Apart from daily blog feeds,  “The Times of India” has been a regular on my office desk since last couple of years. I turned over the business section today, and following the headlines on that page

1. Corus seeks UK’s financial aid
2. Manufacturing to cut 10-30% jobs
3. Sony Plans to axe 16000 jobs
4. ArcelorMittal to lay off 1500 in Germany, Belgium
5. Global air traffic to fall by 3% in 2009
6. Mitsubishi to recall 200,000 SUVs
7. Government booster not enough for core sector

Clearly, the pessimism is the sentiment which was printed in the lemon ink on the paper. I wonder if we are somehow able to assimilate the information conveyed through daily headlines, and asked to summarize business health on a score of 10, this would not go beyond 2-3. More days like this, and we will be seeing a couple of more zeros in the numbers.

These links on web can be read for further reference

• World’s biggest steel maker to cut 9,000 jobs
• Sony cuts 8,000 jobs
• China downturn deepens
• ArcelorMittal looks to cut jobs
• Brown and Sarkozy meet to discuss bailout plans

Image via Wikipedia

In case you do not have a zott idea about the headline, let me assist you with what wikipedia says about fennec.

The Fennec Fox (Vulpes zerda) is a small nocturnal fox found in the Sahara Desert of North Africa which has distinctive very large ears.

Firefox for mobile phones has been named Fennec. A very very early alpha release has been pushed on the web for users to try out. It can be installed on Nokia N810 tablet. Unfortunately, i am not rich enough to get my hands on one . There are a couple of videos floating around to give you a feel of how it looks like on the tablet.

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

It has some major UI changes over existing browsers on windows mobile, symbain, and other handheld devices. The tabs are on left side, and other back, forward buttons are on right side, and search is at bottom. Nokia N810 is a bit different from other handhelds, as it is supposed to be operated from both hands. The buttons are justified, as user would use her thumbs to browse. However, this should not be a standard, as and when ported to a different formfactor handhelds (my Motorola E8). Designing a UI for handhelds is a very big challenge, as there is an explosion of form factors as compared to Laptops/PCs (reminds me of automobiles ). It would be interesting to see how mozilla solves this problem.

The browser supports plugins, so youtube will be available as long as our Adobe friends are in line with our interests. Renedering seems good, and some sites report the jvascript engine to be 600% faster than existing mobile browsers.

Related articles on the web

• Download First Firefox Mobile Alpha Release [Firefox Mobile]
• Firefox for Mobile: What you need to know
• Mobile Firefox AKA Fennec is Here and Ready for Testing
• First Firefox Mobile Alpha Released
• Shots of FF Mobile (Fennec) on WinMo, 88 on Acid3
• Mozilla Gets Touchy and Feely With Firefox ‘Fennec’ Mobile

Image via CrunchBase

that started it all. Rest in Peace

As usual, our eminent blogger superstarts have started beating the drum. They are high on adrenaline, and i am sure slideshare is going to see massive traffic today, courtsy arringtons, marshalls and their “dear friends”. I wish they could give a thought on what these slides say, and then write a story instead of spreading propaganda and foolishly jumping to conclusions. Innovation is always to stay. If your idea is real good, it will still work. If it just another AJAX+social network+sharing+music+widgets, it is bound to fail. That’s common sense. Nothing more, nothing less. It was greed that was prevalent in past few years. Greed, endowed by VCs who always went, “aah! i missed google and facebook this close, but its still time to fund replicas! They might get it big!”. Funding companies with absolute zero business models was the practice that did the RIP part on the skull. Sequoia’s message is simple. Get something real instead of false promises.

Seqouia capital is one of the most successful venture capital funds of all times. In sight of current economic turmoil, they held a meeting with all their portfolio companies. A couple of nice dudes addressed the companies. Om Malik has covered it on his blog through his trustworthy sources. The minutes of the meeting can be read on gigaom. For the lazy bunch who do not wish to click, i am posting it verbatim down here.

Last night I reported on a special meeting held by Sequoia Capital for its portfolio companies, warning them about the fiscal hurricane that was going to hit them, and how they’d better figure out ways to survive what could be a big downturn.

