Sometime back the concept of crowd sourced communities came to the fore where people realized how awesome they can be yadi yadi yada... and now a days we can see these communities around and often their popularity tends to be infectious :) One very novel example I came across lately is txtWeb.

A sms platform where 'developers' can make apps for varied purposes. The term developers may give wrong impression as the interface is so simple that any lay man can just go and make a small app for their keyword.

One quick example, SMS @priyankawriting to "9243342000" to get small snippets about my whereabouts/happenings which I can easily update by logging in to their website :D

This initiative by Intuit is also very interesting as it brings a lot of services/features available to smart phone users to the SMS friendly phones - which are all mobile handsets. Thus opening up many windows of possible interactions for the large mobile user population in India.

From simple apps to tweet and update facebook , there are wikipedia apps to find quick meaning of terms, app to chat with online friends (browser to sms) and a lot more. For this World Cup there would be slew of apps that can help cricket aficionados - stay in touch with game developments even with crappy handsets with SMS.

Since I started my company in digital marketing I keep getting some queries, clients etc.. through my online network. One of the most surprising calls I got was from a tweep, who wanted to help me with the work. In passing he mentioned that he was visually impaired.

"What??" I am sorry, I thought I misheard, did he say visually impaired?

The obvious question in my mind was How can he possibly do any online marketing when he cannot see!!

Since I have chatted, emailed him, and he has some interesting tips for social media marketing too!

I thought all you guys would be interested in knowing about him and how he uses the internet... also Why he does that. Here is a small video and his interview about how he got into internet marketing.



"I started surfing the internet during 2004 that’s when I got my first desktop computer. I am a game geek so I use to play a lot of games with my low vision. It was during 2005 my sister showed me how to use google and then I found that windows xp has got an in built magnifier which opened a new world together. Since then I stopped playing games and started off learning a lot of tech stuff, reading and networking with people using mails. But I got my limitations, in spite of using
the windows xp magnifier I need to give rest to my eyes after 1-2 hrs of continuous work on the computer.

You might be wondering how can I play games when I cannot see any thing on computer with out magnifier, the kind of disease which I got degenerates my vision slowly day by day and during that time I had some good vision which helped me to play games.

Online marketing is a life changing agent and how I entered into this field was due to my interest, hunger to learn and enthusiasm. It was during September 2006 I stepped into online marketing, I went to a friends house and there I saw him making a website with Microsoft front page and when I asked him he told that from these websites we can earn money. It was interesting but my friend told no when I asked him to teach this to me. He said you cannot see properly how can you design websites, don’t strain your eyes…drop the idea. I was stubborn and did not give up the idea of learning web designing. I still remember that every day after coming from college I use to sit before computer for hours together and trying to read lots of tutorials on web design trying and testing new free software’s to crack and make a website. I was not successful but gained a lot of knowledge on web design and learned a lot about the web world as I surfed thousands of pages, read hundreds of newsletters and tested lots of software’s. I don’t like my vision limiting something in life and I always tried to keep up my spirits by cheering my self. When I met the same friend next time I asked him are you earning money, he said I need to get “SEO” done for the website…..when I asked him to teach me SEO the reply was same like before...

I came home and used Google to find out more about SEO and found that it is search engine optimization and I understood what exactly it is. During my campus placements I haven’t got selected. I walk out of the
interview halls because the kind of questions which they asked look silly and use to pull my spirits.

It was then that online marketing took birth as a profession in my life. I thought to my self I can do some
thing with what I had learned through Google. Then I started a blog and got content on it. Did lots of SEO to it and finally sold it for some where around 200$. Then I really thought I can adopt this as profession then I dived into it totally and started doing lots of research.

During this time I met couple of other’s through referrals and started taking clients and offered the
services of internet marketing. We did pretty well and I regularly updated my knowledge in the field of online marketing when my friends use to take care of work under my instructions.

I continued it for a long time of 3yrs until I thought to join some company and learn some corporate stuff. I ran 2 online marketing ventures successfully.

I joined a job at IBM and I can say if online marketing has brought a tremendous change in any ones life I am
a real example. Sometimes it is good your friends might not teach something to you and they may say it is tough and hard, but my message to world is never stop learning by yourself and one day certainly it will
pay you off."

