Planning to buy a computer this holiday season?

Windows Vista is out for retail this January. The best option is to wait a little longer! But if you must buy a computer now, make sure that your computer is "Vista Premium Ready" and not just " Vista Capable".

The reason being, Vista capable PCs and laptops will miss out on the Windows Aero (Authentic, Energetic, Reflective,Open) visual experience of Vista. Only "Vista Premium Ready" machines have the graphical muscle to run the resource intensive Aero.

A Vista Premium Ready PC would need at least a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a graphics card that supports direct X 9, with 128 MB of graphics memory. Windows marketplace has a list of Microsoft approved Vista Premium Ready Laptops.

Windows Vista itself comes in four editions - Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, and Vista Ultimate. Get the lowdown on these editions here.

Jay, from Bangalore

Writing for the web

Writing for the web is very different from writing for print. Sun Microsystems has some simple but effective tips to make your web writing more effective.

• Make the word count for the online version of a given topic about half the word count used when writing for print.
• Put the most important information at the top.
• Allow users to quickly find the information they want.
• Avoid "marketese" in favor of a more objective style.
• Do not use clever or cute headings.
• Limit the use of metaphors.
• Use simple sentence structures.

Get the full article here.

Seth Godin has an interesting post about writing a blog post.

Access more web writing tips here, here, here, and here.

Jay, from Bangalore.

"The World is flat" is No.2 in the 2006 Amazon 50 list

"The World is flat" by Thomas L. Friedman makes it to the No.2 slot in the 2006 Amazon Customers' list of Favorites.

Get the full list here.

There is a crisis, warns Thomas L. Friedman, author of "The World Is Flat".

"We're not producing in this country, in America, enough young people going into science and technology and engineering – the fields that are going to be essential for entrepreneurship and innovation in the 21st Century. "

Read Friedman Interviews here and here.

Jay, from Bangalore.

Google Tourist Guide

Robert Scoble blogs about the clustered search results in Google.

But presently, the clustered search results and refine search option seem to be limited to places.
In fact it seems to be the Google version of a tourist guide!

For instance, when I search for "Taj", which can be Taj Mahal, or the Taj Group of Hotels, or the Taj brand of tea ( All of them are popular!) I don't get clustered results.

But when I search for Bangalore, I do get clustered results!

Jay, from Bangalore

The Open Source Gift Guide

Make Magazine offers the Open source gift guide - Open Source Hardware, Software, and more for the Holidays.
Here are a few...

• Ubuntu Linux with Support
• Arduino Stamp
• Rockbox an new MP3 player

Get the full Open Source Gift Guide here.

Jay, from Bangalore

Robert Pirsig Interview

"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there", said Robert Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - An Inquiry Into Values, his first book, had the distinction of being rejected by 121 publishers before it saw the light of the day and went on to sell 5 million copies worldwide.

The Enlightenment Experience
"Suddenly I realized that the person who had come this far was about to expire. I was terrified, and curious as to what was coming. I felt so sorry for this guy I was leaving behind. It was a separation. This is described in the psychiatric canon as catatonic schizophrenia. It is cited in the Zen Buddhist canon as hard enlightenment. I have never insisted on either - in fact I switch back and forth depending on who I am talking to.'

Here is the latest Robert Pirsig Interview by Tim Adams of the Observer. Get an abridged version here.

Jay, from Bangalore

Living Dangerously

CNN has an interesting story about how Americans are living dangerously, and how facts can be different from perception...

• Two Third of Americans are overweight or obese. Cholesterol kills close to a million Americans every year.

• Tens of thousands of Americans die every year because of the common flu.

Read on...

Jay, from Bangalore

First golf shot in space

Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin was late for his tee time, and mishit the ball. This one is likely to be the longest shot in the history of golf - about a billion miles!

Read on!

Jay, from Bangalore

Just do it!

Gaping Void has an interesting Seth Godin Manifesto.

"So, decide. Decide before the end of the day."

End of the Hour/ day/ week/ month/ year/? NO! It's NOW or NEVER! And not a second later.

Why?

Because doers do not think and do. They "Thinkdo", or rather, "DoThink". Doing for them is exploration. They start off with the hunch of an idea, and that's why they occasionally blow up factory rooftops.

Bill Gates (Yes, Bill Gates) . Steve Jobs. