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Search Results for: access

  • fritz Says -> no money = funday
    2:08 pm on November 5, 2007 | 3 Permalink | Reply
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    Yes thats right and I (fritz dsouza) am making that statement and will come as a shocker to all who know me hahahaha.

    Today was a funday as usual was in my office getting some flow charts done as there was no electricity so was not on my laptop and the TV was also off. So at that point of time got a call from sarvesh saying that he is outside the office so I opened the door for him he came in we sat and talked for a few minutes then he said this office is not healthy we need to get out so we went to CCD miramar we sat there discussed a lot of things work, friends etc etc the normal chit chat and after that I ordered our drinks and we sat there talked a bit till and sipped our drinks and then the bill came and thats when the fun begin I forgot to carry cash since my mind was still preoccupied with the analytics issue that i am currently working for on a project and I thought sarvesh would pick up the tab hahahaha and he realized that even he forgot to carry cash hahahahaha at that point of time I was about to crack up laughing as I found the situation funny but sarvesh was pissed with the fact that they would not accept credit cards :(

    The credit card issue was raised earlier also at CCD miramar by abhimanyu during one of our meetings there and the situation that we were in was the first time in last couple of weeks that i found really genuinely funny and relaxing and I knew that fonda was on the beach so called him to come there with cash and then he said he was not on miramar beach but at baga beach hahahahahaha and I was totally enjoying the situation so I just waited there till sarvesh went to a nearby SBI atm and got the cash and then we moved from there to the beach walked a bit talked more and then sat at dsilva’s since sarvesh wanted to have fish and we waited there for quite a few mins in fact (close to an hr and half but the fish cutlets never got ready so he settled for a chicken roll ) and then we ran into a couple of old college friends exchanged a few pleasantries and well we were back to our discussions we didnt know that it was that long that we were at dsilva’s as we were totally busy talking about our wednesday plans to either go to brittos or martins corner for some good food and relaxing time.

    Well after the chicken roll i got back to office and sarvesh headed back home to prepare for his interview well the day was fun because of one simple incident and that was of not having money at CCD I still find it nice and funny and it gets a smile on my face. I remembered a similar situation when we had gone on a mini adventure at ooty and ran out of cash and had to do a lot of running around ( I mean walking around in scenic otty hahahaha) to find an atm for withdrawing some cash we finally found one you should have heard some of our backup plans hahahahahaha.

    Most of the time the pressures are about money but sometimes not having any can be a funny situation and totally relax your mind. Now am looking forward to another adventure on wednesday but then we will not be dependent on an atm and will carry some cash this time hahahahahaha. I had fun today catching up with whats happening in our friends circle and our work lives and also about personal lives, new crushes etc etc but the icing on the cake was the CCD incident hahahahaha

    So cheers to a great fun outing with no beers :P

     

  • fritz Says -> Too much user activity and feedback channels out there???
    2:22 pm on October 7, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Viewer Voices: Where We Respond To The Opinions Of Our Uninformed Viewers

    This is a very funny video that I came across during my normal daily dose of blog reading. This is very enlightening video it goes to show that in the so called user generated web 2.0 world there is sometimes too much of content for you to go through even for big sites (not like this blog) there are so many comments and moderating those must be pain and not to forget track backs and other similar technologies are not the effective.

    But the biggest problem is still with the feedback channel that you provide to the users feedback as shown in the Video and there are a few of opportunities for innovative startups in the Feedback channel, Comments channel and tracking user activity there are few of them but there is always room for more innovation in this field

    Couple of days back I had asked one of a regular readers of this blog(aka abhimanyu) why he does not comment on the posts he said because he does not feel like it well there are people like this and then there are people who write comments so the opportunity is there but I guess not on my blog :) where the comment activity is non existent.

     

  • fritz Says -> blogshowcase a Rediff product
    7:21 pm on June 24, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Well the big sponsorship for the event was because Rediff was launching their product called blogshowcase targeted at the bloggers. Well blogcamp pune was the right place to meet those bloggers who would test out their product. The product is a combined effort of a startup called WATConsult and Rediff according to this piece of info.

    The Launch presentation was given by Rajiv Dingra of WATConsult and Jasmeet Singh who is the VP of product marketing at Rediff.
    The Initial talking and showing of screenshots was done by Rajiv and then after the first few slides and intro there were questions from the public and Rajiv told the audience that it would be good if the questions were held till last when the presentation was over. Once the initial feature set and screenshots were shown the questions started pouring in most of them were valid questions and were rapidly fired by some of the people in the audience.

