Very auspicious time to make a trip to India

Very auspicious time to make a trip to India:

USDINR=X Basic Chart | USD/INR Stock - Yahoo! Finance 

Google Trends for "Kolaveri" Compared with "Rebecca Black"

Will history repeat? Or, as they say, rhyme? Too early to tell. We'll see.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=kolaveri%2C+rebecca+black&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2011&sort=0

For those who don't know what Google Trends is, here is some information on that from their site:

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.

Google Trends: kolaveri, rebecca black

www.google.com

Google Trends provides insights into broad search patterns. Please keep in mind that several approximations are used when computing these results.

Interoperability Nirvana Achieved

Interesting. Right now in front of me:
- a MacBook Pro
- running Windows 7 (via Bootcamp)
- running Internet Explorer in one window
- Google Chrome in another window
- IE window contains a web app running on Windows Azure
- the Windows Azure app is running java code
- the Chrome window contains another app running on Amazon web services
- the AWS app is running C# code on a Windows VM
- the Azure app is crawling the content in the AWS app

Everything works together, while maintaining their own distinct personalities.

From Quora: Why is so much of Silicon Valley obsessed with small ideas that don't solve a problem?

Good answers on both sides of the issue.

Why is so much of Silicon Valley obsessed with small ideas that don't solve a problem?

www.quora.com

Answer (1 of 34): There are a few questions mixed up in this one. I'll peel them apart: 1. Are trivial ideas overfunded relative to more important ones? 2. Is technology transfer a huge opportunity that we are missing? 3. Are too many entrepreneurs working on "trivial" apps? 4. Are these ideas trivial in the first place? 1. Are trivial ideas overfunded relative to more important ones? Let look at the data from the latest Money Tree report. http://www.pwc.com/en_US/us/technology/assets/money-tree-report-q3...

Google search trends for the term "black turtleneck"

Google search trends for the term "black turtleneck" (note the recent surge for obvious reasons). I got mine, did you get yours yet?

http://www.google.com/trends?q=black+turtleneck&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2011

Google Trends: black turtleneck

www.google.com

Google Trends provides insights into broad search patterns. Please keep in mind that several approximations are used when computing these results.

Top 3 Takeaways from the Facebook f8 Conference Last Week

Facebook announced a bunch of new features at last week's Facebook f8 conference, such as Timeline, the ticker tape, deals with music and other media sites and so on. While these announcements are interesting on their own,  there are deeper things going on under the covers which I believe are even more important. 

Here are the 3 things that stuck in my mind:

1. 800 Million Users: They announced that they now have 800 million users (and recently had a day when 500 million logged in during the day). That's more than 11% of all humanity! This has many implications, and here are some that struck me as significant: a) Any simple change they do now has the potential to affect a large enough fraction of humanity to have a meaningful impact not just inside Facebook, but in the real world. b)  On the other hand, this number means that if they make a mistake which, say, leads to every user wasting 1 second of their time due to being confused / distracted or just being delayed, that amounts to about 25 man-years worth of wasted time! That's a big responsibility! c) Also, I assume they will now have to switch focus from acquiring more users to making the network richer. Richer user experience, more engagement, more services / apps, richer analytics etc. This brings us to points 2 and 3 below.
2. More Nouns and Verbs: Now you can say things like "I am listening to X" instead of just "I like X". And this can be done without you having to explicitly take an action (such as clicking on a button).This obviously is a lot more useful and meaningful because a) now you have a richer vocabulary of things you can track, b) the event generation will be more exhaustive because no user action is necessary, and most importantly, c) now you can track what people actually do (more or less) rather than just what they say or claim to do. The resulting richness, completeness, and authenticity of information about user behavior has tremendous value, not just to advertizers, but to all businesses involved in general.
3. Universal Logging and Analysis: The new platform will allow all kinds of apps and services to send  streams of events such as those mentioned above to Facebook and Facebook will be able to log them and analyze them looking for patterns. This makes Facebook world's primary logging and analysis service. Potentially, anything that happens anywhere in the world could be logged and analyzed in one place. Needless to say, the importance of something like this simply can not be understated. 

