Category Archives: current affairs

Google Auto Complete.. who wins?

current affairs, miscellaneous, tech, web

Once upon a time there was an experiment in Google called Google Suggest (This link redirects to Google Auto Complete which is now default feature of Google searches across the globe).

I liked the concept since it brought promise of proactively helping the user to chose the right content.

However, you should expect more from a devil’s advocate like me.

Exploring Google Keywords (again a labs feature that is now part of Google Adwords product), I realized it is not only user’s comfort that suggested Google to suggest the search terms.

If you start typing “used cars”, Intelligent Google floods you with suggestions like “used cars in delhi”, “used cards in noida”, “used cars in chennai”.

WTF!!! I meant to search for “used cars or new car”. No problems anyways, since Google thinks I am not part of majority that would eventually type the terms suggested by it.

However, if you go to Google keywords, and search for keyword suggestions for “used cars” with India geography, you would find that the same terms appear as keyword suggestion that were thrown in Google search.

And no surprises: these keywords are the ones which come under “high competition” segment.

High competition segment keywords are costliest keywords to buy on Google Adwords.

If Google does not provide suggestion to users in Google search, there would be far more keywords, all of them combined fetching far less revenue to Google than the “high competition” keyword thrusted upon us.

Looking at this, why shouldn’t we assume that Google is trying to find ways of increasing prices of certain keywords, bringing more money the Biggest advertising agency on the globe?

Food for thought?

Symbian takes thousands down

current affairs, miscellaneous, tech,

.. or is it Android?

Nokia announced the biggest job cut in its history sending shock-waves to Finland’s economy.

Windows platform as an alternate of Symbian looks weird choice, but then it was a war between Google and Microsoft, and MS seems to have won the battle for now.

That being said, Nokia might have to include Android phones in its kitty in future. Today no company can ignore Android if it does not have a strong alternative in place.

The Indian Express

current affairs, miscellaneous, sports, ,

Once upon a time, were Lee-hesh known to exhibit unparalleled game of doubles tennis that was unconquerable by the contemporaries. In their era, they were a force to reckon with, they were a fear for the opponents. Now they have teamed up after a long time of 9 years, and after some warm up tourneys, they produced great result in Melbourne.

Continue reading The Indian Express →

AgileNCR is back

current affairs, Software - the art, tech

Having participated in the last edition, I am eagerly awaiting this year’s conference. The announcement suggests it will be held in Feb’11.
This year organizers seem to have tightened their belt to make it the biggest Agile affair in India. Having partcicipated in some Agile conferences across India, I can surely say they have been able to attract the largest audience and some very good speakers.
They have launched their brand new website and are also active on Facebook, Twitter.
On adopting good promotion strategy this time, I would say Better late than never 🙂

Mobile Subscriber figures: are they real?

current affairs, weird, ,

Recently I overheard a conversation where my friends was suggesting taking a new mobile number to a person. The reason was: a new SIM gives you a talkime of 90 INR when you pay 45 INR. In comparison to this, if you recharge, you never get more talktime than you pay. I was startled. It is a fact that rural India is a big part of this growth story where 1 Rupee is more important to people than retaining a single mobile number for some time. Continue reading Mobile Subscriber figures: are they real? →

Another Rural innovation.. impressive one this time

current affairs, society, , , , ,
Telecom in Indian Villages
A need for all of us

Gaon ki Awaaz, an initiative by The International Media Institute of India has been in news lately. It is yet another innovative communication based initiative in rural India. This particular initiative is impressive because the motive seems to be the welfare rather than business. Though they started to charge a fee of INR 10 per month, the subscribers were more willing to pay that fee because of the usefulness of the service.

They were conferred “mBillionth South Asia 2010 Award” recently.

It was heartening for me to listen to their bulletin in Avadhi dialect.

Keep up the good work guys.

AWS cloud computing conference

current affairs, miscellaneous, tech, web, , , ,

The Amazon Web Services‘ Cloud Computing Conference was held at Hyatt Regency, New Delhi on 19th October. I was impressed by the organizing agencies’ skills because they personally tracked each and every registrant throughout registration process, and ensured a great attendance for the event. Continue reading AWS cloud computing conference →

WebP: who gains?

current affairs, tech, web, , , , , ,

Google announced open sourcing its so called revolutionary image format on their chrome blog.

The image format looks promising, as it claims to cut down the image size by 40% on average. Google have tested this image format on more than 1 million images before quoting this improvement figure. So, we have reasons to believe them regarding the potential this format offers.

WebP has a long way to go, though. Today, almost all devices support JPEG, the most widely accepted lossy and efficient image format. WebP/GPEG or any other format, even if promising, would take years to get even a small percentage of the adoption compared to JPEG. Google would have to work with many major software and electronic equipment vendors to achieve this feat.

The question remains: Do we really think Google is promoting this format because it deeply believes in open source movement? In my view, WebP provides more than that to Google. With ever increasing size of world wide web, Google has been experimenting with many algorithms to index the web faster and faster. Map Reduce and Percolator are the recent examples.

The problem of indexing rapidly growing internet can further be simplified if the websites use less bandwidth consuming file format, and use technologies that help in minimizing the content size (e.g. inflate/gzip compression of web pages, optimizing image size using loss-less compression, browser cache, minifying html/css/js etc). Google started thinking in this direction when they launched Page Speed tool. Caffeine was a step further in this direction. Now Google ranks websites considering their load speed too.

google monopoly
Google monopoly

Sadly enough, Google today has become dictator of the internet. Regular revelations of their indexing algorithm ingredients (Matt Cutts’ job profile :)) have made this matter even worse. More people now understand the important factors to get a good ranking on Google, compared to a few years earlier. When a dictator decides to self-promote, nobody has any option but to listen and follow.

WebP is another tool for Google in this chain. We have to see who benefits from this format: Google or us?