Jeep® Waterfall

Guys,

This is just amazing work of art( and programming?). It would be definately something to see it live. They have set this up all over the world. wow !

I am fighting between the words “baffled” and “amazed” to describe what I saw today on Google Trends. “Baffled” has a bit of speculation and “amazed” is all happy. God, it doesn’t matter. It was cool !!(for the lack of words).

Google Trends is a pretty neat service that plots various search request Google receives. Basically telling you how many search request it received over a defined period. I was trying out some of our favourite searches in there raw from (no extra qualifiers). The service also tries to map news stories related to the search request and how it affected the search behaviour. One other bit of information around the graph : where did the search came i.e. Location. One can view cities, countries and even language. Neat han.

Now the interesting part. I search for java, xml, j2ee, linux, eclipse and also some odds like ubuntu linux, ruby on rails, phython, php. Well, the graph wasn’t shockwave here. If you look at the cities, almost always there were 2-3 Indian cities in the list of 10.WOW. There were times there were 5 in the top 10. Most notably Banglore, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi. It was a great feeling in a way but am still baffled (there, i picked the word).

Well, we know India in booming in the high tech industry, but what surprises me considering the popularity of google, having a majority share in search request is a big big thing. That to me, means a hell lot of people back home are searching for tech stuff. The baffling part :

• Internet is not that widely used. Its changing but we have a long way to go.
• Not everyone is doing computers. This is relative to a huge large population base. Thus the search request are maily concentrated to only a very small fraction of the people. This would mean lots of clicks per geek.
• This one is a bit sad then baffling. All the cool searches don’t have Indian cities listed at all. Atom, Ruby, ubuntu,django. An appeal : Atom Pub is goooooooood, RSS is not.
• It seems only the big brands (in terms of amount of money spent on advertising) have hit a chord with india i.e. .Net and related technologies and Java and gang. Python and PHP not hitting the nail right, which is sad again.
• Is the tech industry that hot in India? I knew it was warm but this definitely is hot.
  

Answers anyone ?
Disclaimer:

I do understand the usual caveats of statistical analysis, there are lot other factors involved, dataset is not really connected to the topic in question. And ofcourse, I did not try every available tech search possible but tried enough to get the picture right.


iPhones are taking the masses by a rave. Try search for in on the Internet and you see everyone is talking(i.e. blogging) about it. why not, its such a neat piece of technology. It is indeed is really cool. I personally think it has a very good potential to take the market by storm. I do believe the the price is a bit high for a phone but apple products have generally been above the standard price range compared to competitors. So to some extend, most of us had expected this.

Generally everyone of us seems to be happy with the iPhones, except some of our kind. I mean developers. There rant: “Its not OPEN“. These people (yes, I am not one of them for this one) believe this move of apple (frankly, not quite surprising) can work against them. I think not. I can see it would be really cool to develop apps for iPhones. Think of all new fancy stuff you can put in and with the loads of technology comes built-in possibilities are endless. What does Steve Jobs has to say about it:

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them“

To me it seems fare enough. Reasons listed below:

• Softwares are going to be buggy. Not that Apple’s software won’t but in that case, if software team doesn’t fix the problem atleast Steve has an option of firing them, which is ,of course, not possible for third party softwares.
• Apple is all about UIs. UI to Apple Softwares (and hardware) is like a fashion to the urbanites. Things have to look good. And not everyone can make great looking UIs. Look what happened to Konfabulator. It is a pickup project of the mac widgets (or otherwise). Most of widgets are as ugly as they can get. They do have utility value but come on atleast work some on the display. Steve’s thought, I cannot give out my beautiful piece of tech to these geeks who don’t know shit about user experience.
• I am almost very keen to think there main reason for not making it open, multi-touch interface. Either they just love it too much to give it out in the wild or they are still working on an API to abstract it enough from the developers. That makes sense, as there is a lot of buzz around multi-touchy things.
• As far as its marketability is concerned, iPhone not being open, won’t hurt it. I don’t think people outside the tech community really care if the phone is open or not. Heck ! Most people don’t even know what open mean in this context. I can bet apple will preload the phones with the enough goodies and apps which a normal PDA-class user will need. Frankly, what else you need apart from calendar, browser, maps, contacts, email, music and ofcourse the ability to call someone. For large part of the consumers this is quite techy already. I understand our (geeks) urge always do a bit more. But you don’t have choice in everything. Not everything can be OPEN.

I think iPhone is safe, even though not open.

P.S.: its sucks iPhone is not open. I am a developer after all.

Part II

So it started with Delhi, but now you can see it all around.

