Great article about Overpriced products

I read this fantastic article on MSN today about about 6 products that are very highly priced. The article is an eye-opener and the author has picked up products from our everyday life and provided amazing facts and figures. The most striking point for me in the article is the comparison between the cost of printer ink Vs the cost of blood. After reading this article, I will be always think twice before hitting the Print button!

And I am not buying any more popcorn at the movies :)

Spreadsheets for Risk Management - NO!

My company has been working on Risk Management products for over a year and I am part of that team. We have been interacting with our clients and it surprises me to see many companies still use Excel as their risk management software. That prompted me to pen down a white paper listing the dangers of using spreadsheets for Risk Management and why well designed automated systems are a much better option. You can read the white paper online of download it here.

I look forward to your comments and thoughts.

The debate over proposed Ground Zero mosque

I have been following the proposed Ground Zero mosque debate that has been going for the last few months. It has been quite fascinating to hear the "fors" and the "againsts" over the issue. Almost everybody is into this debate and I thought to pen down my thoughts on this.

I am all for freedom of religion and believe that each individual has the right to practice any religion he chooses. Similarly, there should be no restrictions on where religious institutions should be built. On those lines, I support the proposed mosque site 2 blocks from the Ground Zero. I believe that the opponents only strengthen the promoters resolve of building the mosque since it seems to be a threat to their religion. Islam is a major religion followed by over a billion people around the world.It is only a small fraction of radicals that have brought all the negative press for the religion.

Coming back to the mosque site, if the site is legal and a religious structure construction is permitted by the local bodies, I do not have any problems with it. However, it would be prudent for the mosque promoters to move the mosque a little farther away from Ground Zero. Ground Zero is a permanent scar which brings back a lot of pain and suffering. It is a fact that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by radical Muslims and 9/11 is not a very distant event. 9/11 did change lives for a lot of people for the worse, including Muslims. To build a religious structure so close to it will very surely offend a few. The promoters should understand that by moving the religious center site, they will portray Islam as the greater religion. They will send out a clear signal that they respect the sentiments of people, even a handful of them. They will do more good for their religion as compared to what they are doing now by being adamant about building the mosque so close to the site of the tragedy. A religious site does not need to be in the best of locations to attract people. So, even if the proposed mosque is moved by 10 blocks, firstly, they would silence almost all of their opponents, secondly, they will showcase the tolerance of Islam and thirdly, they will be able to carry out their daily activities in peace.

America is a great country that has bestowed upon its citizens the freedom to practice any religion and follow any tradition. However, it is the responsibility of each individual to not misuse this freedom and be sympathetic to others.

Why can't all govt depts be like NJ DMV??

I stay in NJ and had to get my vehicle inspected. I decided to try one of the State's inspection facilities. Initially I was a little uncertain about using the State's facility, usual hesitance towards govt services, but still decided to give it a try.
I was very impressed by their online services. The website was very informative and it clearly spelled out what documents are required and general information about the process. The best feature, hands down, was the way one could check the wait queue. In all their inspection facilities they have installed cameras which take a picture of the wait lines and update the website periodically. Check it out here. I found this very cool and extremely helpful.
Based on the status from the pictures, I planned my trip there. Once I was at the facility, I found it quite well marked and had no problems getting in the correct line. The staff was very cordial and polite and patiently answered a few questions I had. They then took the car and inspected it and within five minutes, I had the car back, with the car inspected and good to go for another 2 years.
The whole process was very simple and pretty well managed.

Kudos to the NJ DMV!

Google imitating Bing?

I was surprised today morning when I browsed to google.com and saw a background image.



The first thought that cams to my mind was "Is Google trying to imitate Bing?". Bing changes the background image of their page daily and puts up very pleasant background images. It also adds some hot spots on their images that tell you about the image and link to more informative pages using their search. I was not sure that Google would try to imitate Microsoft for such a minuscule thing. I tried searching on why Google is trying to do that, but could not find any useful information. Then I looked up on how users find Bing's background image idea. I found that a lot of people found it useful and loved to see images of vastly varied spectrum daily. Many had commented that they found it very useful and was kind of their daily dose of general knowledge.
The only difference I found on the google home page was that you could upload an image to set as a background. The link is easy to miss, its on the bottom left of the page. That idea is also not new, I was able to do the same and much more on iGoogle.com using themes.
I love the Google Doodles, they are informative and innovative and eagerly wait for the next one. But as far as this background image, I am kind of disappointed and miss the plain simple google home page.

