via Rajesh Jain] does a comparison:

The BOP model is focused on taking a single product or service and finding ways to make it cheap enough to offer to a larger, poorer, market. This is why I think it's essentially about commodification.

The Long Tail, on the other hand, is about nicheification. Rather than finding ways to create an even lower lowest common denominator, the Long Tail is about finding economically efficient ways to capitalize on the infinite diversity of taste and demand that has heretofore been overshadowed by mass markets. The millions who find themselves in the tail in some aspect of their life (and that includes all of us) are no poorer than those in the head. Indeed, they are often drawn down the tail by their refined taste, in pursuit of qualities that are not afforded by one-size-fits-all. And they are often willing to pay a premium for those goods and services that suit them better. The Long Tail is, indeed, the very opposite of commodification.

So the Long Tail is made up of millions of niches. The Bottom of the Pyramid is made up of mass markets made even more mass. Both lower costs to reach more people, but they do so in different ways for different reasons. They're complimentary forces, but fundamentally different in their approach and aims.

m-learning

m-learning's target audience includes young adults who are unemployed, under-employed or homeless. Many of these young people have something in common: a mobile phone!

Initiated by the European Commission's Information Society Technologies (IST) programme the project aims to develop prototype products and services which will deliver information and learning experiences via technologies that are inexpensive, portable and accessible to the majority of EU citizens.

The project is exploring how technologies like mobile phones in the hands of these young people, now and in the near future, might be used to engage them in learning activities, start to change their attitudes to learning and thereby contribute to improving their skills, opportunities and lives.

Brainstorming strategy: Don’t settle for the first idea

Jeffrey Baumgartner is the founder of Bwiti bvba, a Belgian-based company that helps organizations to become more innovative and more creative.

That the best solution is seldom the first to come to mind is one reason behind the effectiveness of brainstorming as a problem-solving technique. Rather than simply taking the first solution that comes to mind, we push our minds further to come up with additional ideas. Typically, the first few ideas will be rather obvious and not very creative solutions. But once we've cleared our minds of the obvious, we must push our minds further to come up with new ideas. This is when creativity kicks in and powers our thinking.

Winners Do the Things Losers Don't Want To

Via Will Pate

No matter what area you work in "winners do the things losers don't want to" and most often those are the little details.

Same Language Subtitling (SLS)

Brij Kothari's innovative approach of Same Language Subtitling [SLS] enables people to improve their reading skills as a by-product of what people already do, watch TV and films!

His NGO BookBox is creating TV and digital "books" for every child and in every language, making SLS, "India's contribution to world literacy".

He can be contacted on brij@iimahd.ernet.in

President Kalam's speech at the Microsoft Summit 2005

Three aspects that would be of interest to India -

1. Any system to reach large portion of Indian people, needs language neutral software. It is vital particularly for the school education system because we have 18 official languages, which are spoken in different parts of the country.

2. For enabling the visually challenged people, a cost effective technology solution is needed at the operating system level (Voice integrated).

3. We need virus free operating system; which is also free from the vulnerability of external and internal attack and ensures the security of data, when using internet.

A Flat World

[via New York Times] Thomas L Friedman, author of ''The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,'' -

When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.

He talks about the six flattners -
i. Outsourcing
ii. Offshoring
iii. Open-sourcing
iv. Insourcing
v. Supply-chaining
vi. Informing

There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living.

Made-in-India Nokia

From Made-for-India to Made-in-India - Nokia is setting up a manufacturing unit for mobile devices in Chennai.

Click here to read more

Indian Telecom reforms

Kunal Bajaj, a young NRI who is now a full time consultant with Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) talks about some key areas where India needs to push telecom reforms -

A lot of people say that India has been slow in adopting new technologies, but for once this delay has worked to India’s advantage with India adopting the latest technology. India has got the fastest growth rate of GSM and CDMA technology in the world and is way ahead of China.

One of the big initiatives for India would be to replicate the growth we experienced in mobile telephones in broadband and Internet space as well. Broadband is more than talking. It involves, education and governance as well. So we need to push that.

Click here to read the complete interview

Google + Yahoo = GooHoo

Search Engine Watch has a story on rumors of a Google-Yahoo merger.

Why would these two competitors -- and companies with largely different operating styles -- combine? Fear of Microsoft. While I've written many times before that Microsoft isn't going to walk all over Google -- much less both Google and Yahoo -- the two companies themselves are falling victim to the hype. Search is seen as so important, such a major future money maker, that they want to unite now.

Fool Around

Google's April Fools Search for everything related to April Fool's Day. :)

Google Glup - The obvious joke

Google Gulp (BETA)™ with Auto-Drink™ (LIMITED RELEASE), a line of "smart drinks" designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent, and less thirsty.

But then again - you never know whats coming next from Google!

The Long Tail

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine blogs about The Long Tail. He first wrote about it in Wired in October 2004.