Nice Concept - Nest Rest: Huge Hanging Birdhouse

Tree house meets bird house, with a dash of hammock thrown into the mix. While it is not large enough to house the amenities of a true tree home, it is certainly a step up from a simple outdoor couch or recliner – and can be hung at a variety of heights.

Eco Warriors

Today's Times of India has an interesting article on people who try to do their bit to preserve the environment in innovative ways. Excerpts.

Happiness in Innerwear
Quite hooked to the idea of ayur vastra, former journalist Rajiv Rai Sachdev launched his organic range of clothes that contain extracts of neem, basil leaves and flecks of silver to keep the wearer safe from bacterial infections. Based on the age-old principles of natural healing by improving the body’s aura and balancing of chakras, Sachdev’s clothing range, including underwear are designed to boost the body’s natural resistance and healing powers. Says Sachdev, “Demand from the US and Europe is huge, but sadly, in my own country, people spend huge amounts on cosmetics and medicines, if only they realised that wearing the right fabric would solve half the problems.”

Cool Pool
While battling the concrete jungle to reach office in his friends’ cars, Bangalore based software developer Vipul Kasera realised how smooth and carbon-free his city would be if people decided car pool. Thus Commute Easy, an online car pool campaign, was launched three years ago. Kasera today has 15,000 users in Bangalore itself who look for car pool services. He has tied up with corporate offices and schools, wherein professionals and children from the same locality can commute together.

Merry Potter
Mansukh Prajapati, a clay potter from Gujarat, invented a first-of-a-kind refrigerator that is made out of terracotta, works without electricity, costs around Rs 2,500! Called Mitti Cool, it keeps food, vegetables, even milk, fresh for days. Prajapati’s bigger success is his Rs 45 nonstick frying pan made of clay. A crusader for awareness, Prajapati has enriched the world with common-sense products.

10 years of life aboard International Space Station -The Hindu

Next week, Nasa will commemorate 10 years of life on the space station (the first residents arrived on 2 November 2000), but fewer than 200 people have first-hand knowledge of life on board. The longer the stint, the closer these veterans come to perfecting the art of life in freefall.

There is a subtle art to moving around without crashing into anything — or, more annoyingly, others — knocking computers, equipment and other objects off the walls to which they are attached with Velcro pads. The ability to form a mental map of the space station — and then rotate it in 3D to suit your perspective — is a priceless skill for an astronaut.

Each of the crew has a closet-like cabin where they can hook a sleeping bag to the wall and settle down for the night. Some strap pillows to their heads to make it feel more like lying down. Unsurprisingly, falling asleep can take some getting used to. Just as you are nodding off, you can feel as though you've fallen off a 10—storey building. One Russian crew member is renowned for doing without a sleeping bag and falling asleep wherever he ends the day.

Tim Brown on creativity and play

Future Indian Internet Users

Even though right now only 1% of mobile phone users are using the Internet. India is going to be different than what we’ve seen in mature markets but also in emerging markets. It’s going to be predominantly a mobile experience since the PC penetration is low compared to mobile.

The report also talks about the language and literacy barriers -Global sites that want to keep the edge they already have in India, compared to some other emerging markets, will have to Indianize more than they have so far.

An interesting insight that the report said about 73% of people who go online in India spend time job hunting and the other thing that’s big there is matrimonial which is a very unique Indian thing.

Making money from Indians on the Internet? That’s an even harder proposition. Internet users are much more likely to pay for online services than for content though Indian and Indonesian users are quite reluctant to pay at all, said the report.

Read the full report

Must Watch Film - Udaan

Udaan is one of the best films I have relished in recent times. One of the few films which leaves a lasting impression... The film absorbed me completely thanks to its sensitive and gripping storyline, impressive performances and music that just gels too well with the film.

And this is one of my first 'original' post :p

Design without Designers by Don Norman

Two Types of Innovation: Incremental Improvements and New Concepts
In design - and almost all innovation, for that matter—there are at least two distinct forms. One is incremental improvement. The manufacturing of products, companies assume that unit costs will continually decrease through continual, incremental improvements. This is what companies call "their cash cow": a product line that requires very little new development cost while being profitable year after year.

