BlogSat

I love coming across simple, non-intuitive results. I just got back from CES in Las Vegas (more on that later..if I get to it!) and learned what I thought was a fascinating piece of information from a cab driver. His take: he actually made less money during the busy CES period, unlike my natural assumption that the busy convention period may be great for business. The reasoning: the crowd and the traffic jams it resulted in meant a journey that would take 10-15 mins was now taking 45 mins. So even though there were in theory more rides available, it took 3 times as long to complete a single, so net-net he believed he was doing fewer rides (and less money) during the day.

My opinion of myself is falling quickly.:) I'm watching this movie right now! I think I'm enjoying the setting more than anything else. Sandra Bullock is wearing a " University of Chicago " T-shirt and just crossed Wacker Dr .....now she's walking under the EL ,.... Sigh..nostalgia.:

Last weekend to a colleague telling him to how find a certain video on YouTube: "Just google the term '.....' on YouTube." ( Legal/PR wouldn't have approved :)) At a conference about a certain blogger/journalist, "Hmm..he's so much more charismatic in print." In conversation with another Googler about yet another Googler, "Sharp guy, but he's pretty unGoogley for a Googler, isn't he?"

A chat with a classmate from B-school reminded me about this and it kinda made my evening! I work on YouTube in my current job, and I'm pretty thrilled about it. But well over an year ago, in fact in April 2006, for my Advanced Marketing Strategy Class , as part of the required final project for the class I proposed to my project group that we do a project on this video-sharing site that been causing a significant drop in my productivity over the previous few months. I even wrote in a couple of emails to the email addresses and PR contacts on the site (they didn't get back to me!...and now I know who they are.:)) We ended up doing something else, but I guess I got to eventually work on a YouTube project anyway. In fact, here's Blogosphere proof (in the first paragraph) confirming the story from another now-Googler. :)

There was a time a long, long time ago when I cared very deeply about football (soccer, not American. Still don't care about real American football ; love it in the movies though .) I knew the teams, the players, the transfer prices, the rules, the leagues, the cups etc., etc. My interest started to wane mid-way through college, and has gone downhill since then. I still read soccer news on the web occasionally, but I haven't been able to recite the standings at the top of each league, like I once used to, for quite a while. But you don't need to be a soccer fan in the US to know that David Beckham has come to L.A. , to play for the L.A Galaxy (a team in the MLS .) The Posh and Becks show has been playing relentlessly on the US news, reality TV and dozens and dozens of magazines . Beckham is a pretty good football player (yeah, I'm going to call it football for the rest of this post.) There was a time when you could say he was the best footballer on the planet and ke...

...the stock market that is. Random surfing led me the Economist website, and this article about MediaPredict . The site portrays itself as a virtual stock market game. Most current revenue seems advertising-driven, but as a side-effect it will generate information that is useful to Big Media. As the article explains: Artists or their agents post samples of their work (a book chapter, say, or a television pilot). Traders armed with a free wad of virtual cash buy shares in the material they feel has the greatest potential. The idea is that as traders buy and sell shares in competing content, the cream will float to the top—where entertainment-industry bosses can skim it off. I suppose this is another example of using the wisdom of crowds to gain greater insight and make decisions. The best example I remember reading about was when such prediction markets were used by a company to see when people in the company thought their product would ship, and that was management realized ther...

After seeing Wicked last month, I couldn't help thinking that my parents (particularly my mom) who'd be visiting, would really enjoy it. Within an hour of being in Chicago, my mother brought up that she'd heard about Wicked and The Color Purple , so we booked tickets the next day. I thought they needed context to be able to enjoy the story, so we rented The Wizard of Oz , the night before. My mom made me pick up The Devil Wears Prada as well. As a result, I did something that I haven't in a while. Guiltlessly paid for, and sat down to enjoy, art for a second time. One rule I've informally followed for a very, very long time is to try to never repeat watching a movie, a TV show or even reading a (fiction) book. The somewhat iffy logic has been that the time could be better spent learning something new, enjoying something different or just more productively. After b-school, I know enough to characterize this as the opportunity cost argument. I realize that this re...

