Just added a Feed Button to my Blog

Joined the 'blog' space in May '06, was in and out posting articles. I did not know head and tail of RSS feeds....still learning though.

But the Good News is, I just added a 'Feed' Button to my blog :)

Thanks to Feedburner

An aggregator or news aggregator or feed reader is Client Software that uses a web feed to retrieve syndicated web content such as weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites, or in the case of a search aggregator, a customized set of search results.

Functions

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper." Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being "pulled" to the subscriber, as opposed to "pushed" with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some "pushed" information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed.

Aggregator features are being built into portal sites such as My Yahoo! and Google; modern web browsers; e-mail programs like Mozilla Thunderbird; Apple's iTunes, which serves as a podcast aggregator and other applications. Devices such as mobile phones and Tivo video recorders (already aggregating television programs) also incorporate XML aggregators.

The aggregator provides a consolidated view of the content in a single browser display or desktop application. Such applications are also referred to as RSS readers, feed readers, feed aggregators, news readers or search aggregators.

The syndicated content an aggregator will retrieve and interpret is usually supplied in the form of RSS or other XML-formatted data, such as RDF/XML or Atom.

For more on Aggregator / feeds --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

Today's world is all about Optimizing what you 'Search'

Increasing usage of Internet had triggered enormous hosting & usage of information online. Today, if you want to know about something all you do is go to google or wiki or answers, type in the search item and click...you shall be presented with contextual based results using of searched item.

Students, employees, Doctors, children, people of all age groups use this functionality to feed themselves with information they require.

An average of billions of items are searched every day. So how has this present day search functionlaity evolved?

- First-generation search ranked sites based on page content - examples are early yahoo.com and Alta Vista.

- Second-generation relies on link analysis for ranking - so they take the structure of the Web into account. Examples are Google and Overture.

- Third-generation search technologies are designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

In today’s business environment, time and information are arguably our two most precious resources. Yet most businesses squander both on a daily basis.
• According to research firms IDC and Delphi Group, the average knowledge worker spends about a quarter of his or her day looking for information.
• Add to that the time spent by IT personnel and various specialists to manage company information – and the technologies used to store, organize, and locate it.
• Finally, tally the lost revenue resulting from delays in time-to-market. The high costs to a company of not finding information, or of finding it too late, include faulty decisions, duplicated efforts, lost productivity, and missed opportunities. Their impact can cascade throughout an organization. The personal frustrations involved are also considerable – as anyone who has tried and failed to find a slide or a spreadsheet in time for a vital meeting can testify. The costs can be even higher in fi elds such as health care, the pharmaceutical industry, and life sciences, where up-to-date information and time-to-market are competitive essentials.


THE CRITERIA FOR GOOD ENTERPRISE SEARCH:
The solution: As easy as 1, 2, 3
The symptoms are complex, but the prescription is simple: Managers and administrators need tools to connect employees with relevant information quickly and easily. Three things are required:
1. Fast, accurate search results. To be successful, enterprise search must be powerful enough to deliver the most relevant information, consistently and effi ciently, whenever and wherever it’s needed.
2. Minimal administrative overhead. Enterprise search must be quick enough to deploy and easy enough to manage that the cost of installing and maintaining it won’t exceed the benefi t.
3. An intelligible user interface. Enterprise search must be simple and effective enough that users will actually use it.


Simplicity without sacrifice
Search quality: Deliver the goods
To fully realize the value of the information assets your business creates:
• Information must be readily and reliably accessible to everyone who’s entitled to view it.
• The information delivered must be current and relevant (the user needs the right document, usually in the most recent version).
• A clear, accurate ranking system should guide users swiftly and accurately to the data they need.
• Your intranet search should put your whole organization on the same page, providing a consistent view of information across your company, while keeping sensitive documents secure

A Study observes that Poor search, was the single greatest cause of reduced usability across the intranets studied. “Search usability accounted for an estimated 43 percent of the difference in employee productivity between the best and worst intranets.”
The study also found dissatisfied search users turning to expensive and inefficient alternatives (“The results are really gibberish. I’d stop now and use the phone”) or giving up altogether – which, for such users, brings the ROI for the unused online assets down to zero. Disappointed by the irrelevant results returned by one company’s intranet search, “Some users had stopped using it entirely. One user said, ‘I’ve tried using the search and I think it’s terrible. I don’t think I’ve ever successfully searched for anything and found what I’m looking for. If I tried anything now, I bet it wouldn’t work.”

Measuring users’ performance for 16 common tasks across the 14 intranets studied, the report found wide variations in usability, with corresponding variations in cost. After accounting for salaries and overhead, a company with one of the least usable intranets in the study would spend $3,042 per employee annually to cover time spent on the 16 tasks measured, while one of the most usable would cost only $1,563 per year.

