The World is NOT flat! »

Contrary to what Mr. Nilekani and Mr. Friedman would like you to believe, world is NOT really flat. I am from India and I know for sure that in India, we still don’t have all the cool techie stuff that the US and other western countries enjoy. While Sweden and Norway are talking about 4G, we still don’t have 3G here in India. We don’t have Vonage or something as popular. We even don’t have Number Portability. Can you believe that while Toyota Corolla costs around $15000 in the USA, it costs approximately $27,000 in Bangalore? I know the import duties and all othe reasons, but at the end, it IS lot more expensive in India. Apple does sell iPhone and iPods here, but we don’t have a iTunes Store. While my business partner in the US, Joe, is watching football games on thescoutingedge.com, the player just says, “Buffering” for us.

If you are wondering why I am so upset about all this, innovation in developing countries will always be slow because we don’t experience technology as you do. For example, if we cannot experience video conferencing on cell phones, it is difficult for us to dream about building a better streaming algorithm for mobile phones. I know this sounds very frustrating, but again, we don’t have enough water, food and electricity, why am I complaining about not having cool gadgets??

Microsoft’s hardwork in 2009 »

Mashable has an interesting article on Microsoft’s products in 2009 and how it corrected its course (with encarta, flight simulator etc). We saw some big products like Bing and Windows 7 in this year. Read more about it here.

10 painful Netbook and Laptop positions »

Gizmodo has an article showing ten positions of exquisite pain. I am sure we would have tried most of those positions.

We need lights that melt snow! »

Engadget has an article about how cold states in the US are complaining about LED lights not generating enough heat to melt the snow that covers them. I guess, incandescent light bulbs, despite being energy inefficient, had their own advantages. You can read more about the article here.

Vertical Search Engines »

With number of websites, blogs and microblogging sites increasing, how effective are broad search engines like Google and Bing? Even with great page ranking algorithms, over time, I believe search results will become diluted. For example, if you type, “Hospitals in Bangalore”, you will probably see results from Google Local first, followed by Google web search results. In fact, you will see almost all the results duplicated. In order for me to get more effective results like hospitals by their speciality or even by reputation, I will probably have to give more keywords to Google. Now let us move to the mobile world, where typing is a pain in the bottom. What I foresee is that more and more vertical search engines will come up in the future, focussing on a particular domain and region. Searching at WebMD will most likely give better search results about a particular medical problem than doing a similar thing on typical search engines.

Another challenge to search engines are “content farms”. You can read more about content farms here. Here is an interesting article on the impact of content farms to search engines.

Amazon’s CloudFront now supports audio and video streaming! »

Amazon CloudFront now supports streaming of media files stored in Amazon S3. You can now use CloudFront to improve access to your static content (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and so forth) as well as your streaming content. You can read more about it here.

Google Wave – What is it? »

You must have heard about Google Wave, but you most likely, you are not using it. Like me, you too are probably clueless as to what it does. If so, here is an introductory article on Google Wave, from TechRadar.com. The last question in that article gives you few more links to Wave. Time to make Unosoft start using it

Updated on 12/19/09:

Here is another article on Mashable regarding, “Google Wave’s Massive Potential for Business Users”.