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".