Even just one of the above would be revolutionary in terms of potential impact. Taken together, possibilities are simply mind boggling. I will blog about some of these possibilities in future posts.

Vin Bhalerao's answer to Which trends in technology will most impact education/learning over the next several years? - Quora

Vin Bhalerao's answer to Which trends in technology will most impact education/learning over the next several years? - Quora:

Most other answers have addressed the "learning" side of education. While those answers are really good, we also need to look at the other side, namely certification / desirability and discoverability from employment point of view. In this area, I believe that following trends will be important:

1. e-portfolio,
2. data-driven / just-in-time certification
3. data-driven reputation / social rank management (for the student),
4. data-driven discovery (for the potential employer / customer)

Some might argue that the last point doesn't actually belong in "education" per se, but I think it will have a major impact on education nevertheless.

'via Blog this'

FT.com - The new FT app using HTML5

The new FT iPhone app is available without going to the Apple app store. It is based on HTML5. I hope this is the beginning of a new trend - at least the big guys should be able to set themselves free of the app store (and, more importantly, having to develop multiple native versions of their apps for the variety of mobile devices.)

FT.com - The new FT app

Also, here is a link to the technical Q&A on this:

FT Web App – Technical Q&A

ESL Reader Web Traffic for June 2011 - Geographic Distribution

June was the first full month during which ESL Reader had Google Analytics turned on. The picture to the left shows the geographic distribution of the traffic (visits per city) during this month. Each circle represents a city. From the picture it is clear that most of the traffic is from North America (USA, mostly), followed by Europe, Middle East and South East Asia. There is a large amount of traffic concentrated in the Northwestern part of USA, where I am based. I have a test program that continuously pings the server to make sure it is alive and that adds a bit to the traffic there.

An interesting thing that does not show up in this picture is that certain sections of Manythings.org are quite popular among some people, in particular, the American History pages. Also, I am getting a bunch of visits to the ESL Reader Live Dictionary pages. And note that I haven't yet spent any money on advertising.

I have more details on the site usage, but I will not be able to talk about them publicly (yet, anyway!) It is just a good feeling to know that some people are finding the service useful.

Good bye SQL, Hellooo NoSQL!

Switched from SQL to NoSQL (using MongoDB and NoRM). Looks good so far. MongoDB seems more "natural" to work with - at least for the stuff I am doing. Plus, things like sharding / replication / high availability will be much easier to implement. And haven't noticed any loss in performance.

By the way, despite the (obligatory) inflammatory title, I am not really taking sides here. I think SQL and NoSQL both will have a place for a long time. Choose whatever works for you.

Why Free is Very Expensive - Forbes.com

Raju Narisetti, Managing Editor at The Washington Post, makes a good case for making online news content easier to understand and more engaging. This is exactly the type of premise that the ESL Reader web service from Redmond Labs is trying to base itself on - make news and web content easier to understand and more engaging to a wider range of readers, while helping them improve their language skills in a fun and natural way. Well, at least that is the hope :-)

"The business model of quality journalism is broken. Readers are moving online--and they want their news for free. Revenues from online advertising too haven't really caught up. Cost cutting and trying to make online readers pay, may not be the answer. The news brands need to get creative and make their content easier, more engaging and useful."

Why Free is Very Expensive - Forbes.com

New sentence completion quiz added to ESL Reader

In addition to the Vocab Quiz, now the ESL Reader has a Usage Quiz. It is a sentence completion quiz, again based on the vocabulary words that are present in the page. The sentences in the quiz are from recent newspaper articles. You can take the quiz multiple times and each time it will give you different sentences. At present, sometimes the sentences can be a bit tough, so I might add multiple levels to the quiz down the road.

There are 2 ways to access ESL Reader.

1. You can either go to the ESL Reader site, or,
2. You can go to one of the partner sites, such as Manythings.org and look for the ESL Reader link on their content pages, e.g. go to VOA News index page and go to any of the pages listed there.

Check it out!