The second form of design is what is generally taught in design, engineering and MBA courses on "breakthrough product innovation." Here is where new concepts get invented, new products defined, and new businesses formed. This is the fun part of innovation. As a result, it is the arena that most designers and inventors wish to inhabit. But the risks are great: most new innovations fail. Successful innovations can take decades to become accepted. As a result, the people who create the innovation are not necessarily the people who profit from it.

Both forms of innovation are necessary. The fight over data-driven design is misleading in that it uses the power of one method to deny the importance of the second. Data-driven design through testing is indeed effective at improving existing products. But where did the idea for the product come from in the first place? From someone's creative mind. Testing is effective at enhancing an idea, but creative designers and inventors are required to come up with the idea.

Design without designers? Those who dislike the ambiguity and uncertainty of human judgments, with its uncertain track record and contradictory statements will try to abolish the human element in favor of the certainty that numbers and data appear to offer. But those who want the big gains that creative judgment can produce will follow their own judgment. The first case will bring about the small, continual improvements that have contributed greatly to the increased productivity and lowering of costs of our technologies. The second case will be rewarded with great failures and occasional great success. But those great successes will transform the world.

Transitions, Wow moments & Endings

Ever read a great book? What do you remember about it? Maybe a few dramatic moments, some wild story twists, and most definitely the ending. Your product is just like a book. You’re telling a story to your customers and they’ll remember only a select few moments from what you tell them. What are these moments?

Transitions
You know how when you type a city into Google Earth and watch the globe spin around to the country it is in and then zoom into the city? That transition is what you probably mentioned to others when you first described the app.

‘Wow!’ moments

Remember the first time you used Picasa? The first promise Picasa had was: “Find all the photos you forgot you had.” The first run experience delivered exactly that for a disorganized user like me. I rediscovered all sorts of ‘lost’ photos, like an unexpected walk down memory lane.

Endings
● Good ending: You click Google Docs Save and Close button and know that: “Certainty I won’t lose my doc!”
● Bad ending: You click the Close button on a cloud app doc and are not sure if your changes were saved.

Full article here

Apple's problem: Too much cash

Apple Inc Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer faces a dilemma that perhaps every finance chief wishes to have: obscene amounts of cash and nowhere to put it.

The iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac computer maker has accumulated a cash pile that totals nearly $46 billion, the biggest cash hoard among U.S. tech companies and equivalent to one-fifth of Apple's market capitalization.

And yet, due to an ultra-conservative investment strategy and low interest rates, that cash is earning next to nothing for Apple, which rarely makes acquisitions and does not pay a regular dividend or buy back stock. Analysts say Apple's near-death experience in the 1990s helps explain why it likes to remain liquid by investing in safe but low-yielding U.S. Treasury and agency debt.

Oppenheimer's cautious approach dates from his time at Automatic Data Processing Inc, but Apple's conservatism is also driven by Chief Executive Steve Jobs.

Both Jobs, 55, and Oppenheimer, 47, subscribe to the Silicon Valley maxim that "only the paranoid survive," he said.

They remember the dark days when Apple was struggling to stay alive and had to lay off thousands to cut costs. When Oppenheimer joined the company in 1996 as its controller for the Americas, a series of bad management decisions had eroded profits and sent its share price diving to less than $5.

Things got so bad that one of the first things Jobs did when he returned to Apple was take a lifeline in the form of a $150 million investment from Microsoft Corp in 1997.

Although Apple is famous for innovation, research and development costs only account for 3 percent of revenue - far lower than at Microsoft and Cisco Systems Inc, due in part to Apple's narrow product portfolio.

Apple does not appear to pay especially high salaries, either. According to career website glassdoor.com, which relies on anonymous users sharing their salary data, an Apple software engineer earns around $100,000 per year, roughly the same as engineers at Google Inc.