    The answers given to the questions were not satisfactory(not just my opinion many others felt this too) plus it was shocking to see the response of both Rajiv and Jasmeet of some of the criticism coming their way apparently they were considering their offering was god sent and bloggers will accept it with their eyes closed no questions asked. I was more shocked with the fact that Rajiv was also having a bit of a problem with criticism which is not at all good for a person in charge of a startup being open minded to criticism helps in survival in this fierce competitive world.

    The problem with this product is that it adds to the problem of information overload affecting all us net junkies.
    Personally there were lots of issues which were not good for the users of the service things like them using the content from the blogs onto their portal and with mainstream content. pulling stuff from blogs and putting it without modification does not work as bloggers tend to be colloquial in their writing.
    Plus the fact that the meta content generated around your content was Rediff property plus it pulls your rss feed so if you give full post in your feed you wont as that will not get traffic onto your site so the question is will you maintain two feeds one for full post and one special one to submit to blogshowcase.

    The Logic behind the entire product is you give us access to your feed and we give you an audience but the question is will be audience be willing to go through hundreds of posts everyday (it is a well known fact that most users just go to the Digg homepage only) the product will fail if not positioned properly for both bloggers and rediff users.

    Well me being a blogger would not use the product why you ask?
    Simply because my doubts about the product have not been cleared and also with the fact that if you sign up and once they crawl your feed and copy the content onto their servers and what do you know how they will use your content?
    apparently Rediff is so dumb they didn’t even bother to put a terms and conditions page they just expect people to come there and submit their details with no assurance.

    Overall from this launch I have learned some important lessons

    • never launch a half baked product
    • be open to criticism
    • come up with better way of presenting to target audience
    • research well to see if there is a market for the product
    • always think about monetizing if you cant find a way don’t get into it

    The product did not create any much buzz in the blogosphere also plus the main stream media also didn’t cover it much.

    To read the blogshowcase teams blog read this they are trying to explain here how their offering is different from digg

     

  • fritz Says -> rediffmail access via yahoo mail interface
    1:48 am on June 12, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    yahoo rediff deal

    Yes yesterday noticed one thing when a friend logged into his email account at yahoo at the top left area in the window there was a window which caught my attention the picture of it is given above it said check other mail and there it should http://www.rediffmail.com so any a very very curious techie I clicked on the link to see what surprise was in store for me it took me to the mail accounts page and there was a message shown which said unfortunately there was a problem
    the image is given below of the message

    error while acessing rediff from yahoo mail

    I am totally perplexed so once my friends account was logged off from I logged in to my yahoo account and that box was not there for me and no my friend is not a premium yahoo mail user he is a free account user like me.
    Is there something that I am missing here are yahoo and rediffmail working on integrating their mail offerings and allowing people to migrate their email accounts to and fro or will both offer a interface with which you can access both your mailboxes from a single login to any of the vendors site if there is a deal in the offering well that will be a big big boost for rediff

    Search on google for yahoo rediffmail threw up one of this as a result this says that yahoo and rediff have a strategic alliance to jointly promote online shopping and mobile content across both portals but now maybe that has grown from just the shopping and mobile content to their mail offerings too.

     

  • fritz Says -> I am stupid sometimes
    2:18 am on June 6, 2007 | 9 Permalink | Reply
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    Well it is very hard for me to admit it(being a bit high helps) but yes sometimes I do act stupid (well not sometimes most of the times actually) and end up hurting the people that I care for.
    I cant help it if I am stupid and don’t know when the prank has gone too far and will hurt someone else’s feelings.
    I would like to say sorry to someone whom I hurt today
    "I am Sorry and I will never ever do it again will you please forgive me"
    and also to all the people whom I have hurt before
    I am Sorry and please forgive me for it I am stupid and stubborn and most of my friends know it by now.

    All the people who plan to be my friends in the future please take note of the following
    I like playing pranks
    I am stone cold when it comes to emotions and mushy stuff
    I listen a lot and talk less
    I am a geek
    I am a dreamer (I think everything is possible there is nothing impossible for me)
    I love music
    I love movies
    I love reading
    and there is lot more to me
    so to keep some mystery alive I am not revealing all about me.

     

  • fritz Says -> desi digg with a tadka
    12:10 am on June 5, 2007 | 2 Permalink | Reply
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    Well this is a digg rip off with a desi tadka it is called mirchh I just stumbled upon it and it is new site launched recently basically it is a site which will try to get the important news story in india to the attention of the user.

