Just about an year ago Finland declared broadband internet access as a legal right and now BBC has come up with a survey that 80% people in developed world believe that internet access should be a fundamental right. Image Credit: BBC , March 2010. Link to detailed results [PDF] People equate internet to a fundamental right stating its impact on other fundamental rights [Ref: UN Declaration , Articles 18, 19, 26, 27 and 29] such as freedom of thought, conscience, right to speech, opinion and expression, and right to education and full development of personality. The whole concept may look outlandish in the developing world where the basic necessities of food and shelter are still not available to all citizens, but for a large part of the "access enabled" population, the internet is becoming as fundamental to the very existence of modern lifestyle like banking services or water or electricity. For example, check out his conversation which happened late night earlier this week

Cleartrip.com - an online travel portal has started a new section called Small World. The feature showcases select destinations around one's residence or internationally. This a is really novel service - not only users get to 'preview' a holiday location, the approximate travel and lodging expenses are flashed immediately on the screen. Once you click on a chosen destination, you are taken to a detailed view of the destination with a Google Map 'to' the location, a slideshow of photos from the destination, flight and hotel details arranged in 4 boxes on the screen. The flights with their prices are displayed in a calendar format while the hotels can be rearranged by their tariffs and traveler rating using sliders. The Google Map widget also has markers for Sites, Restaurants, shopping destinations and entertainment hot spots. The fun part is that Cleartrip has partnered with Yahoo / Flickr and Lonely Planet - the slideshows showcasing are made using photos from flic

When Google Knol first came, it was considered a competitor to Wikipedia - but looking at it now, Knol has evolved into its own type. With facilities like Citation and 'Collect this Knol', Knol has become a tool for people to write articles similar to research papers. Knols may as well be called 'informal' research papers or research papers in draft. I wrote my first Knol a couple of days back on the subject of ' Classification of tweets '. An excerpt below: It should be practically possible to build a web application / extension to twitter which will tentatively classify tweets and display them to users in say a newspaper like layout. Thereafter it should also allow users to suggest changes to the classification if they think this is not a correct classification. Read More

Well, not exactly an acquisition, but Reliance Big Entertainment (part of ADAG group and owner of Zapak Games) has acquired a 50% stake in Codemasters a leading British Gaming company. Codemasters is a big player in European gaming circuit - in the US its content is distributed by none other than Warner Brothers. Codemasters creates games for a plethora of platforms including the leaders XBox, PSP and handheld leader Wii. According to Zapak.com press release, Zapak will oversee the investment on behalf of Reliance. This is a great news for Zapak which is reaping the benefit of being a part of a larger group company. The development will have far reaching implications for the Indian gaming ecosystem. Other gaming bigwigs such as IndiaGames too may now need to seek international investment and collaboration to stay afloat We may see more international games of the PSP/X-Box/Wii family. Prices may also drop. However, the Indian gaming scene is expected to see more action on the mobile pho

Whether the topic is technology , entrepreneurship or corporate leadership - Steve Jobs is definitely a case study worth researching. His iconic leadership style , his resounding success with technology lifestyle products as well as animation movie world and his valiant turnaround of Apple - a company which he co-founded but was kicked out from. However, Steve is also a case study for those of us interested in philosophy, self help, and spirituality. Jobs started as an arrogant, over-the-top young prodigy CEO. Everything about him was perfect from his cute boy looks to the elegant ideas he had. In those days, he looked no less than Tom Cruise. But he soon found trouble at his doors when both his personal and professional life tanked. He was officially ousted from working on his pet project - the Mac, and was later relieved of his position as the chairman of Apple forcing him to quit Apple altogether. In personal life, his history of of LSD and hippy lifestyle, his failure to acknowle

Its just a coincidence that Google and God both have the same starting letters - but sometimes for computer illiterate users of the Web, it is as much a fact. Millions of people in the world do not know about the Web before Google. For them Google is not just a search engine but the window to the web - to permit some exaggeration - the web itself. (Doesn't that remind you of Krsna's quote from the Gita - I am the world ..) So some such people were a couple of days back trying to log on to Facebook. Their modus operandi was search "facebook login" in Google, click the first link available. Even my father - who comes into the category of users who learnt surfing only AFTER Google - used to reach my blog. (If you thought this was incredulous, you are either a geek or a old-timer on the web who still relies on remembering URL's of sites you visit to reach them) With my father, this had once lead to an amusing situation when he was not able to locate my blog as it had

