As a child, i was fortunate enough to have parents who ensured i had the right toys to think the right way…..so Lego blocks, my Technic bucket, assorted ‘dinky toys’ (over 80 of them), a railway set, Atari & a ‘Media’ gaming set, tonnes of ‘101 in one’ gaming catridges (and the list goes on) kept me busy…with the advent of the PC…the PC became the new toy… i spent most of my college life playing NFS (something i’m not sure i’ve grown out of)…and once the PC / Mobile Phone combo arrived, they suddenly turned into all the toys I needed…

In college, i became a gaming enthusiast, and once i started working with Juno i discovered the joys of unix, daemons, servers & the internet. While the internet is by far my biggest toy / playground (i’m on the threshold of starting to develop a 3D Vision of it – Audience, Tech & Brand), the PC & Mobile combo isn’t far behind…. can we ever get enough of whats new….think of it …. Windows OS – Symbian OS, Office 2007, PC Apps – Java Apps – Symbian Apps, Web Services, Plugins for Firefox, Yahoo! Widgets, Microsoft Gadgets, Google Gadgets, Opera Widgets, Float’s Mobile Agent, Bluetooth controls, p2p, torrents, advanced charting tools for excel, Second Life, Comscore Stats, Forrester Data, eMarketer Info, NFS, Search Engines, Blog Tools, Wordpress, Rich Media, Web 2.0, rss, Syndication, and this list goes on and on and on…. could anything ever tear me away from a world centered around the PC / Internet?

Till two weeks back, i honestly believed i had access to most of the toys i wanted…(except my imaginary auto collection) and was relatively content with the toys i could afford…. and then, De introduced me to a concept called MindStorms NXT. Made by Lego, the guys i owe my sense of reasoning, logic and proportion to, this is the stuff dreams are made up of!

Mindstorms is about building Robots… not tiddly fink $0.02 robots….but robots with base functionalities that include Light Sensors, Touch Sensors, Sound Sensors, a programmable brain, intelligent robots that walk, have ultrasonic sensors to make the robot see, a 32bit microprocessor, 4 input / 3 output ports, USB / Bluetooth compliance, a speaker, display and the Lego Mindstorms NXT software which allows you to program your NXT and upload new programs via USB or Bluetooth connectivity. The software, comes with building instructions & programming guides to easily begin constructing and programming. As simple as Lego, as complex as Asimo; they might as well take rizla’s tagline – It’s what you make of it!

If the base functionality isn’t enough for you the software you could scale up to NXT Extreme!!!
Since Mindstorms is open-source you can use the SDK (Software Development Kit) which includes the NXT driver interface specifications and tools to create 3rd party programming environments.
The HDK (Hardware Development Kit) includes documentation and schematics for the NXT and all related sensors. This enables you to design and develop your own sensors and actuators that can interact with and control the NXT through various digital and analog interfaces.
And to top it off, the Bluetooth Developer Kit can be used to create apps for various Bluetooth devices to communicate with MINDSTORMS NXT robots.

So to put it in perspective, one of the simplest things you can do with your mindstorms, is have your Mindstorms crawl the room on voice command (via a bluetooth headset or voice) , spot a red object, send a photo of the object to your phone, send a command to play the file crisis.wav on your computer, then turn around and come back at 2x the pace. If the lights go out during this period, then move to the closest corner, turn on all its lights, camera and beam the video to a remote ftp server.

So what does Mindstorms cost …. you wouldnt believe it – USD 249!!!!!!
However, that is $240 more than i can afford at this time and so i’m setting up a paypal fund so that nice people like you can contribute a dollar each to help me live my dreams! (does that sound convincing enough … the paypal account you can pay into is gautham@maediratta.com … my top 10 donors get my inventions named after them and some emotional satisfaction and most importantly some ‘very good karma’)!

Here are some cool links:

The coolest Mindstorms applications : LEGO MINDSTORMS Hall of Fame
The team that built Mindstorms: Meet the MDP
NBC (Next Byte Codes) http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc
Microsoft Robotics studio http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics
HiTechnic Products http://www.hitechnic.com
Mindsensors.com http://www.mindsensors.com

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Thanks to Capitalism, Democracy AND the Internet we live in an age of opportunity, in an age where doubt is something you address on a Search Engine.
IMHO the assurance that the answer exists out there somewhere further fuels curiousity (doubt). Living in an age as complex/connected as ours, multiple cycles of doubt, resolution, discussion, further doubt, further investigation….leaves little time for existential concerns. While cogito still holds water, quaero quero holds the key to success.

