Radius of Rainbow

Over the holidays, I wrote a small windows mobile app that would let me listen to one of the Bollywood radio stations on my phone. It’s very handy to use voice command to start the app and have it play desi melodies as I set out for a long drive over the weekends. Ever since I wrote it, I wondered why my car didn’t come with something similar. A unit that can talk to the net through my cell phone’s data plan and get all kinds of data such as maps, traffic, weather and even music for that matter.

Looks like somebody in Microsoft Auto group was thinking the same thing. I just saw this modest piece on Engadget about the next version of Microsoft Sync. Though it looks very plain, the coolest part is that “the service uses Bluetooth to tether to any handset, downloading content using a voice call so that you can use this completely fee-free -- even if you don't have a data plan” This is just plain awesome! Now only if they’d put that in a Honda…

Read a short essay by Adrian Hon about decline in reading. It talks about how people are reading less these days and what would get them to read more. I don’t know if people are reading less overall but I tend to agree that in this age of microblogs, twits and SMS, reading a long winding novel or even an essay is rare.

He posits that with the increase in popularity of kindle and other ebook readers, we will see increase in ebook piracy and that would lead to people reading more books. I think anything that transforms from atoms to bits will eventually get pirated. So no doubt that ebooks will get pirated more often but I don’t know if an easy access to books will make people read more. Aren’t libraries already offering good literature for free? That still doesn’t seem to encourage people to read.

As for getting people to read, I think the answer is YouTube. Yes the same video medium that Adrian despises as inferior to books. Let me explain. In Microsoft we frequently have authors visit and talk to us about their latest books. These hour long talks are then archived and are available online for viewing later. Almost all of the books that I have read in the past year or so have been by the authors whose talks I listened to online. Imagine if Amazon put on its pages a 5-10 minute video of the author outlining key ideas of the book. I’d definitely view that as opposed to reading through the first chapter or looking at the table of contents. A video might be inferior but it is great at grabbing attention. It also solves the problem of barrier of entry that Adrian is referring to. One can quickly decide after watching a 5 minute video whether he/she wants to read more about the topic or not. So I think something like that is more likely to get people reading that piracy or Kindle.

Just finished reading Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. This has got to be one of the most convincing books I have read in a long time. I read it as part of an internal study group on Managerial Psychology and I’m glad I did. Though it really is a text book, it hardly reads like one. There are so many cases and anecdotes all throughout the book that it can easily qualify as an easy to read storybook.

All through the book Cialdini talks about shortcuts, our automatic responses to situations such as buying unwanted things at the fear of scarcity, committing to previous decisions just to be consistent etc. There are so many every-day examples in the book that it gives you a constant feeling of déjà-vu as you read the book. At the end of each chapter he also talks about defenses against many such shortcuts. Fortunately these sections are smaller and the author prevents it  being just another self-help book.

Cialidini concludes by referring to the informational deluge that we are facing and noting that such shortcuts can come in very handy to make quick decisions when we are inundated with too much information. The only thing we need to be aware of is that the people are not exploiting the shortcut responses and are not fabricating the information to invoke the shortcuts.

I think the next book I am going to read will be Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. That book also touches upon the subject of quick decisions and should be a good read after Influence.

Just noticed Soma’s post on DevLabs. He introduces DevLabs as a place to share innovations happening in the developer division within Microsoft. This looks like a sibling to already existing Office Labs and  Live Labs. Pretty exciting. Microsoft has a lot of such experimental projects going on in various product groups and this should be a great way to introduce these to the people outside of Microsoft and get their feedback.

We have a research event at Microsoft each year called the TechFest where people in product groups get a sneak peek in the world of MS Research. It’s very exciting and inspirational event for people like us who work mostly on end user products. I have always wondered why we couldn’t allow people outside of MS to one of these conferences under NDA. Now that we have Microsoft Labs, we have a platform to share these experiments with the world. Way to go! All the best MS labs!!!

Selling music online is an interesting business. So many people have tried their hands at it with so many different approaches… iTunes and Zune were revolutionary. They freed good music tracks from the otherwise mediocre albums. iTunes pioneered this model. Zune went a step further and made it easy for people to access millions of tracks via subscriptions.

There are more such models in the wild. Just heard about Lala which has yet another business model around selling music. Two novel approaches here. 1. Lala let’s you listen to your offline music collection from any browser and 2. Lala allows you to purchase a track for listening online for 10 cents. This is one interesting approach to deregulating copy that Lessig suggested.