Following Google-Blogger's 22 January announcement that blogger will be pulling the plug for websites/blogs published via FTP through blogger, there has been a furore on the internet. Without getting into criticism myself, I am trying to analyze the repercussions on sites using this service. For more details on who's impacted and blogger team's efforts to ease the load, go here . Impacted Websites i.e. those using the FTP publishing feature like www.arbitmba.com , now have two options: Move their Site to Blogger's hosting via the custom domain functionality or Start using a different blog management software like Wordpress.org In both cases you will have to perform a migration activity, but as far I have studied, neither migration is going be any more or any less painful than the other. In both cases some functionalities will have to be recoded. Moving to Blogger Custom Domain Pros Hosting on Google's servers - no hassles of hosting provider Blogger platform for

Having been personally associated with an attempt to create a 'personalized' news reader, it was amusing to read views of Eric Schmidt on the subject. Bang on target – Eric steered clear of what a personalized news reader should be, and just highlighted that the increase in the personalized (also mobile) devices which we use to consume info will automatically lead to need for personalizing the content itself. However, looking at personalized news from someone else's eyes, I for the first time am realizing that for all the good efforts of the geek world – humans may not need personalized news after all ! By personalized news I mean, the news which I as an individual am interested in. For example some ways to determine the classifications for such news are: All News from sources chosen by me Any News related to the topics which I am interested in (Sports / tech etc) News being read by people in my network (colleagues, friends, family) News which relates to any entity i

Follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/kulkarninikhil My previous figure here

I am a self confessed Fan (yes with a capital 'F') of Google and its products - my GMail remains open on my laptop as long as it is switched on; I visit Google to reach every 9 in 10 websites I visit; I save most of my documents as GMail attachments or Google Docs; all the websites which I manage are managed through blogger.com; and almost every time I drive to a new place, I use Google Maps ! The resolution and detail on Google Maps for India has improved a lot since I first blogged about MapMyIndia version of Indian mapping software (incidentally, the makers of MapMyIndia now power Yahoo! India Maps ). However, Google Maps has forged far ahead of Yahoo! Maps or MapMyIndia thanks to its colaborative features - most of the landmarks and addresses which I find on Google Maps are tagged or identified by users themselves. This kind of crowdsourced mapping info makes Google maps an ideal tool to find anything from businesses (say CD Shop in Powai) to picnic spots and weekend getaw

Continued from Environmental factors (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part V) We are confident that we will get customers and we will be able to multiply our customer base fast once we cross the incubation stage. But reaching that stage needs massive amount of research and development effort. And that cannot be sustained by us on our personal savings – and definitely not without quitting our corporate careers. And to do all this we need Seed Funding – it’s a vicious circle which probably every entrepreneur faces. Most entrepreneurs overcome this phase by sheer determination of cutting through the hardship – even borrowing money to run their dreams. We would probably have done the same – if this was a smaller venture which could be incubated on less money, but we don’t think it is like that. And so the wait is on – for the VC who would help in Seed Funding and kick starting. Till then – we reminisce on the mistakes we committed and try to learn from them. May be for this venture

Continued from Product Development Mistakes (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part IV) We probably still would have survived, because at the end of the whole charade – we still had a working prototype*, a proof of concept and most of all a revenue model – which hardly any online startup in those days had. But unfortunately for us – recession had to set in just when we were readying our b-plan and reaching out to investors. In the months since October 2008 and today – we have heard responses from umpteen VC’s^ that they are not even considering investing in seed stage startups till the recession goes away. Most of them of course camouflage their response by saying that they would have invested if we had customers (essentially saying no to Seed Stage and asking us to reach beyond that stage). Unfortunately for us, personal lives are at a cornerstone where we could not have risked our personal savings (beyond what we already had) in taking this concept beyond the seed stage. We kne

Continued from Product Vision mistakes (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part III) If the service is not ‘personal data service’ (like email), then one should try providing as many features as possible, without requiring users to log in/register. Registration and Login is a big barrier in enticing new users (especially non-techies) to try the service out. If you cannot provide the service without registration, try to provide screencasts and previews or even better, guest logins (slideshare does that!) for new users. Its important to get at least one section of your site work completely and bug-free than have your complete set of services rolled out but all in a half baked shape. While it is true that beta users are usually tolerant, but they can't be tolerant towards a product that looks full blown, but doesn't work even for some basic requirements. They would rather have fewer sections - but those few work well. Project Management lesson - make sure you get your priorit

Continued from - The Concept (Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part II) ‘Identify a need’ – it is said. We did exactly the thing – the need was clear: information overload requires an aggregator (or segregator as we called it); we wanted to build one. But call it limitation of technologies of the times (2004-6) or our inability (ignorance?) to harness them, but the concept of aggregating feeds based completely on automated algorithms did not appeal to us. Instead we decided to develop a Feed Reader for users which would be our means to enabling aggregation. However, once we set out to build an RSS reader – we got too engrossed in it. The means became the end – we got lost in the barrage of features which we needed on the reader to make it more user friendly to our users. Even worse, unfortunately for us, we came up with a RSS reader just when RSS reader usage peaked and was just about to start its decline [ RSS is dead ]. Being at its peak, the major user share was taken by the