While many top tech companies are awash in cash, unlike Apple, they tend to put excess cash to use. For example, Intel Corp and Microsoft pay dividends; Cisco and International Business Machines Corp buy back big chunks of stock; and Hewlett-Packard Co and Oracle Corp are serial acquirers.Apple makes few acquisitions because it develops products internally, and pays little for what it does buy.

Full article here

The Perils of 3rd Party APIs -ReadWriteWeb

In 2006, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake coined the term "BizDev 2.0" when looking at the phenomenon of supplying commercial API keys to startup partners. Said Fake, traditional business development meant "trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. [It's] much, much better this way!" Three years later, many are finding that while APIs are great biz dev tools for the larger provider, startups can often suffer under the thumb of their platform keepers.

In July 2008, unbeknownst to Ilan, Google was about to change its YouTube terms of service. According to the startup entrepreneur and father of two, Ilan found himself in a predicament. He had originally planned to find sponsorship for his community of curated toddler-appropriate YouTube videos; however, the new YouTube ToS restricted commercial use and his ability to monetize. In one fell swoop from the API provider, his entire business model and livelihood changed. Unwilling to violate the new terms, Ilan began work on a subscription model.

You never believe your home is going to be damaged by an earthquake, but for some it happens. If you build on a platform you don't control, is this akin to laying your foundation on a fault line? If you've got suggestions on how to mitigate this type of risk, let us know in the comments below.

#Full article here

Great stories... For us developers is always great to remember from time to time who is the big fish. Personally I try to rely the minimum in 3rd parties, and sometimes to have different suppliers for the same type of data (e.g. reverse geo coding, video.)...
Posted by: Hugo Romano Author Profile Page | December 29, 2009 3:21 PM

Sort of scratching my head at this article. YouTube is made out to be a villain due to the changing of their policies, which is their prerogative to do. Their distribution of API keys isn't to facilitate someone's short-sighted business plan but to bring eyeballs to YouTube's hosted content for their advertising purposes.
Posted by: Matt Perrin | December 29, 2009 4:29 PM

You can't innovate like Apple!

Really insightful article. Some excerpts below. Full article here.

When what you teach and develop every day has the title “Innovation” attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without question, nearly everyone believes the equation Apple = Innovation is a fundamental truth. Discover what makes them different. By Alain Breillatt.

Apple “wraps great ideas inside great ideas,” and the whole experience is linked as the present concept traces concentric circles from the core outward. Apple’s OS X operating system is the present waiting inside its sleek, beautiful hardware; its hardware is the present, artfully unveiled from inside the gorgeous box; the box is the present, waiting for your sticky little hands inside its museum-like Apple stores.

Pixel-perfect mockups are critical. This is hard work and requires an enormous amount of time, but is necessary to give the complete feeling for the entire product. There is no “Lorem Ipsum” used as filler for content, either. At least one of the senior managers refuses to look at any mockups that contain such “Greek” filler. Doing this detailed mockup removes all ambiguity—everyone knows and can see and critique how the final product looks. It also means you will not encounter interpretative changes by the designer or engineer after the review, as they are filling in the content—something I have seen happen time and time again. Ultimately, it means no one can feign surprise when they see the real thing.

10 to 3 to 1. Take the pixel-perfect approach and pile on top of it the requirement that Apple designers expect to design 10 different mockups of any new feature under consideration. And these are not just crappy mockups; they all represent different, but really good, implementations that are faithful to the product specifications.
Then, by using specified criteria, they narrow these 10 ideas down to three options, which the team spends months further developing…until they finally narrow down to the one final concept that truly represents their best work for production.
This approach is intended to offer enormous latitude for creativity that breaks past restrictions. But it also means they inherently plan to throw away 90% of the work they do. I don’t know many organizations for which this would be an acceptable ratio. Your CFO would probably declare, “All I see is money going down the drain.” This is a major reason why I say you can’t innovate like Apple.

Paired design meetings. Every week, the teams of engineers and designers get together for two complementary meetings.

