Owner: His Master's Toys URL:http://hismasterstoys.blogspot.com Join Date: Sun, 27 May 2007 10:20:28 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Toying with films, media, entertainment, arts and technology from the heart of India Site statistics:Click here
Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now 2007-05-26 08:12:00 Interesting. via TechCrunch - SiliconValley
Could Use A Downturn Right
About Now"When I look back at the pictures from those early events, I remember good times, and no one was talking about twenty million dollar venture rounds or selling out for a cool $1.65 billion. Companies like Meebo and Sphere literally launched in my living room in front of a couple of hundred genuinely interested people.Somewhere in there the money started rolling in. Our first dime of revenue was December 2005. A few months later a lot of companies were raising $3 million A rounds, then $7 million A rounds after the YouTube acquisition. Companies started to hire marketing managers and PR firms, and spending tens of thousands of dollars on launch parties. Now, a year after the madness started, it’s even worse. Companies have to actively dodge venture capitalists to avoid raising a big round of financing.Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley
sucks.I don’t know what it is, but the same thing h
22@ Barcelona - Why Europe May Become The Hub 2007-05-26 07:47:00 Sunny weather, exotic landscape, historical architecture, outstanding tourist attractions, incredible quality of life... we all know about these pluses in the major parts of Europe
. However, no one ever looked at that place and said, "This can be the next valley". Well, attempt is made to change that soon. Check out 22@ Barcelona
- El districte de la innovacio"22@Barcelona Project goal is to transform 22@Barcelona into an international platform of reference in the creation and development of innovative companies that will serve as magnet to young entrepreneurs of all over the world and making of Barcelona an entrepreneur capital.Due to this reason, 22@Barcelona promotes several initiatives to provide the district with infrastructures and mechanisms of high support to entrepreneurs. Thus, specialized working spaces and services are created, with the participation of the different institutions linked to entrepreneurship, such as the Local Development Agency Barcelona Activa, la Universit Read more:Become
The Treadmill Desk! 2007-05-24 09:48:00 via zdnet.A while ago, I read a story (Unguided Days) written by my friend, writer Rohit Gupta (aka DJ Fadereu), where the world has evolved (or devolved?) to a point where the employer provides everything possibly needed right at an employees desk to get maximum hours from him. The day's lunch selection is delivered right to the desk through a food pipeline, and a highly evolved e-psychiatrist poses as a personalized e-god for each human. Matrix? Brave New World? Well, while a personalized e-god might seem a bit too in the future, a new technology already has been launched in the market that allows employees to lose weight while working. "They built what they called a "vertical workstation"--a desk fitted over a standard treadmill. They had 15 obese people to work at this treadmill-desk and measured how many calories they burned.If an overweight office worker used this vertical workstation all day, every day for a year, he or she could lose up to 66 pounds, the researchers report in Read more:Treadmill
Outstanding Italian AD 2007-05-16 01:04:00 One of the most prized commercials this year... via I believe in adv: and AnoopPowered by ScribeFire.
Read more:Italian
GPRS + Bluetooth + Laptop = Internet Anywhere 2007-05-14 00:48:00 This is, of course, not a new story. The first time I started using GPRS for accessing internet from anywhere was back in 2004. Back then, the costs were higher and there was a data download limit. Also, it normally took a full day to get it properly working.Fast forward to the present day -- we have a Rs. 11/day connection provided by Airtel that gets activated instantly. No download limit, no hidden costs. And last week, I used it to connect to my workplace VPN from a remote town in India, a bungalow in the very outskirts of Bangalore, and now, just before the flight takes off! Powered by ScribeFire.