There were some gaps in the details about that meeting, but I have since been able to piece together the minutes and what folks there essentially said. Since these are second-sourced details, I cannot say they are a 100 percent accurate, so please view them with a degree of skepticism. Nevertheless, I still feel confident enough to share them.

These were the four speakers:

Mike Moritz, General Partner, Sequoia Capital, who moderated the speakers. The speakers were Eric Upin, Partner, Sequoia Capital, who until recently ran the $26-billion Stanford Endowment Fund, and Michael Partner, Sequoia Capital, who was Sequoia’s very first hedge fund manager and worked at Maverick Capital and Robertson Stephens. The last speaker was, as I mentioned before, Doug Leone, General Partner, Sequoia Capital.

Moritz Musings

Mike Mortiz kicked off the proceedings by saying that these are drastic times and that means drastic measures must be taken to survive. His message to companies was don’t worry about getting ahead, instead, “We’re talking survive. Get this point into your heads.” He warned that companies need to be cash-flow positive, and if they are not, then they need to get there now, because raising capital without being cash-flow positive is going to be tough. He was warning that there will be a price to pay for those who hesitate to act.

Upin Says

Upin, who knows a thing or two about money and markets, told the room that we are in the beginning of a long cycle, what he called a “secular bear market.” This could be a 15-year problem, he said. This comment was accompanied by many slides that showed historical charts of previous recessions averaging 17-year cycles. He pointed out that the issue here is not the equity markets but the credit market, and that will take a long time to recover. He was ominous in warning the startups that this is a global issue, it is not a normal time, and is a significant risk not just to growth but to personal wealth.

He advised startups to make drastic changes, to cut expenses and to cut deep, but to still keep marching. “You can’t be a general if you turn back,” he apparently said. The point he hammered on was that since you can’t manage the economy, manage everything else, including your business. He had some interesting advice for startups.

* Cut spending. Cut fat. Preserve capital.
* Throw out the models and spreadsheets, because all assumptions will be wrong.
* Focus on quality.
* Reduce risk.

Michael Beckwith

Michael Beckwith’s presentation had lots of charts and data and he pointed out that the V-shaped recovery is unlikely. He also said that the cuts in spending will accelerate in the fourth quarter and the first quarter of 2009, and pointed to eBay as an example.

Leone’s lessons

Doug Leone told the group that this downturn was a different animal and one from which it would take “years to recover.” He was clear in pointing out that:

* Unprofitable companies would have a tough time raising cash, so get cash-flow positive as soon as possible.
* Go on the offensive and pound on your competitors’ shortcomings.
* Be aggressive with your messaging and be out there. In a downturn, aggressive PR and communications strategy is key.
* Decline in M&A will mean that only lean companies with sales models that work will get bought.
* When it comes to deciding between capital preservation and grabbing market share, he advised that everyone should be preserving capital.

Leone’s other tips for companies, especially the Sequoia portfolio companies, were something like this:

* Start with zero-based budgeting.
* Cutting deeper is the formula to survive, and this is an era of survival of the quickest.
* Make sure you have one year’s worth of cash.
* If you have a product, reduce expenses around it and boost sales. If the product is ready, cut the number of engineers.
* Focus on building the absolutely essential features in your product.
* Be brutal when it comes to marketing — anything that isn’t working, cut it.
* Don’t burn through your cash, for cash is king.
* Cut base salaries on sales people and leverage them with upside.
* Most importantly, be true to yourself.

Related articles

• Inside Details of Sequoia Capital’s Doomsday Meeting With its Companies
• “It’s always darkest before it’s pitch black” [Meltdowns]
• More details on Sequoia’s economic “inconvenient truth” meeting
• Benchmark Capital Advises Startups To Conserve Capital, Look For Opportunities
• Inside Details of Sequoia Capital’s Doomsday Meeting With its Companies (Om Malik/GigaOM)
• Sequoia: Downturn will last YEARS!
• The Sequoia “RIP: Good Times” presentation: Here it is
• Silicon Valley Sounds the Alarm – Sequoia Calls Emergency Meeting Warning Entrepreneurs to Brace for Financial Impact
• Sequoia etc. close barn door after horse
• Sequoia calls off the boom [Meltdowns]