In my last I visited Bombay and Pune, growing metros. Constant influx of people because of the recent rise in IT jobs here. Pollution always a big problem in these cities as the number of two wheelers is astonishingly high (IndiaInfo line sector report). Buying a two wheeler now is super simple, all the bank of the country are out there lending money for any and every need of the janata (public). Credit cards too are distributed like free food packets to the poor. Of course, I can say one thing for the Indian population, credit cards are not just going to work. Atleast not for our generation or before. For next generation (sadly, there is one), I reserve my comments. They are just a whole different breed. Anyways, back to saving the world, i mean pollution problem. So everyone has a atleast one two wheeler per home, everyone commutes to office on that, there is no known concept of car pooling (or two-wheeler pooling, excepts in youngsters and parents dont know about it ). But the good part is nobody likes that. Nobody likes the pollution, rising petrol prices and the increasing cost of household. Even better government also realises this. So we have a wave of reforms/laws to introduce more of environment friendly vehicles. It all started when Delhi government ordered that all really really old public transport vehicles should either be made CNG-happy or just get new CNG vehicles. Result: Almost all city buses of delhi are now running CNG. Most of taxis too have been converted to CNG. I see in my hometown itself, there were a whole lot of CNG run rickshaws. I was talking to one rickshaw guy and he was the opinion that the new CNG rickshaw were speed machines, he seemed very excited about this part, which scared me a bit. He also mentioned it was definitely easy on the pocket, which is what makes most of the rickshaw guys switch to CNG. Apart from few mechanical glitches (it seems the CNG rickshaws give up early in knee deep waters compared to there uncool counterparts), he seemed quite welcoming to the whole idea, which was news to me.

The same is the case in other metros, Pune, Bombay both are following the trend.

Now that I am writing about this, I am seeing a lot of movement around this whole thing. [1], hybrids for Indian population [2]. All said, I see there is a lot of traction to have environment friendly public transport and most of it going in the positive direction, there are hurdles as always. But surprising part is it is smoother than I would have imagined. Like in any big democracy (if I know of any) it is never easy to have a big change which is for the good of the society. But this is just rolling right in India. To me the main factor being instant saving you get over using  any other form of fuel. Its just way to cheap. Further buying and installing the CNG kit is not that expensive either. Believe me people, we Indians know our math. I have personally known lots of people who have convinced me on how cost-effective CNG comes to them. I say, way to go.

But I have my reservation as to how the hybrids or factory ready CNG vehicles will do in India. The costs are still above the “poverty line”. May be as the market matures, we may see some interesting turn results. Keep watching.

I have been visiting my home country pretty much once every year. And I have been doing this since August 2004. But this time it was different. India is new now. Things have changed a lot. They might have changed for quite some time now but this time around i noticed it. As like any other change, some were good and some not that good. From the time I landed there I could feel that I was in a totally different world. Every other thing was calling out to me “see this..i was this way before”. The people, there behaviour, the things around and generally all the stuff..I had decided that I would write about it once I land back in US. There “were” so many things on my mind I wanted to talk about but I am finding it hard to recollect be nonetheless I am gonna give it a shot. To make it easier for my brain, I would be doing this in parts.

Part I :

Dude you don’t have a cellphone ??

you just see them everywhere. everybody owns it. From the street side hawkers to the rich. To have cellphone not a big deal in india, I say. Now what matters is what model of cell phone you carrying. Nokia pretty much covers the market back in India. But this are changing. Being the “low cost, high value” (read cheap) proponents we are brands like LG, Samsung and few other Chinese mobile manufactures are also enjoying the market pie. Everyone wants there cellphone to have anything and everything they don’t need. Bluetooth is what they need, given that the only use for it is the hands-free they either never use or don’t own. BTW, bluetooth handsets, i felt, are still to expensive. they sell starting from 2500 Rs. Having mp3 player in your cellphone is a must. Now the fun part, so what mp3 player-cell phones are hit all over the world,everyone wants it. plug in your headphones and wolla you are in your own musical world. right? wrong. Back in India, you don’t use your headphones, well almost all the song are being played on the speakerphone of the cellphone. yes we use it as a damn boom-box. Doesn’t really matter where you are, doesn’t matter if the people around you don’t really enjoy the same taste of music as you do (unless you are playing one of himmesh’s song). you just play along. Actually, I think that is fun sometimes but not all the time. There is this thing about “miss call” which you we will hear a lot among the cellphone carrying teenagers. What it means is to call someone on the cellphone let it ring for ring or two and then hang up. This little is the most versatile piece of communication indians have come up with. The main advantage being doesn’t cost a dime and gets the message over. you want to tell a friend (girl friend) you left the office for home, give a missed call. Want someone to call you, give a missed call. wish somebody good morning, give a missed call. what the heck..if you are missing somebody,give a missed call. this, of course, works only if both the parties have a prior understanding of what each missed call means. Believe me its silly but fun. It gets insane when you see people, waiting for someone’s missed call and even worse fight over why he/she didn’t give her a missed call. hmmmm.. Life just got interesting.

There are a lot of things, the new cellphone carrying population needs to be made aware. cellphone ettiquittes being one. People tend to talk loudly on there cellphone at a public place. The cellphone is never silent mode, no matter where you are and it just has to ring. One common thing I have seen, mainly in our parents and there kind, if there cellphone rings, they would pull it out slowly, keep staring at the screen trying to read the name of the caller. Even worse if there is just a number and no name, they start thinking whose number this could be, at there own sweet pace. Mind you all this while the cellphone is just ringing. No they won’t turn down the volume, as they don’t know how,most of the time. its still ringing. Anyways, by the time they realize they cannot recollect the number and the fact that well “incoming is free” and try to get the phone, the person on the other end is almost dead.

Cellphones in india are still craze. Everyone wants to get the best and biggest on the market. What I feel they are missing is the responsibility as a cellphone owner. But this is changing. Its improving. But either ways, I just love the way it all happens in INDIA.