Read more:Bluetooth
, Laptop
, Internet
, Anywhere
Truemors - The new platform for spreading rumors 2007-05-05 00:36:00 Guy Kawasaki's newest venture Truemors, is all about capturing rumors
that spread across the web. Here's an excerpt from his blog:"I need some help from people who are in the flow of interesting and true rumors. They would be folks who can provide “scoops” that begin with a phrase like, “Did you hear that...?”For example, did you hear that Angelina Jolie just adopted another child? Did you hear that Apple is working on a cell phone? Did you hear that the dean of admissions of MIT resigned? Did you hear that Joe Thornton is getting traded to the San Jose Sharks?"In several scriptures from Hindu mythology, rumors are represented as one of the most important ways of information spread. Rumor is a form of social constructionism and in their book 'The Social Construction of Reality', Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, common sense knowledge of everyday reality is derived and maintained by social interactions. It would be interesting to see ho
Honey, I blew up the battery! 2007-05-04 00:26:00 One fine day, I came to work and was checking my emails on my Macbook Pro, and I found something sticking out from the bottom of the laptop. A few minutes later, check out what I found!Apple buffs reading this must already know about the Macbook Pro battery
and heat problems. Someone actually fried an egg on their Macbook! However, I must admit, Apple has been extremely cooperative, and they are replacing it without any fuss!Powered by ScribeFire.
Indya.com tries the Apple iTunes Store Model 2007-05-02 13:00:00 Ridiculous! Check out this latest move by Star owned Indya.com.ContentSutra talks about this release. For $0.99, you can download and own episodes of "The Great Indian Laughter Challenge", "Koffee With Karan" and some of the popular soap operas.Now, can someone tell me, when I can watch the episodes on TV every single day (yes, almost every Indian in the US have subscriptions to a bunch of Indian channels already), why would I ever want to own it? This is not like "Friends" or "Sienfeld", which you would naturally want to watch even after ten years. If it was a download-and-own of "Ramayana" or "Mahabharata", there was a reasonable chance that the model would have had some success. But with the current line up, they are just wasting time, money and making a fool of themselves. Even my mom, who is a giant fan of the soap operas, would never think of spending a penny on them. Do you know of anyone who would?BTW, don't forget to look at some of the above episodes on YouTube when you ge Read more:tries
, Apple
, iTunes
, Store
The Hip-hop Novel 2007-04-29 08:19:00 My conspiring friend and fellow lunatic recently got covered by Financial Express for his hip-hop style opera. Here's an excerpt from the story:“My friends call me Marwari Mujahid,” he quips, letting out a hearty laugh, which sort of compliments his appearance. Someone who has a knack for changing jobs (four in the first six months), Fadereu is a quintessential storyteller. But his stories are not the kind you would expect your grandmother to tell you. Fadereu’s stories begin from circa 1910, when electricity first arrived in Bombay, and have names like Akkad Bakkad Bombay Boss. It was a few years ago when Fadereu decided to change the format of a book that he was writing to something which would enable him to turn into a book himself. “I converted the novel into verse and adopted a hip-hop style narration,” says Fadereu.The first version included 400 sonnets, put in nine chapters of one hour each. The second version of his text contains 20 songs. Since he is from Rajasthan
Importance of reducing dependence on the US economy 2007-04-28 13:01:00 In the context of the current housing slump and lackluster GDPgrowth, it is interesting to read the following excerpt from Wikipedia. "A recession is traditionally defined in macroeconomics as a decline in a country's real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more successive quarters of a year (equivalently, two consecutive quarters of negative real economic growth). However this definition is not universally accepted. The National Bureau of Economic Researchdefines a recession more ambiguously as "a significant decline ineconomic activity spread across the economy
, lasting more than a fewmonths." You can almost hear the buzz predicting an oncoming recession (though I continue to hear to the contrary). People are asking -- is it a sign for something bigger and more devastating? Eighty two year old Lee writes in his book 'Where Have All The Leaders Gone?': "Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who'sfed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We s
