Since last few days, i have been using tv.burrp.com to find out what’s running on different channels (Such a functionality should ideally should be provided by the aggregators like tata sky and airtel, but nevertheless burrp sort of fills the gap). It is a nice support tool to figure out what to watch in only one hour i have each day.

Today, i had a slight more free cycles. I searched for some decent piece of comedy running on world movies. I was recommended “Forever Young”, and review had a nice plot of cryogenics, freezing, 50 years in no particular order. Upon watching for 15 mins, the promised sci-fi was turning out to be heavily sedated with blues music. Curiously, i searched the title on IMDB, and in a sec found out the problem. There are more than one movies by this name. Burrp seems to be assuming that first hit is always right, but in this case it was the second one. World movies was playing this, and burrp was telling this. Blame Mel Gibson for this.

Moreover, World Movie’s official site has a burrp widget displaying the same error.

Fact no.1, India is playing Sri Lanka in tri-series cricket match today(25th august).

Fact no.2, The match starts in afternoon around 2:30PM IST.

Google news algorithm detected that there is a match today. It tried to get the score from cricinfo. Since the match has not started yet, it is listing score of sunday’s match. Result? following screenshot. Sounds like a bug.

Policy Bazaar has been selling insurance online since some time. Online sale of insurance products has been around in the developed landscapes from quite some time.

Policy Bazaar’s process is as simple as this - 

1. Go online to policybazaar.com
2. Select an insurance category
3. Fill in your details in a form including your phone number and email
4. View the options available
5. Buy, if you are able to make up your mind
6. If not, leave it there
7. Next day, start taking calls from all the insurance companies to which policy bazaar sold your number as it qualified as a lead. 
8. Tell first caller to call later as you are driving
9. Tell second caller to call later as you are driving
10. Tell third caller to call later as you are out in a meeting 
11. Tell fourth caller to hold. Take a look at time. If it has been less than 30 mins since the first call, scream
12. Else think of a new errad and tell that to fourth caller
13. In case policybazaar customer care calls to confirm whether you are interested in it or not, scold them

Essentially there are two monetization channels here. 

1. Sell a policy online and take home the commision
2. If a user does not buy a policy, forward his number to insurance companies and charge them for the lead.

Good thinking. Must be an MBA for such great strategies as it is maximizing the revenue potential by pushing the focus on conversion of unsuspecting lead. 

Summary – The experience is horrible. Wait till a decent offering does it online.

Blackberry is synonymous with suits. Suits love it. It has a huge market share in its enterprise offering. Perhaps it enjoys the monopoly amongst them. A corporate pocket without blackberry is almost unheard of.

Lately, after iPhone and Android, RIM has become interested in getting a piece of consumer cake as well. traditionally it has been an enterprise company. Thus, it is facing hiccups on jumping into the consumer bandwagon. This is evident from reviews of torch and OS 6.

The RIM’s solution of push email got traction because when it was launched, the handheld devices were lacking computing power. Now a handheld device has 1 Ghz cpu and decent memory. Which signifies that all the computing task that has been delegated to RIM’s servers, can be performed on device itself. This makes the concept of push email redundant. Devices are giving same email experience as outlook or any other desktop client. Sooner rather than later, a simple https connection between the device and email servers would achieve same thing as that with blackberrys.

RIM should focus on its most loyal customers, the enterprise folks. It should put the muscle behind making their lives easier rather than loosing focusing towards consumer market. There are plenty of facets of innovation in enterprise space. Noone else is in better position to do so apart from RIM. They already hold the market. Just need to push towards designing features for the suits. They would love it, and would not mind paying (a lot of) money for the same.Otherwise, RIM would join the palm soon.

