Are Social Networks Any Good?

I am not sure about you, but I am really tired of all the social networking news out there. I guess I am sick of the hype surrounding it and I no longer follow it.

I have a Facebook account (along with ton of others), connected to my friends, added Apps, joined groups, added photos, added videos….but, then what? What do I do next? Poke Friends?

After doing all these stuff, I noticed I don’t do much with that. I know I am not alone here. I really don’t see much value on these social networks to login regularly after connecting with people. If connecting with people is what these apps do, then I don’t think I need them as I am already connected with the people I care with in other ways (IM, Email, Phone etc). Unless social networking is built around the apps I use regularly, I think it is not going to go far.

I couldn’t care less on all the Social Networking related news lately. This ends my rant of the week, I guess

iPhone Usage Stats

I was checking out my iPhone usage stats today and found that I did more than 1GB of data transfer on the iPhone just on the EDGE Network…excluding WiFi. This is freakishly high compared to my data transfer rates on my previous Blackberry Pearl.

The Data Received itself crossed 1GB and the data sent is around 200MB.

As I mentioned earlier, iPhone as an internet communicator impressed me more than other cool stuff. I can clearly see the change in my usage pattern and am sure I am not alone.

How does your usage stats look?

Another reason to use Online Apps

Here is another reason to use Online Apps..

For those who are heading to the US, here is a word of caution – the border agents can now search your laptop even without a cause.

This follows a US Federal Appeals Court ruling, earlier this week, that agents at the border do not need any “reasonable suspicion” to search through travellers’ laptops.

In other words, computers are like any other luggage going through the border, and hence, subject to searches at US national borders and airports.

More info here…

Tata Bags Jaguar & Land Rover

Today, Tata finished the acquisition of two major brands - Jaguar & Land Rover - for $2.3Bn from Ford. That amount doesn’t seem a lot for some reason.

On one side, Tata has the world’s cheapest car and now with this aquisition, they have a distribution network. It’ll be interesting to see how these brands will emerge under Tata’s leadership.

This is the second acquisition for Tata in 2008 that ran over $1Bn. More info on their acquisitions here.

Sync between iTunes?

I am trying to find a simple Sync utility that synchronizes all my music, podcasts (atleast the configuration of podcasts), videos etc across multiple iTunes instances running in different machines. Do you know if there is any? If so, please let me know. I have been looking for something like this for a while.

Interestingly, Apple’s Sync functionality, that comes as part of the .Mac subscription, works for most of the other applications except iTunes. While it could be because of copyrighted content Apple doesn’t want to enable sync for iTunes, Apple certainly allows us to share/copy music manually between multiple instances (3 instances) of iTunes. May be they don’t want to make it easier to sync the copyrighted content?

I am essentially looking for a simple Sync tool that keeps my music etc synced between my iMac, MacBook Pro and Windows PC. Do let me know if you have any ideas.

If we look at this broadly, the Sync issues exist only when the apps/data reside on the desktops. If everything is on the cloud, we certainly can overcome these issues. Can we expect a weB-based iTunes? May be it is too much to ask from Apple….atleast for now.

Online Advertising 2.0

This post came from some random thoughts on the advertising markets. If you have some time to waste, please read on…

Currently, we know that Google is the king in online advertising. There are predictions that the advertising market is going to grow drastically going forward, which I agree, and I think we are just getting started in the online advertising space. But the interesting fact is, there are not many noticeable players in the market apart from Google.

Google is the current king in online advertising market primarily on contextual textual ads. But then, there are many other forms of advertising where we need some innovation coming from new players in this market. Hopefully we’ll see some new players emerge in this market with some interesting ideas.

I think there are many forms of contextual online advertising that not are well explored at this point.

• Content based advertising (Google is doing a good job on this one)
• Person Based (Targeting individual - based on a person, his preferences, habits, interests, hobbies etc)
• Time Based
• Location Based
• …and more

The most powerful and more targeted form can be a combination of all of the above.

Google currently owns the content based advertising. But other forms remain fairly unexplored. I hope companies like Facebook, Spock etc will innovate more on people based ads. They have information about an individual, their social interests, relations etc. They can do a good job of targeting ads based on their interests. Scoble has some ideas on how Facebook can create targeted ads.

While there are different concepts/forms of advertising (content based, time based, person based etc), there are different means of delivering these ads (text, banners, videos etc). The delivery methods can be different but they benefit from underlying context. On top of it, they can be monetized by we can have viewer impressions, Pay Per Click etc.

Its been a while that we saw some innovation in the online advertising space. I hope we’ll see more interesting players and interesting trends in this space.

Android vs iPhone: Who Will Win?

There has been some interesting predictions on Android outselling iPhone. While this is interesting, it is too early to call.

The openness and free nature of Android will certainly make it very popular choice for most of the device manufacturers and carriers. But then, openness and flexibility doesn’t necessarily mean winning consumers.