Extrapolating from these and other fi gures, the report estimates the total annual cost
of intranet use at various levels of usability for companies with 10,000 users:
• Good usability: $15.6 million annually
• Average usability: $20.7 million annually
• Poor usability: $30.4 million annually

HOW MUCH DOES SEARCH TIME COST A COMPANY?
Multiply the number of users by the figure below that best represents the current level of search:
• $3,042 per employee – least usable intranet
• $2,069 per employee – average usable intranet
• $1,563 per employee – most usable intranet

SIMPLICITY AND ENTERPRISE SEARCH
A company with 10,000 users would need to invest about $500,000 to move from one level to another. Therefore the ROI for improving intranet usability as ranging from a factor of 20 for the lowest group to a factor of 10 for intranets of average usability.

** Most of above information is from White Papers Courtesy: Google Search**

Tech - Bucks: I

Offlate, back-door garrage tech companies are raking some big bucks either by advertising or getting purchased, after having initial market success of their ideas.

One of my buddies (Pichuck) has the following opinion: "I think this is just the beginning of a trend. This is about a technology called web2.0. All the websites fall in one of the two categories. Web1.0 or web 2.0."

"Web2.0 is basically a user driven website.Think about some thing like youtube, ebay, orkut, wikipedia etc.The concept is simple, the company provides the infrastructure and users from various corners build up the real material for the core part of the website"

"They just advertise and make money. All they do is take suggestions from people and add new features. Wikepedia was built and is being run by end users mostly.If there were to be a burst like the dot com bubble burst these companies get to loose very less compared to others.But thats not the case with some websites like yahoo (partly)...So this is where things change..Google or who ever is going to go big on this web2.0 stuff...and ppl say its the only future for all these tech firms.."

Let us speak of some examples here...!

1) Answers.com


This site launced during early 2005 has raked biggggg in months...

Answers.com has been online since January 2, 2005. Rave reviews helped Answers.com crack the top 500 on Alexa.com’s website ranking within six weeks of its launch (Forbes magazine called it “the most useful, smartest, coolest, easiest-to-use Web innovation to come around in years”). In June 2005, Answers.com was named one of 2005’s “10 Cool Websites” in Time magazine’s annual survey of the most useful and interesting sites on the Web.

They have altogether at this present time 58 employees; Answers reported revenues of $889,000 for the fourth quarter of 2005, an increase of 58% compared to the third quarter of 2005.

As of December 31, 2005, Answers had cash, cash equivalents and investment securities of approximately $14 million.

2. youtube


YouTube, Inc. was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Prior to PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The domain name "YouTube.com" was activated on February 15, 2005, [3] and the website was developed over the following months. The creators offered the public a preview of the site in May 2005, and six months later, YouTube made its official debut.

The company's humble beginnings in a garage and commitment to offering free services necessitated outside financial backing. In November of 2005, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million; additionally, Roelof Botha, partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal, joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the company, which had experienced a boom of popularity and growth in just its first few months.

At present, YouTube is one of the fastest-growing websites on the World Wide Web, and is ranked as the 13th most popular website on Alexa, far outpacing even MySpace's growth. According to a July 16 announcement, 100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded per 24 hours. The site has almost 20 million visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

September 2006: Google purchases youtube for ~$1.65 billion. youtube which went live last year has less than 60 employees. Founders are from Paypal. They jus got rich in less than a year!!!!!!!!

3) Yodlee



spending sleepless nights and days, five guys from IIT, Madras in the backroom of a Sunnyvale building -- slogging their way for over 12 hours a day....

All this, to launch a new product and start a new company. They have launched Yodlee.com, which as Venkat Rangan, its co-founder and CEO says, "is delivering on the true promise of the Internet - to make people's lives easier."

Yodlee.com provides consumers with one-stop consolidated access to their personal Internet accounts, including e-mail, banking, news, travel, shopping, bills, and investments.

"With the launch of Yodlee.com, I can now find all my personal information on the web in one place," says Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail, who was one of the angel investors in yodlee.com.

On October 26 about four months after they had raised $ 2 million from angels such as Junglee and Exodus, Yodlee.com completed a $ 16 million first round of venture funding led by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital. Yodlee.com also announced that Bud Colligan, partner at Accel Partners, and Mark Stevens, partner at Sequoia Capital, joined Yodlee.com as directors.

Started with a handful of people, the Sunnyvale-based firm has 45 employees.

Nearly a dozen students from Stanford and other universities who interned in summer for Yodlee.com loved the atmosphere and challenge of working for the company they decided to skip a semester and work for it. Some may not back at all.

"What would the professors at Stanford do without their students," a visitor asks the founders, who laugh loudly.

