Media’s Role in Mumbai’s Terrorist Attacks
Posted: November 27, 2008 Filed under: General ramblings | Tags: Blogging, cnn, flickr, Google, India, mumbai, Politics, Technology, terrorism, twitter, Wordpress 16 Comments »I’m getting a little sick in the stomach, seeing Mumbai terror attacks coverage on CNN. Most of the times, their news is “stale”, in comparison to the news posted on Twitter.(Just search for #Mumbai). Citizen journalism is turning out to be more comprehensive, well-timed and exhaustive compared to traditional media. Lots of articles on the net that are talking about the power of twitter and bloggers. Lots of bloggers like Arun Shanbag, Vinu etc. have come into limelight because of their responsible journalism- they care for you and me. News channels cover these events only for their own good, to increase their TRP ratings etc.
I have only been a moderate user of Twitter- a couple of tweets here and there. Nothing more. This incident, however, has changed the way I feel about Twitter. It has the potential of becoming a stronger force to reckon with. A force fueled by ordinary people like you and me.
I came across a nicely put Google spreadsheet that has the list of people who are either injured/dead. My eyes welled up with tears. Two of my friend’s friends at Leopold Cafe and another friend of my friend’s younger brother, who was interning as a chef at Taj Mahal Hotel, were shot dead. I was speechless.
Of course, there are haters who talk about the side effects of Twitter and how lots of Tweets were only rumors. I have only one response to these haters- don’t news channels run their business based on rumors too? What’s new?
People have issued statements saying that “people need to tweet responsibly and stop airing all important news on Twitter; this can be used as a weapon etc”. I understand how this can be dangerous, but complainers need to find a way to deal with it! Restricting the use of social networking sites is tantamount to taking away our freedom of speech.
How many citizens sitting in the comforts of their homes and tweeting away to glory have actually done something (donated blood, tried to find information for people who are yet to hear from their loved ones etc.) is questionable. And I’m sure there are others who think this is a great party and a trendy topic to talk about. Leaving such people aside, I do hope that some good comes out of it.
Related Reading: In Mumbai, Bloggers and Twitter Offer Help to Relatives
Slave of Brands
Posted: June 17, 2008 Filed under: General ramblings | Tags: Blogging, brands, general thoughts, Google, Marketing, Meme, Microsoft, ramblings, tagging, yahoo 24 Comments »Shefaly had tagged me for this meme a LONG time back! Because of my self imposed hiatus, this response took longer than the expected wait time. Better late than never…
These are the brands that I use on a regular basis. I couldn’t categorize them on an hourly basis, because I keep using some products throughout the day:
1. Colgate – Toothpaste
2. L’Oreal – Shampoo
3. Johnson & Johnson – Body lotion
4. Maybelline – Eyeliner
5. MAC – Mascara
6. Ecotints – Organic lip tint
7. Davidoff – Perfume
8. Nike – Deodorant
9. Compaq – Laptop
10. Google – Needs no explanation
11. Toad – Running SQL Queries
12. Oracle – Database management tool
13. Microsoft – The necessary evil
14. Yahoo – Email, yeah…
15. Tupperware – Storage
16. Rubbermaid – Storage, again
17. T-Mobile – Cell phone service
18. Firefox – I’m powered by Firefox
19. WordPress – I’m using it now
20. Yoplait – Fat free, strawberry flavored Yoghurt
21. Epson – My 3 -in-1 Printer/Scanner/Photocopier
22. Bath & Body Works – Liquid Hand Soap
23. White- Westinghouse – Microwave
24. Sag Harbour – Leather Purse
25. Sony Ericsson – Cell phone
26. Kenneth Cole – Wrist watch
27. Ziploc – Storage!
28. Pringles – Some potato chips
29. Pentel – Cheap ballpoint pen
30. Office Depot – Other office supplies
31. Dell – Workplace computer
32. Nissan – My wheels
I could probably increase this list and include many other things. But these are the brands that cropped up in my mind first. I guess my interest is quite varied. I really don’t know whom to tag. Looks like everyone has already done this. If you haven’t, then feel free to steal it from here.
Bye Bye WordPress!
