Radius of Rainbow : Interesting

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…

Microsoft Labs: Something between R & D

Ashutosh Galande — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:15:00 GMT

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!!!

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.

beep…

Ashutosh Galande — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 02:24:05 GMT

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” :)

The famous last lecture

Ashutosh Galande — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:24:00 GMT

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…

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My search engine is better than your search engine

Ashutosh Galande — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:07:00 GMT

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

Browse to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx
In the "Create your own" box on the right side, enter http://mysearchoff.com/?q=TEST
Name it something cool.
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 :)

How to beat Guy Kawasaki to a startup

Ashutosh Galande — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:35:00 GMT

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).

WWT @ TED

Ashutosh Galande — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:28:00 GMT

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

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.