Melvin Durai predicts..

In his column, Melvin Durai makes only one prediction for the coming year: that his readers will do something to help the Tsunami victims.

"It's going to take years for them to recover and your money -- whatever you can give, even a few dollars -- will help them do it. That's why you're going to empty your jars of pennies, that's why you're going to search your couch for lost change, that's why you're going to stop taking regular baths until your co-workers cough up some money.

I'd expect nothing less from my favorite reader."

Looks like everyone is doing their bit. At ASU, everyone received an email from President Michael Crow exhorting everyone to donate to the Red Cross/USAID. America has upped its aid to $350 million and Amazon has collected nearly 10 million in just a few days!

The machine ate my change

After losing my money in vending machines innumerable times, I am glad someone decided to fight back. [image: coke vending machine at the Goldwater Center, ASU]

One Hundred Thousand

100,000 is the estimated number of deaths in the South East Asian Tsunami. Dave tries to put this number into perspective.

A Festivus for the rest of us!

The NYT has a story on the origins of Festivus and how it is catching on in the real world too.

This picture is from the Lower Antelope Canyon in Arizona where water has created interesting shapes in the rocks. Of course, the shapes are all about perception, so see if you can spot something related to the Titanic (the movie) in this picture..

Tsunami Relief - Every cent helps

More than 50,000 lives have been lost due to the recent Tsunami in the Indian Ocean region. A lot of money and help is needed to bring the lives of thousands of affected people back to normal, so please donate whatever you can. Tsunamihelp.blogspot.com is functioning as an excellent location for information on how to donate to the various agencies involved in relief work, including the American Red Cross, AID and others. Please choose an organization and donate whatever small amount you can. Remember, even a single dollar goes a long way in this region. If you choose to donate through the Red Cross, visit their donation page and make sure that you choose the International Response Fund as the recipient.



You can also help by spreading the word about the donation options (directing people to tsunamihelp is the easiest option). Wikipedia has a regularly updated page on the Tsunami with plenty of information about the disaster too. I visited Apple's page today and was pleasantly surprised to find that their entire home page was devoted to tsunami relief organizations!

UPDATE 1:

* Google has a special page setup with a list of charities.
* Benjamin Rosenbaum has collected ratings of the charities mentioned in Google's list and on Tsunamihelp.
* You can now donate to the American Red Cross through Amazon. Nearly $3 million has been collected through Amazon so far.

Last page of the Internet

I used to be a champion surfer - websurfer, that is.. and one of my friends told me that if I browse so much, one day I would end up at a page that says "You have reached the end of the Internet". Well, it turns out that there actually is a last page of the Internet. Take that buddy!

Tsunami relief

tsunamihelp.blogspot.com is functioning as a clearing house for donations and relief activities and also provides updates about the ongoing relief work. Please pass this link around, and also chip in with your donations. I am reposting some of the donation links here:

* India: Prime Minister's National Relief Fund, by bank transfer, or by credit card
* Reliefweb (United Nations office)
* Malaysian Bloggers Fund
* Red Cross Online Donations
* Oxfam online donation
* Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) - International

Added a new blog for MATLAB hacks. Also put up some of the graduation pictures online. And yes, I do need to find a proper job before I make blogging my primary career :-)

It's never been tried.

Dave Dufour has a collection of phrases that are typically heard in brainstorming sessions and have the effect of killing creative thinking. My favourites:

* It ain't broke, don't fix it.
* It's too much trouble to change.
* We tried that before.
* It's too much work.

Also worth checking out is this manifesto on "How to be creative" from ChangeThis.

iPod yourself!

IPodMyPhoto lets people send in their pics so they can get iPodified versions in the trademark silhouetted style. In case you do not want to shell out $20 for the service, try this video tutorial which explains how you can photoshop your pictures to get the same effect. (Another tutorial which also describes how to get more detail in the silhouette) I think a picture like that would be a cool thing to accompany any iPod gift. Unless of course, you are planning to propose to your partner using an iPod..

What the @#$%&*!

Avnish Bajaj, CEO of Baazee.com (owned by eBay) was arrested last week for reasons that transcend any previously known levels of stupidity. Here's what happened: Two Delhi students engaged in oral sex, which was recorded by the guy on his mobile phone. He subsequently sent it out as an MMS, which made its rounds on the cellphone networks, before being finally put up for sale on the e-commerce site by another student. When Baazee.com came to know of it, they removed the sale listing. (note that the listing did not contain the video - like eBay, Baazee is just a portal that facilitates trading between buyers and sellers)

So in this situation, who did the police go after? The CEO of the auction site! It is hard to understand how any sane person can hold the auction site responsible for the content of the ads hosted by them. To those who suggest automated tracking: Computer Science has not yet produced AI that is capable of filtering out such content. No, 'word filters' would not work either. Not to be seen slacking in the area of stupidity, the Delhi High Court rejected Bajaj's bail petition. (Sure, how can we let such a menace roam the streets!)

As noted by Capt Raghu Raman, now do we arrest Bill Gates for allowing spammers to sell porn? or the CEOs of telecom companies for any crime that is carried out over a phone? I'm sure sending Avnish Bajaj to Tihar jail to spend time with murderers and rapists creates a wealth of goodwill all around!

Yes, I am outraged, as every Indian should be, at the shockingly low levels of decency and common sense shown by the police and courts. Can they ever compensate him for the mental agony of having to spend nights in a prison along with the lowest denominator of criminals, and being linked with a sex scandal?

