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‘Fast Convergence’ – Oxymoron ? The case of Gmail-Talk

Published by in world 2.0 on February 23rd, 2006

On one hand there is a dream of complete convergence. On the other hand there is a hope of simple and fast. I wonder if both can co-exist (especially the fast part). A few weeks ago, Google announced that their ‘Google Chat’ feature is now integrated with Gmail.Hooray ! Really ? I wondered if one really wanted a browser integrated email system that could also chat. After all, chat is real time, email is semi-realtime at best. In addition, I got pretty tuned off seeing that Google automatically showed me online each time I checked email. Fortunately, it still provided the “standard without chat view” (see image below) at the bottom which I switched back to. I then thought about speed – my main attraction towards google was simplicity & speed , not convergence. I use a dial-up very often and have often complained that maps.google.com is simply not dialup friendly. I also travel very often and use my phone as a bluetooth modem – forget broadband speeds there. I hate having to wait for the image slices to load up – can’t we just have a simple non fancy driving directions page ? (I use the old yahoo maps

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Effective Presentations

Published by in corporate on February 22nd, 2006

Sorry for the lack of posting the past few weeks – I was/am busy designing an IMS network for an agressive carrier (yeesh !) Some tips I wrote up a long time ago for making effective presentations. Always have an Agenda slide – and at the beginning ask if the customer would like to change the flow Before you start, ask the customer for a time-check so you can best fit your presentation according to the time slot Americans in general are very open conversationalists – an (appropriate) joke here and there or a side conversation to make a presentation more interesting is taken well Avoid ‘speaking loud’ – many people tend to switch on their internal boom-boxes when presenting. It really sounds like those looney Americal Idol participants who think screaming while singing shows tone control. Always keep your presentation interactive – if you see no one asking you questions, more likely than not, you are boring those who are listening Try and keep your presentation short at the first level (5-7 pages for corporate, 10-15 for technical). Remember that customers always look at your page count to see how much is left, especially if it’s a boring presentation.

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Be a ‘Fon’-ero. Why technology is not just about technology ( Peer2Peer Wifi Sharing)

Published by in general technology on February 7th, 2006

I received an alert from Fierce Wireless last week that Google and Skype have recently invested in a startup company that offers a mechanism using which broadband ‘users’ can share their wifi connections with others. The model is simple: You buy a ‘FON’ enabled wifi router ad plug in into your existing broadband connection. The FON router has special routing and authentication sofware which then allows this connection to be access by others. This is not a new technology – wifi sharing is a very old thought (almost as old as wifi itself) and was never successfully implemented because of several issues: a) Range – This only effectively works if the access points are ‘within connecting range’ of each other. If you have ever tried to surf the web on your neighbor’s hi-speed internet (now, now ! I am not saying I did !) you would realize that signal drops are very frequent and quite frustrating. On top of that, the Linksys boxes that FON uses (I guess Linksys is their hardware partner) don’t do a particularly good job with signal strength (In fact, in my experience, Linksys boxes are one of the worst in signal strength) b) More than

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The power of blogging

Published by in offbeat on February 2nd, 2006

I always read about how powerful the blogging community reach is, but never experienced it first hand, till now. We began this blog in November 2005 (less than 3 months ago) as a ‘fun thing’ to do. Within 3 months, we have around 600 unique visitors reading our blog, with around 350+ returning visitors. Considering its short life-span, it is quite exciting to see the reach of this system. This has basically taught us four things: People actually read stuff if it caters to a certain vertical they are interested in (in our case, VoIP, Wireless, all things convergent) Humor helps – our funnier ‘red tie yapping’ articles seem to be fairly popular Sharing experience is appreciated – our red-tie posts on “to-code-or-not-to” and “being a good manager” are examples of some of the more widely read red-tie articles we posted. Advertising revenue works – with google ads and similar A Note about anonymityWe have received several emails on ‘who we are’ and ‘why we keep it a secret’. The answer is simple: Just for fun. We don’t really care if you know who we are. It is just a little bit more interesting using a nutty monicker. Infact, if

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© Arjun Roychowdhury. My personal opinions only.