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Yes, Microsoft is Innovative! PC World's list of The 20 Most Innovative Products of the Year has Microsoft Office 2007 on top. All because of that new ribbon. They must be celebrating out there in Redmond! But top spot for this seems a bit unjustified. Its cool alright but the remaining list has some pretty exciting "innovative" products. From the list below, I'll have to say these are all amazing products. So they've got the collection right, probably not the order. 1. Microsoft Office 2007 2. Intel Core 2 Duo 3. Parallels Desktop for Mac 4. Nintendo Wii 5. Samsung 32GB SSD 6. Sony Reader 7. YouOS 8. Dell XPS M2010 9. Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB 10. T-Mobile Dash 11. Pioneer Inno 12. Farecast 13. Sony BWU-100A Blu-Ray Disc Rewritable Drive 14. Olympus EVolt E-330 15. Google SketchUp 16. Sony PlayStation 3 17. RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8100 18. Rhapsody 4.0 19. Logitech NuLooq 20. Shure E500PTH Sound Isolating Earphones

The "someday" I wrote of in the last post has arrived sooner than I expected. Things've been outright crazy: at work, and at home. But I hope they'd be relatively calmer in the days to come. I've been in Bangalore now for 3 weeks and it's been pretty much fun albeit the fact that I spend a whole lot of my time commuting amidst blaring horns on the jam-packed roads . Met lots of my friends from college the past weekend and had great fun at the not-so-chilly hill station Coorg over the extended weekend. Also met Atishay but didn't get to see his Ferrari laptop. Perhaps Microsoft would bribe me too with one! MyToday has launched a free SMS greeting service for Indian Mobile users. You get to type your greeting message of 110 characters and the message is sent free along with 50 characters worth of MyToday ads. Tried composing a cool 110 characters new year greeting. No success so far. " Is Microsoft Driving Innovation or Playing Catch-Up With Rivals?...

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What exactly is it that the guys at Big M are trying to achieve with these ridiculous (dangerously bordering absurdity) ads for the Zune? The first one I came across was at RockInsider . How a couple of monsters swallowing down people and vans are related to MP3 players beats me. Then the new redesigned YouTube also suggested that I see the other Zune ads . And could it have been any different? Looking at these and other Zune ads, I'll say I even believe t his conversation did take place at the fictional Microsoft Zune Design Laboratory. The ads on Soapbox were disappointing too. But atleast they made some sense! Video: Zune TV Ad - Snow Technorati tags: Zune , Television , Commercial , Soapbox , Youtube

OK. I couldn't think of any title for this post. So just picked up the last thing I mentioned in this post and made it the heading. But with Google now planning even “ targeted measurable television ads ” you never know! But Google did one great thing and that was to come up with Gtalk. Things are such that I can barely manage without Gtalk at work. Now that's not because my team is separated all over the building, but it is necessitated because of the frigging earphones and all the stupid music people around me are tuned to. Somebody make them read this ! Browsing through Scoble's Link Blog, I came across this interesting piece titled " Dumbing Down of Programming ". I am sure these guys will try to make a point at me through this ;) Then, there's this wonderful Reformat option in Eclipse that Desh told me about. Its such a pity people can't write a clean piece of code. But this at least solves all the indentation blues. Just hit Ctrl+Shift+F and i...

In films and television code is always sailing across the screen at incredible speeds; it's presented as an indecipherable stream of letters and numbers that make perfect sense to the programmer but dumbfound everyone else! Matthew Inman has this amazing piece on how code, programmers and hackers are portrayed in the movies. The best in his List : #10 10 Most code is not inherently cross platform Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit! If real life were like film I'd be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter. [via Rushi ]

MTV India, after Roadies , takes its adventure travel concept further with MTV Back Pack Holidays . Joining hands with TravelGuru , a travel site offering pretty decent deals, they've put together custom-made adventure-travel packages for the youth. This for sure seems to be fun. And with packages that range from Rs. 800 for a day's adventure to Rs. 10000 for longer vacation, capturing the attention of the adventure enthusiasts in the country would be real easy. The site currently has a package listed for KIHIM near Mumbai and they've got an exciting line up of activities there: rappelling , Rock Climbing , Beach baseball (wonder what that is?) and stuff. All bundled up within a weekend. Too bad I leave Mumbai this weekend :( But they are to offer new packages around Bangalore too! Anybody game??? Technorati tags: MTV , Travelguru , Backpack , Holidays , Mumbai , Kihim , Adventure Travel