PS – So much for my $0.02, De coined ‘cogito ergo tum’ – ‘I think therefore you are’ years ago! The latin-hindi probably has Descartes turning in his grave but i don’t think De ‘thought’ about it!

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I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Coutesy: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

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This video is about life at Sunnyvale, features David Filo, Jerry Yang, a walkthrough the data center & NOC operations, the fitness center, the Guiness record and buzz marketing promos. A must see if you want to understand the ethic @ Yahoo! Videos of the life @ Yahoo! India would soon be uploaded on Timecapsule.

YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

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to give you some background to this, i just saw “Laws of Attraction”!

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Tidiness, Orderliness, Cleanliness, Standards & Discipline!

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Lance Armstrong (1971 – )
U.S. cyclist, 7-time winner of the Tour de France
Cancer survivor

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Having lived in India all my life, domestic help was always an arms length or a shout away! Growing up in Orissa, manpower was never a problem. Living at home through college and the 2 1/2 years while I worked in Bangalore, ensured i was well looked after; and Jibu ensured that the maid in Hyderabad was well managed.

I moved to Gurgaon about a year back, and the mandate was clear….eat out and sleep at home.  In any case, the quality and quantity of work at GroupM kept us in office consistently…be it weekdays or weekends!  The little time that i did take out, was invested in playing catch up with sleep.  Murugesh with his quintessential menus and RP (the home delivery specialist) ensured that organising food at home was a futile exercise.

Crazy as it sounds, i invested what little i earned in all sorts of gizmos but somehow never got down to investing in a refrigerator.  Till July 2006 that is…(Yes, the madman that i am, i went through a the Summer of 2006 without a fridge)
However, I now am the proud owner of a Samsung Refrigerator…and it has changed my life!  I actually went shopping for groceries (read: meat (processed, cooked), beer & beverages) and in the last 24 hours have ventured into the kitchen THRICE….you may think this is nothing, whats the big deal et al….but call my mom and you’ll understand the true implications of my domestication!  The good thing is i seem to be a natural cook (though i must admit the only cooking i’ve done so far would be called ‘warming’ by the experts amongst us) but what scares me the most is the growing pride of my domestication!!
Call it survival or call it evolution…what i feel is more ALIVE!

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This one is courtesy Diya!

–
Mick, from Dublin, appeared on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” and towards the end of the program had already won 500,000 pounds.

You’ve done very well so far,” said Chris Tarrant, the show’s presenter, “but for a million pounds you’ve only got one lifeline left – phone a friend! Everything is riding on this question……will you go for it?”

“Sure,” said Mick. “I’ll have a go!”

“Which of the following birds does NOT build its own nest?
A: Sparrow
B: Thrush
C: Magpie
D: Cuckoo ?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” said Mick, “so I’ll use me last lifeline and phone me friend Paddy back home in Dublin“.

Mick called up his mate, and told him the circumstances and repeated the question to him.

“Fookin hell, Mick!” cried Paddy. “Dat’s simple……it’s a cuckoo.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m fookin sure.”
Mick hung up the phone and told Chris, “I’ll go wit Cuckoo as me answer.”

“Is that your final answer?” asked Chris “Dat it is, Sir.”

There was a long, long pause, then the presenter screamed, Cuckoo is the correct answer! Mick, you’ve won 1 million pounds!”

The next night, Mick invited Paddy to their local pub to buy him a drink.

“Tell me, Paddy? How in Heaven’s name did you know it was da Cuckoo dat doesn’t build it’s own nest? I mean you know fook-all about birds!”

“For fooks sake!” laughed Paddy. “Everybody knows a cuckoo lives in a Fookin clock…!!!”

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–

A husband walks into the bedroom holding two aspirin and a glass of water.
His wife asks, “What’s that for?” “It’s for your headache.” “I don’t have a headache.”

He replies, “Gotcha!”

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Mumbai was rocked with the serial blasts on Tuesday. Couldn’t leave office till about 11 or so that night…with reports of heavy traffic jams all over town. When we did manage to get out, the spirit of Bombay was at its best. People lined the roads, offering water, tea, biscuits, food etc etc to passers by…..many of whom had been stuck in traffic for many hours. This wasn’t limited to one set of people….mumbai’s cosmopolitan crowd was well represented….with old and young, rich and poor everyone offering some kind of help to the needy.