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• Android Surpasses Even RIM In This Study (informationweek.com)
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• Sorry, But The BlackBerry Torch Won’t Save RIM (RIMM, AAPL, GOOG, MSFT) (businessinsider.com)
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Google ceased to support wave today, for not many were wise to understand it. Eric Schmit followed the murder by a series of interviews to some of the most reputed Jehovahs of the tech blogging institution. I still remember it being launched in previous google IO by two brothers and a fat lady (read PM, steph hannon). The most hilarious part of that talk was the lady requesting to do a mexican wave if someone realized the coolness.!Noone did it then. Noone would do it today. Reason? people still do not what it is!

It was launched in an invite only fashion. Whomsoever idea it was, it was absurd. This worked for gmail. Reason? Folks already understood what an email is. They have been using email for quite some time. All knew what to compare gmail with. Since their brains could compare, they could realize the wow’s of gmail. No wonder gmail accounts were being traded on ebay.

Wave, on the other hand, did not go well with folks. It can do lot of things, but would one use it? What problem it solves? How does it help me in day to day work? What am i missing if i am not using wave? Lot of questions still remain to be answered. Many of these doubts would have been solved if it was accessible to people when it mattered most, right after the launch. Most got the account quite late, and by either all had lost interest in the next big thing.

Well, i hate to see it go down, but even i took much time to understand it fully. For a new product, restrictions do not make any sense. Rather, one should spend time with more users to get them familiar. Clearly product management did a bad job here.Merely aping gmail’s reason for success turned out to be primary reason for failure!

Discalimer :- Old Monk is still the source of ideas and typos!

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• Wave goodbye to Google wave. (adland.tv)
• Google Kills Wave Development (tech.slashdot.org)
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If you did not get the title, google blackberry torch. They launched blackberry OS 6 tonight(for the late readers, 3rd day of August 2010). They also launched a phone to buckle up OS 6, which is name torch (torch?? i was hoping for a better, sensible, and meaningful name. Don’t be surprised if next blackberry phone is named after a monstrous 20 wheel automobile called truck or trailer). I must admit i was hoping for this launch since some time now. I have been using a blackberry bold 9000 since some time now. I must admit that my hopes with them took a downward spiral today. I was sincerely hoping that they would come up with a platform with could at least stand in the same line as droid X and iPhone4, if not give them a run for their money. After going through their official blog post, i could help myself jotting down my thoughts on my macbook, at almost midnight IST. I am still struggling to understand the novelty in their blog post regarding something that is named after a device whose only similarity with the handset is the fact that it too is powered by NiMh batteries. The blog post, at the time of writing this post was available at http://blogs.blackberry.com/2010/08/blackberry-torch/.

Following are the excerpts from the post, followed by some notes by an idiot, who still found it tough to get the broader picture (if any)

Today, I am thrilled to introduce the world’s first smartphone with a BlackBerry® keyboard and full touch screen – the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800.

First, there is a big I in it. I thought that there was a big team behind it. Second, World’s first smartphone with Blackberry keyboard and full touch screen seems analogous to world’s first smartphone with android keyboard and touchscreen(the very first android had that).

It comes with the new BlackBerry 6 operating system and there is a lot to be excited about. BlackBerry 6 has something for everyone and personally, I am particularly enjoying the new universal search and auto-wrap text zoom features.

Wow! either iPhone and android are not available in Canada, or they somehow become invisible when they come in reach of RIM. I would have really appreciated if such an statement would have come from someone from North Korea (oops, they call it Korea. Many there do not even know that there is a country called South Korea). Also, it is hard to believe that it is 6th version of their OS, and still struggling to match 2nd version of android!

We spent a lot of time talking with customers, testing and re-testing the software to make sure we could deliver the new features users want without losing any important aspects of the user experience that our customers already know and love. BlackBerry 6 delivers a stunning visual design and the teams here have done an incredible job implementing the amazing array of enhancements, including our new WebKit-based web browser which was first previewed at MWC earlier this year.

BB Engg:- Sir, we have tried to build a browser on restricted hardware, but still, it is far from mosaic 1.0(read netscape).

CEO:- What are other’s doing?

BB Engg:- They are using webkit. and it works really good.