Posted: April 1, 2008 Filed under: General ramblings | Tags: Blogging, Google, Life, Thoughts, Wordpress 25 Comments »Had enough of this bourgeois service, where I need to pay for a custom domain, CSS upgrade (and that gives me the liberty to only “style” the look), and can’t use Java scripts. WordPress hasn’t come out with a decent theme/addition in months!
So, I’m going to stop blogging here. I’m in the process of moving everything to Blogger (Yes, everything’s FREE!).
Bye Bye WordPress.com!
Unaccustomed Earth
Posted: March 31, 2008 Filed under: General ramblings | Tags: Arundhati Roy, Books, Google, Jhumpa Lahiri, Life, literature, The God of Small Things, Thoughts, Unaccustomed Earth 14 Comments »
My mom told me that Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri will be released tomorrow, April 1, 2008. I can’t wait to read it! I didn’t really like The Namesake much. It almost read like a Bollywood movie script (no wonder the movie did so well and found so many takers). The movie was good though. The Interpreter of Maladies was an amazing book and the fact that this unreleased book is also a collection of short stories, makes me excited. The theme is pretty much the same- Bengali family, living abroad and dealing with the typical first generation immigrant family emotions. The treatment is supposedly new. I’ve read a number of glowing reviews on the internet. In fact, the book’s been sold out on Amazon. I’ll probably go to Borders or Barnes and Noble and get a copy tomorrow.
Now…only if Arundhati Roy would write another book. 
I haven’t yet gotten over The God of Small Things, even though I read it more than a decade back, during the time it was released.
By the way, what is it with Google Books? The entire book seems to be accessible? Do no Evil?
Microsoft Fined $1.4 Billion in the Anti Trust EU Case
Posted: February 27, 2008 Filed under: General ramblings | Tags: Antitrust, Apple, European Union, General ramblings, Google, Life, Microsoft, monopoly, Technology, Thoughts 21 Comments »Finally, EU hits Microsoft with a hefty 899 million euros fine, because the latter, has been defying the court’s ruling since 2004. This case has generated a lot of media attention in the past few months and why not? Whenever there is anything to do with Microsoft, people in the media (including me) get excited.
So, why was Microsoft fined? Because-
The commission hit Microsoft with the new penalty, the sum of daily fines running from June 21, 2006 to October 21, 2007, because it said Microsoft had failed to charge rivals reasonable prices for access to key information about its work-group or back-office servers in contravention of the 2004 ruling.
Oh, and this too:
In particular, it accused Microsoft of using its stranglehold on PC operating systems to elbow rivals out of the more competitive markets for media players that play music and videos, and operating systems running back-office servers.
The European Union has also launched new cases against Microsoft targeting a broad range of software, including MIcrosoft’s Office suite.
And where did I read this piece of wonderful breakfast news? At Google News of course.
Microsoft’s second quarter Net Income was around $6.48 billion and for a company this large, $1.40 Billion will prove to be a lot of money, if you consider the intangibles and the future revenues that might (and will) fly out of the window.
Related Reading: Microsoft’s Core Competency
Blogged with Flock
Tags: microsoft, technology, European Union, Monopoly, Antitrust, Law, Google, Thoughts
The War Between MSFT and GOOG’s Not Yet Over
Posted: February 4, 2008 Filed under: Business, Finance, GMail, Google, internet, laptops, Microsoft, Software, Stocks, Technology, yahoo, YouTube, Zune | Tags: Acquisition, Business, computers, Consumer Rights, Finance, Google, internet, Law, Life, Merger, Microsoft, Technology, Thoughts, yahoo 24 Comments »The other day, I made some points on this entire move made by Microsoft. Most of this was focused on the effect it will have on Yahoo and how the combined entity will be able to pull off such a humongous merger. There is a very interesting post in the Official Google blog that totally highlights their insecurity:
So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
It’s tantamount to one thief calling the other person a thief! What about Google’s interest in the 700 MHz spectrum? What about their “habit” of copying each product that their competitors release? None of their products like Google Documents, Google Talk, Google Mail etc. are totally “original”. They shouldn’t even be talking about Microsoft’s “legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses”. Their financial statements were being audited sometime back because the regulatory authorities felt that they were incomplete. Correct me if I’m wrong.