There were stories that commuters were invited into homes….to call their loved ones telling them they were ok (with clogged mobile networks, it was no point trying from mobile phones). Messages were taking hours to deliver and the only resort was good ole MTNL.

The next day we heard reports of people waiting 4 hours outside hospitals to donate blood….that aside, Mumbai was back….people went about their daily business unpertubed…Mumbaiyyas, hats off to you!

Work aside, i met a host of people….was great getting beer with Vasant & Junior Bhandari. Vasant has given me a preview copy of Shanu Taxi, his acclaimed 15 min short film…which i shall see sometime this weekend. Staying with Zaheer ensured that the week was action packed….aside from missing my flight back, which is why i’m here in the middle of the day typing this .

We’ve been asked to proceed for Security check, so i better bounce out of here….take care and keep the smile on! Jai Hind!

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I now work for Yahoo! India as a Strategist! Expect a detailed update soon! Am off to yodel now!

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VERSATILE = I can do anything!
VERSATILE & BULL HEADED= I will do anything within this area!
VERSATILE, BULL HEADED & HALF INTELLIGENT= I will only do something in this area!
VERSATILE, BULL HEADED, H. I. & AWARE = I will do everything in this area!
VERSATILE, BULL HEADED, INTELL, AWARE & RESPONSIBLE = I will get everything done in this area.
VERSATILE, BULL HEADED, INTELL., AWARE, RESPONSIBLE & AWAKENED = I will only do what i want to do and get into a system where everything else gets done! In this area!

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a) MSN Search is now the official Site Search. (Though i’m ironing out issues with the install)
b) Changedetection.com added in to ensure higher stickiness
c) Auto redirect from http://www.maediratta.com

All thanks to De!

Coming soon are adverts which will be served from maediratta.com/advertising

You might notice all LAMP compliant stuff…..Open Source is the way to go!

Wish me luck!

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I’m not AT ALL surprised that the msnbot is the most active.  But a new session from  MSNbot every 110 minutes, i’m flattered…especially when you take into account i hardly update my blog!

MSN crawls constituted 38.56% of traffic Vs. 2.94% for Google (that said i’m sure a high %age of those unidentified crawls were Google)

* Robots shown here gave hits or traffic “not viewed” by visitors, so they are not included in other charts. Numbers after + are successful hits on “robots.txt” files

A total of 1053 crawls for the month!

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In 1872, Remington produced the first mechanical typewriter. With practise professional typists had begun to type so fast that the keys on the old machines were getting jammed. And so, in the late 1870’s
the “improved” Qwerty layout was designed to slow down typing, done with the specific purpose to stop those pesky keys from jamming. We’re still stuck with the same speed trap, 130 years later!!!

The hardware scenario 130 years later is very different. We don’t use typing machines, and dont even use electronic typewriters anymore. So why would we want to stick with a layout that was designed
specifically to slow down the speed with which you type? The main reason for this is habit. We’ve all been introduced to keyboards with QWERTY as the default layout and have never questioned it. However,
ladies and gentlemen, we are not without options.

Quality alternatives to the QWERTY layout include the DVORAK layout and the new XPeRT keyboard layout which was introduced in 2003.

The Dvorak keyboard layout was invented (by Dr Dvorak) in the 1930s.

His layout aimed to
(a) Reduce finger reach and strain by putting common letters on the home row,
(b) Avoid awkward use of key pairs (digraphs), to improve speed.

Though in principle this sounded good, since almost all letters moved from their familiar Qwerty locations, it was hard to transition to DVORAK. Dvorak is superior to Qwerty, and during the Second World
War, the US Navy conducted experiments to ascertain the same. They discovered that the Dvorak layout increased typing productivity so significantly, that the payback time to retrain a group of typists was
only ten days! But these designs were never successful in the marketplace.
However, end users (common folk like you and me) insist that relearning typing on the Dvorak layout may take closer to 3 weeks. Though a few enthusiasts use it today, it has not become the standard.

Many Dvorak advocates claim that the masses are stupid as, the DVORAK layout ensures over “twenty times less motion”. Its easy to see if one’s fingers move less, one can cover more area in the same time and thus type faster, much faster. Many personal computers come with software drivers that let the user switch back-and-forth between QWERTY and Dvorak mappings, so one does not have to buy any special hardware for the same.  Due to lack of awareness and the lack of human willingness to stir from the norm, the DVORAK keyboard has few takers.

