Creative Sovereignty...!

Many a times, we come across those "Ah-Ha" Moments-when we notice an Ad in say a newspaper, journal or even Youtube , we sit back and say to ourselves-"Hey. Isn't that kool? ". And this is where the folks who designed the Ad win-they are able to connect to you emotionally & believe me thats tough !!

In communication business - you have to say a "thing" out there loud to an audience of millions whom you would never ever meet yet your soul task is to connect to them in a split of a second. As always during Lunch time today - I was checking some Marketing Videos of Google - and was impressed a lot. I mean three words came to my mind upon viewing them - simplicity, clarity & "Ah-Ha" :) Now coming to the point I published this post for.....

I draw sketches whenever I find time & a plane A4 Paper. Back in India, I started collecting my cartoons, scanning them and uploading them on Picasa - receiving pat on the back soon became a habit. But then thats about it - life carried on pretty much the same for some time till I arrived in US. Today afternoon I was terribly upset & said to myself "Now that even though my "Sketch Count" has reached 80, but nobody cares:( actually. Everyone around me specially here seems to be too busy with humdrum lives; and the ones that aren't, I don't want them anyways". Thats when I called up my best friend and was told "Making a big deal over one's creative work is kiss of death". I decided to maintain my "creative sovereignty" - with or without the help of world at large -- Nice resolution ('_')

"Everyone has their own private Mt. Everest they were put on this to climb"

Next Generation Search....!

One good thing about most of the "Product" selling Sites is the Online Chat Support they have - which certainly saves time of users (like me) visiting the site for some very specific information (gathering info about some Investment Scheme / applying for a Loan) and such users would obviously not remain on the site for long. Now, this made me think why don't we have Chat functionality for Search Engines as well. I mean many a times I just wake up, check my mails and go to Google and think...now what? I might not think about the correct set of "keywords" in order to get the spontaneous and logicaly & mathematically correct results. And then I think that for sure there would be many others like me too.

And then going by the business sense too, from companies' perspective they can grab a customer pretty quickly if they get customers the required information instantly. Imagine in our ever busy lives where 24 hours seem too short, the "Live Chat" can actually save on our time on a continual basis. Infact there are many great people doing this already say ALICE - an A. I. chat robot. So why not have our Search Giants incorporate this as well??

I congratulated myself upon this discovery and thought about letting Google/Yahoo know about the same. But then seems my friend from NY already though about this before ;) Go have a look urself !

Euphoria @ Wall Street...!

Today while exploring features of Google Finance, I saw under Tope news section about the good news for Wall Street enthusiasts; For the first time in history today the Dow Jones Industrial average crossed the 13k Mark. Basically solid earnings reports for last quarter and strong economic data help ed propel the Dow over the 13,000 mark. Now, this indeed is a good news for it does tell that US economy is doing well and Corporate Earnings are progressively increasing with companies posting higher profits and growth QoQ. To reaffirm the above fact, many (besides me) are looking forward to checking the GDP Report due out on coming Friday.
Lets hope for the best !

What amazed me today was this cool promo video on Reuters (World's Leading News Company) & Second Life (a 3D Online Digital World).

The Era Of Innovation...!

I was recently gathering informartion about new Software Startups trying to find how the dynamics of "entrepreneurship" works in IT Industry.To my utter surprise - I learnt that most of 'em prefer to operate under "stealth mode" for quite some time before going out there in open & making big news.Upon exploring for some more time - I found David Beisel's blog wherein he discusses the logic behind "stealth mode" of operation of startups - very convincing indeed !

In addition to what Davis days - operating in stealth mode gives one more time for testing the site. Afterall you can never know in reality which day of the week, a font or a theme change on your site can affect your conversions. Well then that’s what Beta Testing aims at then !!
Anyways for now I am keeping my eyes set for 3rd quarter of this year when an unknown Swedish firm plans to release a new, free operating system that might radically alter the economics of software development. For the past five years, Xcerion has been working on an XML-based Internet operating system (XIOS) that runs inside a Web browser. In a way, XIOS is an abstraction layer that sits on a true operating system like Mac OS X, or Windows or even Linux. Interestingly,XIOS aims to focus on two very basic yet indispensible entities in the world of internet - security & user experience.

While no computer system is completely secure, XIOS should be immune to most of the malware today because it runs in a sandbox, a virtual environment where code can be executed without risk to computing resources on the outside. Also, since XIOS is based on XML, the operating system, the integrated development environment (IDE), the applications, and data files are extremely portable and compatible. Applications can be easily tied to back-end XML Web services created with .Net, Java, or other Web technology. Because XIOS was built from the ground up, it includes an answer to two of the most vexing computing issues today: collaboration and keeping files backed up and synchronized across multiple machines and operating systems. All this 'n' much more for free. So keep a watch in Q3 this year for XIOS and its promising cloud based computing.