Yodlee.com is the brainchild of five Internet entrepreneurs -- Venkat Rangan, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and an internationally recognized pioneer in multimedia; Sam Inala and Ramakrishna "Schwark" Satyavolu from Microsoft; Sukhinder Singh from Amazon.com and Junglee; and P Sreeranga Rajan from the Stanford Research Institute. The founders -- who are in their mid-20s -- are credited with more than 80 published works and 30 patents.

Yodlee is supported by an elite group of private investors and advisors, which includes the founders of Hotmail, Junglee, Exodus, and Integrated Systems, as well as executive leaders from Amazon.com, Netscape, Microsoft, Checkpoint Software, AT&T, AOL, and VXtreme.

so what's next? Wait and watch....

Meanwhile, I will get some lessons on web2.0 and will get back with more info and examples :)

Einsteins Biggest Blunder

When Albert Einstein formulated General Relativity in 1915, he was not aware the Universe was expanding. Large scale structure in the form of galaxies was not known and all fuzzy luminous nebulae were considered basically similar and within stellar distance scales. Only with Hubble work in 1930 came the realization some of those nebulae were in fact island universes, and that they were not only very far, but also receding from us at enormous speeds. This was not known for Einstein, and since gravitation exerts its influence up to infinity, it was natural for him to postulate some force working in the preservation of an apparent equilibrium among matter, preventing universal collapse. This is why he postulated the Cosmological Constant, symbolized by the Greek letter Lambda, and included a term accounting for it in the field equations. Once universal expansion was discovered, the need for an unknown repulsive agent could be dropped and Einstein dismissed the Cosmological Constant as his "biggest blunder".

Dinosaurs Episode 6 - Death of a Dynasty

At the end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago, all the dinosaurs died out. The question of why the dinosaurs went extinct is one of the most frequently asked questions to all dinosaur palaeontologists. There have been many different ideas put forward as an explanation from the serious to the ridiculous. Probably the two most likely are: the regression and habitat loss hypothesis (gradualistic) or, the extraterrestrial impact hypothesis (catastrophic).

Dinosaurs Episode 1 - New Blood

When dinosaurs first appeared about 230 million years ago the world was very different to as we know it. There were very few representatives of any animal groups alive today - no mammals, birds or lizards (although there were some lizard like reptiles).

HBS Review: The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It)

Read the Q&A on the Author Gerald Zaltman, Harvard Business School professor's latest book, 'How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market', that delves into the subconscious mind of the consumer—the place where most purchasing decisions are made.

'95 percent of all cognition occurs in the subconscious mind'

Q: How can marketers begin to understand behaviors and attitudes of which customers themselves are not aware?
A: - One is to double check stated beliefs with actual behavior.
- Use physiological or response latency measures. These often reveal that what consumers actually believe or think, as measured by unconscious physical reactions, contradicts what they say when asked directly.
- Study the metaphors consumers use to express their thoughts and feelings. This involves in-depth probing in one-on-one interviews for the hidden meanings contained in their metaphors.

Read the whole article @:

The Article: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/3246.html

"Life is not about Business or Management....

...it is about History"



This was told at a lecture given by Prof. John Hall during his Principles of Management Class addressing 1000 of students @ Univeristy of Florida under the infulence of drugs / drinks (not confirmed yet)

"Whoa… dude… Code of Hammurabi. I’ve seen this in … I’ve seen this in a British Museum.”

Within weeks, highlights from the lecture were uploaded onto numerous Web sites, including Break.com, where the video is labeled “Stoned Professor,” and YouTube. And shortly after that, the university placed Hall on paid administrative leave. Another instructor has started teaching the “Principles of Management” course. (Some who have watched assume that the professor was drunk, not stoned.)

He has been a lecturer at Florida since 1988, and has been honored as “teacher of the year” by the business school.

The entertaining sections of the video:

After reading a passage from the Code of Hammurabi, he proclaims, “This is a product liability … law, right?” There is a long pause as he searches for the word “law.” He recovers and then holds up Machiavelli’s The Prince, calling it “a 16th century, principle of management book.”

But when he reaches for Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, his poise leaves him. “Sun Tzu, this is how old? 2,000 years?” he asks.

A student from the audience offers up an answer. “Check the copyright.”

Rolling onto his back, Hall splays out over the stage and starts cackling.

He then sits up laughing. “Noooooooo. You can’t check the copyright because he didn’t copyright the damn thing!” he responds, taking a few more seconds to compose himself before losing himself in another laughing fit.

He then continues with his lecture. “And what Sun Tzu was saying was, ‘Here’s strategy,’ ” he says, nodding his head to draw agreement from the students. “Here’s how to compete.”

Within another minute, he has strayed off on another tangent, and begins advising a student he notices in the audience to go visit the Globe Theater. “Eh, I’m not a big Shakespeare fan, but the Globe is wonderful,” he says.

Watch the video @:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9085610229984937407

He has a Facebook Group voting against him being fired and that his lecture was most entertaining:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2210953173