    I checked the FAQ section it didn’t have much info just that the users should keep the content India specific and to keep the content safe for viewing at work (hahahaha the people behind this are assuming that people in corp India don’t surf for porn which is a huge misconception and outright denial of the fact that Indian employee given access to the net in the office casually scans the net for porn)
    The Blog associated with this was not much useful also as it defied the basic purpose of the blog looks like the blog was setup now along with the web application.

    what caught my attention was the fact that on all the pages near the footer of the site you get to see this
    "You can never unscramble eggs –Navjot Singh Sidhu "
    looks like the person who has set this up is a fan of Navjot Singh Sidhu

    The FAQ section email id lead me to another startup which is better then this and called ijigg it is a social music discovery platform this is a nice site and this site is far more informative and the blog is active and there is a face for the founders and they do have a good team in place. this is also more like the digg for audio content but still it is a bit more fun to play with I liked the player interface it is nice simple and eye catching but here also the content is very less so either the team is doing a bad job at promoting this or their offering is not compelling enough to pick up traffic and user activity but I guess over a period of time it will pick up but I just noticed that they have been up and running for quite some time now a bit longer then mirchh but because of the sharing of email ids on the sites I am beginning to believe that both the offerings are somehow linked and one is India centric and one is world centric.

    Two of the three founders look to be Indian so I guess that explains the India centric focus to mirchh and the sharing of the email id well best of luck to this I hope to see more web startups but what i would like to see is focus on world centric products rather then rip offs with no added benefits for a diverse country like India.

     

  • fritz Says -> sesa goa going going gone
    3:44 am on May 17, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    One of the famous corp houses in goa is Sesa Goa Ltd they are into mining and is India’s largest privately owned iron ore exporter. They have been in the spotlight lately because of the sale by one of the stake holders in the company mitsui to a UK based firm Vedanta Resources for $981 million the sale will generate a total of $423 million in profit for mitsui all the big companies who have interest in the mining industry were bidding for the stake even the birla’s,tata’s and the mittal’s were in the race.

    Well this information got me interested in sesa goa and i went and did some research and found out that they have mines outside of goa too but what caught my attention was that mitsui had to sell it stake to a third party and none of the existing stake holders were interested in the stake and when you here of talks making the news now of consolidation in all industries and how indian companies have woken up to a global domination dream it would have been nice to see the founding family to buy back the stake but their stake is so small and they dont have access to fund their plans I feel even if they wanted to but then again this shows the corporate scene in goa when the birla’s and tata’s are consolidating their holdings in their business by buying back shares here we have a big corp house in goa which cant do the same.

    Maybe I am just expecting too much from the corp scene in goa but then again being a goan it hurts when all the success stories are from outside and none of them are closer to my home(heart).

     

  • fritz Says -> Microsoft and Yahoo sitting in a tree……… kissing
    3:15 pm on May 5, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Well the rumor mills are turning again and this time it is a bit too strong (my assumption based on the fact that the Google juggernaut is rolling on and nothing can and is being done by Microsoft and Yahoo in individual capacities to stop the rolling ) Well the rumors are that Microsoft is going to offer 50 billion dollars for Yahoo

    Looking at Yahoos latest financial standings that looks like a good price for financial details see the following

    http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=yhoo http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=Goog

    According to the latest updates Microsoft has a cash reserve of 25.48 billion at their disposal so if they go with the valuation of 50 billion and yahoo decides to accept it then they still have to raise another 25 billion more which I don’t think will be a problem for them and google also has 11.94 billion dollars in cash( I am also looking out to see who is going to be googles next acquisition target)

    Yahoo also has cash reserves of 2.35 billion but then again the other two giants are debt free where as yahoo has a debt of  749.76 million
    well I would guess that bigger question is does yahoo want to sell to microsoft??
    or the other way around does microsoft want to buy yahoo??

    Both the parties have not yet confirmed any sort of negotiations but then again this is not the sort of deal u want to put it out in the market before anything concrete happens.

    But if microsoft is willing to buy yahoo then the questions that need to be answered are

    1)How much will they pay??

    2)What will they do with yahoo (brand yahoo is one of the most recognised brands in cyberspace)??

    3)Which of yahoo offerings will survive and which ones will vanish??

    4)Will their shareholders be happy with this deal (since yahoo is almost in a coma state at present)??

