Humor: This is hilarious

You've gotta see collection of photos of attempts to pull up a car that fell into a river (apparently in Ireland). It looks realistic, but its just too funny to believe. I hope no one got hurt though.

(PS: If you look careully, you'll realize that the last picture is photoshop magic at its best - the reflection of the mirror on the front of the green truck doesn't change inspite of the change of angle, and you'll notice that the onlookers are identical to one of the previous pictures - gotcha!)

Cingular Sucks ! - But, who else is better?

Having been a NEXTEL user for over 2 years, I was excited to finally move over to Cingular. At least I could use the phone when I travel outside the country and the coverage would be better - I thought.

The former seems to be more of a reality than the latter. As this WSJ article states, Cingular Wireless seems to have the worst record in terms of dropped calls. The FCC has recorded 4.6 complaints regarding dropped calls out of every 100,000 Cingular customers. This compares with T-Mobile's 4.3, Sprint/NEXTEL's 3.6/2.3 and Verizon's 1.4. So I guess I am not the only one with this problem. According to Cingular:

"While we take each complaint very seriously and are always striving for improvement, the number of complaints represents an infinitesimally small portion of our customer base," Cingular spokesman Ritch Blasi said. He acknowledged that there could be some engineering problems during the process of combining the two systems that may cause worse coverage for some customers, but emphasized that the issue isn't widespread.

What these guys don't realize, or don't want to admit is that the number of people who have taken the effort to complain are only a fraction of the number of people who face the problem. For instance, I admit not to have called to make a complaint - .... partly out of fear that my call may get dropped and I'll need to call back........

Motorola SCREEN3 - my past life

So finally, Motorola announced the SCREEN3 technology, which is essentially a ticker on the idle screen of your cell phone constantly keeping you updated with the latest news and other multimedia content. This is one of the technologies I helped develop at Motorola as part of Motorola Labs. I'd been working on this for ages now and I feel proud to finally see it hit the market! At least the name is a lot better than the internal code names we had. :)

It was a collegue of mine, Tzvetan and myself as members of Motorola Labs who built the first prototype of this (proving that it is technically feasible) and helped the Motorola marketing team sell it to wireless carriers. Having had been a user of the product for many months while I was at MOT, I can assure you, its very addictive and useful - once you're on it, you'll never understand how you could have lived without it - Motorola had done that to us with the cell phone in the 80's, now they've done it again.

Enterprise Architects - Cut above the rest

Besides the interesting points in this article in CIO magazine, one thing that caught my attention was the profile of Motorola's Chief Enterprise Architect, Baldev Singh.

In 1975, Baldev Singh was at the pinnacle of his profession: rally racing. He was sponsored by Volvo and Fiat. But in the middle of his fourth East African Safari Rally—a three-day, 3,000-mile dash across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, a race that only about 15 of the 300 or so cars that enter ever finish—his life changed.
...
Twenty-nine years later, he walked into Toby Redshaw's office, where Motorola's corporate vice president of IT strategy, architecture and e-business immediately realized that Singh was just what he was looking for in an enterprise architect.

Redshaw needed someone who had both a deep technical background and a good understanding of the business, skills that Singh, who had earned engineering and computer science degrees and an MBA since he quit racing, had in spades. But that wasn't what clinched it for Redshaw.

"An enterprise architect is going to get a lot of pushback," he says. Changing the way a company thinks about IT and the way IT thinks about the business is not easy. "You need someone," says Redshaw, "who has done something like drive across Africa at breakneck speeds. Someone with persistence. Someone tough."

Wow! Now, thats one really interesting requirement for an Enterprise Architect!

WSJ.com: Rising Gasoline Prices Threaten Viability of Biggest SUVs - Reminds me of the Dave Barry Classic

I read this WSJ article: Rising Gasoline Prices Threaten Viability of Biggest SUVs:

Rising prices of gasoline across the U.S. are raising vital questions in Detroit: Will prices keep going up? And if they do, will that prompt Americans to accelerate their shift away from the auto industry's cash cows, big sport-utility vehicles?

