July 21 - Early Week Readings


  • Why Surface RT failed and iPad didn't (NYT)
    • A telling lesson on why too many options is not necessarily a good thing
  • Tiny lasers will speed up future computers (ars)
  • Apple TV: Cooperating with content providers (NYT)
  • Economics 101: Killing America (salon)
    • Economics is not science, agree to that
  • 10 mind blowing technologies that will appear by 2030 (io9)
  • Why retailers ask for ZipCode when you checkout (forbes)
    • Ofcourse for marketing purpose.. but can lead to unexpected consequences
  • This debate never dies off
    • Charcoal grilling is better than gas (wired)
    • Gas grilling is better than charcoal (wired)
  • Finance set to surpass tech as the most profitable industry (usatoday)
  • Which investment is better: Hollywood or Siliconvalley (NYT)
  • History of Apps pricing, why most apps are free (flurry)
  • How Windows monopoly is getting destroyed (BI)
  • Give me back my iPhone (slate)

July 17, Mid-Week Readings


July 15, Early week Readings

  • The Dropbox opportunity (link)
  • Microsoft overhauls the Apple way (NYT)
  • How to tell you've a lousy 401k (YahooFinance)
  • Cars are fast becoming Smartphones on wheels (TR)
  • You want to hide from NSA? Guide to nearly impossible (wired)
  • Not even Hadoop is free of patent-troll attack (NYT)
  • Warren: Human Bigdata engine (gooddata)

Mid-Week: Reads

Mid-Week Readings:

  • Unexpected use for Enron emails - BigData! (MIT Tech Review)
  • Tech spending will reach $3.7 trillion in 2013, Gartner predicts (AllthingsD)
  • How Apple and IBM learned to change with times (USANews)
  • The essential WallStreet summer reading list (NYT)
  • What's wrong with technology fixes (BostonReview)
  • Why doesn't Apple enable sustainable business on the AppStore (Stratechery)
  • Pandora paid over $1300 not $16 for playing one million songs (Link)
  • How to give a killer presentation - a story of "lion lights". Inspiring (HBR)

Mid-Week Watch list:
  • Art of choosing: Fascinating book about the choices we make. Quick intro by author (Columbia U's Sheela Iyengar)  (video

Big Data and where it is going

Just posted a blog in Greenplum.com about the platform I help lead bring to the market. It is exciting to see the buzz it created in the market, proof that Pivotal is marching in the right direction.

Got a surprise invite to Google Music

I don't remember asking for Google Music invite. Surprisingly received an invite today and promptly signed up for it. It is obviously a competing service to iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive, no matter how slice and dice it. Difference is, Google Music is free while the others are offered for a nominal price but with unlimited storage.

After sign up, the music service ask you to select your preferred genre of music style. To upload your songs you need need install a small piece of software. You can update up to 20,000 tracks to the service. I suppose that is more than enough to store most people's collection (I've 32k tracks!). Here is a screenshot of the service:
Google Music has free selection of music that is presented to you based on the music genres you like. I've some free selections shown (I cannot figure out the total number of tracks in my free music playlist?).

The service is a good add-on for Google's ChromeBook OS, as a iTunes replacement for ChromeBook. Google's strategy does seem to evolve towards moving users to Cloud based OS, Storage and Media(refer my previous post on SageTV acquisition). However, I would like to have offline storage as well. ChromeBook's cloud OS seem to choke my computing senses by offering just a browser. I invariably try to close that damn browser (jail) and feel choked when I cannot access my hard disk!. Why not offer a local caching option so that I don't need to always look for internet connection to use my Laptop? Have some intelligent caching and offer users a way to access local storage for music, photos and video that they don't want to upload to cloud?

Google acquires SageTV, Hulu up for sale, very intetesting dynamics emerging in the fight for living room

This acquisition makes sense for a variety of reasons. Personally, I've been using SageTV as replacement for Dish network from Nov 2010. I've also been watching this company for some two years now. They have nifty little new hardware device (HD 300) that plays almost any multimedia file you throw at it. They also have a very nice DVR and EPG guide for those of us want to use OTA transmission and get rid of Cable/Satellite.

Now that Google has acquired SageTV one wonders what their plan is? Is SageTV going to be the base platform for building Google TV ver 2.0? What SageTV features are going to be integrated in to Google TV? Will Google continue to support DVR functionality in SageTV?

How about hardware HD 300? Is it going to be a reference platform for Google's partners (Logitech/Sony)? Is there a plan to build DVR-in-the-Cloud?

Two companies that will be watching closely are going to be NetFlix and Apple. SageTV offers a fantastic platform to build advanced multimedia capabilities. Only if Google can get license agreements with Studios and Television Networks they will be in a much better position to compete against Apple and possibly threaten NetFlix.

Should Google get into the bidding game for Hulu with Yahoo? (Does it make sense to Yahoo to acquire Hulu?). Hulu is still trying to prove its business model (free vs paid) to its overlords. It is not hugely successful in raising its advertisement revenue. Google has ambition to extend its search and advertisement beyond YouTube into the living rooms. Google TV is  complicated to setup and expensive to buy for a common person. Combining the Hulu content with YouTube on the content side and simplifying setup and also reducing the cost with SageTV will be a big win for Google. Now Apple should worry about this compelling eco-system from Google.