Skot's blog

The startup Punchline

2006-02-07T11:39:00.000-08:00

Ofcourse it will be ridiculous if someone doesn't knows what he is doing.
And as paul says if an employee can't give his job des in one line than you should fire yourself.

In the context of startups, if your idea is not simple enough that can be explained in a line than there is something seriously wrong.
Leave the complex ones to some big ones like microsoft.
Focus on niche.
Do one thing.
Do it good.
????
Profit !!

Browser marker

2006-02-07T03:10:00.000-08:00

I need a marker for text in a browser.

And why will i need that? Well, to speed read.
Whenever you read a long article, usually there is very little actual material as compared to fillers.
Usually what you have to do is to seperate the wheat from the chaff. You do it as you read ( guys who don't do it suffer from what we call
'information overload')
Now with the marker, you'll mark the 'wheat' as you read and continue reading like there is nothing important in the article.
Once you have finished the article you just go through the things you have marked again and take it all in.

That's it ! Now u can read much more faster and remember what is important.

Feed icons

2005-12-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

The feed icon which has almost become an industry standard after it's adoptaion by the IE team.
Now, it's designer Matt Brett has launced a website for it.
I'm all for this nice lovely icon.
You can help spread the word by either diggin it or at delicious.

PS: ironically the feed icon site doesn't have a RSS feed !!

RSS in Outlook 12

2005-12-24T07:25:00.000-08:00

The microsoft outlook program manager recently announced the RSS integration in outlook. That sure is cool and there is nothing better than to have them integrated totally in outlook rather than relying on third party aggregators. I wonder how folks at attensa feel about it. They are trying to provide the functionality more or less which is coming in outlook 12 and they are still in Beta !! So, till they'll come out with there version 1.0 MS will be out with outlook 12. And there are a lot others doing the same thing. Bad for them.

I've been using attensa to manage my feeds for quite a few days and i must say that it works well considerting that it's still in beta.
Sticking with attensa till outlook 12 comes out.

Nice honda advt.

2005-12-22T11:54:00.000-08:00

Have a look at yet another of gud honda ad.

Thanks picasa

2005-12-10T12:27:00.000-08:00

Though in the system requirements section on the picasa website it is clearly written that it won't work for win 98 systems. But to my surprize when i took it on a CD-ROM when i was going home to install it a old, PIII 900 MHz machine with 64 MB of RAM not only did it get installed but worked perfectly too. (Except that it was unable to extract snapshot of the video files)

Thanks to picasa that i was able to show pics of 'Dhruv' to my mother.

As i said earlier now google just need riya to fill tha gap.

Going agile

2005-12-08T14:19:00.000-08:00

Recently there has been lot of buzz around the buzzword agile software development.
Oops..did i just said it's a buzzword.
IMHO it's just old wine in new bottle. The quest to be more efficient and more productive is going on since the day the first company saw falling profits. In traditional companies teamwork was generally how well u get along with your boss and your coworkers. But in software develpment you this line is extended futher. Unlike the manufacturing factories there are no machies or processes to be made efficient, in software development all the team members are part of the machine and unless everybody works in harmony, you will have delayed projects or bad code written.
Wasn't great software made even before someone knew of agile practices?
Ofcourse there was but now as companies get bigger and development teams get larger these practices are just an easy checklist for the 'MBA' project manager.
Scrum and other such overarching agile methodologies are simply ways to enforce standardized positive behaviors upon otherwise mundane workers, or good workers lorded over by second-rate managers who themselves need some kind of framework to tell them how to handle their particular herd of cats. Managed-incompetence, you might say.
And since most software development managers have absolutely no idea how to program or design code so unless the actual team members interact with each other and do reviews and previews themselves ( which is what agile is about as nowhere there is team leader in agile development) there is hardly any chance of getting a robust product out in time.