The Problem with Yahoo Answers!

Yahoo Answers is a great platform for people to ask and find answers to their questions. It is also a great knowledge base and a continuously enriching one. Barring a few instances, the answer quality is very good and to the point. The answers are also very genuine because there is a huge community of users who rate and select top answers. It also helps users to anonymously connect to other users who can be subject matter experts and get guidance from them. There are no fancy widgets or apps, just a simple question/answer model and users get rewarded for contributing. Its a perfect example of user-driven content and information.

After using Yahoo Answers for a while, I have been noticing that it has started being (mis)used by the young children who are putting in their entire homework on Answers and are rewarding other users who give them complete solutions. Check out the Science and Mathematics category and you can easily find tons of questions posted by users asking for complete solutions with a promise of giving away points for total solutions. I think its totally acceptable if children use it to resolve problems where they are stuck or to get explanations on issues they seem to struggle with, but putting in no effort and posting questions should be totally stopped.

I understand its technically almost impossible to remove questions of these types automatically and putting human reviewers will take the entire shine off Yahoo Answers! After giving it a serious thought, I feel a possible solutions could be to generate a lot of awareness among users about this problem and allow for reporting such type of questions even after they have been resolved. And if the reporting threshold has been reached, the user who asked the question as well as the one who answered it should be warned and docked off some points. I know this will be very controversial and will generate a lot of string opinions, but i think in the long run, we owe it to the school going children.

Framed by police

There is very little one can do when authorities turn against you and you are not even given a chance to explain.

I watched this video "Framed by police, youth decided to end his life" a few days back and it brought tears to my eyes. The video shows how few young men, going on with their routine lives are suddenly and unexpectedly hit by a bolt of suspicion that destroys their life as well as that of their families. They are falsely implicated of having links with terrorists and are arrested and tortured. Its shameful and disgraceful for the police that they indict people without strong evidence or proof. They should have investigated in some detail before creating a fake case against them. I totally understand that in today's time police are under great pressure to prevent and solve terror related crimes, but they need to also think that any wrong arrest basically destroys a life and devastates those of their loved ones. Investigative agencies need to be a bit more careful.

The only good thing about this whole episode is that atleast the judiciary is doing their job well even though they take their own time. Another aspect is how we, the common people tend to discard or distance ourselves from people who are under suspicion without trying to find out if the person is really guilty or not. We are quick to form opinions and stick to them even when they are wrong.

I hope the affected youth get their pride back and are able to find good jobs and have a better life for them and their families. God, please give them a lot of good luck!

The upcoming threat to Google - iAd

Few days back I wrote about the iAd program from Apple. I truly believe that it will redefine the concept of online advertising. According to a survey in 2009, there are around 4.4 billion mobile phone users as compared to around 1.5 billion Internet users. Of the 4.4 billion, 1.8 billion are smart phone users. The rate at which smart phone users are growing is alarming and much faster than Internet users. More are more people are today browsing the Internet over mobile phones and more and more companies are developing custom mobile apps. This will automatically lead to a shift from desktop based online advertising to mobile based advertising. What Google did with online advertising, Apple plans to do in the mobile world. They have the biggest share in smart phone market and it will continue to grow as they launch the iPad.
Almost all of Google's revenues come from selling online ads. To maintain their dominant position, Google needs to quickly devise a totally new program for the mobile platform and counter the threat from iAd. I tried their current mobile advertising solution, but its falls quite short of expectations if You have used their desktop based advertising solutions. Google has a good mobile platform of their own - Android, and that's growing slowly but steadily and they can use that to leverage their mobile advertising. The stakes in this field are very high and although I am a big fan of Google products, I have a feeling that Apple might dislodge their dominance in online advertising in the years to come.