There’s one approach that I want someone to try out. It’s music rental. My theory is that a music track has shelf life. You’d hardly hear current chart toppers a few months down the line. Artists and trends come and go. J Lo and Shakira were popular a few years ago so why do people have sunk cost in their songs today? Particularly if they hardly ever listen to them these days.

There are very few tracks that you’d perpetually own and would listen to over and over again. For all other tracks, it makes sense to rent them for a friction of the purchase price and let the DRM expire the track after some time say a year. If I want to own the track for long haul, I can always own it DRM free. This will let me explore a lot of music without having to commit to 15$ per month or spending a dollar a track. This will also let me play all the music that is currently hot without having to pay a lot of money for it.

Restrictive measures against piracy should not prohibit people from exploring music and developing their taste.

Saw the latest Mac ad. In it Hodgman tries to buzz the Mac guy every time he tries to say Vista. These are getting more and more boring, negative and pointless. Come Mac folks, Think different!

Also on the topic of buzzing, while its competitors are busy making bricks and unfunny ads, MS went ahead and got a patent for live filtering of objectionable words.

A lot of people are hoping to see this in profanity filter to show up Xbox and other voice communications, I was wondering how come we never implemented something similar in Live messenger and Outlook for textual communication. May be they expect the authors to do the censoring using backspace and delete keys. There’s no undo key in speech, just the post-faux pas words “oops sorry” :)

Read over at TechCrunch today that Joost has undergone a UI makeover to become an all-flash site. Don’t know how that is going to give the ailing site a boost, but good to see that Joost is still alive. They have a great idea; using P2P to deliver streaming video. but I could never get myself to use it. I was one of the early adopters to try the desktop client. It was nice to use with lot of good features but I can’t see myself using keyboard and a mouse to interact with my TV. I am too addicted to my media center for that.

In early days, one of the most common feature request on the Joost support forums was for a media center plug-in for Joost. I am surprised that they never made one. However cool media center is, it still lacks a killer app that delivers non-TV content to TVs. TVTonic, my most favorite app on MCE, does that job to some extent but still all it does is to aggregate a bunch of video rss feeds. Joost had all that plus had a social aspect to it. Given the proliferation of Vista Ultimate and XP MCE, such a plug-in would have provided a nice install base for the fledgling software. A good install base would have given a much needed network effect to Joost particularly given that it’s USP was P2P streaming + social. I’d have loved to use Joost from my Media Center but alas that never happened.

I really wish MCE provides a platform to broadcast ad supported media over the internet to our TVs. There are a lot of such sites (Hulu, YouTube) that have a such content and I wish I could watch them on my media center sometime. Having some social features that would allow viewing what my family/friends are watching and sending them recommendations/reminders about shows/events right from the MCE UI would be awesome too. First preview of Windows 7 is just round the corner and I have high hopes.

Lawrence Lessig had an interesting essay yesterday at the WSJ. Based on his upcoming book remix, the essay is subtitled “Digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up”.

Among the solutions he proposes, the most interesting one is about deregulating the copy, focusing on the ultimate use of the copyrighted material rather than the actual act of copying. It essentially says that the use of a song by a political campaign in a public meeting and by an amateur YouTube mom in a home video has to be treated differently.

Although amateur, the content on sites like YouTube does generate revenue implicitly. It would be unfair to let a company like Google eat that up given that it did not contribute to the content at all, only provided the infrastructure to broadcast it. Sites like Break.com do offer uploaders some share of the revenue but the most popular video site in the world still doesn’t.

An ideal scenario would be something like this: You upload your remixed video on YouTube. YouTube parses it to realize that you have used some copyright material. It automatically sets aside a revenue share from that video for the copyright owner and publishes the video.

The current model and the usage of DMCA by sites like YouTube is a mockery of the concept of copyright. It’s inefficient, scales poorly and also inhibits creativity of the remixers. Using the remixers’ creativity by letting the original copyright owner collect part of the profit would not only encourage such remixes but would also give credit where it is due. Now only if YouTube could be less greedy and bold enough to take such step…

A truly moving lecture by Prof. Randy Pausch of CMU. This guy has incredible story telling skills. He kept reminding me of of Richard Feynman particularly during the first part of the lecture. Coincidentally Feynman lost his life to cancer too…

I'm a new soul I can do this strange world hoping I could learn a bit about how to give and take

But since I came here felt the joy and the fear finding myself making every possible mistake :)

Joel's blog is one of the best resources on the net for software development. I find myself agreeing with him most of the times but his latest post on Live Mesh didn't come out to be as insightful as some of his others.