You can contact him on Twitter @raghavasatish He also blogs @ Raghava.in

The Oatmeal is quite a kickass place to go for some groovy (often) social media related goodness. They also have stuff on English and other random stuff. Take a look at the recent funniness,

What your email address says about your computer skills

While you are at it, you can also check out this 20 Things worth knowing about Beer!

Some interesting blog posts I came across on the iPhone4,

RIP, Macintosh
This blog talks on how Apple Inc. is now forgetting its laptop Mac and focusing on the iPhone type stuff. The only reason I don't think the Mac can be pushed out of usage is cause the iPhone screen is too damn small, and also the iPad's. They are very good for mobile units but really don't compete with laptop UNLESS...

Unless the sci-fi type idea of a virtual screen becomes real. Like if the iPhone5 or iPhone6 has a button which I can click to create a working BIG touch screen and keyboard in front of us, like the 6th sense device. That would ROCK and would probably soon through the Mac out.. including all other laptops and laptop type devices.

What would the iPhone4 cost?
Well of course that is THE Question, isn't it. To really understand how much of our lives it will impact. If the cost is 50k as suggested on the blog, thats quite high! Would you buy a 50k iPhone?

How this will affect the existing Apple devices?

Social Networking and Gaming, my two passions combined and mixed with Stocks brings Empire Avenue! Anyone can sign up for free and create their own Stock, for themselves or in the name of their company! We can then aggregate our social presence like Twitter, Blog, Facebook to it, so people can see what we are doing online and figure whether to buy our stock and/or follow us.


So it has two way influence one is that our online activities on Twitter, Facebook help us in the game, and vice versa doing well in the game can get us visibility in our real, virtual lives! Cool!

I have 3 free invites to the game so if you are interested let me know in the comments or through the contact me link in the header of this blog!

EAVB_BAUGOOZMOH

From quite sometime there is some idea of Semantic web aka web 3.0 floating about. Here is a video about it which sheds some light on the concept. It covers different perspectives...

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

via @jangles from here

Posterous recently introduced the custom domain feature. It has a blogger like option which lets you register a domain through them and they manage all the redirecting and directing automatically.
Pretty cool!

Previously I would have thought that since they have brought this feature in now, it meant that a custom domain couldn't be used on posterous before. Recently I figured that the domain can be forwarded to the posterous from the domain register service, too.

All this domain directing stuff would probably fall under the SEO work profession. The difference between SEO (Search engine optimization) and SMO (Social media outreach) keeps merging every now and then. Recently I had a client for social media whose main concern was what Google ranking his site was getting. That is not really my job as far as I see it, but then social networks, and outreach does get a lot of Google love.

In fact my efforts including the wikipedia page, did get them some good results for various Google searches.

So I have had reason to ask the question about what is Social Media? I will write another post on that. let me know your thoughts!

From last sometime I have been looking for a free blog theme option for a small company website. I have been checking out lots, cause my work often requires setting up blogs. Here is a summary of what I have found,

Blogger

Blogger Rules as of now due to the new Template Designer option that they just released and the Page feature that they released in January. Read More about this at my Guest Post.


So Blogger is as of now the best option to make a free company blog.

Wordpress

Wordpress has a huge range of themes for a free blog, but the fact is none of them are right for a small company website. Also the customizability is very limited in the free option.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a good option, it has an open completely customizable HTML code and an option to create Pages. I am still planning to look more at this blog platform to figure out what can be done with it.

Posterous

I love this blogging platform but as I have mentioned in this Guest Blog, there is just no good theme option for it, though its HTML code is open and customizable. Pages option is also lacking. Not good for company blog, I would say.

Flavors.me

I found this website via here, its quite ok for a profile. Not so much for a company profile cause we cannot connect a Facebook Fan page there. I feel they need to do a lot more in terms of user interface, include some cool themes or some such.

It integrates the Facebook, Twitter and many other streams with the profile. Check out mine below,


Wix

I found this site, Wix.com pretty good for creating a flash website. They have tons of options including some good free ones. Using the customizing tool is a little cluttersome as it is heavy and difficult to load. I think it could be used to make a simple, yet elegant flash website.