CEO :- Then why the fuck are you wasting my time! Lets use it too. You go ahead and port it! I’ll take care of using some new adjectives during the launch.

With the new BlackBerry Torch smartphone, we also believe our hardware team has delivered the best combined touch-qwerty experience available, seamlessly incorporating our signature BlackBerry keyboard and precision trackpad in a striking design that simply feels great in your hand. One of the things I love the most about the BlackBerry Torch design is the way it allows me to easily transition between using the touch screen, trackpad and keyboard interfaces. I can switch between them and interact with the handset and applications in a very natural way.

Tell me, who in this world would first use the phone in fashion as put up! A free beer to the person!

The BlackBerry Torch is also the first BlackBerry smartphone to ship with our new web browser and we invested a substantial amount of time and effort to engineer a WebKit-based browser that can operate quickly, beautifully and efficiently. In fact, Peter Rysavy today released a new study reporting on the efficiency of the BlackBerry 6 Browser with respect to data usage. We continue to believe that efficiency is an important advantage for our customers and an imperative for the wireless industry.

With all due respect to webkit, guys! RIM! you did not invent webkit! You first ported the fact that webkit can be a good mobile browser, and then you ported webkit.

At RIM we have a long history of building groundbreaking technology, and we are passionate about our products – each day, thousands of RIM employees are focused on enhancing our software, services and smartphones in order to continue meeting your changing wants and needs. The launch of the BlackBerry Torch with BlackBerry 6 is one of the most significant launches in our history and this amazing new smartphone brings together many of RIM’s core strengths into one fluid and superior user experience.

Well! RIM have put some weight on the fact that it is not necessary that early movers are not always the in best innovators. No one doubts them being pioneers of, if not smartphones, wireless email devices. Messaging if the only core strength of RIM. If they continue to “innovate” in this fashion, they might loose it too!(in fact they have almost lost it too! They held an advantage when traditional email did not work properly on handhelds due to many limitations like HTML rendering etc. Current smartphones do not have any of them, thus i feel that messaging experience at par with desktop is not far. )

After reading the specs of torch on mobilecrunch, 624MHz CPU struck me most. Bold 9000 had it too. So, in short, they have same hardware platform, with new OS 6!(which seems like ios and android morph).

I had high hopes on them. Being a long time blackberry user, i have decided not to continue with them. Even Samsung galaxy is a better one as of date.

Disclaimer 1:- I had applied to RIM as a product manager last year, but my application was gracefully turned down.

Discalimer 2:- Old monk with coke is good food for thought and typos!

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Ubuntu pushed out Lucid Lynx some time back. This is one of the major milestones, which will expedite the drift to it. However, as always, some blockers exist. The funniest of them all comes when lucid updates it for the first time. Somehow, network-manager becomes arrogant and starts misbehaving. Following are the symptoms of this problem

1. Network Manager Applet behaves does an up and down and unable to connect to the network.
2. you are unable to ping.
3. ifconfig tells you that interface exists, but IP address is not visible in the output
4. daemon.log tells that call to dhclient has resulted in “Usage: ……” message

The reason? Yes, it is unable to run dhclient in order to get the IP Address from the remote dhcp server.

Solutions? Many claim to solve it, but none worked for me. Forums would tell that this issue is due to some icon shit, other tell that dhclient is not being called properly (the later one is true). Seems like dhclient and network-manager have started speaking french and german instead of normal english.

What worked for me? wicd is a new network management tool. I gave it a try and removed network-manager. Also, i installed dhcpd. All worked well after this.

sudo apt-get install wicd

sudo apt-get install dhcpd

sudo apt-get remove network-manager

sudo init 6

Bonus tip: If you are unable to connect to google docs account from openoffice using gdocs extension, then put the folllowing command.

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-java-common

It will install and work after this.

Read more ….