SMSGupshup has raise $11,000,000 (million) in a new round of funding. Charles River Ventures and Helion Venture Partners participated in this round. Following is the official press release

Helion and CRV invest US $11 Million in SMS GupShup, the world’s largest mobile social community

SMS GupShup, the world’s largest and fastest-growing mobile community platform, today announced it received investment of USD 11 million from Helion Ventures and Charles River Ventures. The funds will be used to fund business growth, product development and increased sales and marketing.
Since its launch in April 2007, SMS GupShup has rapidly grown to be a popular social community platform with over 12 million unique users, in over 500 thousand communities ranging from finance, entertainment, business, news, education, spiritual, health and more. The company is seeing increasing adoption from major advertisers for targeted, contextual mobile advertising.  Initially launched in India, SMS GupShup will later be available in other geographies.
“Helion Ventures is very excited about SMS GupShup’s rapid growth and leadership position in the dynamic mobile space. We believe that this innovative platform for mobile communities and advertising has immense potential,” said Ashish Gupta, Managing Director, Helion Ventures.
“SMSGupShup has assembled a talented team of smart technologists and proven entrepreneurs. We look forward to working with them in building a large, successful business.” stated Devdutt Yellurkar, Partner, Charles River Ventures.
“We are delighted to have two world-class venture capital firms as our investors, helping us deliver great customer value and build on a significant market opportunity” said Rakesh Mathur, CEO and Co-founder of SMS GupShup. “This investment will enable SMSGupShup to innovate faster and deliver great products to consumers, advertisers and enterprises,” added Beerud Sheth, President, and Co-founder.

SMS GupShup provides an unique platform to enable contextual advertising to targeted communities to increase brand awareness and engagement. For example, SMS GupShup built communities around DLFIPL and Pepsi – Youngistaan to enable loyal users to deeply engage with the respective brands.
About SMS GupShup
SMS GupShup is the world’s largest and fastest-growing mobile social community platform. It is a free, SMS-based group messaging service used by millions of users to build communities in categories ranging from finance, entertainment, business, news, education, spiritual, health and more. Users communicate with each other by sending group messages, personal messages, greeting cards and more. For more information on SMS GupShup, or to create and join groups, visit www.smsgupshup.com. SMS GupShup is operated by Webaroo Inc. from its offices in Santa Clara, Mumbai and Delhi.
About Charles River Ventures (CRV)
Founded in 1970, Charles River Ventures is one of the nation’s oldest and most successful early-stage venture capital firms with approximately $2.1 billion under management. CRV is dedicated to helping exceptional entrepreneurs turn their ideas into the next category leaders in high growth technology and media sectors. Over the past 10 years, CRV funds have been ranked among the industry’s top performers. CRV has offices in Boston, MA and Menlo Park, CA. For more information, visit www.crv.com.
About Helion Venture Partners
Helion Venture Partners is a multi-stage, India-focused venture fund with $350 million under management. The fund invests in businesses that are either technology-powered or catering to the Indian consumer services space. The focus sectors of investment include – outsourcing, internet, mobile, technology products, retail services, education, and financial services. The fund’s investors are well-respected Global institutions including top tier University endowment funds, Foundations, and family offices. The fund and its portfolio companies are advised by an experienced and industry renowned team of professionals based in India which include Sanjeev Aggarwal, Ashish Gupta, Kanwaljit Singh and Rahul Chandra.

I mentioned the firefox bug last weekend about wrong versioning. You can read the details here. This morning i woke up and fired up my laptop, i could see a new update on firefox (maybe it was downloaded last night, but was applied in morning only).

In their new “whatsnew”  page, they have omitted a version mention altogether, keeping it simple and sweet .Guys! What took you so long?

Paul Graham of Ycombinator fame, has published a wishlist of the ideas they would like to fund coming season. The original article is available here. Since i hate unnecessary clicks, i am pasting the post here. All you startup junkies, its high time to get your brains working. Buy some caffeine on your way back to home today evening, and burn some extra watts to come up with something meaningful. You might be Kevin Rose 2.0, new::Zuckerberg

Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund
Paul Graham
July 2008

When we read Y Combinator applications there are always ideas we’re hoping to see. In the past we’ve never said publicly what they are. If we say we’re looking for x, we’ll get applications proposing x, certainly. But then it actually becomes harder to judge them: is this group proposing x because they were already thinking about it, or because they know that’s what we want to hear?