iAd - The Game Changer in Advertising

On April 8th 2010, Steve Jobs made another jaw dropping presentation on the iPhone platform and its new features at the Apple's iPhone OS 4 event. I was amazed at the rate with which new apps are being developed and more amazingly the rate at which people are downloading and using them. All the new features specially multi-tasking, VoIP and folders are great and will make iPhone platform even better, but the biggest one that caught my eye is iAd. Check out the slides at 10:49AM and 10:50AM. Assuming Steve is giving the correct data the three slides that show the numbers game are very very powerful. They show the enormous opportunity that lies in front of advertisers to use the iPhone platform as the next gen in online advertising. It provides them with a perfect platform for targetted and focused advertising. I feel it is much more commanding than web/Internet advertising since in case of mobile advt, the advertisers can actually identify their users. They can know about their habits, usage patterns, geo-locations and routines by placing their ads on specific apps. These ads will also have a better ROI since the platform they run on will be with the users all the time, Internet ads cannot boast of that. The only problem I have with iAd is that is is tied to the iPhone OS. I would have loved it to be platform agnostic so that one could utilize it on Blackberry's or Palm OS or Windows Mobile. But going by Apple's history, that would have been a total departure from their strategy of having everything Apple :)
But overall, I give it a big thumbs up and am sure that advertisers will be quick to grab this huge marketing opportunity.

We the engineers

A group of managers are given an assignment to measure the height of a flagpole. So they go out to the flagpole with ladders and tape measures, and they're falling off the ladders and dropping the tape measures. The whole thing is just a mess.

An engineer comes along and sees what they're trying to do, walks over, pulls the flagpole out of the ground, lays it flat, measures it from end to end, gives the measurement to one of the managers and walks away.

After the engineer has gone, one manager turns to another and laughs: "Isn't that just like an engineer? We're looking for the height and he gives us the length!"

The Day India Burned

Last weekend I watched a BBC documentary on India's Partition titled "The Day India Burned" on YouTube. I was deeply touched and disturbed on the plight of people on all sides(Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs). The partition is considered as on of the largest human migrations, and the number varies from 12.5 million to 20 million. The number of deaths is between 200 thousand to over a million. Apart from these, millions were looted, women raped, people beaten up and forced conversions. So many people got affected because of the decision of few. And its a shame on those few for not planning on such a mammoth event and not taking care of the people they said they were fighting for. Also, it is a disgrace for the British empire for not thinking through on the partition and preparing a blue-print for it. A few more months of their troop deployment could have saved so many innocent lives.

At the same time, its bizarre to imagine what got into people's mind when they started this pandemonium. They went about committing these crimes in their neighborhood, their community, their cities. Shame to the leaders, political and religious, from both sides, who did not take enough actions to minimise the chaos.

Imagine being born in those times, not knowing whether you will live to see another tomorrow, enmity prevalent all over the streets, seeing your loved ones going through pain or all your wealth and materials being looted or burned in front of helpless you . How painful and difficult would it have been to leave your native place and move to a new one and in all probability being empty handed.

I am so lucky to have not seen any of the partition horrors and being born in a free democracy. I thank my previous generations to have come out of revulsion and building a strong and progressive nation.

How Each One Of Us Can Change The World

The title of this blog is borrowed from the book "Giving" by Bill Clinton. I just finished reading it and it has been a fantastic read. I am not qualified enough to write a review for a book, so please dont consider this post as one. I decided to write about this book since I feel each one of us should read it. The book is aptly titled "Giving". Bill talks about how each one of us with whatever resources we have, can make a positive contribution towards hundreds and thousands of causes that might be close to our heart. In the book he highlights a lot of causes including HIV/AIDS treatment, child education, women empowerment, environment improvement, community tutoring, general hygiene, old age support and many more. Alongwith each of these, he also gives many examples on how common people like you and me have made significant impact and continued to contribute against all odds. I salute each one of those mentioned and otherwise for their dedication that is making the world a better place to live in. The book also mentions certain "do's" and "dont's" when contributing so that they can have the maximum bearing. After reading the book, I also realized that there are so many in need and there are so many areas we can contribute, we are lucky to be in a position to give. It doesn't matter how small or big our contribution is, what really matters is that we do.
I thank and congratulate Bill Clinton for writing a great eye-opener and his own personal efforts including the Clinton foundation for lots of positive contributions to the society. I would end by qouting him "We all have the capacity to do great things".

