A picture is worth 1000 words. This is from cool google service based on UN data What happened in the last 20 years. Look at the increasing chasm between China and India GDP.

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The world of social networking is catching very fast with the real world. Having water cooler talk is pretty normal but hear this now. I was getting ready for a welcome party for a baby and like any self respecting geek I asked Ms Beta Thoughts – hey I like this white shirt what do you think? Umm… didn’t you wear this when we went to Santa Cruz boardwalk, and we uploaded the photos so every one has seen this. Wear a different one.. Oh nooo…

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Am I the only one who care about seeing Hindi on G1 phone? So far the big search company has been very good for Hindi. Alok would attest that. But for whatever reason Hindi, still shows as boxes on Google. I was hoping the cupcake release would have that but not yet.

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Didn’t knew there were Dilbert cartoons. My favorite

Dilbert – Engineers

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There is an article on NYTimes about how the age of Kindle or e-bookreaders is going to impact the old-fashioned books and the culture associated with book reading. Much of the article is devoted to the physical nature of books and the signals it sends to people around the person reading the book. For example if I have all my library in Kindle how would others be able to see what I have been reading and infer what sort of a person I am. In another case while traveling seeing another person carry your favorite book makes instant connections.

While I won’t miss these things about books as physical objects. What I would definitely miss is the impact books have when one is growing up with a lot of books around. Some of the earlier books I read were not recommended to me by any one. I happen to read them as they belonged to my elders and were readily available in the house. As a kid when you have spare time you just pick what is around and read it. With ebook readers it is going to be tough. Another thing that concerns me about ebook readers how it is going to impact libraries. I hope I would still be able to borrow books from library the way I do today. May be even better that I won’t have to go to library physically.

As far as the touting the books you are reading in front of your network – it has already been taken care by the “new media”. See my books section. There are applications like livingsocial, weread on facebook. There is even shelfari.com So nothing to complain over there.

Image Courtesy : Flickr Cheneworth

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No question about the fact that book reading is great. After completing college education, only way to grow further is by reading books. But reading a book also means time commitment. Typically a week to few weeks of reading every day. So it becomes necessary to select books with care. Though there is always the option of reading few pages or few chapters but that also results in waste.

Over the years my book selection process has become somewhat refined. Before the advent of blogs or even web the way to find good books was word of mouth, newspapers or magazines. There were best seller lists and books of the year but that meant that one would miss good but obscure books. Also the books from past would be missed too. For example there is no way I was going to find about Thomas Schelling’s “Micromotives and Macro behavior” from best sellers list. With blogs this selection process has become really easy and very effective. Since one only subscribe to authors one likes iis quite likely that the books recommended by them on their blogs would be to your taste. And when one is fond of bibliophiles like Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution it is bonus time.

Most of the blog authors when talking about books point to its page on big river aka Amazon. Once at Amazon it is easy to find what other’s are talking about the books in customer reviews. This is all good but what I am really excited about is the ability to check if the book is available at one of the branches of local Santa Clara County libraries (SCCL). This is possible by a little greasemonkey script on firefox that was written for Seattle Public Library which I improvised for SCCL. So now I have a blog filtered stream of books whose reviews I can read on Amazon and check their availability in the local libraries. An optimized solution, just what the good engineer ordered.

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First a little background – I have used Airtel Call Home for calling India in the past and generally like their voice quality. They had also ran great introductory offers when they started which gave good run for the money to Reliance India Call – gold standard in India calling. Competition has been good in this market and has pushed the prices down considering it used to be 65-70 cents a minute when I came to US in 1999.

Now to Airtel’s recent claim of 1 cents / minute call. How would you feel if you went to a shop for buying a pair of shoes and saw on display “Shoes for only $100″ but later on realize the shoes are infact 66 % more i.e. they are really $166 not $100. This is what Airtel is doing with their 1 cents a minute promotion. Best is the use of phrase like “Rental Value”. If I buy a card for $10, $3.99 is deducted to provide “Rental Value” I wonder what value does the customer drives from this. Why did they choose to rephrase a charge as value. Is customer that dumb. And what was wrong with selling minutes for 1.66 cents per minute? It is still the lowest price I have seen in the Tier 1 India Calling card business and is half the price of what I am paying right now. By trying to mislead customers Airtel is not gonna earn TLC from customers.

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Livemint has become quite popular during the last year or two of its existence. But sometimes funny things happen on the first page. Example in case is the screenshot above taken on  Nov 14th about 12:30pm IST. This image shows 4 different values of the BSE sensex index. Which one should I believe? While I can understand why it would happen, but I think it should be embarassing for the site owners.

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There has been a visible shift towards design on Beta Thoughts in the past few months. If you are one of the 1.5 readers of this blog you might have noticed it. While I have always been interested in the design of things – but only after the google reader’s recommendation engine recommended “core77’s design blog” that this interest has gone into over drive. Besides my work as a NetWeaver professional revolves around thinking from user’s perspective aka user centric design. So what all of this has to do with the title of this post? Read on…

Core77’s recent post pointed to a lengthy but immensely enjoyable article about the design and development of Wii Fit which might have over taken Grand Theft Auto sales by  now. Don’t miss reading the complete article for some of the craziest places there ideas come from. Over here I would just point out to how important the user centric design is for them

Miyamoto-san banged the table and said, “That’s wrong!” He told this person that from the consumer’s point-of-view, clarity was important. That people don’t say, “You need to lose 2 BMI points to reach your ideal weight”, they say, “You need to lose 3 pounds to reach your ideal weight”. We wanted people from age 5 to 95 to enjoy using Wii and he pointed out that most of those people wouldn’t know what BMI is. He demanded to know how this person could be so backward-looking when so many employees were working so hard to negotiate with official organizations to allow kilograms to be displayed in the game for the benefit of the consumers.

Image Courtesy - Goodrob13’s photostream at flickr

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When Dash Express, a GPS with internet connectivity and utilizing the collective knowledge about routes from its users was announced, it was quite an innovative concept. But it seems ants might have beaten them to it. Though a bit of rudimentary technology but it works from the Telegraph article (HT Marginal Revolution)

His team set up an “ant motorway” with two routes of different widths from the nest to some sugar syrup. Soon the narrower route soon became congested.

But when an ant returning along the congested route to the nest collided with another ant just starting out, the returning ant pushed the newcomer onto the other path.

It is a pity that Dash is getting out of making their own hardware. I am sure they will survive and hope to use their technology someday in some form.

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