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Ten reasons to avoid Google’s IPO
An oldie from before the Google IPO in 2004, that seems hilarious in the current scheme of things, especially with gems like:
“Look at Google’s competition: Yahoo, Amazon, and soon Microsoft. All three know more about their customers than Google, because all three have many years of portal experience. And Microsoft owns your desktop. Can Google compete?”
“Google has excellent brand recognition, but how much more saturation of the mass media can we expect before journalists get sick of it?” – Going by the recent hype over G+, the saturation doesn’t seem to have set in even after 8 years.-
Yahoo is trying too hard to monetize their new search engine, but apart from this they’ve already shown that their technology is as good as Google’s.
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Google has excellent brand recognition, but how much more saturation of the mass media can we expect before journalists get sick of it?
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personalized search is the Next Big Thing
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Look at Google’s competition: Yahoo, Amazon, and soon Microsoft. All three know more about their customers than Google, because all three have many years of portal experience. And Microsoft owns your desktop. Can Google compete?
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Author: Aditya
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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10 best (unknown) open source projects | ITworld
Quite a variety – from ebook organizers to toxicology testers
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The science of fanboyism – The Tech Report
Quite a lot of stats to back it with…
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Inside RIM: An exclusive look at the rise and fall of the company that made smartphones smart
Quite a bit like the railroad vs road transition. Underestimate the customer at your own peril.
“You’d hear Mike Lazaridis unequivocally state time and time again that BlackBerry smartphones would never have MP3 players or cameras in them because it just does not make sense when the company’s primary customers were the government and enterprise.”
“RIM would be proud of the fact that someone would only use 1MB of data in a month in 2005”-
You’d hear Mike Lazaridis unequivocally state time and time again that BlackBerry smartphones would never have MP3 players or cameras in them because it just does not make sense when the company’s primary customers were the government and enterprise.
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A BlackBerry with a name is ridiculous.
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There was no three-year plan at RIM.” RIM would be proud of the fact that someone would only use 1MB of data in a month in 2005
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In the corporate world, especially at large companies, the senior executives would buy a BlackBerry as soon as it came out. They would then give their old devices to employees beneath them, and these BlackBerry phones would eventually make their way down through the corporation. This isn’t the case anymore, and now those people that used to receive the hand-me-down BlackBerry devices are asking for shiny new phones.
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“When you hear Mike talk about the latest and greatest, it’s been the same thing for ten years: security, battery performance, and network performance
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the data network fees paid to RIM were definitely the number one cause of heartburn from carriers, and a big point of contention.
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STANFORD Magazine: July/August 2011 > Features > Stanford Prison Experiment
A look back at the experiment by its participants. Interesting insights.
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Monkey Business: Can A Monkey License Its Copyrights To A News Agency? | Techdirt
A pretty interesting case – if a monkey clicks some photographs, who owns the copyright & what can be termed as fair use?
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Op-Ed Columnist – The Bankruptcy Boys – NYTimes.com
If you thought 9/11 was a catastrophe for the US, think again – the deficit is going to be a much bigger & longer term problem. The beast is starving but not getting any thinner.
“Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.”-
The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol — was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.
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Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Google, Microsoft and Apple — Global Nerdy
That’s hitting the nail on the head
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Windows Firewall with Advanced Security (Guide for Vista) – Wilders Security Forums
A very handy guide to setup advanced options on the Windows firewall – should apply to Windows 7 as well
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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A handy site that tells you whether your email has been breached by recent exploits
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Download free customized ribbons – Excel – Office.com
“The Favorites tab was created by using customer feedback on the commands used most frequently in Microsoft Office programs. You can use these customized ribbons as is or as a starting point to personalize the ribbon the way that you want it.”
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Pretty much a version of “The wolf & the mastiff” as the author himself puts it –
“If doing a startup is like rolling a boulder up a hill, then working at Goldman Sachs is like rolling it down the hill: you just have to stay out of the way of the boulder”
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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A Letter to the PM by Harimohan Pillai
So the system does work without all the media chaos, & all you need to do is ask
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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MySmartPrice: Mobile Phone Price in India
A useful price comparison portal, currently limited to mobiles, books & cameras
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Quite a long list of Bollywood movies & their “inspiration”. Not every movie listed is such a big ripoff though
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What’s a Degree Worth? Report Has Answers, by Major – Students – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Over their careers, full-time, full-year workers whose highest degree is a bachelor’s make 74 percent more, on average, than those whose highest attainment is a high-school diploma, the authors found. When those with more than a bachelor’s degree are included, the premium for higher education rises to 84 percent.”
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Warren Buffett on castles and moats – (37signals)
Revisiting the competitive advantage concepts…
“In business, I look for economic castles protected by
unbreachable ‘moats’.”
-Warren Buffett -
Android or iPhone? Wrong Question « abovethecrowd.com
Another piece on Android focusing on the business model:
“Some will argue that the best product will win the market and that Apple will still dominate the smartphone market. The history of the personal computer market is no omen for this thesis. If you think about it, the people that know this better than anyone are the exact Apple loyalists who have been frustrated for years at Apple’s lack of dominance in the PC market. Disruptive business strategies can and have trumped better products. And with no change to the current market, the Android leveraged position in the market could result in staggering unit share gains. This is not to say that the Google Android is better than or as good as the Apple iPhone. The key point is that it does not have to be. It only needs to be dramatically better than the current feature phone. Which it is.”