Cool features of Bing Search

After using Bing alongside Google for more than a month now, I have had a liking for few of Bing's feature and would like to see something similar in Google.

Bing textual Search:
Summary - I like to be able to see a concise view of a search result page that helps me to decide whether or not that particular search result is useful or not.
Additional Information on the left column - I like the way Bing picks up the search term and gets helpful links that include reference articles, related terms, additional insights into searches and so on. These help to narrow down searches and get better results.

Bing images search:
Although most of the options to filter and narrow down the results are similar to Google, I love the way it pulls up a list of "Related People" if you search for a person or a list of attractions, tourism info, maps, weather, etc, if you search for a place, or a list of reviews, prices, deals, etc. when you search for a product. I also like to be able to just pull the vertical scroller for more images and not having to click page numbers to go to the next set of results.

Bing video search:
The short preview feature when you hover your mouse over the video seems to be helpful, but the result quality is not as good as Google's video search, which is what is the most important factor when I search.

Bing Shopping:
Although I find the shopping results page a little too cluttered in Bing as compared to Google, I feel that the Category feature on the left column is slightly better in Bing that Google.

These are a few features I think really make Bing sleeker that Google in terms of user interaction, however when it comes down to the search results quality, Bing needs to catch up. Google's search algorithms seems to be better in a few areas. However, Bing engineers, just to underscore, it does not matter how many search results are pulled up(I notice that Google almost everytime pulls up 20 to 30 times the number Bing gets), its Google's results' quality that beats Bing's seldom.

Should I Bing or continue Googling

It has been quite a while since Bing(Live), the search engine from Microsoft has been launched and many of you reading this would be wondering as to why am I comparing Bing to Google after such a long time. I wanted to use Bing extensively before even trying to compare it with Google. Google for me, has been THE search engine from the start. I did try Alta Vista, Ask, Yahoo Search but after a couple of searches then, I knew that I had to go to Google for all my web related searches.

After the huge hype sorrounding the launch of Bing, I decided to try it out. I made Google as my benchmark since I was comparing Bing against Google. I started off going with Bings punchline - "The Decision Engine". I couldnt figure out as to why MS calls Bing a decision engine. All of my searches just gave me search results. I typed in specific questions, but still search results. Maybe, I just dont get the whole concept of the decision engine!

My searches for specific terms like "Liz Hurley", "vancouver 2010", "super bowl", "nikon d90", etc. returned excellent results. As compared to Google, Bing returned more refined search reults on the search page directly rather than having to click on the results and figuring out myself. Moving on to my more generic searhes that included "best blogging sites", "mta schedule", "health care summit", etc. I found that Bing performed just about OK. Some of my searches returned almost similar results to what Google did. Others were not as good. Also when I searched for current news or events, I realized Google had a much broader base and that Google crawlers were made to work much harder. Google also seems to have an upper hand when it comes to searching within Blogs.

Now comes the part that impressed me the most. Type in terms like "risotto recipes", "flight tracker", "flight to sfo from nyc", "movie listing" or "weather 07306" . These queries returned answers that were relevant to what I was looking for. I did not have to look among the search results to locate my answer. Bing is hands down much more superior to Google in these kind of searches. A couple of other neat features that I liked about Bing were the "summary" feature that lets you get more information about a specific result and the "related searches" that come up on the left margin.

Overall, there are few areas where Bing does impress and beats Google, however overall I am a little disappointed that with all the engineering prowess of Microsoft, they have failed to raise the bar on web based textual searches. It seems that I will stick with Google and conintue Googling, ofcourse Bing once in a while!