We don’t like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. So we’re trying something new: we’re going to list some of the ideas we’ve been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn’t anticipate.

Please don’t feel that if you want to apply to Y Combinator, you have to work on one of these types of ideas. If we’ve learned nothing else from doing YC, it’s how little we know. Many of the best startups we’ve funded, like Loopt, proposed things we’d never considered.

1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when Sony and Universal are suing children. Actually, at least two things are broken: the software that file sharers use, and the record labels’ business model. The current situation can’t be the final answer. And what happened with music is now happening with movies. When the dust settles in 20 years, what will this world look like? What components of it could you start building now?

The answer may be far afield. The answer for the music industry, for example, is probably to give up insisting on payment for recorded music and focus on licensing and live shows. But what happens to movies? Do they morph into games?

2. Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you’d trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don’t want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox? If you built one now, who else would use it besides grandparents and small children?

3. New news. As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem is not merely that they’ve been slow to adapt to the web. It’s more serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives.

News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the web. So called “blogs” (because the old media call everything published online a “blog”) like PerezHilton and TechCrunch are one sign of the future. News sites like Reddit and Digg are another. But these are just the beginning.

4. Outsourced IT. In most companies the IT department is an expensive bottleneck. Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months. Enter Wufoo. Now if the marketing department wants to put a form on the web, they can do it themselves in 5 minutes. You can take practically anything users still depend on IT departments for and base a startup on it, and you will have the enormous force of their present dissatisfaction pushing you forward.

5. Enterprise software 2.0. Enterprise software companies sell bad software for huge amounts of money. They get away with it for a variety of reasons that link together to form a sort of protective wall. But the software world is changing. I suspect that if you study different parts of the enterprise software business (not just what the software does, but more importantly, how it’s sold) you’ll find parts that could be picked off by startups.

One way to start is to make things for smaller companies, because they can’t afford the overpriced stuff made for big ones. They’re also easier to sell to.

6. More variants of CRM. This is a form of enterprise software, but I’m mentioning it explicitly because it seems like this area has such potential. CRM (“Customer Relationship Management”) means all sorts of different things, but a lot of the current embodiments don’t seem much more than mailing list managers. It should be possible to make interactions with customers much higher-res.

7. Something your company needs that doesn’t exist. Many of the best startups happened when someone needed something in their work, found it didn’t exist, and quit to build it. This is vaguer than most of the other recipes here, but it may be the most valuable. You’re working on something you know customers want, because you were the customer. And if it was something you needed at work, other people will too, and they’ll be willing to pay for it.

So if you’re working for a big company and you want to strike out on your own, here’s a recipe for an idea. Start this sentence: “We’d pay a lot if someone would just build a …” Whatever you say next is probably a good product idea.

8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you’re going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don’t focus on the novel take on dating that you’re going to offer. That’s the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.

9. Photo/video sharing services. A lot of the most popular sites on the web are for photo sharing. But the sites classified as social networks are also largely about photo sharing. As much as people like to share words (IM and email and blogging are “word sharing” apps), they probably like to share pictures more. It’s less work and the results are usually more interesting. I think there is huge growth still to come. There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered.

10. Auctions. Online auctions have more potential than most people currently realize. Auctions seem boring now because EBay is doing a bad job, but is still powerful enough that they have a de facto monopoly. Result: stagnation. But I suspect EBay could now be attacked on its home territory, and that this territory would, in the hands of a successful invader, turn out to be more valuable than it currently appears. As with dating, however, a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work.

11. Web Office apps. We’re interested in funding anyone competing with Microsoft desktop software. Obviously this is a rich market, considering how much Microsoft makes from it. A startup that made a tenth as much would be very happy. And a startup that takes on such a project will be helped along by Microsoft itself, who between their increasingly bureaucratic culture and their desire to protect existing desktop revenues will probably do a bad job of building web-based Office variants themselves. Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven’t taken the world by storm, and how you’re going to beat that.

12. Fix advertising. Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they’re getting. It doesn’t work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.

What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.

Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects are measurable, above all in sales.