“With its disruptive and leveraged strategy, it is Google that is attempting to be the Microsoft of the smartphone market. Perhaps ironically, Apple is well positioned to be the “Apple” of the smartphone market.” -
The Freight Train That Is Android « abovethecrowd.com
Google is doing what Microsoft did, and in a very different way… “Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not “products” in the classic business sense. They have no plan to become their own “economic castles.” Rather they are very expensive and very aggressive “moats,” funded by the height and magnitude of Google’s castle. Google’s aim is defensive not offensive. They are not trying to make a profit on Android or Chrome. They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free). Because these layers are basically software products with no variable costs, this is a very viable defensive strategy. In essence, they are not just building a moat; Google is also scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it. And best I can tell, they are doing a damn good job of it.”
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The Truth About That ‘Landmark’ Twitter Case – Twitter
So, a landmark case that wasn’t
“Needless to say, despite Twitter clearly doing all it can to help maintain the privacy of its users, maybe it’s time we all reviewed & reconsidered the TOS of some of our most used services, particularly where anonymity is concerned.”
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Happier meals: four Toronto chefs reimagine the Big Mac combo
“Four local chefs turn the most famous dish (the Big Mac combo) at McDonald’s into a five-star meal” – Makes for some pretty interesting looking results
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A very interesting & visionary memo from Bill Gates to the Microsoft employees written in the mid 1990s. Quite a lot of his vision has come true. Too bad that Microsoft could not capitalize on them.
via http://gizmodo.com/5805140/bill-gates-he-got-the-big-stuff-right-and-never-let-go -
“Google Correlate finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends”
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Using the FOR command to copy files listed in a text file | sides of march
A simple one liner – for /f “delims=” %%i in (filelist.txt) do echo D|xcopy “\\server\share\folder\%%i” “c:\temp\%%i” /i /z /y
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Rands In Repose: A Hard Thing is Done by Figuring Out How to Start
“We’re addicted quick fixes, top ten lists, and four-hour work weeks, but the truth is – if it wasn’t hard, everyone would be doing it and a hard thing is never done by reading a list or a book or an article about doing it. A hard thing is done by figuring out how to start.”
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Rands In Repose: Lost in Translation
“…and the beginning of understanding something fundamental to make future Falls less catastrophic: that people are the best puzzles you’ll never solve”
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Namib-Naukluft Park Picture – Travel Wallpaper – National Geographic Photo of the Day
When a photo looks like a painting
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AppRedeem Real Rewards – iPhone Apps and iPod Apps
An interesting concept that rewards you for trying out iOS apps
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Quite a website making use of a lot of modern HTML\JS functionality. Belongs to the UI designer of the original iPad. Visualization at its best with tablet friendliness thrown in for good measure.
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And now we have a javascript\HTML5 based gameboy emulator
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The Twitter Trap – NYTimes.com
From the executive editor of NYT – “Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity. “
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Ninite – Install or Update Multiple Apps at Once
Quite a handy utility that lets you build a custom installer for a bunch of software & then have them silently install\update
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Not much of functionality, but pretty interesting that we can now run simulators in the browser itself.
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Recreation of the internet as it was in the 1980s right in the browser.
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List of numbers – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Who knew that there were these many numbers and so many systems
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Entering The Minority Report Era: A Video Series – TNW Social Media
Welcome to the future?
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The People vs. Goldman Sachs | Rolling Stone Politics
A big brand name combined with brains can be a deadly combination
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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A dream come true for Mumbai citizens – “Gary Chang, an architect, designed his 344 square foot apartment in Hong Kong to be able to change into 24 different designs, all by just sliding panels and walls.”
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Over the past 30 years, designer, writer, and researcher Bill Buxton has been collecting. Explore his collection of input and interactive devices that he found interesting, useful, or important in the history of pen computing, pointing devices, and touch technologies.
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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The Reason We Reason | Wired Science | Wired.com
The idea here is that the confirmation bias is not a flaw of reasoning, it’s actually a feature. It is something that is built into reasoning; not because reasoning is flawed or because people are stupid, but because actually people are very good at reasoning — but they’re very good at reasoning for arguing. Not only does the argumentative theory explain the bias, it can also give us ideas about how to escape the bad consequences of the confirmation bias.
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[Tool] Android Injector – xda-developers
A tool for Android to install non-market apps when restricted by your service provider. Thankfully this is not yet a problem in India.
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General Motors: Weight Loss Diet Program
Includes the steps in the program along with explanations for why the diet is suggested.
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References in Samit Basu’s ‘The Simoquin Prophecies’ // needlessly|messianic
Some seem to be off the mark as pointed out by the author himself in a twitter post.
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Notable Quotables : The New Yorker
Quite a lot of information on how quotes get mangled over time & get popular thus immortalizing the person who made the quote. Then again, sometimes quotes are misattributed. It also mentions a couple of books that help verify the authenticity of quotes & traces their origins.
“Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority. Quotations are prostheses. “As Emerson/Churchill/Donald Trump once observed” borrows another person’s brain waves and puts them to your own use. (If you fail to credit Emerson et al., it’s called plagiarism. But isn’t plagiarism just the purest form of quotation?) Then, there is a subset of quotations that are personal. We pick them up off the public street, but we put them to private uses. We hoard quotations like amulets. They are charms against chaos, secret mantras for dark times, strings that vibrate forever in defiance of the laws of time and space. That they may be opaque or banal to everyone else is what makes them precious: they aren’t supposed to work for everybody. They’re there to work for us. Some are little generational badges of identity. Some just seem to pop up on a million occasions. Some are razors.”
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Anatomy of a Fake Quotation – Megan McArdle – National – The Atlantic
An analysis of how the fake quote “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. – Martin Luther King, Jr” originated & went viral through the social networks in a couple of days
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