April 8, 2009
(http://amrutam.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/seeing-beyond-the-tweet/). Micro-payments was of the key things twitter was missing and kept me wondering why Twitter didnt make the move.March 3, 2009
This post by Reid Hoffman speaks to my sentiment and I am sure a lot of you dealing with the current economic situation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/02/AR2009030201947.html?sub=AR
March 2, 2009
During my 6 year career in technology I have come across various consultants doing all sorts of studies for the companies. I found very few of them to be justified the rest – a waste of money. Its like paying someone more than what you make to tell you what you already know. I am yet to see great value out of a consultant.
I love this statement made by Anil Ambani: “Don’t hire a consultant to tell you the time from your own watch! “.. right on.
February 4, 2009
Since I moved to the Bay area there is one thing that became quite obvious – Anything Google releases is considered a hit. I think the press and the attention that small google app releases get is a little too much. I think ts time that press and everyone in silicon valley start focusing their energies inon other innovators as well.
Om Malik from gigaom does a great job of expressing the same feeling that i have regarding google’s ‘new ideas’ http://gigaom.com/2009/02/03/google-the-big-ideas/
January 30, 2009
Microsoft recently filed a patent for Desktop Smartphones. You could wonder, what the hell is this? I did too.. but i would recommend reading about it more, it has great potential
January 29, 2009
When search engines such as Google and Live (yes it IS a good search engine) and other sites like wikipedia surfaced the web, finding information about anything became as simple as clicking a button. This also included information about people and connecting with people as well, especially with the recent storm of social networking sites which make keeping in touch with people a trivial task – at least for those net savvy people who have nothing else to do but keep browsing the web wasting their time going through others facebook profiles and updating their status.
All of this has surely made the world flat and everyone’s life an open book. I can basically find information about where a person lives, his/her marital status, work status and even what a you did yesterday or last weekend at a click of a button- doesn’t this get you scared. Sometimes i feel like a celebrity (not in a good way), in the sense that everyone seems to know everything about me without knowing me personally. There are even sites which specialize in people search (eg. pipl.com) where you can just get info about people just knowing their name and country, and if you have a unique name like mine well you have all the information, including my previous addresses which even i don’t remember.
This is making me very anxious. While I do want to share information about myself (and yes i do know how to use the security features on the social sites) there is still a lot of information about me that I dont like seeing out there.
I am waiting to see a service/tool which would enable people to secure information about themselves on the web, not only information they published but also published by other people. Dont we have a right to information about ourselves?
All you social networking entrepreneur’s heres some food for thought, and if you need someone to help you design it get in touch with me, I already have some stuff cooking.
January 21, 2009
This is one of the coolest things i have found on the web via twitter.
http://tomtaylor.co.uk/projects/microprinter/
This is what i call innovation. I can get my to do lists, voice messages even tweets printed out for me.. yeah i know some of you will say I have reached another level of laziness, but come on this is really cool.
January 8, 2009
And Enjoyed life and would love to do it all over again. Thanks to everyone who made 2008 an awesome year and wish you all the best for 2009
December 1, 2008
Sounds weird but yes it seems possible thanks to the INS and the Green Card processing times. It’s been about 6 years now and no green card in sight and for some it’s been longer - totally ridiculous. The government talks about all sorts of reforms for everybody but what about us legal highly skilled workers who play a very important role in the American economy. How would an American citizen feel if they were
1. The one’s who spent a fortune in getting a graduate degree from a reputed school
2. The one’s who had to go through job interview after job interview getting rejected not because they were not good or the company didn’t want them but just because the company couldn’t sponsor an H1 visa
3. The one’s who have to stand in long lines with a folder full of documents to prove you are legal in spite of having worked in this country for 6-7+ years.
4. The one’s who have to possibly get married to their girlfriend/boyfriend earlier (at a certain stage in visa processing) that they want to just so that the other can get in the same line of green card with you.
5. The one’s who pays Medicare and social security without even thinking about getting the benefits from that
I am no statistician, but I’m sure us legal immigrants are paying a big chunk of that Medicare and social security benefits that everyone else in America is enjoying, but yet most of them still look at us with that look “you b***** immigrant”. What about us? What happens to us, even after giving almost 10 years of our life to this country, paying high taxes and helping grow their economy we are not even close to getting a simple green card or any other benefits. What happens to people who are in the line to get their green card but lose their jobs especially in these economic crisis, they don’t get any social security benefits, and will they get all the money I gave up in paying others social security and Medicare back? NO. It seems like it’s just the price we have to pay to be in this land of opportunity, and it surely seems to be a big price. I know a lot of readers would say, why are you here just go back to your home country if you don’t like the processes, but that’s not the point I am trying to make here. I am here because I see a great future for myself here which I didn’t in my country but at the same time I would like to have the country to also have some apathy towards me, even a simple thing such as granting me a green card within 5 years of working here – is that really too much to ask for from a country which was established by travelers and people from all over the world.
November 6, 2008
Since I moved to San Francisco Yelp has been the default application I use to look for places to eat or look for recommendations from my friends. Yelp does most of the basic things I would expect it to do, and I haven’t seen any other site be as successful and do such a good job at it . But seems like yelp is about to get some competition from Thummit(http://thummit.com/)
Yes, Thummit is a new site that is based off Washington DC and is very similar to Yelp. You could think of it as a subset of Yelp that focuses mainly on Restaurants. Although, I think the idea of creating a site that concentrates on one particular aspect is awesome, I am not sure how long it can stand against yelp or the other similar site such as Citysearch out there. Although the UI is much better than yelp, the functionality seems exactly the same. I will surely watch this site, which is currently in beta, to see what they do next.. maybe audio comments, videos or notifications on new restaurant openings or maybe it could become the new Zagat, which is a reputation that I think yelp has failed to achieve or maybe never tried to. I think it might take some innovative features and great business plan to keep this afloat for long especially in the current economic situation
