Monday, May 28, 2007

Flash Mob - A commentary

FlashMob:
Pillow fights, zombies eating human brain, silent raving, flashmob flash photos, and many more... Where does it all end? Or does it? A couple of cool business models have emerged. And marketeers have picked up a few new ways to get you. Are there any negative impacts of this? Plenty, I would think. But, its still fascinating to see complete strangers coordinate and have some fun. How starved are we?:)

I'm waiting for this to be used effectively or obstructively on the next political campaign. Or for that matter, on our current prez... a little bit of fun wont hurt, would it?

What would Bush do if he were to be confronted by 4000 strange zombies? plus one, I say! What would Hillary do, if 4000 Bill Clinton's show up on her campaign trail one day?

A brief history of flash mob in Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob
Very interesting...

Silent Raving in London:
IMO, this one is the best so far: "Silent Rave" Revelling... I would have gone:) This one would qualify as "modern art" and a video of this should be in SFMoma!


Internet Bargain hunting? - China:
This one, you got to take your hats off to Chinese(asian?) ingenuity in finding a deal... Russell Peter - are u watching? Ur jokes might need to be reworked a bit...

Teambuying is indeed a very creative... Walmart, welcome to china

Zombies in SF:

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Guardian

Maybe its the British influence in India that I developed a bias towards English newspapers and magazines. But, you cannot question the quality of Guardian, BBC & Economist.

Guardian is balanced, mostly, and covers a broad range of topics that interest me. Economist covers my business interests well. BBC gives me the international depth... Now, local news is something I turn to the Net.

Some interesting reads from the Guardian..
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/05/happy_birthday_helvetica.html

Chelsea - Double title

2 out of 4 titles wont be bad for most sports organization in any country, any sport.

FA Cup and Carling Cup winners, Chelsea - was just amazingly resilient. Just doing enough to win both these titles. Runner up in EPL and semi-finalist in Champions League is not all that bad either.

What attracted me to Chelsea about a couple of seasons ago was its character. I hated ManU until then, and didnt really care who played against them, I would support the other team. Along comes Chelsea and Roman. Beats ManU in its own game (spend a lot of money and build a winning organization). Now, Chelsea is worth about 3 times as much as it was worth before the Roman era. Business success. 2 EPL titles, 1 Carling cup, 1 FA cup... U name it, they have it... Champions league will come in due course, undoubtedly.

Mourinho is a genius, say what u may about his unconventional, almost irrational bragging. The chosen one, has done not many things wrong... Winning should absolve him from some stupid mind games.

Players I love: Terry, Eissien, Drogba, Lampard, Cech, Carvalho, Ballack, Joe Cole, Ashley Cole, Roben, Makhele... With so many amazing players, its not a wonder they win or atleast lose less:) Now, add one or 2 decent strikers and the goals will pour in...

Go Mourinho... Go Roman... Go Chelsea!

Apple TV & Airport Wireless Basestation

Wow! Very sweet piece of hardware.

Apple TV is the best investment I have made in home-theater. It took about 5 minutes to install, once I got hold of the right monstor cable for my TV. It connected with the Airport Base in a jiffy... And connected to my iTunes running on G4 in a second. I had all my music downloaded smoothly.

I'm yet to see another well packaged, well delivered, well designed hardware! Period. If u think iPod is cool, Apple TV converts ur plain old TV to a the Wifi dream home theater... I love it!

Now, I need multi-box support for my iTunes. That is, iTunes sync between different boxes on their own, so I use my laptop to buy a song and it syncs with my home computer, which syncs with my iPod and iTV. And why cant my iTV take a feed from my TV and record it? Why do I need a TiVO?

And my iPhone can sync addresses, appointments, emails, photos, songs... bye, bye iPod.

And why do I need to buy 2 separate devices? I'm talking about BaseStation and Apple TV. Rack it please... And ofcourse, add a few more things on top of this please. I should be able to hook up my video cam to Apple TV, playback my video on to this, edit the video and save it on to iTV. Which sends it back to my desktop, and I can cut my DVD. Not very far fetched, is that now?

Now, where is my Google free no-bandwidth-limits wireless?