It’s not that I’m against Google. In fact, most of my regular readers call me an “Anti Microsoft” person. So this post is quite out of the line for me. You won’t read such good words for Microsoft very often on this blog.
I think Google feels quite threatened and they have good reason to be. Microsoft has a huge share in the PC Market and if they were to merge with Yahoo, then the internet dominance fight will only get more interesting. The consumers will benefit in either case. So it’s good for the consumers I would say.
Further, they say:
Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM, and web-based services?
Google shouldn’t even be commenting on the monopoly issue here because this is exactly what they are trying to do now. How else would you explain their coming out with every possible internet service and all of them being accessible from a single Google account?
And you’ll find it interesting to know that I could hardly find any “Google suggestions” when I started typing “Google trouble” or “Google audit”. Of course, Yahoo! gave me more results for once.
Market Watch (owned by News Corp) has another take on this entire issue. I kind of agree with what they have to say because it’s perfectly logical and quite unbiased. While they mention this positive point:
If Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo is consummated…
…the Goliath of the PC desktop will represent the one truly credible competitor to Google in the online world. (News Corp. is the owner of MarketWatch.com, the publisher of this column.)
They also mention the negatives:
Put it all together, and Microsoft/Yahoo vaults to the number one position with site traffic that’s nearly double Google’s. That’s the good news. The combination would still lag Google’s sales by a factor of two to one — $2.6 billion for Microsoft/Yahoo in the last quarter of 2007, despite the traffic advantage, as compared with $4.8 billion for Google.
And I agree that Microsoft +Yahoo is the only way that Google can be stopped. Otherwise, even though Google propounds “Do No Evil”, this is exactly what the company has started to do and will do full scale in the future.
Someone’s Trying to Hack My Gmail Account
Posted: February 2, 2008 Filed under: Business, E-mail, Economics, Finance, GMail, Google, Life, Microsoft, Orkut, Software, Technology, Thoughts, yahoo, Yahoo! Mash | Tags: Business, digg, E-mail, Economics, Finance, flickr, Gmail, Google, Life, Microsoft, Orkut, Software, Technology, Thoughts, yahoo 48 Comments »UPDATE: Now my Yahoo! account has been hit. I don’t know what’s happening. I’m not being able to log-in. I use this email for a lot of correspondence work. 
I had used this account to purchase a domain name today and my credit card detail’s stored. This Yahoo! account was earlier being used as the Alternate Email address for my GMail account. Before this problem started, I’d changed the alternate email address for my GMail account. I’ve been trying to log in. Doesn’t work. I’m trying to use the Forgot Password Page. But all that I get is a BLANK PAGE. No Password. I am on hold with Yahoo! Small Business Center because I bought a domain through them and my Yahoo! Mail account is linked to my Domain account. Let’s see if they’ll be able to help…else I don’t know what to do.
In the mean time, if you want to contact me, email me at timeandagainblog at gmail dot com. I’ll answer your comments once this tension is over. Please bear with me. If you have any advice, please leave me a comment or an email at the above mentioned GMail address.
*******
A couple of weeks back, Ish had written a post saying that someone is trying to hack his GMail account. The same thing’s happening to me now. I got a “Change Password” link in my secondary e-mail address thrice. Good thing that I was online when this happened.
Me: Is this a genuine email? This can’t be happening to me!
Yahoo! Mail: Yes, this is a genuine email. We’ve verified it.
Me: Okay! I gotta think fast.
So, I deleted those emails with the “Change Password” links. Next, I logged into my Google account and Changed the Password and the Security Question too. Unfortunately, I use the same Google account for all my services- Google Mail, Google Reader, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Google Notebook et al. Not to forget, the most important of all, Google Checkout, which has my credit card details. So, I’ve deleted that too. The last thing I want to be hit with is a bill costing me thousands of dollars.
The GMail account associated with this ID is quite important because I use it for lots of important work. Anyway, after doing some preliminary damage control, I sat down to think who could be behind this attack. Can be anyone, unfortunately. People are so curious to know about other people’s private lives…it’s quite funny.