The stakes are huge. For more than a decade, the Big Three Detroit auto makers have derived most of their overall profits from sales of gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks. Indeed, General Motors Corp.'s current predicament -- it was forced to slash its earnings outlook last week and its debt now trades like junk bonds -- was provoked in part by sliding sales of SUVs such as the Chevy Suburban and Tahoe.
....
Cris Manning spent $44.84 one night last week to put about 23 gallons of gas into his SUV, a white 2002 GMC Yukon. He figures he drives 50 to 100 miles each day, shuttling around the Dallas region as corporate education manager for a university. His Yukon gets about 15 miles a gallon. He has no plans to change his travel habits -- or his vehicle -- regardless of how expensive gasoline gets. "I just like having a big SUV," he said.

Gasoline represents only about 15% of the cost of owning and operating an average new passenger car in the U.S., according to the AAA, a federation of affiliated automobile clubs in the U.S. But the recent rise in gasoline prices still can pinch. If Mr. Manning drives his Yukon 75 miles each weekday, and about 50 miles each weekend, the rise in gas prices over the past year will cost him about an extra $540 annually.
...
GM begs to differ. In the past five years, it surged ahead of Ford in total sales of large, truck-based SUVs. GM executives attribute the recent slide in large-SUV demand not to any widespread worry about pump prices, but rather to the fact that GM's segment-leading SUV models, such as the Chevy Suburban and Tahoe, are old. The large-SUV market is "stable, not shrinking," GM Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner said this year.

and guess what I have on my mind - of course its the classic Dave Barry article on 'More Souped up SUVs' (a hilarious, must read!):

I don't know what the new Ford will be called. Probably something like the "Ford Untamed Wilderness Adventure." In the TV commercials, it will be shown splashing through rivers, charging up rocky mountainsides, swinging on vines, diving off cliffs, racing through the surf and fighting giant sharks hundreds of feet beneath the ocean surface - all the daredevil things that cars do in Sport Utility Vehicle Commercial World, where nobody ever drives on an actual road...

Symbian Succumbs to Microsoft or vice versa?

WSJ: So finally, Microsoft Licenses Technology For E-Mail to Rival Symbian.

Microsoft Corp. has licensed an e-mail technology to its biggest rival in the cellphone-software market, Symbian Ltd., in the latest sign of how intensely the cellphone industry is wooing businesspeople who send and receive e-mail on their handsets.

The deal will allow handsets running Symbian's software to automatically send and receive e-mails from accounts managed by Microsoft's Exchange software, which is popular with corporations.

The agreement, which follows a similar deal with top cellphone maker Nokia Corp., of Finland, last month, is designed to boost sales of Microsoft Exchange and reduce the lure of BlackBerry mobile e-mail technology, made by Research In Motion Ltd., Waterloo, Ontario.

While helping Microsoft Exchange, the agreement has a catch for another Microsoft division: cellphone software. One of Microsoft's major advantages over London-based Symbian, which is owned by a group of leading cellphone makers, is that handsets running Microsoft's software tend to work better with the Exchange e-mail system -- and that advantage appears to be undermined by the new licensing agreement.

Now this helps level the Mobile Enterprise playing field. In a strange way, this agreement helps both Microsoft and Symbian as the article states. Is this the beginning of the end of BlackBerry's solo reign of the mobile enterprise market?? I wonder....

IIT team solves the Ashoka pillar mystery

So finally, a team from IIT Kanpur solves the Ashoka pillar mystery. The Ashoka pillar is a 4th century iron pillar, attributed to the ancient King Ashoka, that has resisted rusting for all these years. Currently located in Delhi near the Qutab Minar, people have attributed the non-corrosive nature of the monument to all sorts of reasons - even some crazy ideas like extra-terrestrial influence as proposed in Von Daniken's 'Chariot of the Gods'.

Want some new ideas? Check out DEMO@15!

DEMO@15! is one of my favourite annual events where startups and new companies demonstrate their wares. This year's event was held on Feb 13-15. Check out the list of participants to gather an idea of emerging technologies.

The death of radio as we know it?

WSJ has an interesing article on radio station's reaction to iPods, satellilte radio and the likes. Radio stations are getting paranoid that satellite radio and iPods are taking aways their audience - and for a reason. With over 22 minutes of advertising and the lame selection of songs, go figure.