13. Online learning. US schools are often bad. A lot of parents realize it, and would be interested in ways for their kids to learn more. Till recently, schools, like newspapers, had geographical monopolies. But the web changes that. How can you teach kids now that you can reach them through the web? The possible answers are a lot more interesting than just putting books online.

One route would be to start with test prep services, for which there’s already demand, and then expand into teaching kids more than just how to score high on tests. Another would be to start with games and gradually make them more thoughtful. Another, particularly for younger kids, would be to let them learn by watching one another (anonymously) solve problems.

14. Tools for measurement. Now that so much happens on computers connected to networks, it’s possible to measure things we may not have realized we could. And there are some big problems that may be soluble if we can measure more. The most important of all is the defining flaw of large organizations: you can’t tell who the most productive people are. A small company is measured directly by the market. But once an organization gets big enough that people on in the interior are protected from market forces, politics starts to rule, instead of performance. An improvement of even a few percent in the ability to measure what actually happens in large organizations would have a huge impact on the world economy, and a startup that enabled it would be entitled to a cut.

15. Off the shelf security. Services like ADT charge a fortune. Now that houses and their owners are both connected to networks practically all the time, a startup could stitch together alternatives out of cheap, existing hardware and services.

16. A form of search that depends on design. Google doesn’t have a lot of weaknesses. One of the biggest is that they have no sense of design. They do the next best thing, which is to keep things sparse. But if there were a kind of search that depended a lot on design, a startup might actually be able to beat Google at search. I don’t know if there is, but if you do, we’d love to hear from you.

17. New payment methods. There are almost certainly things whose growth is held back because there’s no way to charge for them. And the people who could implement solutions don’t realize how much demand there would be, precisely because this growth has been held back. So pretty much any new way of paying for things that’s easier for some class of situations will turn out to have a bigger market than its inventors expected. Look at Paypal. (Warning: Regulated industry.)

18. The WebOS. It probably won’t be a literal translation of a client OS shifted to servers. But as applications migrate to servers, it seems possible there will be something that plays a central role like an OS does. We’ve already funded several startups that could be candidates. But this is a big prize, and there will probably be multiple winners.

19. Application and/or data hosting. This is related to the preceding idea, but not identical. And again, while we’ve already funded several startups in this area, it’s probably going to be big enough that it contains several rich markets.

It may turn out that 4, 18, and 19 all have the same answer. Or rather, that there will be things that answer all three. But the way to find such a grand, overarching solution is probably not to approach it directly, but to start by solving smaller, specific problems, then gradually expand your scope. Start by writing Basic for the Altair.

20. Shopping guides. Like news, shopping used to be constrained by geography. You went to your local store and chose from what they had. Now the space of possibilities is bewilderingly large, and people need help navigating it. If you already know what you want, Bountii can find you the best price. But how do you decide what you want? Hint: One answer is related to number 3.

21. Finance software for individuals and small businesses. Intuit seems ripe for picking off. The difficulty is that they’ve got data connections with all the banks. That’s hard for a small startup to match. But if you can start in a neighboring area and gradually expand into their territory, you could displace them.

22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there’s an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based. Like make it easier to get data into it, through forms or scraping.

Don’t make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists. (Which means you probably want to write it in one.)

23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they’re constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they’re looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.

24. A buffer against bad customer service. A lot of companies (to say nothing of government agencies) have appalling customer service. “Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us.” Doesn’t it make you cringe just to read that? Sometimes the UIs presented to customers are even deliberately difficult; some airlines deliberately make it hard to buy tickets using miles, for example. Maybe if you built a more user-friendly wrapper around common bad customer service experiences, people would pay to use it. Passport expediters are an encouraging example.

25. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it’s a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves.

26. Better video chat. Skype and Tokbox are just the beginning. There’s going to be a lot of evolution in this area, especially on mobile devices.

27. Hardware/software hybrids. Most hackers find hardware projects alarming. You have to deal with messy, expensive physical stuff. But Meraki shows what you can do if you’re willing to venture even a little way into hardware. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in hardware; you can often do dramatically new things by making comparatively small tweaks to existing stuff.

