BlogSat

Greenspan on the Daily Show: the portion on monetary policy (in the beginning) was like a flashback to Macro .Loved it! I really like Jon Stewart and his detached, look-I'm-poking-fun-at-authority-because-I'm-kinda-smart-and-curious brand of humor. But he seemed to doubt the free market there for a little bit...tsk, tsk. :) Ooo..favorite Stewart/Carell/Colbert moment from the last Emmys (enjoy it while it lasts on YouTube): While I'm embedding videos anyway, here are two more; new Pepsi commercials in India. I love it when movie stars are willing to acknowledge they're old. Also, at this point I'm comfortable saying with some confidence that the average Indian TV advertisement is better than the average US TV advert....if you get em.:) Hmm...someone seems to be taking down advertisements from Youtube too. Seriously, who wouldn't want their ads to be distributed more?

Yes, I realize reviewing a product about a year after its been released is kinda pointless, and the irony of having the word "quick" in my title is not lost on moi either.:) But I ended up installing Vuze last week, wasn't really expecting much, and hence was pleasantly surprised. Vuze is the "corporate" version of the open-source p2p bittorrent client: Azuereus . It does 2 things well, and thats why I was pleasantly surprised. Its adds a decent skin on top of the basic Azuereus client UI (which you can access by clicking on the 'Advanced' tag.) Sure, the normal UI looks just like iTunes, but what video download service now doesn't?:) Its probably not a big deal for most Azureus users who'll just ignore the new UI, but I've had a lot of friends say to me, "Hey, I can't figure out how to get Bittorrent to work." Well, this goes some way to solve that problem once they try it. ..and the content will give them some reason to actu...

Once works starts, I'll really need to watch the Google-referencing blog posts just in case, though I'm obviously pretty bull-ish on the company by default.:) So here's one that I meant to post three-ish weeks ago when Google announced their Q2 earnings , which weren't spectacular enough for Wall Street. A few people asked me what I thought (apparently an offer letter from the company qualifies me to have an opinion. :)) Well, I don't know. My one course in Financial Statement Analysis though allows me to appreciate how insightful, Kevin Kelleher's commentary over at GigaOm is, and he seems a little worried. Time will tell if he's right to be concerned. Either way, its a really exciting time to start work there. Interesting sidenote: you can't seem to buy a car or rent a house in the Bay Area without getting a Google reference just randomly thrown in. For example "BTW, we have a lot of Google employees live here." ...

Clearly, politicians in the US discovered YouTube a long time ago. They've used it very effectively , and very ineffectively, to peddle/propogate their messages. The Economist has a brief write-up on it as well. Caveat emptor: I can't claim to know too much about US politics and certainly am not an active follower. However, two new political-ish videos caught my attention, because I thought they're different and may indicate a new level of Internet video-savvy. So far, the political videos I remember seeing fall into two categories: the first is the simple "Listen to me" variety. This is just the candidate sitting/standing/walking around delivering a message. The second was the "look what happened" variety; typically another event that the candidate (or his/her supporters) want to draw attention to. Think the Michael J. Fox controversy and the macaca controversy . This was content that would have worked just fine even on television. The only differe...

Gates and Jobs gave a joint interview at the WSJ's D:All Things Digital conference. I haven't finished watching the entire interview yet, but its remarkable how complimentary they are of each other. The feel is almost like they're veterans reminiscing over a long-forgotten war they once had...kinda sweet. If you've seen Pirates of the Silicon Valley , it almost feels like this should be the end of the movie. As an aside, I was impressed by the range of videos available on the WSJ site, but even more so by the provider of the service: Brightcove . I can see why some people think that this will end up being the "enterprise YouTube", and it seems to be the provider of video services on so many sites that I visit. It's not even close right now though ( Compete graph below)

..in that they all pretty much look and act the same. A good friend sent me this Makkadman video link. Warning: you're not going to get it, unless you understand Hindi and really Hindi films.:) It turns out the spoof Hindi-Spiderman-animation is a advertisement for this social networking site: DesiMartini . Check out the site. Does the UI look vaguely familiar??? I spent at least a minute trying to figure out how it was related to facebook ; if it was related to facebook etc., etc. Its not, but it looks exactly like it. Given how many white-label social networking tool providers there are now (i.e. companies that make the site for you and slap your branding on it), a social network site is basically a commodity ( GigaOM post on this way back) and just as everyone's personal blogs kinda look alike (because of the limit on Blogger templates), its a matter of time before everyone's social networks kinda start looking alike, especially if systems such as Ning continue to ga...

I was watching an advertisement on TV and the background song was the muppet show "mahna mahna" song. So simple, but pure genius.:) The original clips are below Also, new ChiBus article this week. Update: I'm wrong on the origins of the song. Here's the wikipedia entry .

...and it can be kinda cool too. OK, latest way to waste time: " Brothers and Sisters " on ABC's online site. The show isn't exactly riveting, but I'm still kinda riveted. It's very family-ish, and I tolerate Calista Flockhart , like Rachel Griffiths and some of the other cast, so I'm along for the ride. The show is kinda like a PG-rated, less interesting, more sappy and less controversial version of Six Feet Under . But what's almost more interesting to me are the advertisements in between. Each episode has a different sponsor: Intel, Toyota, Fidelity etc., and the few spots in between sections of the show (the equivalent of the commercial break) are each 30 seconds long and I thought were more effective than a TV ad might have been. Some of them were straight commercials, but others were creative little games that you couldn't help getting engaged in. The take-away is they did provide ( warning: MBA phrase coming) "more value" to the...

OK, I can't decide if this ad is cute or annoying. So, I've been skeptical about video advertising in general, but this was kinda cute and it did get the message across: Gmail works again spam. It's a good example of the Google synergy game: Youtube meets gmail meets Adsense .