Continued from Bloozle – the Startup that never was Bloozle is an information segregator (our own twist over the rising din of ‘aggregators’ online) which would allow the user to surf through the sea of blogs according to his/her tastes. The idea is simple – also a clever combination of various existing concepts like Social Bookmarking, FriendFeeding, RSS Readers, news rivers, co-ranking (digg/stumbleUpon): Users would subscribe to their favourite blogs in our custom developed feed reader. They would read their regular blogs and would rate and tag blog posts they read Incoming blog posts would also be automatically tagged based on the labels/tags which the authors attach them when posting. Going forward the system will also perform intelligent tagging based on factors like source, number of times a word appears in the post body, words in the title etc. The rating and tagging would be aggregated by our server and then blog posts would be rejigged (segregated) – grouped under tags and or

This is the story of a startup that never was. It’s a story which I want to document to crystallize learning which I myself have had from this experience and also for several wannabe innovators/entrepreneurs to read and take lesson from. The Story In the heady days of 2004 when me and Hemant were incubating MastishK , our talk sessions lasting into the wee hours of the morning often threw open many revolutionary ideas which we canned and kept at the back of our minds for future use. One such idea was to create a newspaper out of blog content – essentially as we realized later, we wanted to build an intelligent aggregator of user generated content. Fast forward to 2006, when I conceptualized the idea in words and posted a prelude to it on my blog. The idea then developed further on in discussions with Aurko, Shubham and Manish. I developed a very basic prototype of the idea (I learnt Ajax during this development phase) but it was looking very amateurish. About the same time, I got hook

Forenote : Apologies for sounding so crass in this post - its a rant, so guess its ok. But if it bothers you to read - don't! 1. Changing one's name on a social network to some cryptic text/phrase In the days of yore (read:2005-7) when social networks like Orkut did not have the facility of setting your status, many people changed their display names to reflect their status such as "got married", "now in Pune" etc. Now that all social networks provide a "status" field, I don't think people need to continue to change their display names - yet, so many of them do!  Again, while most are sensible to append these messages after their names, some people completely replace their names with the message. Coupled with the fact that such people often use a cartoon or random image as their profile photo, it becomes impossible to determine the person's identify even when you visit their profile. And with some who have peculiar email IDs such as arbit-d

All web applications are pull-based in nature, in effect meaning that the client (your browser) can request more data from a server, the server cannot send data voluntarily to the client.  Thus while a client can ask the server for the body of a known email, the server is unable to inform the client of any newly arrived emails unless the client specifically asks.  Hence, for data that may change without interaction from the current user (eg prices, bids, chat, email) the client must poll the server to discover any changes to the data set. Currently, this is how most of the web applications work. Comet Comet is a Ajax based technology which overcomes the push-limitation of the web by using the ability of a server to hold poll requests until either a timeout or an event occurs, so that the server can send a response at any time to communicate an event to the client. A very nice layman intro to Ajax-Push or Comet technology can be found here . For more info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(p

Those who are Google Fans would have by now already installed the new Google Chrome browser. For those of you who have not, here is the link to download the installer (~450KB). [ Caveat : The installer downloads the app from the web, so you need connectivity for installing also. The app downloads about a 100MB of files during installation.] For a long time the industry has speculated about the Google OS and so many have proclaimed Google search engine and Google Adsense to be the [notional] OS of the web; rumor mills and fiery debates have been done across blogosphere - but none of these has been convincing enough. But surprizingly enough, since the release of Chrome, no one has revisted the debate - apparantly people are too precoccupied with testing the browser and revealing its privacy flaws .  I believe, Chrome is what we all have been waiting for as the Google OS . When they themselves proclaim in their introductory comic book - [ Ref : Page 4] "We are applying the same

The Mobile revolution in India is no more a dream but a reality - the benefits of which we are already reaping everyday. « Image Source : blog.ThematicMapping.org India emerged as the hottest mobile market in the world during 2006 [ 1 ], overtaking China to claim the top spot by adding more than 73 million new mobile customers in 2006 [ 2 ], a 97 percent increase, to reach 149.5 million in total. But what makes Indian Mobile market more attractive is that it has the world's lowest service charges and huge future potential for further growth. Apart from the growth factor - Telecommunications industry is significant from another perspective to India. This is one industry where India is leading the pack in technology adoption. While we might not lead the pack in premium services (VAS etc) but in terms of ubiquity of connectivity and introduction of innovative services using this ubiquity is something India is actually ahead of even some developed nations. I personally have an exa