Dilbert blog

2005-12-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

Gud thing to take some time off and think about some nice little things happening in daily life.
Only a few days into it's inception and it's one of the highly commented blogs out there.

Back from hibernation

2005-12-07T17:45:00.000-08:00

Been busy for a while. First went home for a few days as two of my cousins were getting married. Had a blast back home. (With my fav black suit back in action ;)). Danced non-stop in the 'baraat'. Ate great indian delicacies too.
After coming back, it was all work no play. Though took time off to catch two movies.

Lately india is buzzing with some great tech news.
First foss.in concluded with great succes and now bill gates is back in india on his fourth visit to make even greater announcements. Which follows close after cisco and intel too announced their investments in the country. So boom time for tech capital and jobs too as microsoft only will be adding 3000 more during next few years.

There couldn't be a better time for the tech geeks living in india.

Google Base

2005-11-16T04:53:00.000-08:00

Google has virtually become a factory which consistently churns out products every 1-2 months.
Needless to say all it's web based products have to be scalable as ppl flock to use their product atleast once after it is released.
They seem to be in such a hurry that their products no longer have the trademark reliablity of "it just works". They are in all aspects "Beta". It happened with google talk, happened with google reader and it continues with google base.

As soon as i went to google base, you can see above what happened.

As they r google, and it's a web app we can expect that it'll be back on track in a few days.

Apart from that, there's a lot of confusion over what exactly is the use of google base.
For me, it's a one stop shop for all the "user generated content", u get assured google index and free hosting for lifetime. It can be a substitute to your blog, your flickr homepage or craiglist for that matter. It can provide free hosting to small business.

It can do a lot more than we can currently imagine.

Bloggers on a roll

2005-11-14T15:59:00.000-08:00

On the heels of vistadb offering it's database free to bloggers, now component factory are offering it's dotnetmagic library to bloggers who blog about their Krypton toolkit.

About Krypton toolkit:

The Krypton Toolkit has been released
It provides user interface controls for Windows Forms
It is targeted at Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0
It is free for commercial use
A link to http://www.componentfactory.com/downloads.php

Hmm....now give me my copy

Riya up for grabs

2005-11-14T09:49:00.000-08:00

Recenly california based startup riya has been generating a lot of buzz. Thanks to their face recognition and text recognization technology. They have thrown in all the stuff of flickr with the zing of face recognition. And going by the initial reaction of a few, it works well.

Are you also thinking what i'm thinking?
Yes, that now it has generated enough buzz just to get noticed by the Big Three(Google, Yahoo, MS) and get acquired. Out of these yahoo already has flickr so its out of the race.
It best fits the bill of google as it's boasting of all the advanced research and tech which are
google TM. It'll also bridge the gap from getting your photos from picassa to the web.

As for microsoft, they are not much into online photos thing. But as always they might decide to take the plunge, though late, and come out winner. ( Thinking about the browser war?)
And riya will arm them with just the right start needed to do it.

Or may be the riya CEO doesn't want to sell out at all or at a later stage which seems highly unlikely coz it's not a normal thing when someone from Big Three comes knocking on your door.

Review

2005-11-14T06:32:00.000-08:00

Just got a positive review about my blog with some nice piece of advice from none other than my sister. It matters not coz it's from my sis but coz she is a Master in computer application and has a hell lot more experience than what i have.

Thanks sis

More jeers and cheers welcome through comments or by a email to me.

Picaboo

2005-11-12T18:38:00.000-08:00

Just downloaded picaboo as it was posted by robert scoble .
And what i got? Sheer disappointment.
It's a desktop app built in .Net which tries to bring flickr to your desktop.
But according to me they have failed miserably. Even a few months into version 1.0 and i don't see ne acceptance for it.
Picassa doesn't have all of the things which picaboo has but picassa does things which are supposed to be done by a desktop photo manager and might i add, it does it rather gracefully.
What do they expect of a user? That he'll copy his pics from camera to PC and than edit them in another software and import them to picaboo for sharing. It's too much to ask for a user.
I'll be happy to just copy them from a camera to picassa and then post it to my blog or send them by hello or email them or... the list goes on.
And above all the person viewing them need not have picassa unlike picaboo which is a closed network.