Hardware is already mostly software. What I mean by a hardware/software hybrid is one in which software plays a very visible role. If you work on an idea of this type you’ll tend to have the field to yourself, because most hackers are afraid of hardware, and most hardware companies can’t write good software. (One reason your iPod isn’t made by Sony is that Sony can’t write iTunes.)

28. Fixing email overload. A lot of people, including me, feel they get too much email. A solution would find a ready market. But the best solution may not be anything as obvious as a new mail reader.

Related problem: Using your inbox as a to-do list. The solution is probably to acknowledge this rather than prevent it.

29. Easy site builders for specific markets. Weebly is a good, general-purpose site builder. But there are a lot of markets that could use more specialized tools. What’s the best way to make a web site if you’re a real estate agent, or a restaurant, or a lawyer? There still don’t seem to be canonical answers.

Obviously the way to build this is to write a flexible site builder, then write layers on top to produce different variants. Hint: The key to making a site builder for end-users is to make software that lets people with no design ability produce things that look good—or at least professional.

30. Startups for startups. The increasing number of startups is itself an opportunity for startups. We’re one; TechCrunch is another. What other new things can you do?

Consider this list to end with a giant ellipsis. It’s not even a complete list of the types of ideas we’re looking for, let alone of all types of startup ideas. So if you have a great idea that’s not on this list, don’t be deterred. Some of the best ideas are outliers everyone ignores because they seem crazy.

It was an interesting exercise to write out this list. I noticed a lot of similarities between ideas that I never realized were there. In fact, when you read the list, you get a pretty accurate composite portrait of a startup: a combination of relentless predator upon the obsolete and benevolent solver of the world’s problems. As ways of making money go, that’s pretty good. Startups are often ruthless competitors, but they’re competing in a game won by making what people want.
 

Looks like i am having a tough time with upgrades. Yesterday, it was firefox, now it is Vuze.

Vuze was formerly known as Azureus, and was arguably the most popular torrent client. It recently upgraded to version 3.1.1.0. I felt my downloads are becoming slow, in fact system is taking a lot to respond. Upon opening task manager, it seemed that ping.exe is working overetime. Tonnes of instances here and there. I killed vuze, and they were all gone. Restarting, and they were back to work. See the screenshot.

I am not on a good connection for 2 days. So will be posting updates later. Plan to play around with ethereal to sniff these pings and get details. Check again on monday.

I am going through a lazy weekend. Not doing anything productive, just killing internet bandwidth with some torrents, some surfing, some thinking on potential blog posts (One on Mike Arrington’s Kindle killing books and other on apple app store).

Anyways, firefox 3 patched itself yesterday, opened a whatsnew page upon restart. To my surprise, the new whatsnew spat out a wrong version. Url is right,about box says right, but wrong messaging. It says 2.something as currently running firefox version. To support my surprise, i am attaching the screens shot as well. Take a look.

Discalimer :- I do have Flock 2.0 installed on my laptop, but this is an authentic firefox screenshot, no doctoring.

1. Intelligent mice :- Microsoft has put around 1 GB of memory in the conventional mouse. I welcome this. Intelligent mice will be good to work, and will be a boon to people, replacing need for carrying portable HDD.
2. Cheaper office :- According to microsoft insider, they are launching office student edition for just $60. Cool. It is a welcome move from many, but it seems that office 2007 is facing some real competition for user acceptance.
3. NYTimes facing the book :- Yes, Yes – They have launched a facebook app. Looks like facebook is becoming web within a web. Now i want to have a website, and a facebook app.
4. Everyone is going green :- Green seems the flavour of season. Vinod Kholsa is known to invest actively in green startups. Now Google has jumped into bandwagon to provide a greener world. Their philanthropic inititiative about developing an eco friendly transport vehicle has also coma at the same time.
5. Digg, reddit vs news :- BBC has a nice article with a comparing digg, reddit, and other news website. An interesting read i must say. It is citizens vs journalists.

References :-

1. Memory mice :- http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9776021-1.html
2. Microsoft office discount :- http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/archives/2007/09/12/office-ultimate-2007-just-60-for-students/
3. NYTimes on facebook :- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_york_times_launches_facebook_app.php
4. Greener google :- http://blog.google.org/2007/09/drivers-start-your-batteries.html
5. Digg, Reddit :- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6990033.stm