HP is buying the beleaguered smart phone manufacturer Palm for $1.2 billion. Palm has been struggling to make ends meet in recent times. It approached HTC and a few other companies, who refused to buy them. At one point in time, there were only 2 smart phones in the world – Palm and the Blackberry. With some many variants in the market, now it is Apple and BlackBerry which dominate it, closely followed by HTC. Lets see if Palm re-invents itself within HP, and rises from the ashes. HP’s IPAQ has been suffering sales for a longer time now. Would the Palm portfolio increase HP’s interests in smartphones.
Recently, I have started seeing the Bangalore Traffic Police put up signage in several places like this:
But Bangalore traffic is neither linear nor discrete, like what is assumed in the above pic. Sshould not the signage read more like this:
Jokes apart, Bangalore – please follow traffic rules and drive safe. Yesterday morning, there was an accident right outside the gates of my office on Old Madras Road, where a two wheeler was run over by a water tanker lorry. The two wheeler driver died on the spot. My heart goes out to the family of the driver. They probably were just expecting the guy to go to office and return in the evening. If only, each of us, took our own driving into our hands, and driving sanely, Bangalore traffic chaos would reduce by magnitudes.
image src: flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/markjms/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Yes. I know there was a lot of talk about Walmart coming to India, and then the Government blocked them. Farmers and small business owners compained and made a huge cry about their future being destroyed etc. But do you know what happened after that? We also heard something about Walmart tying up with Bharti (yes, the Airtel guy). But then what?
I just read an article on NDTV.com about how Walmart is already in, and a lot of us do not even know about this. They are laying the foundations, so to speak. Walmart has made an entry into the wholesale vegetable and food products industry. What does this mean? They establish contacts with a large number of farmers, help them get the best crop, procure them, and then sell them as a whole sale dealer to smaller retailers.
By helping the farmers, with the latest innovations, doing research with them, to achieve high yields with minimal cost etc, Walmart has established a good rapport with these farmers. One other thing that they do, which has made Walmart have a huge fan following, is the fact, that Walmart comes, and collects the produce from the farmers, instead of the farmer having to lug it there. Payments are made in time. What have we here? Walmart is a hero in these parts.
Here in Haider Nagar, in India’s bread basket state of Punjab, farmers who supply vegetables to Wal-Mart say they like working with the company. It typically pays them 5 percent to 7 percent more than they earn from local wholesale markets, they said. And they don’t have to spend money transporting produce because Wal-Mart picks it up from their fields.
Abdul Majid, who sells cucumbers to Wal-Mart, says his yields have risen about 25 percent since he started following farming advice about when to apply fertilizers and which kinds – more zinc, less potash – from the company and its partner, Bayer CropScience.
Walmart is trying to push other goods as well through its whole sale market, such as clothes etc, but it has recognized that the largest commodity that is traded and needed in India, is food.
Ofcourse, not everyone likes the idea of Walmart in India. Activists are protesting that, they will wipe out the small traders. But what can Walmart do new, that Big Bazaar has not done already. I am of the firm belief that, Capitalism does not kill anyone. Capitalism makes people reinvent what they are, and adapt to what they are smart at. So if someone was a smart farmer, he would adapt to selling to walmart. If he was not a smart farmer, he would reinvent himself, he would either move to the city and become a driver or something else, where he would showcase his smartness. That is life. But is moving everyone to the city a good thing? Well, that is another topic for another day….
Everyone has their own war to fight in their offices. But we do not have any weapons right. Check out this 7 step instruction to build your own professional crossbow with just pencils, rubber bands, and a bit of tape. Yee Haw. Lets go get them.
Recently read this story in Inc.com, about plentyoffish.com, which is an online dating service. This was built by one man Markus Frind. It is one of the largest and most successful websites to hit the web – probably because of the space in which it is playing in. 1.6 billion personal ads. That is a lot of ads. Most of them are paid. Advertisers line up at Markus’s door to advertise on his website.
All this is something that looks like a typical dotcom success story. But the story takes a slightly different route this time. Usually startups are associated with a bunch of hard core nerd type people, who burn a lot of midnight oil. And all the night outs fructify into this beautiful product, which becomes a success. In this case, it is one man – Markus. And he says, he did not work that hard to get this up and running. It started off as a simple website, which served a great purpose, and people just came.
And to keep it running, Markus just did a big upgrade. His staff strength went up from 1 to 3, and he moved out of his bedroom in his apartment.
Free software hosts his web servers. He wrote his scripts to be fairly automatic. The only manual handling that his 2 customer service staff does, is to screen spam and delete inappropriate images. Markus comes in to office at 10AM, and leaves about an hour later. That is his office hours. He has the rest of the day to relax, while the website runs itself, and generates more money for him. He holidays in the French riviera, and just generally has a good life.
Wow, after Senator Ted called the Internet a series of tubes, this is the next interesting description. This time it comes from a judge in Milan, Italy. In her description of her judgement against Google, for an objectionable Video case which made its way into Google Video.
“With images of the Wild West evidently in mind, Judge Oscar Magi wrote in a 111-page explanation of his decision to convict the Google executives: “There is no such thing as the limitless prairie of Internet where everything is permitted and nothing can be prohibited, on pain of a global excommunication by the people of the Web.”
Another dramatic sunset, taken a few weeks back, while returning back home from work. Another day, when I was banging my head on my steering wheel, for not having the Canon with me. This was taken with my Nokia camera phone.
No, it is not a cheesy title to get search engines to get here. I just saw this fantastic presentation at Garr Reynolds’ PresentationZen.com. Just mind blowing. It is a self-running two and halfminute presentation. Just blows your mind away. You just stare at the presentation. The message seeps into you without any effort. And it sticks. Wow.
Wow. Just found this on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, and this blew me away. This, after reading so many people saying, that the IPAD is not a computer, it is not a powerful thing, no one will want it, etc etc etc. Apple has once again proven it. Amen.
Apple Sells Over 300,000 iPads First Day
CUPERTINO, California—April 5, 2010—Apple® today announced that it sold over 300,000 iPads in the US as of midnight Saturday, April 3. These sales included deliveries of pre-ordered iPads to customers, deliveries to channel partners and sales at Apple Retail Stores. Apple also announced that iPad users downloaded over one million apps from Apple’s App Store and over 250,000 ebooks from its iBookstore during the first day.
Yes, I am moving again. No, not physically. The blog is moving. I first had my blog for a few years on blogspot. At that time, it was a pretty rudimentary service, and then I found wordpress.com to be far superior at that time.
Now, I am making a bigger leap. I have my own domain, and my own host.
Regular readers – please update your bookmarks. I intend to continue blogging from there.
Update: Just realized. I have had this blog on wordpress.com for about 5 years. Thanks wordpress for powering this blog for so long, with just unfailing quality. I am continuing with wordpress.org software on my domain.