HitForge and The Mixercast Model 2007-04-26 00:33:00 A year ago, I was the first from India to join a team of two entrepreneurs (Adarbad Master and Freeman Murray) who had come down from the valley with funding (from Com Ventures) to India to start a Web 2.0 venture. From a three people team, we have now become a full fledged 25 people team (in both India and US combined), and recently launched our product Mixercast. And with our CEO Jennifer Cooper pushing the throttle, things are looking damn good! In the last one year, we gave gone through ups and downs thats typical of a startup, but the true beauty of the idea has been the ability to feel the market direction and rapidly adapt with an incredibly low burn. The cost advantage and talent pool that India offers turned out to be our biggest advantage over others who were aiming for the same market. It also gave us the ability to come up with a super-extensible platform that can now be integrated into a variety of different verticals. In that way, the model is very clear -- Have an id
Grindhouse Films 2007-04-25 05:05:00 I know that Tarantino/Rodriguez double bill release has done complete justice to the genre in terms of the marketing it has done in the theatres. But has anyone seen the classy website for the film? The word "exploitation" itself is an old show business term for publicizing shows and motion pictures. "Exploitation films" are those whose success relied not on the quality of their content, but on the ability of audiences to be drawn in by the advertising of the film (for example, a common device used by the more notorious exploitation films is to advertise the banning of a film in a certain country). Ephraim Katz, author of The Film Encyclopedia, has defined exploitation as: Films
made with little or no attention to quality or artistic merit but with an eye to a quick profit, usually via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques emphasizing some sensational aspect of the product Given the above definition, I wonder if I could classify the entire of Bollywood 80s as Indian Read more:Grindhouse
Writings by Cho Seung-Hui 2007-04-23 14:46:00 Link forwarded by a friend. "The play by Cho Seung
-Hui, a 23-year-old English major, was submitted last year as part of a short story writing class. Entitled "Richard McBeef," Cho's bizarre play features a 13-year-old boy who accuses his stepfather of pedophilia and murdering his father. A copy of the killer's play can be found below. The teenager talks of killing the older man and, at one point, the child's mother brandishes a chain saw at the stepfather. The play ends with the man striking the child with "a deadly blow." Needless to say, the writing is worth reading only as a peek into the mind of a troubled man. Mostly, its a cathartic outburst of the writer against something. From Wikipedia "While it may be simplistic to assume a straightforward "profile", the study did find certain similarities among the perpetrators. "The researchers found that killers do not 'snap'. They plan. They acquire weapons. They tell others what they are planning. These children take a long, Read more:Writings
Interactive Multiplayer Movie Theaters 2007-04-13 07:32:00 MIT Advertising Lab blogs about SS+K, the agency working on a unique game concept that requires collective audience participation. "Several theaters in LA, Philly and NY will be equipped with a camera that tracks the motion of the entire audience. Projected on the screen will be a modified version of the NewsBreaker game and a faint mirror image of the audience in the background. When the audience leans their bodies to the left in their seats, the paddle on the bottom will react with their movement and move to the left. When the ball makes it way towards the right, they will all have to collectively lean to the right to keep the ball in play, and so on. Like NewsBreaker, many of the bricks will have msnbc.com headlines (via RSS) embedded in them, that fall as the bricks are destroyed." Note: Newsbreaker is a tile game where bricks become news items.
Read more:Multiplayer
, Theaters
The Corposexuals (or, Marriages are made on whiteboards) 2007-04-13 07:21:00 A few hundred years ago, the idea of having a "conversation through pressing some buttons" would have sounded alien-ish. When IM clients started spring up a few years ago, most people couldn't believe that users would actually type in their thoughts into a text box, and communicate with someone they knew. Over the last few years, IM (in its many different incarnations), has emerged as the chief communicating metaphor for a generation of IT savvy corporates. Is it a manifestation of man's need to connect in a severely fragmented universe? Almost as a parallel development, the notion of "worker's union" vanished from the tech industry, although most other industries in India still have to deal with it. In its pristine form, the worker's union used to look after the benefit and well-being of the labour force as a bonafide entity. However, they brought in their own unspoken baggage, so their disappearance was considered a good thing. However, alongside, the employees work hours start
The Evolution Poster 2007-04-11 13:51:00 Chanced upon this gem while I was searching for the existence of the word Corposexual. More on that in the next post.
