Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
"Birthday wishes" – reading between the lines.
It was my birthday recently and the number of ways I got birthday wishes really set me thinking…. Here goes…
- A few phone calls on my mobile phone that woke me up…
- Calls on my land line wishing me.
- Some friends who walked in to wish me.
- SMS wishes.
- Email – Office email & Personal email on Yahoo and Google.
- Instant Messaging – Yahoo messenger
and Gtalk messages chat messages wishing me.
- Twitter messages.
- Social networks – Facebook
and Orkut messages.
For want of a better term I call these ways of communication “channels”. That was 8 different channels or means that people used to communicate with me this birthday!
And guess what? – I got no Birthday cards or Electronic Birthday cards this year!
I suppose… The thought is more important than the deed!
It made me stop and think what all this meant. I tried to make sense of it all… And here’s what I concluded.
- “Impersonal” is now becoming “personal” – Wishing is becoming more and more impersonal… And so are many relationships and acquaintances. It is now normal to receive an offline IM birthday message. Communication is getting asynchronous
even when it could have be synchronous. An offline IM message, or SMS or facebook message instead of a call.
- The onus of picking the wishes is “yours” Annie Hall film – You don’t “pick”
your wishes you don’t get it. What this essentially means is you don’t
log on to Facebook for a week you get your wishes “late”. - It is getting tougher to acknowledge wishes – You need to reply and acknowledge wishes on all these many channels. Even if you find sending an SMS back boring. After all your acknowledgment mean a lot to the sender.
- More social channels => the more connected you are
– The more social channels you are on the more you might get wishes. I got wishes from people I would never have expected earlier.
- Channel usage patterns are changing – For many Twitter is almost email, thought it was never meant to be. The usage patterns between some channels are blurring.
- They still care for you no matter the channel – The important fact is people want to wish you and that is what matters. it doesn’t matter if its impersonal.
- You are really old fashioned if you expect Birthday cards!
No matter how much I adopt technology or geeky I get, the charm of being wished by some one in person or receiving a “real” greeting card is unmatched.
And of course as always, many others who simply forgot my birthday despite all these channels. 
Barcamp Bangalore 3 – 30th March, 1st April 2007
The tech community of Bangalore is back to organize the third edition of the popular Barcamp Bangalore event. The event has pan-Indian following and has in the past had many tech enthusiasts fly in from around the world to participate. The event is planned for the 30th March and 1st April 2007.
This Barcamp Bangalore edition is about Internet, Mobile and Society. The event is being held at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB).
This time I am part of the core organizing team. It is a lot of fun to be working with a passionate bunch of people who want this event to be one that delivers value to the participants and is cool.
Keep yourselves posted at http://www.barcampbangalore.org
. And if you are potential sponsor reading this post, this is a great opportunity you ought not to miss.
See you all at the event.
Technorati Tags: barcampbangalore3
proto.in – bringing together Indian entrepreneurs and VCs
Kiruba Shankar C.H.U.D. download spoke about the upcoming Proto.in conference – a conference billed with the theme – Create, Collaborate, Contribute. The conference is on the 20th, 21st January 2007 at IIT Madras.
The organizers say this is inspired by Demo (The launchpad for emerging technologies). Here’s a summary of what this event is all about.
- They intend to get the most promising 25 startups to come and present their prototype for 10 mins.
- IIT Madras Basic on dvd and TiE
are supporting this event.
- They are looking at prototypes. No powerpoints. They are yet to define what a “prototype” is. Some in the audience wondered if an HTML prototype would do?
- They intend to have 20 something VCs
- They wanted to call it “launch.in” but the URL was taken. So it was called “proto.in”
- They already have 50 nominations so far.
- You could send you nominations by 20th December.
- They are going to charge Rs.5000 for the startup, Rs.25000 for VCs and Rs.500 to participate.
It has all the ingredients to make it a big event. They just got my attention.
Barcamp Bangalore 2.0 on December 2, 3
Its back again in Bangalore on the 2nd and 3rd of December. For the uninitiated Barcamp is an “unconference”. In simple english it is a gathering of technology enthusiasts who get together and share thoughts, ideas and emerging trends. The intent is to have an informal environment where the conference schedule is put together on the fly and presenters typically make impromptu sessions. Far from the formalism that one sees in formal conferences.
Bangalore now joins the list of cities that have had more than one barcamp.
The team organising Barcamp this time around seems to be doing great. They already have sponsors in the bag (boy it aint easy to get money these days).
Immigrants (L.A. Dolce Vita) on dvd
This would be barcamp 3 for me after Barcamp Chennai and Barcamp Bangalore.
Lock you calendar in. And dont miss the fun. See you all there.
Technorati Tags: barcamp, bangalore
Wikipedia success faster than expected?
Wikipedia is taking off faster than it can handle….
I have been dabbling with Wikipedia and editing articles there since June 2004. Since then it seems to have come a long way in terms of awareness and usage amongst the Web surfer community.
How did I figure out?
The servers at Wikipedia are choking and unable to handle the traffic. It happened twice today for me in the span of 4 hours. Servers are either down or way too slow. I Investigated further to understand why….
’s website says that Wikipedia’s daily page views has tripled in the last year. To get a sense of comparison, Yahoo’s daily page views are 250 times more than that of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is 159 in rank in terms of the daily traffic on the Net. The following graph shows slashdot.org reach declining in the same period.
A Mysterylaska movie Guess, its time to upgrade servers and uncork some champagnes…. Way to go wikipedia!
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