I can’t help but compare Android to Linux. Both are open and gives the flexibility to the user/manufacturers/carriers. Like Linux, I expect Android to gain huge traction and gain decent market share. But then on the negative side, like Linux, we probably will see several versions of Android floating around going forward with a layer of carrier/device specific versions confusing the end user.

Linux has gained good market share on the server side but failed to gain a decent share on the desktop. One of the key issue, according to me is the User Interface. A good user interface makes a HUGE difference in consumer apps. I think Linux lacks that. There are some versions better than other (Ubuntu?), but then, we cannot compare most of these with Mac or Windows.

I expect the same issue with Android. Unless there is a company who can focus on bringing innovation on the UI side for Android, I expect it to have the same fate as Linux on the desktop. Don’t get me wrong, I love linux, but to get mass adoption, it needs to get a new face, kind of like the Mac which is actually built on BSD. Google is a great company on the server side, but unlike Apple, their expertise is on the server side which doesn’t help Android much.

If there is good focus by vendors/manufacturers/carriers etc on the UI, Android can outsell iPhone. On the other hand, if iPhone opens up their platform (which is unlikely knowing Apple), it is going to be a totally different ball game. Even then iPhone will still have lots of other advantages with its integration with iTunes etc.

Android and iPhone are taking two different approaches in the mobile market. iPhone started as a consumer product and is now becoming a platform with the recent SDK release. Android is taking the opposite approach where it started as an open platform and is moving towards end user products. Who will win? My vote is on iPhone. What do you think?

Could the fall in Indian Oursourcing lead to Innovation?

Sramana Mitra has an interesting article on “The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing“.

The death of this industry is far from anyone’s mind.

However, the reality is that wages are rising in India. The cost advantage for offshoring to India used to be at least 1:6. Today, it is at best 1:3. Attrition is scary.

….

Forbes recently published some scary statistics on wage inflation in India. (See “Indian Employees Enjoying Swift Pay Hikes.”) Salaries rose 15.1% in 2007, up from 14.4% the previous year. The 2008 forecast: 15.2%. This would be the fifth consecutive year of salary growth above 10%.

Raising salaries, falling dollar, raise in cost of living etc in India could hurt the outsourcing industry. Recently I was looking to buy a house in Hyderabad, India and it turns out it is cheaper to buy a house in Silicon Valley than to buy in India.

But then, in the long term, I see the fall of outsourcing industry in India as good news. It’ll pave the way for the new breed of innovation. India got a jumpstart with the outsourcing market. It now has a HUGE pool of resources to build on. If it can focus more on innovation and entrepreneurship instead of ‘outsourcing thinking’, it can turn itself into a new innovation powerhouse. I see this inevitable.

Time for India 2.0

Yahoo! + Microsoft = Death of Zimbra?

There is enough being talked about Yahoo! and Microsoft. When you get into the details, some Yahoo! acquisitions might end up no where after the merger. The best example is Zimbra which Yahoo acquired for $350 Million.

If you look at Zimbra, it really is an Exchange competitor. Yahoo probably bought it to build a platform around email gaining from Zimbra’s expertise on email. When Microsoft completes the acquisition, we can safely assume that the exchange competition will no longer exist. Yahoo might integrate some goodies from Zimbra into its webmail client. But then, Microsoft has enough email client(s) in Outlook, Outlook Express, Outlook Web Access and ofcourse Hotmail with tighter integration with their software.

What do we see at the end of the day? There might be some client side JavaScript goodies integrated into Yahoo Mail and nothing much. All the server side stuff of Zimbra might die a quick death. That’d be my guess. We should revisit this topic a year later.
What do you think? Is Yahoo’s $350 Million investment in Zimbra wasted with Microsoft’s aquisition?

Television 2.0

Over the last few years we have seen several changes in televisions with screen sizes increasing, thickness decreasing etc. I think these changes are just the beginning stages of a bigger change to the television. Over the next few years I expect some important changes to the TV like…

• Integrated Wireless Connectivity (this is going to be an important starting point)
• Integrated of Audio/Video/Pictures (Music, Family Entertainment, Photos etc)
• Integrated of Entertainment Units (DVD/Blu-Ray Player, DVR etc)
• Transmission over the web (like SlingMedia)
• Podcasts Integration (This is going to be key integration)
• Convergence of Gaming Systems (If everything is based on software, all PC games can work on these televisions)
• Convergence of Rental Systems (Directly renting from online systems and through cable systems)
• Integrated Browser
• Built-in Cam (think family conferencing)

I expect these systems to integrate with other systems…

• Integration with your telephone system so that the Caller ID is displayed on your television etc
• Integration with your PCs/Laptops etc

For all of this to happen, there needs to be a good platform that’ll make it easier for TV manufacturers. We need a good operating system for televisions (more on this later). That OS for TV can even be Android.

We’ll see how this key living room hardware will evolve over the next few years as the computers and televisions collide. What do you think? Any thoughts on how the television will evolve?