There are moments when the you realize that you're always going to be a geek, and you're still pretty stoked about it. Yesterday offered me one such moment. Despite all my plans over the last year or so to get back to programming a little bit, it has just never happened. A combination of being incredibly busy and almost as lazy ensured that.:) However, a need to keep myself occupied over the summer and curiosity about if the Facebook platform is really as easy to program to as advertised meant I finally got around to writing some code again. Big surprise: not doing something for two years will leave you rusty! Particularly if its web programming, which you never really did anyway. Some things still stay constant though; like the time you need to waste up front to prepare so that you can actually get some work done! It took me more than a day and a half to (re-) install the necessary software on my machine, figure out the particular eccentricities of the web-hosting provider I...

The thing about business school is that at weird times you brain will suddenly switch to trying to apply school concepts to the real world, and you end up learning some pretty interesting things as a side-effect. My parents are in town, which meant yesterday involved a frantic trip to on the largest importer in the US to acquire some household supplies. It seems like every MBA in the US has done at least one case on WalMart , and you end up learning about its tremendous buyer power, unique (and recently changed) market positioning, how its competitive strategy/advantage evolved, and mostly about its ridiculously efficient supply chain. I wandered about recognizing some these patterns that I'd learned about, when for some reason I ended up striking a conversation with an elderly lady who seemed to be working in the greeting card section of the store. It turns out she didn't work for WalMart at all, but for Hallmark . She was just a Hallmark vendor who stocked card in the two ais...

Scrubs isn't just one way I'm wasting time this week, now that I'm done with finals. It also got me thinking about a discussion I was in a couple of days ago. Ask most people about something their going through or own or have recently experienced, for example: "How's the job going?", "How's the school that you went to?", "How're things?" , and most times even if things aren't going well, you'll get "Great!" Now, there's one theory which is The person just doesn't know you well/doesn't feel like talking to you, and "great" results in a shorter conversation than "oh, not so great." I'm guilty of using this once in a while. But let's say you know the person well, the response is still more negative than the experience is in the person's mind. Why is it? My initial take on it was People think that their experiences are a reflection on them , and hence always want to paint a...

Mahalo debuted yesterday, with some fanfare . I approve of the flowers and the cute UI, but I'm still trying to decide what I think of the rest of the business plan. Now, in my deservedly humble opinion using the power of crowd-sourcing for search is interesting, which is what the Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales is pursuing. On the other hand, I'm still mystified by the value proposition of Mahalo. I'm not sure why 40 to a 100 people building webpages manually (realistically they're probably using some automatically generated templates and tweaking them slightly: one for movies, another for organizatoins etc.) are going to produce really interesting results. According to the WSJ article, management think that because "some of them work as artists, musicians and artists" they'll be able to build better web pages. Maybe if they stick to their area of expertise...but then won't their pages will be biased by their interests?...unless they stick to a temp...

The usual procrastination ploys led me Prof. Greg Mankiw's ridiculously frequently updated blog , and this political quiz , which tells you where you are on the political scale. The test (like any of this sort) has to be a little simplistic, but apparently I'm strongly libertarian and just a little bit to the left. I share the "libertarian left" label with Gandhi and Mandela so, yea! Wow, two years at Univ of Chicago and a recently indocrinated belief in free markets....and a test still pegs my economic proclivities mildly to the left; don't understand it and kinda sad.:)

Apparently being kissed by Clooney is priced at $350,000, but here's what surprised me. A man won the bidding, so that Clooney could kiss his girlfriend. That is either one really confident or really stupid dude: the cynic in me is dominant today so I'm going with stupid.:) In other pricing news, the WSJ carried an article this morning that mentioned this lucky primate . The Wildlife Conservation Society sold the rights to name this species; so all such monkeys are now called the GoldenPalace.com monkeys; that's right the ".com" is part of the name of species. I love this planet: humans find a way to keep things interesting. The WSJ article though was about this project : interesting and yet another cool use of wikis .:)