There is much more expected of a app apart form cool UI and presentation.

.Net rant

2005-11-12T04:28:00.000-08:00

Been programming in .Net for quite a while now.
As the days pass by i become more and more convinced that anyone who wishes to something other than the run of the mill stuff shouln't program in .Net.
Whenever i wish to do something which is not obvious in .Net i go to god(read google) just to find out that the thing which i want to do can only be achieved by some windows api calls.

All microsoft has done in .Net is to make a few advanced methods so the programmer can save a few lines of code. Like making a httpwebrequest class so that the programmer didn't have to deal with sockets at all. Those thing are good and make a lot of sense but one thing that they forgot is that i need all of the power of the native languages even when programming in C#.

Like if go about making a windows explorer like listview which has all the grouping and stuff.
I simply can't. Though they have provided a listview built in but for the grouping functionality u hav to go through the api calls. If a programmer is able to have that functionality anyway why not built it in .Net in the first place?

If you go about making a full app in .Net with a few advanced UI elements and stuff thrown in u simply won't be able to do that in pure .Net. In the end all you will be doing is searching the net for the correct api call. Or go to a forum and wait for a geek who has 2-3 yrs of experience in com programming to answer your question.

Whatever i've said i'm sure folks at MS know it already.
It's been like this all this while and it's not gonna change.
They make each component 3 times - once for the OS, another advanced one for their office apps and one crappy version for visual studio. They will give the developers enough power just to lag behind their apps.

And look at times bill gates has mentioned developers and partners in his latest leaked memo. I wouldn't be surprized if that memo was meant only to be "leaked".

Ego searching

2005-11-08T22:14:00.000-08:00

Guess what u'll get when u'll search for skotie on google, you guessed it right, u'll get this page.
Though when u search for sourabh kothari this page figures 6th and surprisingly my old imeem blog is the top result. Still, when searching for skot my page is nowhere to be found :( ( .

Vista db for bloggers !!

2005-11-07T14:38:00.000-08:00

Have used their version 2.0. Can't wait to get my hands on version 2.1

VistaDB 2.1 database for .NET has been released
This 2.1 update includes over 60 improvements, including new support for .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. VistaDB is a small-footprint, embedded SQL database alternative to Jet/Access, MSDE and SQL Server Express 2005 that enables developers to build .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 applications. Features SQL-92 support, small 500KB embedded footprint, free 2-User VistaDB Server for remote TCP/IP data access, royalty free distribution for both embedded and server, Copy 'n Go! deployment, managed ADO.NET Provider, data management and data migration tools. Free trial is available for download.
- Learn more about VistaDB
- Repost this to your blog and receive a FREE copy of VistaDB 2.1!

Apple stock

2005-11-06T13:00:00.000-08:00

If you think that google stock has been doing really well, think again.
The returns which you would hav got if u had invested in apple than google one year before would have been much better.

MS v/s Silicon valley

2005-11-02T15:16:00.000-08:00

For a long time now i've thinking to map Micorsoft's competition.
But everytime i started writing about it, every single company in silicon valley came up.
Now Om Malik has taken some pain and counted all the companies and put them in a nice image for u which is aptly titled "Microsoft Versus Silicon Valley".
Though not all of them belong to the silicon valley but u can take silicon valley as a general term for all the tech companies.

Here comes windows online desktop

2005-11-02T14:47:00.000-08:00

Remember in my last post something desktop on browser.
The recent announcement of windows live and office live makes it come true.
It's still in beta and seems like it was released to meet some deadlines but as always in a few days we can expect to get some things fixed by MS.
Google has also made more inroads by offering rss reader which had many initial bugs unlike the previous google beta products. Seems google is now trying hard to keep up with the market expectations of their quarterly results.
Google has also now started consolidating it's different services to one account.( Recently it started linking orkut accounts to google accounts.)
It would be nice to have a nice personalized google homepage where you can orkut, read rss feeds, read mail and blog. That would make a complete google online desktop.

