How incentives don’t work as we expect them to?

This video grabbed my attention for the whole video time, not just with the content but with  the way it is presented.Its not only fun to watch but actually explains in easy to understand language (and pictures) the vital ingredient behind success. One among the best creative presentations out there. There are a lot more of these here: http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/. The idea of augmenting the information with clever visuals is just brilliant.

 

Microsoft academic search

Most of the people must have heard about Google Scholar, There is similar thing from Microsoft Which most of them must have not heard of. Well, maybe people in the academic community do know about it, and it is just me. Still, very cool especially compared to Google Scholar. How hard is it to integrate it into Bing’s Visual Search?

 

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/

 

Here is Bhaskar’s Graph, one of the Prof from IIT Kanpur.

 

Google TV Announced

 

Google TV is unveiled, a couple of days back in Google I/O conference. Looks like it is going to be both set-top box as well as built and play into TV’s. Well it’s all about Ad reach here, They make money from advertising. Google does not sell content -- it sells ads. The difference here is in the business model. Google is going to pay OEM’s and operators like DISH, Google will get paid by advertisers and do a revenue share with OEMs and operators. Apple will have a different business model where it sells customers to the operators and boxes to end users at a profit. . I feel Microsoft has to do some thing similar to this, since they already have the infrastructure. They have to append XBOX with something similar and leverage XBOX market and do some of the same search functionality with BING powered video results and what not. The only concern is XBOX is directed towards hard core gamer, whereas as GOOGLE TV is mass market device.

Interactive pacman game on Google's home page

 

This space isn’t dead, The updates has been really slow this month. Some office work stuff is keeping me busy this month. Anyways to celebrate the 30th anniversary of classic video Game Pacman, Google has its first interactive doodle – a Pac man game that Web users can play straight from the Google’s home page. When I first opened its home page today, I figured out that there is some annoying noise coming out, and to figure out what was causing this noise, I had to close the Google tab to make it shut.A mute button on the screen, for that tab only, would have been enough, but I can't mute my computer when I need to listen other music from the system. You can’t buy publicity like this. Front page on Digg, front page on reddit, mentioned on NPR, front page on Google news, covered by ABC news, fortune, CNET, They just killed the productivity of every other company with internet access on the planet for the day. It would definitely have all IT managers block Google homepage from work. Coming to the technical side of it, This is apparently Javascript + HTML4.  View background image shows the sprite layout. Insert coin twice gives two player mode.

 

Update: Google is making it’s Google Pac-Man game permanent here. If you double-click on Insert Coin you get Ms. Pac-Man.

Google Redesign - Mimicks Bing

 

 

Recently Google Search Results got a make over. Good to see that Google is going in the direction of the Bing. It certainly shows that they are paying attention towards Microsoft Bing and think that what Bing’s doing is some what right. Its interesting to notice how if Microsoft tries to imitate something they get blasted whereas if others do the same, they get lauded. Google appears to be much better at generating hype than any others. The mere fact that the ridiculously minor changes they made to their search results somehow qualified as front page news speaks volumes. One thing I have to admit is, Bing experience outside US is not so great. By default it redirects you to local home page based on your location and the quality of results outside US is not up to the mark. Though their side bar looks like Bing, but the feature they are offering is not anywhere close to Bing. I still feel Bing is actually helping you to make the decisions and therefore called as a decision engine rather than a search engine with WYSIWUG (What You See Is What You Get).

Invisible mode in GTalk

One of my friends asked, how to be in invisible mode in GTalk.One aspect She find particularly irritating with Google Talk is not to be able to appear as invisible. Well this problem can be solved in you use Pidgin for IM. Pidgin is an IM chat client which supports many chat networks like yahoo, gtalk,AIM,MSN etc..Add your gtalk account to it after installing and it acts just like your gtalk, infact much more than that with tabbed interface to handle multiple chat windows, smileys etc…

 

You still need to do something to enable invisible mode here…

http://fahhem.com/pidgin/gtalkinvisible.zip

 

Download the zip file, extract it,  Move the  gtalkinvisible.dll file to "C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins\".

 

Restart Pidgin and enable it

 

Go To Tools->Plugins, Scroll down the list of available plugins. Install the GTalk Invisible plugin by enabling it.

 

After enabling you  need to restart once again and you are all done.You can see the invisible mode option down there along with Available, Busy, Do Not disturb etc…

Kasab Found Guilty

Yes you heard it right, After so many twists to Ajmal kasab trial, he is finally found guility, no pun intended here, You might be wondering that it is the greatest discovery of 21st century. It took around 16 months for the supreme court to make this amazing discovery. One among the charges included "walking inside the railway station without a platform ticket". No wonder Indian Govt is spending so much on his security and health !! Rs. 2 Lakh per day ? Given the Nature of Indian Legal system, There is no wonder if Indian Govt take a decade to hang him. In India, where police cops like Rathore who was responsible for a 14 year old girl -Ruchika's death is still roaming outisde, and Jaish-e-Mohammed militant Mohd Afzal who was sentenced to death for the 2001 attack on parliament is still having fun behind bars eating mutton biriyanis, I wouldn’t be surprised if Kasab is given an opportunity to submit a mercy petition before the President of India.Ever wondered how dumb can an IPS officer be? This is the perfect example of it.

http://news.in.msn.com/international/article.aspx?cp-documentid=3600136 where Kasab citied as inspiration to Indian Police by an IPS officer. I seriously do not know whether to celebrate or hang my head in shame. I personally feel he should be hanged in public before 26/11 victim families. Infact Auction the hangman's job. I'm sure many would love to do that!!

 

This is my opinion. You might have yours. Feel free to state yours. Take the following Poll, Share your thoughts.

 

 

Update: Kasab gets death. Judge mentions about, how Kasab was anxious to attack India and how he was disappointed when there was not so much rush at the Mumbai CST, etc.

Something Meaningful