FM broadcast technology hasn't significantly changed since they became popular in the '70s. What other consumer technology is still that lame? Some may say TV, but digitial cable is fast picking up and of course there is satellite TV. Its high time radio stations invested more in digital broadcast technologies such as DAB (digital audio broadcast) or other similar technologies. Added value to the user being richer content - audio intermeshed with even vidual content like weather and traffic reports. And someone's gotta do something about all those ever increasing ads.

My personal take is that unlike in the past where radio faced competition from TV in the 1950s and the Sony Walkman in the 1980s, this time its different. And my prediction is not stallite that would kill the radio - it would be iPod-like players integrated with streaming Internet radio stations - services beyond those such as AudioFeast, who already work well with your iRiver MP3 players providing you a selection of songs customized to your taste. Motorola has announced a similar service, iRadio at DEMO@15 that works with your mobile phone. Now imagine all this integrated with a 3G radio service such as that offered by Virgin Radio.

Now that woud be interesting! It won't take too long before we see such services kick conventional radio right in the nu*s!

TiVo Finally Gets Its Comcast

Impressive that Tivo could finally make this happen. TiVo Finally Gets Its Comcast. All the TiVo fans must be doing cartwheels. I don't know if you know any, but those TiVo fans are probably the most loyal set of fans outside the NASCAR fan set.

Former FCC chairman Micheal Powell is known to have called it 'God's machine' - now thats what I call an endorsement ! Some of my former collegues are such fans of TiVo that I'm sure they'd havemixed feelings that TiVo replaces the Motorola DVR devices used by Comcast.

Drooling over the new Motorola PEBL V6

Sometimes I wonder why I left Motorola and my unlimited suply of toys..... like the Motorola Motorola PEBL V6 announced at CTIA the past week. As far as I've heard this is only the beginning. I hope the recent surge of innovation reflect well on Motorola's stock some time soon, unfortunately, according to Forbes, they need to work on their margins.

Amazing Visualization of Web Server Logs

I've been looking around for software to log visits to Red Rabbit's website. I'm currently using one from StatCounter. On their site, I saw an ad for this amazing visualization tool for web server logs: VisitorVille: Web Site Intelligence for Creative Thinkers - its a pretty neat SimCity-like UI for visualizing visits to your web site.

I am not sure how usefull it really is, but it certainly looks innovative. To be practical, I'd rather stick to my graphs - they're far easier to analyze at one shot as opposed to 3-D people walking around town carrying passports :)

Red Rabbit Software - Website is now live !

As of noon today, Red Rabbit Software's website went live !!!

Let me know your comments (if any) here.

Business Intelligence Seminar Tomorrow

Got to attend the Business Intellience Seminar organized by the Chicago chapter of the Technology Executives Club. I hope to get some leads and get some insight into customer issues faced by users of Business Intelligence tools there.

All I am looking for ammo for my product, besides understanding some real customer pain points. I knowhow much better our product, Corona is, but I'd love to hear it from the horse's mouth.

Also, our website (www.redrabbitsoftware.com) should go live tomorrow - no more single logo with contact email information. Version 1 might not be the best, but its a start. Of course we don't intend to publish our entire strategy, so the website will only function as minimal marketing tool and more as a reference for potential customers and interested parties. Most discussions would be in person with our customers. Its always to be extra cautious when working in the software world - remember - 'Only the Paranoid Survive'.

How to Start a Startup - Tips from Paul Graham

Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters has a wonderful article on his website: "How to Start a Startup". Quite an interesting read. I'm yet to read 'Hackers and Painters' - I've heard a lot of good reviews about it from my former collegues. After reading this article from Paul, I'm even more encouraged to pick it up from the bookstore.

Stifling broadband penetration

Wired Magazine had an article that caught my attention this month "Why Your Broadband Sucks". It talks of the efforts by the City of Philadelphia to provide free WiFi throughout their municipalities, that was eventually thwarted and vetoed out by the telecom lobby.

I am not a communist, but I did feel that Philly was going in the right direction by increasing the availability of broadband to its constituents by providing free broadband. The emergence of such services may lead to greater innovation and other new services that may benifit us all. Unfortunately the threatened telecos made their fright clear by preventing this from happening - dampening the rate of provision of broadband access to underserved communities in the interest of keeping their stronghold on high speed Internet.

