Amit Doshi's Take on Things
I am starting a series of articles on issues Small & Medium Indian Companies face when putting IT in place. These are going to be posted on the blog of my company’s latest product the WAT Intranet Suite. Over the next few months I am hoping to cover a number of topics that Indian companies struggle with and I though the best place to start was where I hear the most complaints, Email .
Anyway take a look and leave a comment.
Amit Verma posts on the Shiney Ahuja situation, and at the end points readers to some rediff.com comments. Hers is the comment in question:
i thoughted that he is a good persun and his name telling that he is shiney persun. All pepuls are spradening baddy things about him. No oned talkied about shakeete kapeur and guldshand geiver. Why?
I absolutely took the comment at face value but went down a little further and found another one by the same user:
how i killing you with simpule engleesh? are you goned maddy ? to killed you need guned, kniefe, hamur, stoned. howe simpule engleesh killed you?
As soon as I read this it clicked. Poes Law. Its an old internet rule that states:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.
I think we need to have a rediff commenter specific version of this law. On reading rediff comments I think we can simplify the law as well:
It is IMPOSSIBLE to recognize whether or not rediff comments are parody.
I think we should name it the Bala law in honor of Ajit Balakrishnan without whom we would not be blessed.
And for anyone who is willing to try and figure out if the above commenter is for real check out Halakus Comment Page.
I saw a medianama post about internet penetration in India. Nikhil has some good analysis but I disagreed with one point.
Percentage growth: In percentage terms, Maharashtra grew the least, followed by Delhi and Tamil Nadu, primarily because of the large subscriber base.
I think growth in Maharashtra lags because of pricing. An unlimited 256K connections going to cost you close to a Thousand bucks. I pay VSNL about 1100. My cable guy offers me something for 800 but I promised never to use IN Cable for internet ever again an I intend to follow through on that. MTNL offers one for 2500. I just thought I would compare prices between MTNL Mumbai and MTNL Delhi and was shocked. I knew there was a price difference but this is ridiculous.
Mumbai:
Thats Rs. 2500 for a 256K, 4500 for a 512K
Compared to Delhi:
Thats Rs. 599 for a 256K and 1299 for a 512K. Thats half the price for twice the bandwidth.
Are you fucking kidding me? Can anyone come up with a logical reason for why thi might be the case?
Microsoft Surface is a new interface that Microsoft has developed. Its initially going to be sold to large customers like T Mobile and Sheraton Hotels, but it looks like the Minority Report future is not far. Or at least not that far.
This is from CES 2008
From a Popular Mechanics feature
Microsoft Promo video
I read about some of the drama about friendfeed over the last couple of days and thought id try it out.
While playing with it I started realising that what friendfeed really would be awesome as a feature for twitter. Right now its the other way around, twitter is a feature on friend feed. If you could create a friendfeed client like snitter, wouldn’t that pretty much eliminate the need for twitter for a lot of people?
I dont think you can send messages to twitter using friendfeed as of right now, but that shouldn’t be too difficult to to do. But once that functionality is in their, twitter becomes superfluous to a lot of people.
I like using the net to do things. It makes my life easy for the most part and I appreciate that. The sad fact however is that as of today the internet is a second or third or fourth or non existent part of a companies strategy. That this is the case with established brands is understandable(if short sighted). But new companies, even so called internet companies, have some terrible service standards. I dont want to pick on one particular company, but its a company that serves a need close to my heart, and I really hoped for more when I joined.
Seventymm is an online video rental company. Modeled after Netflix, for a monthly charge, you can get either 4 DVD’s a month or an unlimited number of DVDs a month. There are no late fees, when your done, ask them to collect what you have at home, and they’ll send you the next movies in your queue. The queue can be setup on their website.
Though I love the concept( I remember one year when I ran through a 500 movie rental subscription, I rented maybe a 100 movies, but lost 400 in late charges)
This weekend I got the movie Heyy Babyy but the DVD was defective. That happens sometimes, not much anyone can do about it and I dont blame seventymm at all for that. The problem is what happened afterwards. One gets 2 movies at a time, and i hadnt seen the other movie(The Fifth Element if your interested) that was sent. But seventymm policy is that they wont send just one movie, even to replace a defective disc. This strikes me as foolish.
Another problem I had, was I tried to watch Lost. They sent me the first 2 dvd’s no problem I asked for a pickup. They sent me Lost DVD5 and some other random dvd. I called, but once again nothing can be done. Seems like it should be a simple enough fix.
Its annoying when a service that really has potential craps out on issues like these. They should have better processes in place to handle it.
I wish there were some more features on their website, though with the recent changes its become tolerable, a couple of months ago it was unusable.
All in all a pretty good service with some service issues they need to get under control. Especially this one movie at a time thing.
