एहसास-ए-तुफ़ां किनारे से नहीं आता
इश्क-दा-जझ्बा दबी कशिशों में नहीं आता
सदियों कि खलिश और पल मे छुटकारा
रंगीन दिल को आसां रास्ता नही भाता

TOI and our thought trains

The other day I was talking to my brother who is aspiring to get into a Business school. The topic of discussion was GD sessions that are conducted during the Management Entrances. One of the topics given to bunch of 10 candidates is "Morality is a creation of weak to control and deter strong" and initial thoughts that are heard would boggle anybody with sane mind.

One guy gave an example of how Dhirubhai and how he (not even saying) allegedly build an empire using corruption while others took shots at the similar examples. Now it is absurd in so many ways ...first you quote an heresay, second it is not even close to point under discussion. It seems guys in their eagerness to 'talk' loosing a ability of active listening. Other thing evident is inability to talk in terms of concepts and abstractions or making statements which shows chain of reasoning and logical/rational bent of mind. Most talk like a typical Times Of India article, shallow in its way to drive home a point...look what you did to our best brains...!

Any takers of these mashups....

Being in an IT company is like leading two lives. Your alter ego works in the office which is time-matched to precision with western developed world while as you step out of office the reality hits you in the face. Some time it leads to frustration while sometimes I look at it as an opportunity and responsibility on us to at least bring into our daily lives some essence of digital world. These days my Google reader is flooded with feeds on topics like free APIs, most powerhouses exposing key APIs for the developer community to use and create mashups. I cannot help but put these pieces together in my mind. Some mashup ideas I am thinking can greatly make a difference...

1. We have lot of builders want to advertise their new projects, and people take long time to visualize the exact location of the new site of the apartment. A google map API can be used. We got to decide where this data is coming from. It can be a small news-mailer sent to key builders that will fetch the location information of the upcoming projects, or more appropriate would be government registry which is more authentic but the toughest to access place unless you have more forthcoming municipal corp. We can also ask them to upload images of the scheme which then pins it places using panoramia. Same thing can work wonder for the rentals. We are yet to build businesses around it.

2. With sites like 'burrp' getting loaded with members-and-consequently-with-visitors. Burrp is basically an imitation of "Yelp : an collaborative restaurant review site in a nutshell" an web20 venture started by Paypal founders once they sold off the cash cow to eBay. Now with lot of info on burrp we can utilize a standard toll-free number well popularized to get a query SMS from any location and throw back information of hotels in-and-around that area to that cellphone in return. Since we got this mobile revolution like never before in India; this can be a hot-cake idea for an API if not a tailored feature for burrp.

3. We are close to an age wherein Phone cameras geo-tag all the images it takes. Now with some additional voice tag while the photo is being looked at or being taken becomes a powerful metadata. This will improve the relevance for the image search from its current effectiveness.

4. More from the geo-tags: Assume you have access to the locations of the people through their cell phones; may be you are sitting in the control room of a cellular service provider. Once you know this area/pin code/lat-lang constitute an area under IMAX a movie theater. At 6:00 pm you have a bunch coming out of some XYZ movie. Now you can send SMS and do quick market survey as soon as those folks walks out of the theater. I know this flirts with privacy issues but such geo-context can lead to some interesting 'push' information flows.

My 2 cents on Gtalk-Gmail

Lately got into habit of critically comparing products I use. Case in point is gtalk and yahoo chat clients.
G-talk I felt also lagging in terms of some of the features like "show me recent conversations". Its a high time folks at Google should come up with something as base functionality is now already assumed and well digested. Now we want next course on our plate!
We share so many urls / links among the close group of people. Why not Gmail provide a way to access all those in one place. It can be a list of links shared with columns like who send it, when, etc... Same can be done by finding out phone no.s, and attachments. We are moving towards an era wherein Gmail is our Online Any Time accessible place for storing document and communication.

I have seen lot of people using it to work on doc partly at work and later imparting finishing touches at home using Google doc.s. Now unless you convert consciously each attached doc into a Google document it wont let you collaboratively edit it. It should be done by default for every document that comes as an attachment.

And above all...when are we going to have the tabbed interface for mails...