After cool iPod Shuffle ad , the uncool Vista ad , its now time to see the funny Vaio Interactive Flash stuff. It features a PC, a Mac and a Vaio (Remeber the I'm a mac, I'm a PC ad from Apple) . But wait a sec, isn't Vaio a PC??? But then, you can always say that Vaio is in a league of its own. Beats me, how I couldn't convince my cousin to get a Vaio instead of the stupid Compaq thing she got. Check out the funny Vaio Interactive Flash and the explore the new Sony Vaio C Series . Technorati tags: Vaio , iPod Shuffle , Vista , ads

" And this, O Fate, is I think the most vicious circle that thou ever sentest " Remember the classic Poem by Ogden Nash . Caught up in a similar vicious circle at work for the past few days, these words from my primary school text book simply came to my mind. What fun days were those! Is there a way out? Prasoon recommends spending more time at Digg rather then burning out with the build-compile-deploy routine. I honestly fail to understand how that could make things better, if not worse. No sir, I'd rather stick to my feedreader like BusinessWeek's Rob Hoff , without all that crap Digg throws. And the feed reader and the unanswered mails in my Inbox are certainly keeping me busy. This morning, Andy Kazeniac over at compete.com informed me about their c omparison of the demand for the three Video Game consoles through the week of November 25th. Really interesting to note from their research how the XBox 360 is holding its own in terms of popularity despite the rec...

Its been a bash-Zune season so far with so much written about it ever since its first appearance, without anything being remotely positive about the Zune . Sometimes I felt that they were written with the sole intent of bashing up the big M and their latest offering. As I mentioned once earlier, Andy Ihnatko even proclaimed that it'll be dead and gone within six months. But finally, someone has come up with praise review for the Zune, declaring that Zune is even better that the iPod itself . Unbelievable, it may sound, but thats what Matthew Miller at ZDNet thinks after three weeks with the Zune. Unlike many people slamming the Zune, I have been checking out the Zune and the iPod with video in direct comparison and have to say I prefer the Zune for my usage. In side-by-side comparison, I find the Zune with its directional pad much easier to navigate than sitting there spinning my thumb around in circles on the iPod wheel. The Zune is taller and thicker than the iPod, but fe...

And Microsoft does it again. Just like everything else with the Vista, they screw up the first television commercial too. Its simply too boring . I couldn't even stand to see the whole one-and-a-half-minute video. Judge for yourself. Technorati tags: Microsoft , Vista , television , commercial , advertisement

"They are grand memories." replies Max Skinner to the question "Are they good memories" in the movie A Good Year , prompting me to spend the whole of Sunday wondering what were my grandest memories. Surprisingly, nothing came to my mind- zero, zilch, nada. And so, I concluded finally that either I've had a pretty boring life or I simply do not realize the grandeur of my memories. NR Murthy of Infosys was talking on one of the zillion news channels out there about the phenomenal growth of Infosys. And this he attributed to "the great Indian Middle Class" and its "strong work ethics". He said that "people didn't go home before completing their work." I am not too sure about Mr. Murthy and Infosys but others in this country's IT services companies seem to possess a completely different mindset with the sort of restrictions imposed on the employees, Internet access restriction being one of them. And the most absurd of reas...

Continuing with his experiment where Chris Pirillo comapred YouTube, Google and revver , he now has a "shootout" between nine different video networks. Chris called it "multimedia madness". Yes, that's exactly what this is!!! And my results on comparing the 9 videos: YouTube- the best, Soapbox- didn't do bad either, and iFilm- took forever to stream. Technorati tags: Chris Pirillo , Soapbox , YouTube , Break.com , Vimeo , Jumpcut , Blip.tv , Metacafe , Revver , iFilm , Video Comparison , Christmas