Did the hacker really think that clicking the “Forgot Password” link would be a good way to hack into my account? Didn’t he know that the “Forgot password” link would be delivered in my secondary e-mail address? I’m guessing that whoever tried this method is probably an amateur hacker.
This incident reminds me of another one that happened a couple of months back. One of my good friends tried to hack into my Yahoo! Mail account. I was dumb enough to assume that nobody will ever try to hack my email account. This friend knew enough about me to guess the answer of the Security Question. The next day, I tried to log into my Yahoo account and failed to do so. It didn’t even occur to me that it might have been hacked. I thought that Yahoo’s server must be down.
Next, I logged into my GMail account to check my emails. To my surprise, the very first email was from my friend, explaining to me that he tried to hack into my account and has not read any of my personal emails and he’s very sorry about it. He also gave me the new password. Now starts the fun part. I logged into my Yahoo! account to change the Password and the Security Question. Well…there was no direct link to change the Security Question! Can you believe it? I had to contact Support and verify my identity. A whole bunch of administrative hassles later, my Security Question was changed.
Lessons Learned:
1. Never ever trust anyone. By anyone, I mean just that. Look at my friend. If a friend tries to hack into your account just because he’s very curious, can you blame a stranger?
2. Don’t panic. First do the needful (Change your password and Security Question). If you have confidential information in your email account, then forward those emails to another account and then delete them from the primary email address.
3. I’m thinking of contacting Support, but probably it won’t help. The GMail help section says:
When an attempt to recover your Gmail username or password is made, an email from Google is automatically sent to your secondary email address.
If you didn’t request to recover your username or password, you can ignore the message. If you’re concerned about the security of your account, we recommend changing your password and security question.
The Gmail Team isn’t able to provide you with information about attempted logins to your account including, but not limited to, the IP address from which the attempted login was made, and the time and date attempted logins occurred.
So there is no way that I’ll get to know who did this sinful deed. But you can follow these directions in case your account gets compromised.
4. I tried the “I cannot access my account link” and clicked on “Forgot my password”. After I entered my username, I got this message:
We’ve sent instructions to the secondary email address you provided during signup.
If you don’t have a secondary email address, or if you no longer have access to that account, please try the ‘Forgot your password?’ link again after five days. At that point, you’ll be able to reset your password by answering the security question you provided when you created your account.
To prevent someone from trying to break into an account you’re actively using, the security question is only used for account recovery after an account has been idle for five days. The Gmail team cannot waive the five day requirement or access your password under any circumstances.
If you’re unable to answer your security question or access your secondary email account, we regret that the Gmail team cannot provide further assistance. If you’re concerned about the security of your account, please visit our Security Center.
So, this person might try to retrieve my password after the five day lock period is over. On my part, I’ve changed the Security Question and no one knows the answer except me. Unless the person uses a brute force mechanism. *shudders* I like the way GMail is handling this by providing a five day safety period. That’s an amazing find because it gives me an opportunity to react and change the password/security question in the mean time.
Yahoo! has started a sign-in seal process that will help you distinguish a genuine Yahoo! site from a phishing site. It’s a good idea to do that. Earlier, I had seen that sign-in seal process only while signing into my credit card accounts. Good to know that email service providers have also introduced such a feature. I’m waitig for GMail to come up with something like this too.
In other tech news, Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo! for $44+ billion. This came as a big surprise to me. Ballmer has been trying to acquire Yahoo! since more than a year. Yahoo’s share price has been declining since a couple of months. Recently, it hit an all time low of $20. Just two days back,
Business Week had published an article that says-
Layoffs and a refocusing effort can only do so much. CEO Jerry Yang needs to find exciting new products or services if he hopes to make Yahoo sing again.
Shortly after, I read this piece of news about Microsoft’s public offer to buy Yahoo! Yahoo’s share price increased as soon as this piece of news was disseminated. Google’s share price has recently been on a downward spiral, because the company has missed the earning estimates of the analysts. Nevertheless, Yahoo and Microsoft are facing increasing pressure on account of Google’s Search Engine.