[Google News coverage]

Update 1: as this columnist asks, why treat kids as criminals? The kids who engaged in the sexual act were expelled from school! Why ruin their careers for what can be termed as an indiscretion? People have sex, it is not a crime, and these are high school teenagers - ruining their lives by slapping criminal cases on them, shaming them in front of society and expelling them from school shows that the 'authorities' have a lower maturity level than the students they are dealing with!

!Xobile

If you have a good sense of humor and are not easily offended, go watch this Russell Peters monologue. This video is not work safe if you don't want to be seen clutching your tummy and howling at the monitor. Safe in every other way :-)[Thanks Vivek!]

BOP: Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid..

Here's a question.. Do the millions of people living on just a few dollars a day around the world represent a market with considerable spending power? University of Michigan's b-school professor C.K.Prahalad believes they do. Sure, you cannot sell them an iPod, but they represent such a huge market that even the slimmest of margins can translate into huge profits!

Such a huge, untapped customer base is registering a blip on the screens of major multinationals only now. From selling $4 lenses in India, to 3-cent prepaid phone connections in Philippines, Prahalad's BOP philosophy is fast gaining ground. I have personally seen how this operates in India. Hindustan Lever (a subsidiary of Unilever) found that rural markets were not responsive enough to its expensive shampoos. The solution: sell shampoos in 1-rupee sachets (or something equally cheap) that are eminently affordable. Now, every tea stall in the most remote corners of India stock shampoos and toothpaste in small packets that are within the reach of the daily wages of the poorest people. (And oh, posters showing beautiful half naked women using shampoos can't hurt their popularity either, can't they :-) )

The moral of course, is that everyone is a consumer as long as the products are available in affordable denominations. This reminds me of the anecdote of the two shoe salesmen who were sent to a remote village to do a market study before opening a shop. The first salesman returned with an anguished report of how the business would not be successful since no one wore shoes in the village. The second salesman came back beaming and reported that the entire village was an untapped market since no one owned shoes!

Google: the world's most dangerous media company?

Google takes its mission statement (to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful) very seriously. What makes Google cool is the fact that it sees business potential in areas that are generally considered unworthy of any investment, and opens up a whole new world of information for people at large. When Yahoo! was manually indexing pages and creating portals, Google came up with its algorithms that made the internet the useful tool it is today. When web-mail became a tired old thing, Google reinvented it with Gmail. (People associate it with its storage space, but I see it as a web application that pushes the limits of scripting and CSS).

Now Google has decided to bring more information to the table by digitizing the greatest libraries in the world. To be fair, Amazon started the process by digitizing a large part of its catalog with the publishers' consent, but Google is pushing the envelope here by going straight to the libraries and digitizing content that is in the public domain. (read copyright-expired stuff). Which makes it possible for people to have access to content that

a. they are unaware of
b. is not available for sale and
c. is not available in most libraries.

This latest move prompted Red Herring to make the (fond?) statement "It’s official. Google is the most dangerous media company on the planet...Google bounces in a new direction every time its competitors seem on the verge of catching up." It's hard not to agree.. and I'm loving it!

Lookie on the left!

Last night I put together a quick-and-dirty PHP script to show the latest 6 pictures from my photo gallery on the sidebar. It still links to the flash gallery which is probably not the best way to show the pictures since it requires flash 6 to be installed on the browser, but I like the simple and clean interface of simpleviewer. So until I find the time to put together another script to produce an html-only photo album that lets you save pictures, enjoy the flash version.

Say hello to the new graduate!

I successfully defended my Masters thesis today and let me be the first to tell you that I'm done with my Masters! Yayyyyy! I'll be doing the graduation walk next week after which I'll offically be a graduate. [clink] cheers!

The outsourcing story continues

According to the International Labor Organization, India outsourced $14 billion worth of IT and business services by the end of the fiscal year 2003-2004. Popular wisdom has it that outsourcing is bad for people in the economy which does it. The logic goes something like this:

1. Country A outsources services.
2. These services were earlier performed in Country A itself, and will now be performed in Country B.
3. Country B benefits with jobs and money while Country A loses jobs.

While this is a nice bit of logic which appeals to politicians, lobbyists and people who have unfortunately, had to bear the brunt of shifting jobs, the reality is that outsourcing helps an economy compete where it couldn't do so otherwise. This is how I believe outsourcing really operates:

1. Country A faces competition from other countries where production is either more efficient, cheaper or both.
2. Instead of going down, Country A outsources services to Country B where production is more efficient/cheaper or both.
3. Country A still retains industries which would have gone down otherwise, is still able to sell products and is able to maintain economic growth.
4. Country B gains money and jobs which did not exist earlier and experiences economic growth of its own.
5. Country B now outsources certain services on its own to other countries including Country A based on the specific strengths of Country A.
6. Everyone benefits since there is a growth in producers and consumers everywhere.

See it happen : The $14 billion that India outsourced was 2.4% of its GDP (compared to the $41 billion which the US outsourced - 0.4% of its GDP) making it the fifth largest outsourcing nation in the world after the US, Germany, UK and Japan. Guess where India outsourced the bulk of this $14b? the very same nations mentioned above. The way the world does business is changing, and on a global level it is better for everyone. On a local level, it is still better for everyone - when an economy grows, the effects trickle down to everyone. (I'm not an economist, so correct me if I'm wrong) [ related: the outsourcing weblog]