Read more:Evolution
, Poster
On the moral police and making wine 2007-04-09 14:39:00 Day before yesterday, I took the customary three hour bus ride from Pune to Bombay, and found myself sitting next to a retd. Major General of Indian army. Within the next fifteen minutes, he gave me the recipe to make wine in India, the Indian way -- "Pour 20 kg of grapes inside a giant mud container... the one that's normally used to keep water thanda (cool), fill that up with water, and add sugar enough to fill one fifth of the container. Then roll your sleeves and start smashing the grapes, so that they split apart. Then put some yeast, and close the container (make sure its airtight as much as possible). Put half a bottle of rum. Now forget about it for four months. Then open it up and mix everything well again. Close it back, and then forget about it for next 3 months. After that, just filter out the liquid and your wine's ready to serve (of course, after you have chilled it)." Interesting. I almost feel like trying rightaway. But, is it worth taking the risk of 20kg of grapes Read more:making
Pearls Before Breakfast 2007-04-08 04:16:00 One of the greatest living violinist plays at the L'Enfant Plaza Station in D.C. in the rush hour. What happens? From an experiment conducted by Washington Post: "HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a fewdollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play. It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'EnfantPlaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with th Read more:Pearls
, Breakfast
Year Zero 2007-04-07 07:37:00 Trent Reznor and NIN have produced an awesome marketing campaign around their upcoming album Year Zero
. Check out this excerpt from wikipedia synopsis of the whole act: "On February 12, 2007,fans found that a new Nine Inch Nials tour T-shirt containedhighlighted letters that spell out the words "I am trying to believe." It was discovered that iamtryingtobelieve.com was registered as awebsite, and soon several related websites were found in the IP range,all describing a dystopian vision of the world fifteen years in the future. Many events reported on these websites take place in the year "0000." Digit Online later reported that 42 Entertainment had created these websites to promote Year Zero. Rolling Stone described the fan involvement in this promotion as the "marketing team's dream."Trent Reznor has however stated, "The term 'marketing' sure is afrustrating one for me at the moment. What you are now starting toexperience IS 'year zero'. It's not some kind of gimmick to get y
Do You Need A Second Life? 2007-06-02 10:32:00 You might, if you feel incumbered by the politics of the current one! Guardian has done a nice roundup of the current state of affairs in the virtual universe, your chance to lead your life a second time. Of course, the world's catching up. The Swedish embassy has opened its office, and Linden Labs, the creators of Second
Life, claim that they have a daily turnover of $600,000, and have already created 6000 full-time jobs. UK government has started taxing money earned in SL (don't you remember... nothing's more certain than death and taxes!).But then, SL isn't the only one, and the list is growing by the day. For the moment, the two biggest contenders are Entropia Universe and SL. In a year and half, there would be hundreds of businesses cropping up in trying to seamlessly merge the two worlds... or at least, import / export from one to the other. There will be virtual world and virtual existence mashups created.Here's a bit from Guardian. "This week may mark a coming of age for v Read more:Second Life
Twitter widgets in Mixercast! 2007-06-01 13:36:00 Months ago, when we were developing the platform for Mixercast, it was unanimously decided to keep the architecture as open as possible. We sincerely believed that the Web 2.0 (yeah, yeah... I know that the word really doesn't mean anything anymore) is not just about social networking and user generated content... its really about the seamless integration/mashup of a multitude of services. Today, now that the site is alive and kicking, that decision might well turn out to be one of the best ones we ever made.The integration of Twitter
into Mixercast, literally took us no more than a week, and more such services are "coming soon". If you are a flash developer, you would really understand the beauty of this - flash running inside flash, and all the users need to do, is drag-and-drop! Isn't that how the world is supposed to be?
Read more:widgets
Bank of America employee mistakes faulty fax as a bomb threat 2007-06-01 11:43:00 This gotta be one of the funniest news I have heard in a while!. Via International Herald Tribune "A Bank of America
employee misinterpreted a faulty
fax about a bank promotion as a bomb threat
Wednesday, leading authorities to evacuate more than a dozen neighboring businesses.The fax from a marketing group about a Bank of America small business promotion contained images of a lighted match and a bomb with a fuse, bank spokesman Ernesto Anguilla said. But words explaining the promotion did not transmit."The fax machine malfunctioned, so a partial image came through that looked somewhat suspicious," Anguilla said.The missing text included the phrases "The countdown begins" and "Small business commitment week June 4-8," according to a copy circulated by police."It was an internal communication designed only for our employees," Anguilla said. The fax was sent to the bank's branches in parts of New England as well as New York and New Jersey."Raises a bunch of questions. Would it be seen a
Shrek 3 Trailer channel 2007-06-25 19:21:00 Check out this channel of Shrek
3 trailers created using the MixerCast application. Its quite a feeling when your one and half year of efforts come to fruition in creations like these (hint: click on the curtain.. duh!!).
Read more:Trailer
Recommend Site To A Friend
