Yahoo! is offering free PC to phone calls to India on Diwali day! They are
giving away 60 minutes of talk time to any phone line in India. This special will last from Oct 20 – 11:30AM PST to Oct 21 – 8:59PST. Even the regular rates to India are 4.9¢/min! This is probably the cheapest rate anywhere on the Internet. I see that Yahoo! is making full use of its Dialpad Communications, Inc. purchase.
It wasn’t until 1988 that I got my first home computer, the Atari 65XE. I was less than 8 years old at the time, and the system was phenomenal. Not only was it a great home computer, it also came with an extensive library of games that could be loaded through a cartridge, or through a cassette drive.
We didn’t have LAN parties back then. No one had predicted anything of that sort at that time, at least no one my age. Traditional computer networks were extremely expensive, and a modem was a geek’s dream. Our gaming parties were constituted by getting together at a friend’s place and playing almost every game we had in our arsenal. We could spend entire evenings, or even days just playing against or with each other. Games were a lot simple back then. %5B2%5D.jpg)
So simple that even my parents enjoyed playing games on the weekends! The four of us would regularly gather around the Atari, and spend hours competing with each other in a game of River Raid or Pac-Man. I probably had around 50 different games, and the best thing was that my parents were always more excited than me when it came to buying new games or software.
Another allure of the Atari Home Computer was the fact that it wasn’t just a gaming console. It was a full fledged computer in the sense that it came with RAM (64K!), ROM, and a BASIC interpreter. This meant that I could type in my own programs and save them on an acoustic cassette. This was phenomenal. I learned to write programs in the BASIC language all by myself at the age of 8! In fact, I might still have some of them lying around at home. Too bad, the Atari doesn’t work any more. The last time I played River Raid on it was in 1995.
Portable video gaming at that time was mostly little LCD screen based battery operated handhelds. Again, I had almost a dozen, if not more, different video games 
from Casio and Nintendo. They were good to play while on the way to school, going on long drives, or when the class got boring 😉
The best thing in portable video gaming was definitely the Casio game watches. At one time, they were so pervasive that almost every kid in school wore one.
I was looking around on eBay when I realized that most of these video games and watches are collector’s items these days with a lot of the ones I have fetching close to $100 each. I still have all my video games and watches with me, so I wonder how long before they start fetching really good prices. At that point, I could truly go out and say that I have an antique collection!
I love my childood. I was able to learn everything much earlier than other kids my age, and had access to the best things out there. And, now I am old.
The bubble is swelling up again, and we have news about Google Inc. trying to buy YouTube.com for a price of $1.6 billion. According to the news article, that works out to $32 a user for the total userbase of approximately 50 million. So, essentially, Google is considering spending $32 on people like you and me to use their FREE service. Am I the only one who considers this ludicrous?
First off, YouTube is still not profitable. How is it going to profit when the only source of profit is text advertisements that no one likes to click? Let’s consider that Google would come out with a revolutionizing technology to embed ads within the videos for a minute. Wouldn’t that take away from the whole video sharing experience? These videos are generally very short. There’s no way you could possibly insert an ad in the middle. You could insert an ad at the beginning, but that is annoying, and I doubt a lot of people would enjoy that. Ads in the end are nothing more than the useless text ads/AdSense ads. Hence, the business plan for profitability is going to be a hell of an exercise. Of course, it would be dumb to imagine that Google would rely on just this service for being profitable. It is more of a mechanism to get users hooked to their web services, even if that means subsidizing it through other profitable ventures…like Adwords!
This brings me to the second point. So, Google is trying to either gain more users or not let go the current ones. Wait, there’s a problem here. Just how many users would stop flocking around Google just because they have to use a different website for sharing their videos?! How is the quality of Google’s core product – search, related to its capability to become the best video sharing website on the Internet? You ask, what about the challenge from other portals like Yahoo! and MSN? The simple answer is that none of their video sharing services is profitable either, and I strongly doubt they even consider themselves in the same league as Google when it comes to search traffic.
So, the fight is essentially about who gets the most overall Internet traffic. And, winning the fight makes sense only if you know how to make money out of it. I am not sure how that is going to pan out, nor am I thorough enough to predict the future based on past events, but it does sound stupid to me to be paying that kind of money for a user who isn’t even in the same continent.
I am not even going to talk about the legal and copyright issues surrounding any kind of media sharing service/community. All in all, this sounds a lot like eBay paying a ton of money for Skype.
I could also use a primer on valuation of money losing websites!
Last evening, I went to the Vali-Hi Drive-In with a friend to watch 3 new movies, back-to-back! The cost – $7! You just can’t beat that price to watch new movies on the big screen. This was not the first time I had been to a drive-in. The last time I went to one was about 13 years ago in Ahmedabad, India. Things have changed since then, and we now have audio transmitted on a low power FM channel instead of through speakers on poles.
The best part was that I could sit comfortably in my reclined seat, which is a lot better than what you’ll find at many theaters. Not to mention that I didn’t have to stumble over people while I tried to find seats in the dark. The aftermarket speaker system really helped, too, and I was able to enjoy a very good soundtrack. And, this was after receiving an FM reception, which makes me wonder how terrible the sound system is in most movie theaters.
Only mistake on my part – forgetting to bring my warmer wear. It is starting to get cold, and driving around in a short sleeved shirt isn’t a really good idea late at night. I could use the heater but that would cost me in gas. This made me wonder, what if the drive-ins had some sort of AC or DC outlets along the poles at the parking lot so that people could connect their “appliances” for a price. That would be great.