    5)The mother of all questions would be will be combine entity be able to take on google (otherwise microsoft shareholders will not see any benefit of this deal)?

    If this rumor is true then I guess Microsoft’s concern is not the price tag or the debt or the usefulness of yahoo brand and access to its loyal users but the fact that integrating yahoo’s assets (IP and web properties) into Microsoft’s family of products will be a gigantic task and all the issues faced while integrating and migrating hotmail into the msn family will come back to haunt them and also the open source movement will lose one of its champions yahoo is the user of many open source offerings like php, mysql, apache etc etc

    Well only time will tell whether this is true or false but overall I dont think the merged entity will be able to give Google a decent fight why you ask? well because google does one thing well and that is search unless someone else comes up with a better search engine google will remain in the limelight (yes I have tried Microsoft search engine and it is good but then again it is not part of Firefox  and also it does not make you come back looking for more information the way Google does)

     

  • fritz Says -> Yahoo Messenger Ajaxified
    1:18 pm on May 5, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    Yahoo messenger has finally been ajaxified and the new avatar of the most widely used desktop IM client in india(my assumption) can be found at
    http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/

    I am assuming that it is the most widely used IM client in India because people were not onto the Hotmail and msn bandwagon because of the slow crawling dial up speeds that were available at that point of time and yahoo became a darling to the thousands of Indians online at that point of time.

    Yahoo is losing this edge now to Google and most of the people (including me)have made our gmail accounts as the final frontier in managing a mailbox.Well I am not surprised that yahoo came out with a web version of their most used service after their free email service off course (Again my assumption) and rumors were ripe some months back that yahoo was going to acquire meebo but I guess these deal didnt see the day of light.

    Now here we are with yahoo’s own version of ajaxified IM client well I am perplexed by yahoo’s use of flash as a platform for this rather then building one using plain old javascript and ajax technologies build on top of their popular open source yui library.

    Well I did login and use the service it is pretty neat I must say since  it is very simple to use and nice clean interface  and easy to use and explore and also the colours are easy on the eyes (even though I am a bit disappointed with the whole purple theme that yahoo has going now for them i would love to see some more vibrant colours the purple colour is giving them a funeral kinda look and it goes well with the state there are in now )

    And one of the most fun feature that I liked in yahoo messenger was the feature of leaving offline messages and am glad that yahoo has carried this useful little feature in the ajaxified version of yahoo messenger too.

    Well this is one of the new cool offerings from yahoo considering that most of the yahoo users are now in the corp world and that they are on networks where they no longer have privileges of installing desktop applications on their office pc’s and this will give them access to their yahoo pals.  I was sad that this offering from yahoo did not create much buzz in the blogosphere and it is a shame that a decent offering from yahoo goes unnoticed and a Google’s april fools joke is giving a wide coverage well that goes to show that the new darling of the media is Google and not Yahoo.

    I am really hoping that Yahoo gets it groove back their ability to innovate is almost dead well I guess the first thing is drop the purple gloomy colour and go vibrant and then look at the consumer offerings and see where they have missed out in recent times (they have missed out on a whole lot) but I guess after the colour change they need management change and then they have to rejuvenate  their employees and wake them from their sleep and motivate them to come up with gd stuff

    Also the other thing you will notice is a .php extension to the page when you login to the webmessenger which is a first for me since i have known for a long time that they have replaced their old yscript with php for some time now but this is one of the rare occasions that they say openly(via the browser address bar hahahaha) if u do a search you will find lots of presentations by Yahoo and its employees on php and mysql and how it is being used at Yahoo

     

  • fritz Says -> new video service fun stuff can be done with this
    12:46 am on January 11, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
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    This is a really cool service it is a small startup in Israel with this service you can add comments on top of the video from video sharing sites like youtube, metacafe etc ( a few of which are supported more details can be found on their site)
    http://www.bubbleply.com

    Even though they are showcasing this as a software to add speech bubbles to videos it is basically a video remixing site with a twist. this video could not be embedded on my blog so the script had to be hacked a bit to get it working. This guys should see to it that the video player that they provide is easily customizable for the end user who will be embedding it in their blogs or web pages.

    The other purpose that can be served by this is for actually remixing old charlie chaplin type movies with peoples imagination playing the part in providing is comic book like commentary to the happenings on screen.

    anyway thought this is really cool and wanted to share it with you’ll.

    The video for this fun technology which i hacked is below for youll to enjoy and this video is the best one i could find to showcase the innovative use of this service.

     

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