Saurabh Garg's Blog

I have been spending all my gaming time playing with Kameo lately (as in controlling her on the TV :-P), and should be done with it pretty soon. Definitely one of the best video games I have every played. Great graphics, too.

I have been at the neighborhood Super Walmart store quite a few times over the last couple of months. Company policies notwithstanding, I always enjoy shopping at that store. Contrary to popular “anecdotes”, I have always had great customer service, and at times, the sales staff has even helped me pick out colors of bed sheets, and assisted in transporting big electronic stuff in my car.

Everyone remembers the huge brouhaha over Walmart’s extremely tight RFID rollout deadline to its suppliers. Well, it looks like Walmart is already starting to use RFID tags on almost everything it sells. There are new signs at various locations inside every store reminding the shopper that Walmart uses advanced technologies to monitor their storeshelves and inventory.

I found this collection of pictures of a Walmart store with the RDIF tags on various electronic products. This is amazing. Talk about instant notification to the store inventory frontend whenever a big item on the shelves is purchased by a shopper. Examples are furniture, mattresses, etc.

Link – http://www.spychips.com/protest/walmart/spychip-slideshow/pages/can-you-spot-the-hp-spychip.html

It will always be remembered for the inovation it so succinctly fueled.

Links:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/warp/withdrawal.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

I happened to go to the local Best Buy only to discover dozens of people camping out in the cold weather outside the store. I thought that Black Friday was long gone, and there had to be a good reason for the gala. Turned out that there was a rumor that Best Buy stores were getting an undisclosed shipment of Xbox 360s at midnight. Some fanatics did not want to lose the opportunity to get the Christmas gift of the season, and so decided to camp out all night to get hands on one as soon as the store opened in the morning. Of course, some people were camping out just so they could re-sell the console at a profit margin of more than $300.

Deliberate or not, this Xbox 360 shortage has me puzzled. Why would Microsoft do something like this, especially in the busy Christmas shopping season? They said their plan was to sell a million units within 90 days of the launch. Are they near that objective?

I will get a new generation gaming console myself one of these days.

While I sat on my chair looking at my first greatly successful website, I realized that getting visitors to my site was a bigger challenge then (late 90s) than it is now. The only formula was to get a successful listing in the Yahoo! Directory. It is no joke, Yahoo! was the best way to get traffic to your site in those days. I remember rejoicing when my website was finally listed in Yahoo! (It still remains listed to this day)

Banner exchange programs were another way to expose your website to the masses. The idea was to put up a huge graphical banner on top of your main webpage to advertise other websites. These banners were mostly animated. In return of advertising other websites, you got your own banner advertised on someone else’s website. The idea was simple, and over 200,000 websites in that time actually subscribed to one or the other banner exchange services.

One of the biggest such services was LinkExchange, which was eventually bought by Microsoft in 1998 for $250 million in stock. It seemed like a smart move for Microsoft at the time considering that they really wanted to develop an Internet business strategy. Something that they did not have until Balmer literally yelled at Gates for. Of course, LinkExchange was fairly profitable at that time, and had a user base of about a quarter of a million websites, both professional and not so professional.

Everyone likes to increase their website’s traffic, but no one likes “scandalous” third party banners on their webpages. What if a banner supporting the Linux SANs crops up on your webpage about the Windows Server family? People wanted an easier way to market their websites cheaply, and in a targetted manner. This is when Google launched a search engine, and some time later, their Adsense/AdWords service.

AdSense does not display any annoying big-sized banners on top of your webpage, and you can customize the ads in any way you wish. The end goal still remains at bringing more surfers to your webpage. Only, this time you don’t exchange ads. Rather, you get paid for publishing third party ads on your site. So, how do you increase viewership? You just invest a little in the AdWords program and get ads posted on publishers’ websites. Not everyone wants increased viewership. Some display ads just to make money off their websites. The scheme makes perfect sense, and isn’t annoying for either the publisher or the advertiser. Everyone goes home happy!

If only Microsoft hadn’t given up on the golden opportunity to revolutionize online advertising at a time when the Internet was growing at the rate of 100% every 2-3 months, they would have been a far more happier bunch. It is strange how the world’s best software company couldn’t come up first with a more user-friendly service.

Reading the news on Yahoo! News in the morning today, I saw an ad for Yahoo! VideoGames, and clicked on it, only to discover a very good looking and comprehensive site about videogames. It was much more organized and eye-friendly than Gamespot, and covered all the consoles, handhelds, and PC configurations. Yahoo! even has its own video game reviews/discussion show called “Reset”.

This made me wonder. Is Yahoo! the next big media company? They have been in the Internet business ever since it took birth, and have invented a lot of the stuff/ideas we have come to live with. The Internet is a carrier of voice calls, videos, music, and gradually even television today. Where is Yahoo! in all this?

Well,

1. Yahoo! owns Dialpad, a VoIP telephony provider. It plans to include dialpad technology into Yahoo! Messenger to provide global calling plans for only a couple cents a minute.

2. Yahoo! owns Launch/Yahoo! Music, one of the fastest growing music subscription services.

3. Yahoo! acquired broadcast.com in 1999, aiming to target corporate marketers, and financial analysis media outlets.

4. Yahoo! provides exclusive live audio/video webcasts of college sports on a paid subscription basis.

5. Yahoo! provides a suit of comprehensive domain registration, hosting, and small business solutions.

Finally, Yahoo! has some of the best software developers on their payroll, which distinguishes them from rival Google, which hasn’t come out with one good client based software other than Google Earth. Yahoo! has consistently been bringing good software (Music, messenger, Maps API, etc.) to the end-users.

Another thing seems to be Yahoo!’s emphasis on basing their technology/products on actual user experience. They believe in a more human managed approach to bringing the best of the web to users (del.icio.us, Flickr, MyWeb2; all of which are based on tagging).

Not all their acquisitions have worked in their favor though, and they have actually been known to make a lot of their acquisitions non user-friendly in the past (egroups, flickr, etc.), but they are changing it for the better. Also, most of their new services (Yahoo! Answers, Maps Beta) are a step above what the nearest competitor provides.

Truly interesting times indeed…and the best part is that I see very little hype in Yahoo!’s efforts.