Yahoo! has a very strong brand value, which, in my opinion will be compromised if this deal fructifies. Even Ballmer has said that he’s not sure if the brand name “Yahoo” will remain. As an avid Yahoo! user, I’m not very happy with this announcement. My dislike for Microsoft is well known. All that Microsoft will bring to board is its 75,000+ strong work force, who’re anyway bundled up with useless ideas. Yahoo’s email service and the photo sharing service Flickr are really popular. But it does lag behind Google by a very wide margin in the search engine depart. Perhaps an acquisition with help Microsoft, which has the 3rd highest share in the Search Engine market, compete with Google on an equal footing.
Almost all of Google’s income is due to its Adsense business, which is indirectly a success thanks to its killer search engine. If Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo, the former will capture Yahoo’s market share and also bring on board its R&D department (how good is the R&D department….is another question) and tremendous wealth. Recently, Microsoft posted high profits on account of its new Operating System Vista and very low profits in all other departments. Perhaps this deal is all that this company needs to revive itself. Maybe Microsoft will still manage to screw up its business. Who knows. Merging two companies that have different work cultures, different product offering, different set of business principles and ethics is not so easy. Not to forget, lots of Yahoo! employees will be laid off, in addition to the already announced 10,000+ people who are being given the cut. This will only leave the other employees disgruntled. On top of this, imagine working for a new boss. The problem will only aggravate for people who are higher up in the corporate ladder.
It takes a couple of years (in the very minimum) to pull off such an acquisition. $44 billion is not exactly peanuts either. Ballmer says that he’ll save at least a billion dollars if this deal comes through. Let’s hope he’s right and let’s hope that Yahoo and its products survive. He’s known for his craziness and I hope that this is not one of his “pet projects”.
In the mean time, you might want to look for other email and photo sharing applications. I don’t know if Yahoo! Mail and Flickr will remain the same.
UPDATE: Found this on Digg- What Will Happen To Flickr if MSFT Buys It
Aggregate All Your Online Feeds
Posted: January 22, 2008 Filed under: Blogging, Business, Facebook, Finance, GMail, Google, Howto, Orkut, Social Networking, Software, Technology, Thoughts, Tumblr, yahoo, YouTube | Tags: blogger, Blogging, bloglines, Business, digg, esnips, facebook, Finance, Google, Howto, Microsoft, MyBlogLog, netvibes, Orkut, social bookmarking, stumbleupon, Technology, Thoughts, Web 2.0, Wordpress, yahoo, YouTube 12 Comments »Online social networks seem to be proliferating at an exponential rate and it has become quite necessary for us to aggregate them in one place. It’s difficult to keep track of different people and their online activity in different networks. There are lots of websites online where you can aggregate all your online accounts and then, circulate a “master feed”, that simplifies the entire process. I really love this idea and have been tinkering with it since the past couple of days. These are some of the websites that I would recommend:
1. Friendfeed- Started by three ex-Google employees, and still in beta phase. You need to request an invitation to join it. I got mine on the same day. They plan to make this service public by the end of next month. The UI is extremely simple and resembles Google. Friendfeed tops my list for the simplicity of the sign up process (less than 30 seconds), and the overall usability. You can aggregate all your online accounts, such as Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook status updates, Netflix queue, Amazon wish list, Tumblr, Youtube, Blogs, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Delicious…I’m tired! Your friends can just subscribe to the “master feed” and know what you’ve been doing everywhere. Simplicity is what we should aim for. Take a look at my Friendfeed page.
People can also comment on your activities and decide if they “Like it”. Deleting a particular activity from your feed is also very easy and takes only a single click. You can also install a bookmarklet that lets you post anything that you liked to your friendfeed profile. You can also install a Facebook application that will integrate your Friendfeed with your Facebook profile. I haven’t seen these features in any of the other “Aggregation” services.
The only drawback that I see here is that there is no way of adding any sort of single sentence profile. Louisgray.com has ten suggestions for its improvement.