• Dustin Kirkland: Have you taken Lucid for a testrive yet? (dustinkirkland.com)
• Ubuntu Lucid icons for Caffeine – the computer sleep inhibitor (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Chromium Daily shifts buttons to the left for Ubuntu users (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Skype Added In Official Ubuntu Repository (techie-buzz.com)
• Chuck Frain: Maryland Lucid Release Party May 1 (chuckfrain.net)
• New Proposed Lucid Theme – ‘Sorbet’ (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• How are you updating to Lucid Lynx? (omgubuntu.co.uk)

According to Darwin, everything that evolves, survives. This can be aptly applied to computer science and modern information technology. When i was i grad school, there was no firefox, iphone, android, twitter, gmail, reader, facebook, google IPO, and lot of other things that you see around today. Following used to be the tools we used then.

1. Browser – Mozilla used to be a big favourite. Firebird appeared on scene (it is known as firefox now).
2. Email – Yahoo mail used to be de-facto mail. Although, not many used it actively. We used to rely on IIT mailserver.
3. Blogging – Pretty initial versions of wordpress, and sometimes blogger.
4. Photosharing – Flickr was there. But we still used open source photo albums like JAlbum to host it on our respective websites.
5. Camera – I purchased a 2 Megapixel Canon powershot A60 for 17k bucks then! Now i am sure kaddy can be laughing reading this. NagP got an A70 a few months later, and Kalam got an A80 from Singapore few months further.
6. Phones – I would not even mention this. These were either b/w phones or 8 bit candybars.
7. Online videos – NA (Youtube was launched in feb 2005)
8. Social networking – Orkut (was not completely “owned” by google then).
9. Laptops – Used a Dell inspiron 8000 which costed me 1Lakh ($2000).
10. Office tools – openoffice/staroffice
11. Other mentions – Digg and stumbleupon.

Now in 2010 following is the configuration

1. Browser – Chrome and Firefox(occasionally)
2. Email – Gmail(and google apps)
3. Blogging – I still use hosted wordpress and twitter.
4. Photosharing – Picasa and facebook.
5. Camera – Sony SR7 FullHD and Canon powershot 12 MP
6. Phones – Blackberry, Android
7. Online videos – Youtube.
8. Social networking – Facebook
9. Laptops – Macbook and Dell vostro (costing 30k INR)
10. Office tools – Google docs.
11. Other mentions – Google maps, iphone

Disclaimer – Please read these in my personal context. This is not the general consumer usage trend.

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After many years, i have left webaroo/smsgupshup, and joined another early stage startup in New Delhi.

Webaroo was fun place to work. Built many products, made many good friends, and learnt a lot of good things there. But since last year, working remotely was becoming more of a not-so-funny experience. I thought its time to change “maalik” , though i intend to write the memoirs separately.

I have joined Shop2020 (he he! do not laugh. I am told this is a placeholder name) in New Delhi. It is a pretty super-early stage stealth mode startup.

Again, a lot of interesting work is on the plate from day 0. This also implies that less and less time for blogging and other hack-a-day projects, which is pretty bad, as i have just managed to procure android ADP2 (yes vishy, now i have one too ) last night. I shall keep all posted, and try to put at least one post per week.
Also,
RG, Kaddy, Prajakt, Sumita, Sunil, Rachna and Amit, if you are reading this, best of luck for your new careers.

I have been browsing through Apache OfBiz documentation these days. It is a power packed offering combining the niceties of a weba based framework, to a strong set of existing abstractions to augment you website. Primarily, it is meant for building e-commerce stores. The architecture allows you to build plugins encapsulating the business use cases, and at the same time, extending any available functionality is also pretty easy.

This is a great offering for all the mom and pop stores, which have limited catalog strength and still are in phase of scaling up their businesses. Being open source provides a healthy and proven set components being used at various portals.

The recipe has Java as the core framework, java derivatives like Beanshell and Jython as the scripting tools, and Freemarker as the templating engine. One might argue that instead of a framework, it is a glue that hold various things close, but the real power is the existing library of components/abstractions shipped along with it.

As far as extensions are concerned, it can be compared to mozilla style development.

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