Top ESL website using ESL Reader

Manythings.org is one of the oldest and highest traffic websites for ESL (English as a Second Language). It contains a treasure trove of content and activities for ESL students. I have been working with them to allow their web pages to use the ESL Reader web API. You can now see it in action on any page on their site that contains reading material (such as news items, essays, etc.)

For example, go to http://www.manythings.org/voa/america/ or http://www.manythings.org/voa/stories/ and click on any item. When the page comes up, look for the ESL Reader link on the right hand side of the page. When you click on that link, the page will be processed by ESL Reader and you will be able to use the basic ESL Reader functionality on that page. Note that ESL Reader is currently pre-beta and many more interesting features will be added to this in the near future.

The Billion Prices Project @ MIT

Some day, may be something like this will replace the inflation numbers that governments publish?

 

From the website:

The Billion Prices Project is an academic initiative that collects prices from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct economic research.

This webpage showcases a series of experimental inflation indexes. We upload our most recent research leveraging high-frequency price data and focus on price indexes that can enhance policy decisions. Currently, we are showing the US daily index, a price and product availability index in Japan, as well as a World Inflation Index that provides real-time information on global inflation trends.

Daily Price Indexes » The Billion Prices Project @ MIT

Jay Walker on the world's English mania

A TED video that does an excellent job of explaining the motivation behind my ESL Reader web service. Enjoy the video and then try the service by clicking on the ESL Reader link!

Jay Walker explains why two billion people around the world are trying to learn English. He shares photos and spine-tingling audio of Chinese students rehearsing English -- "the world's second language" -- by the thousands.

[If you are having problems viewing the video below, here is the link to the video on TED.com.]

Use of analytics for a good cause

The site is somewhat new, so we will have to wait a bit to see how well it works. I guess their stats may be currently skewed due to the likely places where the site is likely to have spread (they should really adjust for where most of their traffic comes from), but I am hoping to see more realistic numbers over time.

I PAID A BRIBE

Attending the Game Developers Conference | February 28-March 4, 2011 | Moscone Convention Center | San Francisco, California

I will be attending some of the tutorial sessions and summits. Here is more info on this conference:

Game Developers Conference | February 28-March 4, 2011 | Moscone Convention Center | San Francisco, California

HTML 5 Basics - 3 (Pulsating Rotating Yin-Yang symbol)

This time, the yin-yang symbol expands and contracts while rotating. (Requires browser that supports HTML 5.)

Here is the link to the Javascript source code for this.

HTML 5 Basics - 2 (Rotating Yin-Yang symbol)

This time, the yin-yang symbol is animated. (Requires browser that supports HTML 5.)

Here is the link to the Javascript source code for this.

Innovation & Entrepreneurship Salon with Nathan Myhrvold

Attended the FourPeaks event "Innovation & Entrepreneurship Salon with Nathan Myhrvold" at UW today. Presentation about his new book on modernist cousine, followed by discussion on entrepreneurship and education. Some things that stuck in my mind:

"The tuition in life is largely failure" (meaning that failure is the tuition you pay for learning in life)

"Sports and music prodigies get passionate advocacy to grow while academic prodigies don't"

One of the main contributors to the Wright brothers' success in achieving flight was that they had created a wind tunnel where they could test various designs without having to risk their lives.

Also, copying from nature is usually a good idea, but in case of aeroplanes, that idea did not work too well.

Good overview article on Educational Games

Educational Games

Want Value From Social? Add Structure - Tom Davenport - Harvard Business Review

The trend towards structured / reliable / secure social media:

Want Value From Social? Add Structure - Tom Davenport - Harvard Business Review

HTML 5 Basics - 1 (Yin-Yang symbol)

Starting to create some simple samples / tutorials for HTML 5. I will start with something simple and keep making it more complex as I go. Let us see where it goes.

Here is a Yin-Yang symbol drawn using HTML 5. (Requires browser that supports HTML 5.)

Here is the link to the Javascript source code for this.

Visualizing Scientific Collaboration

Map of scientific collaborations between geographic locations - from 2005 - 2009. An interesting way to visualize the "scientific cortex".

Visualizing Scientific Collaboration