Rating: 5/5
2. Soup.io- Very similar to friendfeed, minus the ability to comment. The best part is that you can try the service without even signing up. Of course, if you want to make your profile permanent, then you need to make an account, that takes only 20 seconds. You can customize the look of your page by adding a theme and editing the CSS. But I didn’t like the fact that I need to click twice in order to delete a particular entry (once, initially, and the second time, to confirm) and for me, that’s very important! But yes, it’s open to public and you don’t need to wait for an invitation. Take a look at my soup page.
Rating: 4.5/5
3. Readr- This has been in existence since a longer time, compared to Friendfeed and Soup.io. Again, you have the ability to comment on particular items, choose a theme and merge all your online accounts together. There is nothing unique about this service, IMO. Soup.io and Readr are clones of each other. Readr’s output of the feeds is not that nice looking and it kind of looks jumbled up. Another problem is that when you initially set up an account with them, then your items will be shown in the order you added the feeds and not in the chronological order. So, you might have three pages of Delicious, two pages of Stumbleupon, one page of Digg etc. You get the picture. Take a look at my page for an example. The process of adding accounts was a little more cumbersome because the default number of accounts that are available are less compared to Friendfeed or Soup.io.
Rating: 3.75/5
Apart from these major player, there are others such as Mugshot, 30boxes (the sign up process needed me to click on a link in an email and that is a complete no-no when we compare it with its competitors), etc. The bottomline- The web 2.0 sites are showing a tremendous upsurge in the usage. If you don’t sign up for an aggregator today, you very well have to a couple of months down the line. And what are those RSS feeds for? We need to embrace anything that helps us save time (and become lazier).
Someone forgot about WordPress
Posted: January 21, 2008 Filed under: Blogging, Business, Facebook, Finance, Google, Microsoft, Orkut, Social Networking, Software, Technology, Thoughts, Wordpress, Yahoo! Mash | Tags: blogger, Blogging, bloglines, Business, digg, esnips, facebook, Finance, Google, Microsoft, MyBlogLog, netvibes, Orkut, social bookmarking, stumbleupon, Technology, Thoughts, Web 2.0, Wordpress, yahoo, YouTube 24 Comments »In this Web 2.0 picture:
I thought that Reddit was bigger, but it’s reach is 900 and valued at just about $30 milloon. Of course, Stumbleupon is much bigger, with a reach of 1,800 and valued at a little less than $100 million. Digg remains strong and steady with a reach of 6,000 and a little less than $500 million in valuation. The biggest joke here is Windows Live Spaces, right at the bottom of the graph (towards the middle), with a reach of 15 and any guesses regarding its market value?
MyBlogLog, Netvibes, and Meebo (also won a Crunchie) are almost in the same category. Orkut (reach of 26,000) is still bigger than Facebook (reach of 9,000), yet the latter makes more noise in the Web 2.0 world.
And you know the best thing? Google owns three out of the top five market value/reach grossers- Youtube, Orkut and Blogger. Just another graph to show how powerful Google is becoming. The only thing is that I see Bloglines in the third tier, with a reach of 2,200, but I don’t see Google Reader anywhere. It might be possible that Google Reader was excluded (very unlikely though). Bloglines was my first feedreader. Then I changed to Google Reader and now I use the in-built feed reader provided by the social web browser, Flock.
Box is also doing pretty decent with a reach of 500 and I strongly feel that it will rise very soon because of its lovely user interface.
Where is Yahoo Mash? It seems to have disappeared already. I wanted to do a follow up on it…maybe I need to take a look at my account and see if Yahoo has introduced any new features. There is no way Yahoo Mash will be able to play catch up with Facebook or Orkut. Something that is very evident from this graph.
Now let’s get down to the big question- Where is WordPress? With millions of users, surely it should have made a splash here, even though the graph has been made by the CEO of Esnips?
While we’re on the topics of Web 2.0 start ups, maybe it’s not too late to assess what kind of a Web 2.0 user are you? I’m sure most of you are at least Spectators (33%), else you wouldn’t be reading this blog.
I could write miles about Web 2.0 and each of these companies, and still not get done. So, it’s better if we just talk about issues in the comments section, right?
Edit: By the way, Apple haters might want to take a look at this. Microsoft haters, I have something for you too. I don’t disappoint either of the sects.