Do you know any other options to create a website (for free without using too much of HTML or CSS)?

Wow look at this image of the internet cables!

Trivia: The longest internet cable starts from Norden in Germany to Keoje in South Korea it connects 32 different countries with 39 landing points!

Just saw this video on Mashable, super cool!



The black box is actually a barcode which gets decoded by the webcam to show the dragon. Only being viewable on web cam, kinda reduces the appeal. Getting a tattoo for it is also not too feasible.

I think that we can have such 'special' effects appear using a small hologram device hidden somewhere on the body which would show these effects to everyone online and offline.

N Nilekani left his Infosys job, to get every Indian an unique identification number. With all the upcoming augmented reality technology advancements, I wonder whether this is not too old age!

I am thinking of AI where camera's scan a persons face and with the photo finds their identity on a social network. Using a Google Goggles kind of application. Basically what every citizen needs is to be registered on a social network. This social network can be a government owned one where every entry is verified. Like issuing a ration card, they issue a social network profile.

Moreover, this photo scanning and searching technology will soon be small enough to be built into mobiles. So if I go to a new location, or even my neighbourhood I can turn it around so it scans the people's faces there. It then quickly searches for those people on Facebook, Twitter and displays the info for all those that have made their accounts public. Not only does this increase mingling, interacting but also increases trust in some ways.

While what I am thinking here maybe quite futuristic but the truth is that by the time we get our unique identification numbers it will already be obsolete technology compared to the stuff happening in the tech advanced countries.

Just found a video about the concept I am talking about.



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Just upgraded my Ubuntu to Karmic Koala. Upgrade is different from install where I erase everything from the disc and reinstall the new Ubuntu version. In upgrading, the new update system notifier, downloads the necessary files to rehaul the old version to the new Koala version.
The process took around 4+ hours.

I have used Hardy Heron, then Jaunty and now the new Koala. They all have been a pleasant surprise with visible betterments. The invisible betterments I will not know about since, I donot do much below the surface activities (I mean coding and stuff :p).

Some new features with this version of Ubuntu:
- Login screen gives the option to choose the computers language, keyboard style and session. The colours are also different, I like this new Black look!

- Browsing speed of the computer is faster than with the previous versions including windows I think. I can easily get used to this :)

- Hard drive notifications. I am getting a 'hard drive is failing' notification. This is good cause anyway the drive was failing but previous OS's did not give me a notification.

- Wall papers are many and vivid, making it a whole lot more user friendly!

- Music feature:
I don't know whether this was or was not there in the previous version I never noticed it. If I take my cursor next to a mp3 music file a little bubble appears. If I keep my cursor on the bubble, the music starts playing! This playing happens only until the cursor is on the bubble.
Cool!

All in all very happy with the Karma :)

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Recently I used Google Wave for something kinda useful other than chatting, playing sudoku and hangman. We along with other wavers made a wave for a tweetup! If you see the snapshots below...

First we put a poll for those that are coming for the Kalaghoda Festival and Rs 9/- Gelato tweetup. Then added the Location via Google map...

Then we had some chat conversations about the time, itinerary of the festival etc...

The wave was started by a friend @mehulved, he added me and a few others to it. Then I added lot of my contacts who might come for this tweetup to it. A few others also added people.. so very possible to make things go VIRAL on wave!

Again the setback was that as yet not too many people are on Google Wave, hence we also made a twtvite, which was more popular. This wave was made using very basic apps of maps and poll. As more and more apps get developed I think we should be able to do a lot more interesting stuff with this tool!

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Presented this at Mumbai Barcamp 6, some simple tips for people who spend long hours on the computer to maintain health.

Laugh
There are people who replace actual laughter with LOL, ROFL etc.. please don't do that! For more refer to my blog post Virtual LOL is not the same as REAL laughter!