The XPeRT Keyboard layout prides itself on being Built for Speed and being an easier transition from QWERTY. The XPeRT website actually claims that Hunter keyboard users (those who hunt for leys with their eyes) can reach touch typing speeds with no special training. Since the XPeRT Keyboard moves only two high frequency letters, A + N (in dvorak you move 6) and adds a second E key (the most common letter (13% usage), the change is easy to adapt to. It also optimizes key sequences to be struck by opposite hands, the fastest way of typing. With these 3 elegant moves, the XPeRT keyboard goes from digraph disabled to speed enabled.

Many natural questions follow and the answers lead the inquisitive into experimentation. Windows does come with support for DVORAK keyboards and trialware for the XPeRT keyboard is available online.
Though XPeRT does require you to pluck out the keys from your keyboard and re-align them, the speed difference and the ease of use (once you decide on opening your mind to the idea) of both DVORAK and XPeRT is far superior to the traditional QWERTY layout.

I personally used the XPeRT layout for over 6 months and using QWERTY, in my humble opinion, is both decadent as well as significantly slower. Didn’t want to reshuffle the keys on my notebook keyboard, so have been back to QWERTY. It’s time to buy another keyboard and mix it up a bit!
Though it takes some getting used to, having two ‘e’ keys and commonly used alphabets bunched together in the centre of the keyboard gives an XPeRT user additional speed and tremendous excitement. It’s not very often that doing something fundamental in a radically different manner means doing it radically better!

They say the more things change, the more the stay the same. It’s almost as if Dr. Dvorak is looking down at me saying, ‘I told you so’!

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I’ve been tracking 37Signals for a while, and though i haven’t subscribed to BaseCamp or any of their process mgmt software i have signed up for Ta-da lists.

What rocks about their models are they’re based on increasing productivity and are so usable that they can give Google Products a run for their money. I’ve signed up for Ta-Da lists so that I can organise my to-do lists (read life) better….also coz i can syndicate data via RSS (one of my favourite pastimes these days) and work it out of a central location (read maediratta.com).

Am also hoping to test out BackPack sometime next weekend, so will post my review sometime in the next fortnight.

Have a rocking week ahead!

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Time.com Ratings of the best innovations of the year gone by.

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http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/01/ipod_accessories/index_01.htm

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I’ve finally decided to start blogging. On the advice of the wise Govind Menon, i’ve adopted the open source WordPress. Though a slight convulated install, feels good to be powered by the most powerful open source editing tool available .
What can we look forward to in 2006?

Loads actually….from Redmond, we can hope to get our hands on Vista, a peek at MSN Biz Apps, pay-per-go Office, MSN (India) Rich Media and India specific Ad-Center, Growth and evolution of Windows and Office Live! IE7, upgraded newsbot and personalised search are other areas we can expect activity on….

From Google we can expect pay-per-call advertising, Google Wallet, increased activity on Google Base (which would result in a showdown of sorts between eBay and Google), a more accurate analytics software (currently google analytics has inconsistent data) and more tie-in between AOL/Google. Another thing that would keep the attention of industry watchers are Google’s plans of Wi-Fi, their investment in black fibre and internet over power grid.
Jobbs and Co. have technophiles all excited with more powerful and affordable Intel processors powering Apple computers…can’t wait to get my hands on one of those….

The gods of open source should hopefully beef up OpenOffice and if all goes well an integrated Google Linux could be with us soon…..the only question being when….also Mozilla, we want a MS Outlook killer soon…..thunderbird falls way short….

All that i’m looking forward to from the Yahoo! stable this year is the new Yahoo! Mail Beta….am already on the wait list….and will be posting a detailed review as soon as i get onto it….

As far as the Indian Internet scene goes….with PC and Internet access costs spiralling southward we should continue to witness growth like we have in the last couple of years…with marketeers understanding that the Internet is a necessary part of the media mix, we should find newer and more interesting advertising solutions….expect some great ideas from mOne this year….we’re ready to rock the market!

I’m lucky to be a part of this revolution thats already changed the way millions of people work, live and function across the globe. It’s the same platform, accessible to everyone…a land of equal opportunity, the world’s biggest democracy, the world’s biggest community, the world’s biggest playground…with nothing to limit you, except yourself….have fun people…while the cyberwars of 2006 have netro-sexuals like me enthralled, it’s never been better for the end-user!

Go, Play!

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