And now waiting for yahoo to announce its feed reader after a nice podcasting service and mail.
(Didn't had a chance to try new mail, send me an invite if u hav one.)

Everything's Ajaxy

2005-09-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

Since the term was first coined in february by James Garrett there seems to be a mania to convert each and every site to ajax. Though google showed the way by using ajax in gmail, it's only now that we are seeing some real good applications made in ajax.
You can find a good list of new and upcoming ajax apps in a compilation by Dan Grossman here and here. Out of them meebo and writely seems pretty new and innovative.

Well, what took so long for ajax apps to pick up. May be increasing reach of broadband which has made loading even ajax apps pretty fast, coz even now if the u hav a li'l less bandwidth than gmail fails to load. Then thrs the advantage of just opening a browser and launch the app instead of downloading a appication and installing it. The first generation of ajax apps is all about personal management as in calander, todolists, contacs, email, IM. Still i feel ajax is in it's infancy and there will be more innovative apps we r goin to see in near future. Soon we'll be seeing apps with a gr8 degree of consolidation. Like yahoo seems to be doin in it's beta mail.
I see a imminent war in whr u have a online desktop in ur browser. Either it'll be yahoo desktop or google desktop or micorsoft desktop(doubtfull, who'll buy office ;))

Seems like flash is also getting a upgrade from irritating ads to full sites and applications in goowy.

WoW !

2005-09-06T17:54:00.000-07:00

What a phenomenon. If you are wondering what wow is then i'm referring to the breakthrough game by blizzard "World of Warcraft".
Riding high on it's success blizzard has been making some obscene amounts of money out of it which, before WoW was released, noone thought a game development company could make.
Currently WoW is with 4 million subscribers and still going strong. In the times of Sony's Everquest, when it had half a million subscribers it was believed they have tapped all the ppl who r willing to pay a monthly fee for gaming have been tapped. How times change...

Now, chances are that if you are a game company and your name is not blizzard you are probably thinking of ways to make a WoW killer. Eventually it has to happen but in near future, i don't see that happening. Well, there are some pretty good reasons to believe that.
With all that wow gold selling on ebay and people buying new hardware just to improve their wow gaming expierience. And with blizzard claiming that at any time there are atleast 500,000 subscribers online.

Why Yahoo! bought Konfabulator

2005-08-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

When Yahoo! bought Konfabulator a few days ago i was thinking that what Yahoo was planning to do by buying a 3 ppl company which makes widgets for the desktop. Well, after the recent release of GDS 2.0 it makes much more sense and the picture is much more clearer.
So, we are soon going to see a desktop tool a la Google's sidebar from Yahoo. Don't know if they knew already how Google was planning to integrate so much into a thing as neat and unobtrusive as sidebar. But now with Konfabulator under thr belt it's just a matter of time.
No wonder Yahoo announced to give it free and keep its API open to developers to writer thr own widgets, ofcourse, inline with Google who is also keeping it open.

Podcasting

2005-08-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

Though podcasting has been around for quite some time now its only now that the thing is catching up mostly due to The Big Apple giving it the official status by integrating podcasting into iTunes 4.9. As most of the apple products listening and donwloading podcasts on iTunes is a breeze. You just select which podcasts u want to listen to and iTunes checks and updates and downloads them for u. Ofcourse the podcasts page in the apple music store adds more zing.
Now with Apple quoting podcasts as the next big thing people surely would listen.
Now tech companies are coming out and sponsoring the podcasts we sure are goin to see more and more of them. One thing i would like to see in podcasts is that some important info should be included in with the info tag, that is the description which appears for each episode on iTunes.
Nothing much but just some handy info and urls which we heard in the show. Nobody cares to open a notepad or browser and note down the url which was just spoken in the show as www dot this this that dot com.
The one big question is what lies in it that Apple is going all out and embracing podcasts.
It sure is a cool tech and having Apple's name associated with it is gr8. As more and more ppl hear abt it, it sure is goin to help Apple a lot in gaining over the Redmond Giant. But what abt the revenue model, is thr ne? Or Apple just wants to cash in on podcasts' popularity into its other products.