Healthy Snacks
Many web workers tend to skip lunch or just 'grab a bite' out of some junk food product. Maintaining some healthy snacks with you at your work table can really help get in some nutritious stuff in your diet!
Some examples:
- Fruits like apples, oranges, bananas
-Dry Fruits
-Nutri bars
-Homemade snacks

Water
Often drinking water gets postponed if the water cooler or fridge is too far from computer. So keep a bottle of water with you at your computer so you don't get dehydrated!

RSI ailments
RSI = Repetitive Strain Injury, Using your wrists a lot every day, all the time, can and is leading to wrist ailments in a large number of web working (also percussionists, typists etc) populace.

A 2008 study showed that 68% of UK workers suffered from some sort of RSI. Read More. (Wikipedia)

One of the common RSI ailments is Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. It does not have any cures so some ways of preventing it from happening.



Eye Exercises
Headaches related to insomnia, eye strain are common for people spending long hours on the web. One simple exercise to relieve eye strain and to exercise its focusing ability is:

1. Look at far away object for a few seconds then rapidly change the focus to a nearby object and gaze for a few seconds. Do this for objects at different distance and elevation from the eye.
2. Roll eyeballs in clockwise direction about 10 times and then anti clockwise 10 times.
3. Keeping face still move the eye ball to the right then to the left, again to the right and then to the left. Do this a number of times.

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A recent NY times article looks deeper into creativity! A research shows that mingling with different groups helps foster innovation and ideas.

"People who live in the intersection of social worlds, are at higher risk of having good ideas." says Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago

Read another analysis of Burt's study: Collaborative networks produce better ideas.

The ability to ideate seems directly related to:

- how diverse and heterogeneous your connections are
- how adept you are at transferring info and practices from one group to other
- drawing analogies between the groups different aspects
- combining the similarity of the groups

Such info exchange and socializing would require good communication skills!

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Twitterfeed has a new feature, publishing to Facebook! This is really good cause I was looking for some such service. Some people suggested using the RSS applications of Facebook, but I never found them to work.

Now it is actually quite easy to feed in your RSS into twitterfeed and let it publish your newest blog posts to Facebook. You can select whether you want the update to go to your profile wall or to a fan page you are admin of.




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Recently I have been coming across many articles about wi-fi access on airplanes.

Right now, Virgin America, United, Delta, American and Southwest are just some of the airlines offering in-flight Wi-Fi as an extra perk (a perk that usually costs about $12 or $13 per flight). (via Mashable)

How abt some free wi-fi in air?

Ad support: One of the ideas is an inflight wi-fi service that is supported via ads!

Mobile media company JiWire and satellite broadband provider Row 44 are teaming up to deliver an in-flight Wi-Fi system that will come to you via advertising support. Read More.

Sponsored: Google and Virgin Atlantic are coming together for the holidays to provide free wi-fi in the latter's flights. This is another good way of enabling some free wi-fi. Surely the sponsor will get some love from the net addicts :p

When will we see wi-fi in Indian flights?

With wi-fi becoming more and more available, the world gets more and more connected! The world is getting flatter...... :)



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Today morning in my mailbox was a very mundane looking mail 'reply-wave' - My Google Wave preview invite! In my past posts you can see how excited I have been abt Google Wave!

Initially wave was kinda confusing, cause my contacts were not online, but then got a few of my twitter friends on it. So now we are waving together, they have discovered ways to play Sudoku and all kindsa stuff. I am not exactly clear how it works.

The chat speed is real time, as in you can read what I am typing as I am typing it... and the UI is definitely more interesting than the usual IM chat boxes! You can see in the below screen shot, the chat can happen in different parallel strings... in the same wave.


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Just back from Mumbai's 6th Barcamp and my first! Had a good time, with free wifi and some live tweeting. Many of the sessions were techie where I asked my usual very fundamental questions... and understood a bit of what was being said.

I also took an impromptu session on Health bhi, Web bhi... will blog on it soon!

A friend's b'day party to go to now... ciao.

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There are now many good browsers available for web users. Which one is your favorite? Why?
I came across a cool article today on Information Week. It has a comprehensive and kinda long analysis of the different browsers. They have covered their strengths and weaknesses.

Which web browser do you use?

Also came across this article that says Firefox is the browser being used by more than half the people. I myself use FF, will definitely try out Chrome version for Linux when it is out!

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