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.

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…

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.

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.

Wow, so CA closed the deal . Many many congrats to Barack Obama. It is a historic moment in the US history. Watching so many people jubilant in Grant Park is fun. A good break from the melancholy financial mess scene.

Thomas Otter was mulling over how analogies are a great tool in internalizing new concepts like SOA. His analogy of pointing the difference between a laptop/notebook and Desktop is a good one and points to the loosely coupled and tightly coupled systems. There is another analogy I really like and I believe is a good one in explaining SOA to someone. It comes from Bernard Wheeler at Sun. Here it is in its entirety

The traditional relationship between business and IT is like having a personal chef: you (the business) can dictate what you want to eat, or take menu recommendations, but your chef (the IT department) only buys supplies according to the pre-agreed menu. You play no part in how the food is bought, cooked, etc., but you pay the whole cost for the chef, cooking fuel, food and all the waste from each meal. In addition, if you suddenly change your mind about what you want to eat, there’s unlikely to be an alternative meal ready in a short time – apart from re-cooked leftovers.

Using commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) software is more like eating in a restaurant: there’s typically less flexibility available to you in the actual make-up of the dishes and the more customization you want, the more it’ll cost. But you share the costs of the chef, facilities, etc. among other restaurant-goers – reaping some benefits from the ‘economies of scale’ of the restaurant. Furthermore, if you change your mind about what you want just before ordering (e.g. pizza vs. pasta), there’s probably a reasonable alternative that can be available in an acceptable amount of time. But if you want to include a totally different culture or flavor (e.g. vegetable tempura as a starter), you may have to visit more than one ‘restaurant’ and figure out for yourself the logistics of how the ‘meal’ as a whole is going to be achieved. Also, there’s nothing to stop the restaurant from suddenly hiking up their prices, radically changing their menu, or being bought out by a bigger chain who then ‘trashes’ your preferred meal.

SOA is like eating at a buffet: the chef (either private or shared) prepares a range of dishes from which you build your own meal. The meal you choose does not require the whole ensemble to be put together ‘in the kitchen’: rather, the chef focuses solely on ensuring that there is an appropriate range of dishes provided in the buffet to keep most people happy for most of the time, based on market demand, season (and other prevailing conditions), consumer feedback/requests/suggestions, etc. And if the cost of any item changes dramatically (or there’s an ingredient shortage, "food scare", or some other reason to change a menu choice), you don’t have to change your whole meal, just that one piece of it (although granted, it may be the centrepiece of the meal).

All of us have seen the rise of social software wave in the last few years. If I were to put these software on human life scale – wikis and forums would be the oldies, blogs the middle age folks, FaceBook-Myspace-Orkut-LinkedIn as the young adults and twitter, friendfeed as the teens. The underlying human behavior for the success of everything social on internet is greatly summarized by Clay Shirky in his book “Here Comes Everybody”

Human beings are social creatures – not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect. Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

Similar views were echoed by Seth Godin in this post where he said

It’s so tempting to believe that we are merely broadcasters, putting together a play list and hurtling it out to the rest of the world. Louder is better. But we’re not. Now we’re leaders.

People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting.

A quick look up for the meaning of internalize at answers.com tells me it is “to take in and make an integral part of one’s attitudes or beliefs”. Over the years I have realized that it takes quite a long time for ideas to “really” sink in. You might read a book on behavioral economics and really like the ideas and various biases presented in it and say wow that is cool. But unless the idea is internalized you will probably forget it. It would be akin knowing a word and its dictionary meaning but never use it in conversations. It is only after you have read the same idea again and again in various contexts, have discussed about it with your peers, friends etc that the ideas are absorbed. Some of the ideas that have taken time for me our opportunity cost, time value of money and the one pertaining to my profession IT is enabler of business or a tool if you would.

What ideas do you have that took time to sink in?

Image Courtesy – http://openclipart.org/media/files/yves_guillou/6505

Over the years I have grown fond of economics. I stumbled across Brad deLong’s blog and started reading some stuff about economics. Then I read “The Great Unraveling” and it was a pleasure to read the ways Dr. Krugman explained some of the concepts using simple models. For the last few months I have been reading his blog at NYTimes and it has been very very informative. So when I read on Marginal Revolution this morning that Dr. Krugman has won this year’s Noble’s prize for economics, I said WOW..

Many many congrats to Dr. Krugman on the much deserved prize.

I came to know about Wordle a service which can turn any text into tags. See how independence day speech by Nehru looks in tags