The solution is not to fire private enterprise; it is instead to encourage more competition. Communities across the country are experimenting with ways to supplement private service. And these experiments are producing unexpected economic returns. Some are discovering that free wireless access increases the value of public spaces just as, well, streetlamps do. And just as streetlamps don't make other types of lighting obsolete, free wireless access in public spaces won't kill demand for access in private spaces. In economoid-speak, these public services may well provide positive externalities. Yet we will never recognize these externalities unless municipalities are free to experiment. That's why the bipartisan Silicon Valley advocacy group TechNet explicitly endorses allowing local governments to compete with broadband providers.

Also interesting is Wired's interview with Verizon's VP of Broadband solutions, Marilyn O'Connel, where she says:

From the citizen's perspective, it sure seems like you're trying to prevent wireless access from becoming a basic public utility. Shouldn't bandwidth be free?
A lot of things would have to come together before you have the kind of coverage that would allow people to say, "I don't need any other bandwidth, I can just go and plug into the city's network." I don't see that governments are going to supply that kind of service in such a broad, ubiquitous way. The reality is, to have the kind of broadband-rich networks you need, private companies have to come forward.

Somehow that last answer didn't make too much sense to me....

Down hill Skiing - learning a little bit more than skiing

So, I'm back from the weekend skiing trip to Wisconsin's Cascade Mountain Ski Resort. Pretty fun place - especially for beginners. This is the second trip this year - and being a beginner, I'm happy with my progress. What I liked about this place are the good instructors who adapt their teaching to your experience level. And of course the abundant downhill trails for beginners who really want to try out what they've learnt on the smaller slopes.

One key thing I learnt from the nearly 8 hours of down hill skiing across this hilly terrain was to make sure I knew what I was doing and not waiver from my faith in it. I knew how to ski down smaller slopes, but the steeper ones, where I found difficult to control my speed, I tended to become nervous and fall. Once I realized that the steeper, longer trails were no different - except of course that they were steeper, and longer :), I maintained my faith in the basics I learnt and didn't have any issues. I knew that the moment I lose faith in my fundamentals, I would fall.

Maybe life has a subtle way of giving you lessons. All we need to do is to look for them to appear.

Another one hits the bucket....

My buddy, Santhosh (SRT) does it once again! He's getting engaged on the 16th of this month. SRT and I share a very special relationship - our lives run parallel in many ways... let me explain:

1. Both were born in Kerala, India (him to royalty, me to the plebs)
2. Both lived in the Middle East till senior high school
3. Both of us went to the same coaching centers in Kerala after school
4. Both went to IIT Khragapur, in the same freshman hostel and ended up in the same wing, a few rooms apart
5. Both ended up taking up Computer Science
6. Both ended up working on the same projects, including our bachelor's thesis
7. Both ended up in the same research group at UMass Amherst
8. Ended up being roomates at Amherst (well, this was under our control)
9. Both bought our first cars around the same time
10. He got a job a few months after I did
11. Had similar issues with certain friends
12. Both graduated together
13. Both ended up crashing the cars we bought at Amherst
14. Both ended up buying new cars around the same time
15. Both ended up getting promotions faster than the norm
16. Both ended up meeting someone special through our parents and chatting for 5 months
17. Both ended up getting engaged within a week of meeting the special someone in person

.... and both getting married this summer? I am... I'm yet to hear back from him regarding his marriage plans.... not too much of a guess for me though :-)

View from the top?

02-11-05_1619
Originally uploaded by anwarhaneef.

A quick snap from my office on Michigan Avenue. Thats the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Gleacher Center, blocking my view of the NBC tower on the rear left and the Chicago river on the right. This picture was intended to be abstract, showing my relfection on the window. I'll try to upload a better picture soon. Also, this is my first blog posting via FlickR.

Four lines in four hours !

I spent four hours today, brainstorming with my collegue, the Director of Sales at Red Rabbit, working on the introduction line to our website. Four hours later we came up with four lines.... rather dissapointing if you measure throughput in terms of lines per hour, but I guess it was fine since the objective was to pack in as much in as few lines as possible. We should get the web site up by the end of the week.

So finally the architect takes up a part-time marketing role. Tomorrow I partake in yet another pre-sales, marketing role in a conference call with another potential customer. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Spicing it up! - Puck u, Wolfgang ! ;-)

Finally, after placing my cooking skills in hibernation for over two years, I have revived my passion of cooking. Ok, maybe not passion, but it certainly is fun. I prefer to cook when I have company, but its a whole lot better than eating canned food - I've been feeling like somone living in a bomb shelter the past couple of months.