1. Apple does not do market research. This is straight from Jobs’ mouth: We do no market research. They scoff at the notion of target markets, and they don’t conduct focus groups. Why? Because everything Apple designs is based on Jobs’ and his team’s perceptions of what they think is cool.
“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’’’

2. Apple has a very small team who designs their major products. Look at Ive and his team of a dozen to 20 designers who are the brains behind the genius products that Apple has delivered to the market since the iMac back in 1998.

3. Apple owns their entire system. They are completely independent of reliance on anyone else to provide inputs to the design and development of their products. They own the OS, they own the software, and they own the hardware.

4. Apple focuses on a select group of products. Apple acts like a small boutique and develops beautiful, artistic products in a manner that makes it very difficult to scale up to broad and extensive product lines. Part of this is due to the level of attention to detail provided by their small teams of designers and engineers. To think that a multi-billion dollar company only has 30 major products is astounding, because their neighbors at that level of revenues have thousands of products.

5. Apple has a maniacal focus on perfection. They say Jobs had the marble for the floor at the New York Apple store shipped to California first so he could examine the veins. He also complained about the chamfer radius on the plastic case of an early prototype of the Macintosh.

So is it possible for you to innovate like Apple?

So given all this, what is a company to do if they want to innovate like Apple? First, forget about it unless you are willing to invest significantly and heavily to establish a culture of innovation like Apple’s. Because it’s not just about copying Apple’s approach and procedures. The vast majority of executives who say, “I want to be just like Apple,” have no idea what it really takes to achieve that level of success. What they’re saying is they want to be adored by their customers, they want to launch sexy products that cause the press to fall all over themselves, and they want to experience incredible financial growth. But they generally want to do it on the cheap.

You need to know your customer and your market.
Jobs and team can get away with not doing market research, identifying target markets, or going out and talking with customers because of the markets they play in and the cult-like customers who adore them. Most technology companies also believe they can get away with this—and most technology companies get it wrong.
Because you’re not Apple and you are likely not selling a similar set of products, you must do research to understand the customer. And, while I’m sure Jobs says he doesn’t do research, it’s pretty clear that his team goes out to thoroughly study behaviors and interests of those they think will be their early adopters. Call it talking to friends and family; but, honestly, you know that these guys live by immersing themselves in the hip culture of music, video, mobile, and computing.

You need the right people, and you need to reward them.
The designers at Apple are paid 50% more than their counterparts at other organizations. These designers aren’t working at Apple simply because they’re paid more. They stay at Apple because of the amazing things they get to do there. Rewards are about salary and benefits, but they are also about recognition and being able to do satisfying work that challenges the mind and allows the creative muscles to stretch.

8 months and not a single post...

...is this what Corporate life does to you?

Nitendo Wii becomes top-selling video game

Nintendo Wii became the highest selling game console in USA. Now this is a proof of how innovation has made it so popular. And technologically, the console uses simple motion sensors and group-oriented games!

Oil cost fuels boom in online classes -Economic Times

I never imagined rising fuel costs could lead to students enrolling in online classes instead of attending classroom!

Sketching in Code: Magic of Prototyping -A List Apart

One of the obvious developments in the web application world that has made prototyping approaches more attractive has been the rise of Ajax and rich internet applications (RIAs).With the rise of Ajax however, wireframes started to come up short. When we leave the world of page-based interactions, how do you document all but the simplest interaction? Even with a single interactive element on a web page, we often have to generate multiple wireframes or use extensive annotation to convey the different possible states. When there are multiple, possibly mutually interacting elements on the same page, the problem is exacerbated. Even when we do manage to convey all the possible states, we lose a sense of timing.

the situation gets worse when we start to consider not just design, but development as well. Development involving Ajax and RIAs requires closer communication between developers and designers, and this communication often has to be iterative. The only way to convey this facet of interactive applications is through an interactive prototype.

