Beta Thoughts

Audrey and iPad

admin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 07:03:21 +0000

It is very difficult to have totally original ideas on the internet. iPad was released around the same time I was changing apartments once more. And during the move I came across my broadband connected tablet like browsing device from the dot com bust era. I am talking about the 3 Com Audrey I bought during 2001 for $99 after a friend from S’Pore called that it is available on tigerdirect. I loved it during those lean times. So the release of iPad brought back all those memories. While these thoughts were circling in my mind, kind folks on the interwebs have already written a post I wanted to write . Here is one snippet from that post

Audrey is/was a $500.00 USD “Internet appliance” released by 3Com in 2000 that ran QNX – a popular embedded *nix-like OS. You could surf the web, listen to music and e-mail folks (plus run a few other apps that came with it). It had a touchscreen (tho, you needed a stylus) with a virtual keyboard, but you could also use a wireless keyboard. My setup is a bit worse for the wear, but she still works:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

The device failed because it was too expensive and just a bit ahead of it’s time (you have to remember, the Internet was a different place back then, with the intended, primary means of connecting the Audrey being dial-up). I believe it also failed because there was no good way to develop for it, thus snubbing early adopters who might have been able to get 3Com over the 1st gen hump and provide it a stream of cool apps to make it worth the money for the general public.

On the internet nothing ever dies. There is still the audreyhacking site live. I might just use audrey for few days for the retro feel.

Does online shopping changes the buying behavior

pankaj — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 07:45:28 +0000

@jeffnolan sent the above tweet about placing more orders than last year on amazon. This prompted me to look at my order history as I was sure I would be in the same boat. Going through the order history confirmed it. Now two consumers from the same geographic region don’t make a trend. But I suspect that this would be the case for a lot more people who are voracious consumer of information on the web i.e. heavy users of blogs, tweets and online news. Increase in spend in itself is not bad if it has merely shifted spending at brick and mortar to online spending for stuff. It would be bad ( at least for my pocket) if this 24/7 connectivity, 1000s of review sites, ease of online ordering has increased our wants and buying behavior.

While buying clothes and food etc is not practical but buying gadgets, books, music, games and software etc is super easy. There is always a new batch of TVs with more features, digital cameras with HD video recording, AV receiver with newer version of HDMI, new notebooks, routers with wifi-n, ipads and iphones. Then there are techmeme, gizmodo, engadget, amazon etc to review it. For more hardcore guys there is dpreview and avsforum. And all of this in your smart phone, connected TV 24/7 at your service. I think all of this creates a never ending anxiety to upgrade stuff. Which is resulting in ever increasing line items in things-I-bought-last-winter list.

Good or bad depends up the age old question about wants and needs. So far I have started going the route of giving useful age in years to various things electronics e.g. TV, notebook at least 5 years, phone 2 years, computer stuff at least 3 years etc. Will be watching my behavior

China India GDP Gap – Last 20 years

pankaj — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:35:10 +0000

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.

Negative side of Social Networking

pankaj — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 20:33:44 +0000

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…

Hindi on G1?

pankaj — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:04:43 +0000

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.

Nope he'll be an engineer

pankaj — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:51:23 +0000

Didn’t knew there were Dilbert cartoons. My favorite

Dilbert – Engineers

Taking literary snobbism to new a era

pankaj — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:29:37 +0000

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

Selecting books to read

pankaj — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:31:29 +0000

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.

Airtel Call Home – Misleading 1 cent campaign

pankaj — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:46:13 +0000

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.

Livemint's four values of sensex

pankaj — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:08:00 +0000

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.