After a trip to my friend's place last week and his reenforcement of the fact that cooking can be simple as long as I chose the right dishes. So, I proceeded to shop at the local Pakistani store for spices (I prefer the Pakistani brands of spices to the Indian ones) and got me some Tandoori masala and Chana (chick pea) masala. After making one absolutely horrible and overly spicy chick peas curry, I realized that random spoons of masala don't work and I need to be more careful. Fortunately, I had enough skills to revive the chick pea curry. The tandoori dishes came out rather good. So the next time you feel like having Indian food, drop me a line.... the Streamwood Desi Dhabha is open for business!

Best Ad I've seen

I know Quiznos probably has the WORST ads - from filthy singing rodents to ugly babies, but this series of ads from 3M are absolutely the best. Click here for pictures. They're advertising their security glass by placing doles of 'cash' ($3 million) between two sheets of their glass (unfortunately only the cash on top was real - the rest were fake).

I 'm an International Film buff

With my monthly movie pass, I've been hooked on to International Films as opposed to the loads of junk (and occasional classics) from Hollywood. The advantage with watching the International Films at the video stores are that most of them are award winning films, so you get the best of the world.

I prefer movies that highlight the culture of the country they are from. And of course, I have a soft spot for epics. The most recent epic movie I watched was a Chinese movie called 'Warriors of Heaven and Earth'. To all those Indian movie fans reading this, you'd be as surprised as I was to note that the soundtrack of this movie was done by A.R. Rahman !

Some of the good Int. movies I watched lately have been - 'The Thief' (Russian), 'Amen' (French), 'Legend of Suryothai' (Thai), 'Advertising Rules' (German) and of course the most moving of all - 'Osama' (Afghani)

New paradigm in TV consumption?

The last blog entry went a little bit into the details of my monthly television billing, but was there for a purpose. I am not sure how many people like me exist, maybe I'm unique, or maybe not. But this experience has lead me to believe that with the availability of broadband at home, the need for me to watch TV is decreasing. Had I had the option of subscribing to a monthly service that would provide me with movies/TV programming whenever I wanted it for a price point lower than basic plus cable, I might be one of the first to jump onto it.

All I'd need is something to hook up to my TV. I understand Microsoft Media PC tries to enablea similar experience, but I would prefer a more simpler device that could be latched onto my TV or better yet, an Internet enabled set top box that can receive such Internet broadcasts. Being a loyal Yahoo! Launchcast user, I understand the benifits of personalized Internet radio, and in this case television. Its high time Internet based, personalized TV services becomes a reality. Now, with recent annoncements by SBC regarding their upcoming Internet TV service, I am starting to believe that that future is not too far ahead. My personal opinion is that we will start to see more SBCs in the future - large telecommunications companies providing converged services ranging from wired telephone access, DSL service, VoIP service, Cellular service all the way to Internet based television service. Comcast is large enough to want to think in this direction - I'm sure they've got something stirring in their pot.

So until then, I'm happy with my monthly 'movie buffet' deal from the local video store.

Stepping down my cable

A couple of months back I realized, partly because of my schedule, that I don't watch much, if any TV. The only shows I really liked watching were 'The Daily Show with John Steward' - a left-wing slanted political comedy show that pokes fun at current events, 'The Simpsons' - arguable the most politically incorrect TV show and on occasion 'South Park'. I realized that I could get a Personal Video Recorder (PVR), a la, TiVo, or one of the new Motorola set top boxes Comcast provides, but didn't think it was worth the time and effort of getting a box and the subscription ($27 for digital cable + $10 monthly for the TiVo/PVR subscription + cost of hardware [$100+ in case of TiVo]).

Also, the other thing was that the only time I really watched TV was when I had dinner. And even then I spent most of my time flipping channels, not really watching anything of interest. So I decided to downgrade my cable to get the basic channels and keep my high speed Internet connection and get a monthly movie pass from Hollywood Video. This way, for less than the cost of basic plus cable, I get to watch movies whenever I want. And besides, 'The Daily Show's website has their latest videos online!