Another clear win is in presentations to decision makers. Prototypes can help you sell a decision that is fundamentally or radically different from the client’s current solution or application. The traditional approach is to create a compelling story and a riveting PowerPoint presentation, and spend a day arguing for the wisdom of your approach.

Finally, let’s not forget the users. Just as we, in our role as designers and developers, can’t always foresee the implications of our decisions until we see them played out in front of us, users are governed by the same constraints. Users can request features they “need” only to discover when using the new application that the feature in question was not actually helpful. Putting interactive prototypes in front of users is a great way to get effective and accurate input.

GTA 4 is the most expensive game: 429 crores!

Rockstar's GTA 4 is the most expensive game made at a whooping cost of 429 crores and by a team of 1000 people. "It's like making a theatre production, a few movies and an album all to fit into one package," said Benzies, Rockstar president.

Ads in Mobile Games get an eye-popping 10.1% CTR -OmMalik

There’s a lot of VC money going into web-based, advertising-driven casual games, so here’s a wake-up call to investors: They may get better ROI with mobile phone-based gaming.

In 2006, mobile game platform Greystripe launched GameJump.com, a distribution site for free, ad-supported cellphone games; since then, consumers have downloaded over 65 million copies of Greystripe’s hundreds of titles. I’m looking at a lot of surprising numbers, but the most striking one to me is how gamers interact with the ads that appear before and after gameplay.

According to Greystripe, 10.1 percent of them click on the ads, a CTR that far outstrips web ads, which average some 1 percent to 2 percent. I strongly suspect at least some of these are accidental, fumble-thumb click-throughs, but even then, from the advertisers’ perspective, that’s not a bug, but a feature. And while mobile games are almost by definition casual, the demographic breakdown is markedly different from the web-based casual space, which is dominated by older women.

Can Microsoft win the Search Wars with Charity? - ReadWriteWeb

The Microsoft Live Search team announced today that it had expanded the company's Search and Give charitable searching program to more than 1 million eligible organizations. The program donates 1 cent for each search conducted by users to the school or charity of their choice up to 500 searches per month (or $60/year per person).

Can Microsoft possibly make a dent in Google's strangehold on the search market by offering up charitable donations as an incentive to search?


read more...

Importance of Short URLs in Newspapers -Labnol

It is interesting to see how newspaper sare trying to connect stories published in their print edition with online content. See this clip from Business Standard newspaper.



They add a short URL after the story that print subscriber can type in their browser and read related content on the web. And this approach may actually be helping companies drive traffic to their web properties. They work at least in the case of print advertisements that have URLs.

Graphic Processors grow up -GigaOm

Remember when CPU processor speeds were the driving force behind new computers? Going from a 500 MHz to 1 GHz then 2 GHz machine meant noticeable improvements. Then chip vendors started adding more cores. But for the style of computing consumers use today, it’s not about the CPU anymore.

It’s all about graphics processors. Thanks to today’s visually intensive style of computing, a good GPU can improve the user experience much better than a fast CPU. That’s why Intel is pushing graphics chips such as Larrabee, while AMD is set to unveil integrated chipsets that combine CPUs with GPUs, the result of its acquisition of ATI in 2009.

All PDF documents now run through the graphics processor, they told me, as does Google Earth and multiple other web applications. The same goes for PowerPoint slides, Word and other parts of Microsoft Office, starting with Office 2007. On Macs, the visual interface on the file system is handled through the GPU, which makes flipping through thousands of photos and movies much easier. On the consumer side, the rise of the such graphical interfaces helps people visually navigate through ever-increasing amounts of information.

GPUs are good for applications that require a processor to crunch a lot of data in parallel; they’re not good for step-by-step processes that require decision-making at each step.

As the large content vendors and even carriers try to deploy media content in multiple formats for televisions, personal computers and mobile phones over IP networks, they’ll either have to pay more for storing those multiple versions or pay for real-time transcoding, either in the data center or on the network. The increasing delivery of visual media over an IP network and the increasing amount of electronics data stored in corporate databases all represent an opportunity for GPUs that mean the chips might move out of the graphic niche.