Apple proposing Microsoft

News came out a couple of weeks back about Apple and Microsoft possibly entering into a wedlock. Wow, that will be something to watch and watching most closely will be Google.
Three big technological competing companies, all entering into different arrangements to be the bigger one by taking the help of each other. Apple wanted Google as the default search engine, maps application and video content for its revolutionary iPhone. Google needed that alliance to push for more advertising revenues from search. Microsoft was sitting in a corner and wondering what to do. They came out with Bing, although it did not get a lot of traction. Meanwhile Google decided to enter the hugely popular mobile market. Not only did they come out with an open-source operating system(Android) for mobile devices, they launched their own mobile phone - Nexus One. Apple sees it as a big threat to their iPhone market. Seriously its Nexus One that can really disrupt iPhone's success. Apple has also realized that it has been making Google richer by continuing with them for the iPhone's search tool. They plan to put a stop on this revenue channel by dumping Google and shaking hands with their traditional rival Microsoft and use Bing as their default search engine. Good news for Microsoft. However, it still needs to be seen whether Bing will be popular among users. Till date, it has only been able to capture 6%-7% of web search market. This alliance might be a good test to judge Microsoft's search capabilities.
Among all this dynamics, one thing that should not be forgotten by these companies is that their rivalry should not affect their users, any wrong move and we, the users would migrate.

"Mis"Using Search Engines

Have we become too much dependent on web search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask? The reason I ask this question is to think about all the different kind of queries we type in the search boxes of these search engines.
I am a big user of search engines, and had it been not for the search engines, read Google, I would not have been hooked to the Internet. I use search engines, read Google, for almost all kinds of queries I have. Be it product comparison or upcoming movies, weather updates or web development related questions, traffic directions to news updates, word meanings or even how to make money on Internet, I dig into the Internet using search engines. How else? There is so much "free for all" wealth on the Internet and the only way to grab it is via the search engines. I wonder should we, all Internet users, not honor the Larry Page's and Sergey Brin's of the world for giving the common man access to this wealth and the ability to fully utilize the power of the Internet.
However, off late, I have started to realize that we are in some way misusing these search engines too. Do i need to type in Yahoo in the search box to reach yahoo.com when I know the web address of yahoo? Or for that matter, can i not just type gmail.com on the browsers address bar rather than typing gmail in the search box, its just a question of 4 more characters (.com). I think its the mental attitude that forces me to go via the search engine to any website I want to go to. Should I not relieve the search engines for these "unnecessary" searches.
As the first step to get rid of the "search-engine" obsession, I decided to remove Google as my default web page. Next was to use the browsers built in Favorites or Bookmarks feature. I tagged my most frequently visited websites for emails, news, weather, sports updates, dictionary sites and other utility websites. I have also started to use the search bar embedded in my browsers to perform searches rather than visiting the search engines home page. I still use the search engines a lot but now i restrict myself to using them only when required. I also phrase my search query better before I just type in the box and click "Search".
The reason I decided to better utilize the search engines was to reduce unnecessary search look-ups, optimize Internet bandwidth usage, reduce hardware wastage and more importantly to conserve energy. I know,its petty, but I know in the long run, it will add up and with lots of Internet users deciding to use search engines optimally, I am pretty sure it will help.
I know you have reached this blog via a search engine and I cant help but congratulate you on using the search engine optimally this time :)

Folks with a 9 to 5 job

Here's a little food for thought for all those, including me, who work 8 hours daily on a 9 to 5 job. This article calculates the number of hours and the percentage of time we work (for what we are paid) in a year.

Lets work out the actual number of "work" days in a year. To get that number lets add up the days when we don't work. Starting with the weekends (52 Saturdays and 52 Sundays), our counter for "non-work" days jumps to 104. We do get another 12 days of paid vacation, so we are at 116 on the "non-work" days counter. Of course we also need to add 2 personal days and 3 sick days, to get to 121. Aah, I almost forget, we need to add another 8 national holidays given to us by our beloved employer. So, our "non-work" days add up to around 129 days in a year.

A year has 365 days. Lets get the "non-work" days out of this number and we are left with 236 days.

Each of the 236 days has 24 hours, and we are working (supposedly) for 8 hours. So, in terms of number of "work-hours" in a year we are putting in a staggering 1888 hours each year. Impressive isn't it!

Well, only till the time we calculate the total number of hours in a year - 365 * 24 = 8760

What?? Yeah, its true, we put in 1888 hours of the available 8760 into work each year OR to put it in another way, we work for only 21% of our available time.
The number makes for an interesting comparison with the average time spent sleeping (7 hours a day) - 2555 hours/year - 29%.

When I did this calculation, I was flabbergasted and vowed to work more. I will let you know how much more have I been working in coming months!