Radius of Rainbow : Hobbies

The real smart car

Ashutosh Galande — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:03:28 GMT

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…

To get them reading

Ashutosh Galande — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:04:22 GMT

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.

The most influential book on Influence

Ashutosh Galande — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 00:18:00 GMT

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.

Lala: Yet another business model around selling Music

Ashutosh Galande — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:06:17 GMT

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.

And I'm reading again...

Ashutosh Galande — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 03:43:00 GMT

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.