Fon

Posted on by
0

Fon seems to be getting a lot of attention, what with the $22 million funding it received from Google & Sequoia among others. Instead of depending on municipal governments to get towns WiFi-ed, I like the grassroots level approach that Fon is taking in spreading WiFi. While I do wish Fon success, questions are being asked on why/how would anyone share their broadband accees, it being not-so-easy to install/use & most of all, it being at the mercy of ISPs & telcos. But Google betting on them (Google has its own interest in popularising free braodband) makes Fon a good bet. Let’s see how they fair.
More at Mark Evans blog.

…


Read More

Link Cloud # 2

Posted on by
0

Office 2.0: Photoshopping with PXN8. (via)Not quite as feature rich as any other Image Manipualtion software, but it’s fast. Really.

Hooray Web 2.0. Logos of web 2.0 companies compiled. (via)

A link cloud without a link to Guy Kawasaki? No way.

Tagging is really useful. From car chases (via) to using RFID tagging for milking Goats (via). Is it delicious?

…


Read More

Differences between podcasting and MSM

Posted on by
0

Loic lists the differences between podcasting and radio or TV. Actually its all the advantages of podcasts over MSM that he lists there. A good example of the power of podcasting is of Loic himself conducting various interviews from the World Economic Forum recently. And with ‘podcast’ being the word of the year 2005, we are yet to realise the full power of podcasts.
That said, it would do good to list some disadvantages & difficulties also. (I’m not a regular podcast listener, meaning I don’t subscribe to podcasts yet & I just listen to whatever I think is interesting. I don’t own a iPod & listen to podcasts in my laptop).
# Many podcasts are amateurish (blogs like this are too!) & the sound quality is often bad. If the podcast is conducted over phone, the quality detoriates even further.

…


Read More

Overbrain: Or can the web be “intelligent”?

Posted on by
0

I happened to read an editorial in Febrauray issue of Digit magazine the crux of which was “how can the web be intelligent”. And more importantly, the article started of with a familiar example – “Customers who bought this also bought” section in Amazon.com. When I first chanced upon Amazon a couple of years ago, I was drawn to this feature like how . It was a great place for book recommendations, and in many cases it worked out fine for me.

Back then the web wasn’t run by people, like it’s today. There weren’t any web-apps developer or a personal database which is, well, more personal than a website like Amazon. Then slowly blogs and tagging evolved. And to the relief of a lot of people, web-apps can be created in no time. It seems almost true that the internet contains information about anything under the stars.

…


Read More

Less is More, But people expect more..

Posted on by
0

For some people, less is sufficient, less has less confusion, less feels lighter and less is more-than-enough. I agree and for good reason: they’ve been trained to think that way. May be they advocate pareto’s 80-20 rule, just do the 20 percent – the less is more.

But most people want more, they need the extra one feature which may not wanted by most – they really want the long tail of features. The ‘more’ should not spoil the experience they had with ‘less’. Should not complicate the user experience introducing the more. What they really want is More features at the experience of Less – they expect more..

This drives to analogize with the classic example of longtail; Wal-mart and other major retailers don’t carry less popular albums (they carry less, the top 20 percent). The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going.

…


Read More