All in all, definitely a lot better experience than going to a regular movie theater.
Microsoft has become the first company to officially launch a gaming console in the Indian market (Sep 23). Yes, Xbox 360 is now available in India for the price of approximately Rs. 23,990 (premium bundle)!
This is interesting. This launch comes at a time when Indian youth is increasingly running short of avenues to spend its disposable cash at. Being predominantly a “young” country, India also boasts of a potential gamer community worth about $700 million. Sadly, at the same time, it is also one of the most prolific homes of pirated software. So much so that in 2001, Microsoft had expressly denied any plans to launch their Xbox console in India due to piracy concerns.
The ad campaigns are really interesting, and bring out the great Indian creativity. I seriously consider the advertisements on Indian TV as the best advertisements on TV in the entire globe. All the companies should get their ads made in India. They have chosen noted Bollywood actor, Akshay Kumar, and Indian cricketer, Yuvraj Singh, to be their brand ambassador’s in India.
There’s something India is getting which no other country is…and that is an XBOX 360 cricket video game. At this time, I do not know anything about the game developer undertaking this project, but I hope it is a quality game.
One thing I find interesting about the Indian gaming community is that being heavily exposed to American media since childhood, Indians enjoy the same kind of games as their western counterparts. This is unlike more developed Asian countries like Japan and China that have their own genres and taste. This could be a good thing for Microsoft in the Indian market. All they have to do there is to be competitive in terms of price and new games/accessories availability, and they would have won the Indian youth’s Rupee.
I can’t wait to be able to play Cricket online with my Indian friends. I hope this proves to be a catalyst for the Indian broadband industry’s growth. Truly fascinating times!
Addendum: It has now been confirmed that the cricket game will be developed by Codemasters.
The verdict is out! Graduate business students in the United States and Canada are more likely to cheat on their work than their counterparts in other academic fields. I am not at all surprised at this finding. And, it is not because there’s something fundamentally wrong in their thought process. I think the blame goes to the way business education is carried out at a lot of schools.
The report puts the number of cheating engineering grad students at roughly the same as that of business students. All in all, a pretty bleak picture. But, what surprises me is that business students justify their behavior by saying that the real world has accepted cheating as a way of doing business. While this is very true on the outset, there’s still a lot of inherent fallacy.
When you cheat in your business management assignments, you’re not avoiding a quantitative problem. You’re running away from theory, and that is what degrades your education. In the real world, theory still does hold true. Cheating occurs in other forms like corporate espionage, trade secret bungling, or other anticompetitive/copying tactics. Effective managers still understand the theory behind doing business.
Today’s business management education is nothing but a careful analysis of case studies, market predictions, value forecasting, optimization etc. While there are a lot of qualitative areas, most of it is still learning from others’ mistakes. Needless to say, if you are unable to form these opinions on your own, you have failed as a business management student.
I am a fan of using Yahoo! Rarely do I ever check any other maps/local information website for my trip planning. Since the Windows Live Writer software uses Windows Live for its maps, I thought about giving it a try, and was truly amazed. Although, I did not spend a lot of time playing around, I was impressed by the interface, and how similar it is to a regular desktop application. In addition, the following capabilties have made me think about switching to Windows Live Local:
All in all, I am throughly impressed. And, yet again, good going, Microsoft!
MInnesota is a very beautiful state. Even though it lacks a coastline and high mountains, there is still lot of natural beauty to be found. Part of the credit also goes to the way small attractions have been developed. Being a warm in the summer and extremely cold in the winter type of state, Minnesota has a lot to offer for everyone.
I would have never explored Minnesota if not for my parents 2 month long visit. I drove for about 4,000 miles in less than 2 months, to put it into perspective. The day before their scheduled departure, I made up a small plan to visit a city called Winona. The plan was instigated by the fact that Winona was voted as the “Best Day trip” in the local CityPages.
The agenda was to head directly to the Garvin Heights Park. It was here that I discovered that the name Winona actually means “First born daughter”. 
The overlook allows you to catch a glimpse of the entire city as well as the Mississippi river on a clear day. truly exhilarating!
Next on the agenda was a stop over at the visitor center. It is not clearly visible in the picture, but was located directly below the peak on the left bank of the lake!
This is the visitor’s center on the right. I bought a small wooden magnetic memento from here. The staff was friendly and genuinely interested in welcoming tourists. Speaking of tourism, the only other economic contributor in the city is the Winona State University.
Then we headed for a drive on the Lake Drive road where we stopped by the Memorial Park at the lake bank to take some pictures. From here, you could actually see the Sugarloaf Bluff at a peak. It is said that the bluff resembles the shape of the hat worn by the first Indian settler in Winona!
Downtown Winona is also pretty beautiful with lots of restaurants, and a Levee Park at the edge of downtown. We had lunch (soup, hoagies, and pita) at a coffee shop called Acoustic Café, which was recommended by the lady at the visitor’s center. It was here that we decided to skip going to the Winona County Historical Museum due to lack of interest.
We finally came back to Minneapolis, driving through Rochester, MN. And, in the evening, I treated my parents to a nice dinner at Maggiano’s Little Italy restaurant. They had a flight back to Mumbai the next day.
Here’s a map of the location:
