2004-01-25 – 12:40 am ::
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The market is agog with the news of Google’s upcoming IPO. It is really going to ignite the minds of investors and techies alike.
It will be a cliché to say that Google has become a generic verb! Folks just “google for it” - be it a research thesis for obtaining a doctorate, or a techie trying to get a solution for his network problem.
In eighteen months:
* Google has quadrupled its size
* sextupled its annualised earnings
* boomed its profits by a factor of 23 to a mind-boggling $350 million!
I really turn green thinking of Sergei Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google who are in their mere thirties!
But Fortune has voiced a certain jarring note amidst the gaga. Besides the much-publicised news of Yahoo! and MSN pouring millions to set up their own search engines - the former having acquired Inktomi and Overture and MSN planning to bundle the search engine with its next version of OS, the real Achilles’ heel of Google being lack of customer “lock-in”. People come search and go, unlike in Yahoo, where folks dwell in mails, briefcases, my Yahoo’s, discussion groups etc.
Perhaps Google has perceived this shortcoming and has started an effort to have a sort of Googlised community. First in the series is the promotion of Orkut.com, a social networking outfit started by one of its employees. Google regularly throws out new products and services to see if they stick. Google News, for example, began as the personal project of Google engineer Krishna Bharat in 2002. Google has acquired Pyra Labs and Blogger and its discussion groups are very famous amongst geeks!
Google aspires to become a portal like Yahoo. Google already helps people shop, read news, thwart pop-up advertisements, get stock information and publish to the Web. With a social networking component, at the very least, it would likely feed investor demand for a public offering because of its diversified assets, financial analysts say. Investors expect Google to go public sometime in the spring.
Let us wait and watch (and if you have a finger on the crispy Greenbacks, try and have a piece of the pie!)
2004-01-23 – 9:30 pm ::
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They are not known to be soft operators - not even on micro scale!
Yes, you guessed it right!
Now the facts of the case as reported in News.Com
Mike Rowe, a 17-year-old student from Vancouver, British Columbia, registered Mikerowesoft.com to front his part-time Web site design business in August 2003. Three months later, he received an e-mail from Microsoft’s lawyers, asking him to transfer the domain name to Microsoft. They offered to pay him a “settlement” of $10, which is the cost of his original registration fee.
However, after the case received widespread coverage on the Internet, Microsoft acknowledged that it may have taken things too far and promised to treat Rowe fairly. A representative of the software company told ZDNet UK: “We appreciate that Mike Rowe is a young entrepreneur who came up with a creative domain name. We take our trademark seriously, but maybe a little too seriously in this case.”
Mike Rowe may have a good argument for keeping the domain name, because it is his real name, and he isn’t pretending to be affiliated with Microsoft. But he said Microsoft probably regrets getting involved with the case because of all the bad publicity it has generated.
Letz wait and see what happens next!
2004-01-23 – 4:35 am ::
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One of the places where you have to be constantly looking at the local time is the transit airport where you wait to catch a connecting flight. As you fly from one time zone to another, it is imperative that you are mindful of the local time so that you are present at the appropriate terminal in time to check in and board your flight.
New York JFK International airport is ideal in that respect since it sports a bright and bold Rolex wallclock (Rolex Oyster Chronometer Perpetual, to be precise)at every 6 feet interval!
In contrast, you crane your head all round but can’t find even one clock on the entire passengers’ lounge of Kuwait International Airport, except for a very small digital display clock at an insignificant location at the far end of the corridor.
I think the authorities concerned should spare some time to tell the time to the passengers so that they do not lose time and in the process miss their flight by not being there in time!
2004-01-13 – 8:20 pm ::
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My geeky freaky friend Jason Anthony suggested that I follow the ISO recommended date format (CCYY-MM-DD) in all my blogs. This site is very informative on the date format and Eleven good reasons why you should start using the standard format stipulated in ISO:8601. Besides, this universal format eliminates the confusion of date first in one part of the globe and month first in another!
And think of the millions of $’s that would have been saved, had all 1st generation C - coders followed this format upfront (Remember Y2K, the biggest hoax of the Millennium!).
2004-01-09 – 9:47 am ::
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Yes, whatever you purchase - be it in K-Mart or Wal-Mart or Macy’s or any of those malls that crave after your Greenbacks so earnestly - they are all made behind the Bamboo Curtain!
Beats me as to how mainland China is able to swarm all over the the Great Society with their assorted ware to such a mind-boggling proportion! Take anything - a Barbie doll or a mechanized toy or a game or a kitchen utility or a hand tool - you name it! I picked up a Mancala made with solid strong Oak of Northern America and Lo! It it is made in China!
But what worries me is, will service sector alone provide sufficient jobs for Americans without manufacturing factories? Where will the Greenbacks come from for stacking the made-in-china’s in trolleys!
You may like to attribute this phenomenon to cheap labor, precision manufacture, no democratic hassles and a host of other juicy capitalistic darlings! But then how things that are ethnically American (sic) can be made to typically American standards and taste to a T by a diametrically different society and ethnicity! I’m still at a loss to fathom this fully!
I dream of an era when most of these trinkets will sport a “Made in India” label on them for a change! If they can write such volumes of handsome software code, can’t they make a sleek can opener? Well, perhaps much of exports from India consist of raw materials and semi-finished’s that they don’t get to add the magic line “Made in India” on to them!
Though serious manufacture left the shores of America long back, may be a new trend will be ushered in like Toyota starting manufacture of cars on the U.S soil recently.
Let’s wait and watch!
Possibly related posts:
2004-01-09 – 9:22 am ::
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Here is what Stanley Bing has to say about the vapid and lackluster “All work no play” life of a typical Manager of the day in his last page of Fortune Magazine:
They (managers) stumble into office grim-faced, high on nothing but anxiety and coffee. They go to their stoic lunches munching on greenery like starving llamas and bolting down enough mineral water to float a midsized dinghy. After work they repair to watering holes for more water, unless somebody in authority is having something, in which case they may join the boss in a moderate quaff.
It is time managers learn to take time off and unwind, relax and have some fun. After all life is to be lived, as you only live once! (You are not the Bond, buddy!) - what about rebirth? OK, I give it in, but then you will be somebody else then, won’t you be?
Think about it!
2004-01-05 – 8:48 am ::
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I found a pretty annoying shortcoming in the otherwise awesome and wonderful American Museum of Natural History in the New York City. Though floor plans and maps are available everywhere, you can still get lost since the floors and levels will take you on a spin! Yes, though the locations are indicated in the map level-wise, directions to the actual halls housing the various sections are not prominently displayed. This results in you going on a volute and ending up querying each time for directions.
Even the piecè de résistance viz, the Imax theater has a mere arrow of relatively small size only some four feet from it!
Hope the good folk in the museum would do something about it!
But please don’t get me wrong! This bellyaching on my part is prompted by only a feeling that such a marvel as this monumental museum should not have even this tiny deficiency!
End of the story!
I am S.K!, ok, what's the big deal!