about google selling its 14.2 million shares...whew!

2005-08-18T16:44:00.000-07:00

In THEORY, a secondary offering has no impact on current shareholder...

Let us assume that Google is worth $75b (its really 77, but 75 makes easier math).

So, it's pre-money value is $76b. Pretend Google is selling $5b work of shares. Now, Google has an additional $5b in cash, making its value $80b. However, everyone has been diluted. So, your previous 1% of Google is now 15/16 of a percent, but the company is worth 16/15 what is was before.

Now, assuming that Google has a profitable use for that cash, then Google takes that $5 and turns it into $25b of value (but loses the $5b in cash). Now, the new Google is worth $100b. So while you own a smaller share, at the moment of sale you were made whole (by the cash coming in), and you benefit from the increase in value.

However, reality is NOT so kind. In reality, Google selling $4b worth of shares will probably be at a slight discount, to encourage the big funds to pony up the cash (you don't normally unload $4b of shares on the open market and hope for the best), plus the bankers get paid. So the company ends up diluting by more than the net cash position improves.

Assuming Google has a profitable use of that cash, you should still come out ahead, because Google will in theory sell $4b in stock, collect $3.8b, and as long as they turn it into at LEAST $4b of value, you're even, and at $8b-$10b, you come out ahead...

Now let's add a little more reality. Generally, companies deploy their capital in less and less valuable area, which makes sense. If you have 20 profitable investment opportunities, each of which take $1m. If you have $10m to invest, you do the top 10 of them. If you get an extra $10m, you choose the less valuable ones, and if you are stuck with investing another $10m, you either sit on cash or chase the 10 best unprofitable activities to look busy. That's part of why dividend companies with reasonable payout ratios look so good on a dividend-reinvestment basis, they only chase REALLY profitable activities.

In addition, Google is very profitable, so it should be able to chase most of its profitable investment opportunities. With a P/E of 80, the implied cost of capital is MUCH higher than a junk-bond offering, which would only expect an 8%-10% return (interest) compared to investors expecting an 80% return (no I'm not doing the math, but its a ridiculous annual return to justify paying 80 times trailing earnings, somewhere in the 40%-80% annualized range).

Therefore, the non-financial view of the situation is: profitable companies that think their stock is undervalued do stock buy-backs, which boosts EPS, and make sense if the company believes that their stock is a better investment than any other projects that they could invest in (meaning they can only get a 20% return on new projects, but a 40% return buying their shares), and tend to do secondary offerings when they think their stock price is high (meaning, they can get a better return on the money than the market, they expect the company's stock to be a -10% return and they can get a 3% (money market) or higher return on the cash).

I would consider this offering bearish, even though the fundamental financial analysis looks closer to neutral.

Alex

Happiness..

2005-08-15T16:11:00.000-07:00

Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongued voice that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the tension, feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are faking it. Go to a ball game. Watch the fan in the stand. Watch the irrational fit of anger. Watch the uncontrolled frustration bubbling forth from people that masquerades under the guise of enthusiasm, or team spirit. Booing, cat-calls and unbridled egotism in the name of team loyalty. Drunkenness, fights in the stands. These are the people trying desperately to release tension from within. These are not people who are at peace with themselves. Watch the news on TV. Listen to the lyrics in popular songs. You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations. Jealousy, suffering, discontent and stress.