Its been one of those weeks: there was so much I wanted to blog about I ended up not blogging at all. Oh well: let's do the public diary first and at least get started again. My cousin was visiting, and so I finally had the brief of trying to see a little of Chicago. Ended up spending most of Friday evening/night at Looptopia , where I had a blast. The idea was an open concert with about a 175 free events around the Chicago Loop area. The event ran from 5pm to 5a m. I ended up walking around downtown Chicago more than I have in a while, visiting the Art Institute , catching a Stage Door Broadway in Chicago performance, standing in line for events for a ridiculous amount of time, getting turned away from some of them and catching a few other open-air events including jiving belly-dancers, stand-up comics and the Wierd Sisters . The next day it was a touristy visit to the Sears Tower , where a quote on the Skydeck walls seemed so true to me, especially after the night before. "...

The WSJ had an article today on yet another issue that some parents apparently consider while naming their kids. They check that Google thinks their uniquely precious one really is that unique. In the words of a proud mother of a young baby boy, their excuse for wanting to name their child Kohler is the currently low Google return for this "I wanted our son's name to be as special as he is" Sheesh! Yes, lady. Unfortunately your telling this to a WSJ reporter now means that the first 100 links for your precious one's name are going to be links to articles where people are questioning your decision.:) Now I'm as big an ego-surfer as anyone else out there , but this is carrying things too far. Parents overthink the names of their kids, and that's natural and to be expected. What annoys me is when they start unnecessarily worrying about optimizing these names to suit the environment. I have friends of Indian origin who're giving thei...

...and apparently on TV Asia as well. The India Business Conference made a promo video (below) and have some footage from last year's conference that ran on TV Asia. I'm the guy leaning, seated at the last table they show about 2:15 into the video. Not bad for a YouTube debut, I guess.:)

... that is the question. The Grand Canton 's recent rant got me thinking. There's been no shortage of people losing job s, destroying friendships and even being threatened because of what they put on their blogs. On the other hand, I've had it drilled into my head on numerous occasions that the only truly effective writing, is that in which the writer is being completely honest. The most compelling blog posts I've read are unique because of the author's perspective, and honesty seems like a pre-requisite, or at least essential, to be able to do that. But what is the cost of that honesty? What the point of a blog is, even what constitutes a blog vs. a news/opinion website is a pretty complicated issue, so I'll skip that. But let's assume that most personal blogs are used to communicate personal opinions and experiences. I've often heard the analogy made that a blog post is a one-way conversation, or a speech. Now, that to me is extremely dangerous, be...

Nice going , Ken.:) Incidentally, saw both the recommender and recomendee at the Becker Brown Bag Series this week.

Friends know that the spacebar on my Dell Inspiron laptop hasn't been working for the past 3 or 4 months. I spilt some milk on my keyboard and well let's just say while the other keys recovered, this one didn't. My experience with Dell customer support had been so annoying once before (my laptop casing still has a couple of dents in it. If my laptop was a person, it would be in therapy) that I decided to see if there were options. I knew there had to be, and was surprised to find just one that seemed to do the trick. Thanks to the people at Swapkeys , I substituted the "[" key for the spacebar (choice of key based on ease of pain on fingers and redundancy of key.) It worked pretty well and had the unforseen side-effect of making my keyboard absolutely unusable by anyone else. I was surprised by how quickly I adopted to the new keys. Unfortunately the remapping didn't seem to work for all programs ( over a unix prompt, the command line etc. ) so it did place ...

Umm...more than a week of blog-less days. There goes yet another resolution.:) As one of the reading for this class, I read this chapter (When Talk Substitutes For Action) from this book (The Knowing-Doing Gap) . BTW, isn't Google Print awesome!? The take-away from the chapter: that business school can be dangerous in that it can leave MBAs believing that victory is merely successfully articulating a good idea. The case method and discussions help foster that view. I've definitely observed that in myself and many (if not most) of my peers. Success is seen in successfully arguing for one's own point of view and intelligence or cleverness is being able to cut down someone else's point. The chapter also notes the tragedy that it is easier to appear smart by disagreeing with someone rather than agreeing with them. I've caught myself doing (and actually done) this literally hundreds of times. Some of this skepticism is necessary to test the idea on the table, but is so...