If you take out his histrionics, Joel’s premise is that MS is wasting too many resources in solving the problem of synchronization which doesn’t even exist to begin with. His logic is that synchronization must not be an issue as you don't see people flooding numerous other services that provide similar functionality.

So what's Microsoft doing different with Mesh?

One thing I love about Microsoft is that it never stops at writing an app. It always tries to make a platform out of it. Microsoft's past successes have come from generating a critical mass of ISVs around its technologies to create a whole ecosystem of software and solutions. And that's what I see is being done differently in case of Mesh. Sure there are a zillion other applications out there that sync your files across but none of them was written with a vision to make every desktop and device out there a first class citizen of the Net.

Our desktops and other devices (e.g. phone) are like big silos of applications, data and information. They exist as isolated entities that connect to the net primarily through browser. That's the reason we see a crop of these web based applications (even a so called OS) that hardly integrate closely with the rest of my desktop. I think Mesh is trying to break that model and open up those silos so that all my devices and their content is always accessible to me wherever I am.

Sure there are issue like security and access control that would be paramount in such scenarios and I'm sure folks over in Mesh team are thinking hard about it. Frankly, I haven't yet wrapped my head around all the concepts of Mesh but from whatever I have seen it looks a bit too sophisticated to be dismissed as just a file sync app.

Hey you, yes, I am talking to you. I know you use that non-evil search engine. Yes the one with multicolor logo. You think that's the best search engine out there don't you? You are so addicted to it, you even made it your your homepage. Like a lost wanderer, every time you have to find directions to any place on the www, you go to that omniscient oracle of yours and blindly follow wherever it takes you assuming that the best the world has to offer.

Now listen. I've got a news for you. Your search engine is lame! Sorry to bring this disappointing news to you but my search engine is better than your's. 3 times better! Now c'mon don't feel bad. You too can use it if you like.

Here's what you do if you are using IE7/IE8

1. Browse to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx
2. In the "Create your own" box on the right side, enter http://mysearchoff.com/?q=TEST
3. Name it something cool.
4. Click on install. Make sure that "Make this my default search provider" check box is clicked. That's it.

Suddenly you'll feel enlightened. At least three times smarter than what you felt with your lame old search engine. And if you love typing and prefer browsing to the search engine every time you want to look up something, you can use its address http://mysearchoff.com. While you are there, don't forget to check which of the three search engines is leading in search satisfaction. Tell me if you were surprised. I wasn't :)

I admire Guy Kawasaki and love The art of start. I'd recommend his book to anybody who has ever dreamt of starting anything. So when he announced his latest venture today, I was all ears. It's called alltop. A concept so simple that it'd make you think how come nobody thought of this before... well some people sure did. Ever heard of live.com, my yahoo, igoogle or....? Well there are hundreds of them out there.

Though not original, I would certainly not undermine the idea of an rss aggregator with links culled for the mass market. I am one of those people who use Live.com as their default homepage and rss reader and since switching to live.com I have hardly ever spent time looking for interesting stuff to read in my spare time. Having all your favorite sites at your fingertips the moment you open your browser can be very addictive. I spent a few weeks gathering the feeds that I liked and Alltop saves you the effort by gathering most interesting sites for you. The disappointing part is that I did not see any smart algorithm or customization around the blog selection.

Though it looks quite obvious and simple, I'm sure Guy has plans for the site but in the mean time if you want to beat him to a startup, head to live.com and start customizing your home page. In terms of look and feel, live.com home page is at least as good as alltop, if not better. Here's a comparative screen capture of live (on left) and alltop (on right).

The much blogged about WorldWideTelescope was talked about at TED. Here's a quick glimpse of it. I can't wait to see it live at the TechFest in a few days. Folks at MS research do a lot of cool things that only we had a privilege to look at. I am glad that WWT is getting its fair share of public limelight.

PS: If the video below doesn't load, here's a direct link for you: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/224

For last couple of years my reading reading appetite has been sated by the junk news served by digg and reddit. I read it not because it was sensational but just because it was so easily accessible from my live.com page. Thanks to DailyLit, I won't be able to use that excuse anymore.

I came across this really simple concept just yesterday and got hooked to it immediately. They send you books via email or RSS feed. The selection is limited to about 500 public domain books but I'm sure by the time I finish my first book, I'd have many more to choose from.

This reminds me of those good ol' days when we used to browse the internet by our emails using Agora servers. Now here I am on a lavishly fast link and still using a service quite similar to the one in the infacy of the WWW. Anyways gotta go I have my first installment of Lessig's Free Culture to finish.