enginerd

AOL has come to India with their India specific portal www.aol.in , though I might wonder if they are too late. Nothing too interesting about it. It has the usual news channels, with Cricket and Bollywood getting obvious attention. Plus there's the email and the Instant messaging about which I am not too sure if there would be many now who'd be keen on an @aol.in web based email address with the much superior likes of Yahoo and Gmail. How I'd see is that its just another India specific portal, and there is simply no need for it- with Rediff,IndiaTimes,Yahoo, and  MSN already around. How, if they, do they actually pull it off will be interesting to watch. If you remember, long long time ago, Lycos had came to Asia, India included, www.lycosasia.com (the link doesn't work anymore), and didn't really deliver.

For a while I was beginning to think that the world had forgotten about about 30Boxes  which I feel is a top-class Calendaring application and would be my first choice any given day. If you thought so that they've been chilled by Google,  the PC World Magazine doesn’t think so.  They continue to roll out interesting stuff and have now have released a Firefox plugin called PowerTwitter to enhance Twitter with photo sharing, video sharing etc and other cool things.

ICC CWC 2007 - The Semi Final LineUp There you go. The final 4 of the ICC CWC 2007 have been decided and it's basically what one had predicted even before the tournament started. A few hiccups here and there but things finally went the way they were thought to go! So, here's the final four: Australia: The ultimate package. By far the favourites. Sri Lanka: The most versatile attack. Invincibles in this form, just give them a slow dead pitch South Africa: If they were called chokers, Greame Smith dismissd any such notions with utter disdain today. New Zealand: The black horse. How much ever I want SA to win, nothing like a Aus-NZ final! Stats Reveal Another intersting thing I noted today. While everyone here want the likes of our "seniors" - Ganguly, Sachin, Sehwag out of our Indian Cricket Team (yes, the same Team India as it is more fashionably called these days) because of their age and the need of a fresh change, almost everyone forgot to see the top run gett...

There is no place like home! 2 days and I haven't got a clue how they flew off. I already feel I should have planned a longer vacation. Anyways, what I've been upto here? Nothing at all except eating, sleeping, eating and sleeping. And ofcourse, the television, which somehow is never short of interesting offerings inspite of the cable wallah not kind towards my requests to improve the reception of Star Movies and HBO . A quick scan of my television watching during the last 48 hours: I'll have to say, there simply can not be a more ridiculous channel than AajTak . Just a few hours ago, they ran a detailed story on how Richard Gere hugged and kissed Shilpa Shetty (now Big Brother fame) on stage for some AIDS awareness program . The newsreader was all bashing Richard Gere on how this is in stark contrast to his Dalai-Lama-disciple image that we Indians have and how this is so against Indian culture (or mentality?) Bull shit. If these news channel guys want to do moral poli...

An apple can save your life! Apparently, a US soldier somewhere in Iraq (where else would you find them) was hit in the left chest when an insurgent opened fire on him. Fortunately, his iPod was in his jacket pocket which slowed the bullet down enough that it did not completely penetrate his body armor! Check out this picture of the Life saving iPod.

"How long is half a second? In the context of a mobile user interface, it can be long enough to cripple the experience and make the difference between a converting a user from a casual browser to a dedicated customer." This wonderful piece highlights how latency in Mobile interfaces is such a big Usability issue. This half a second delay has been the major undoing on the proliferation of mobile based applications. What a consumer looks for is an intuitive + quick interface that responds lightning fast. How the service providers and the developer network manages that with the device OS, Processor or the memory issue isn't of concern to him, and justifiably so. Unfortunately, all mobile applications we come across somehow haven't been able to get the UX right, and it would be interesting to see how and when are we able to come up with something to address this issue. Talking of usable interfaces, I just came across a couple of mobile widget platforms: The first one wa...

Just saw these weird mastheads on Technorati. Anyone What's with these??? haterTonic, heartTonic, Threaticon, niceThroat, Tonierchat and so on...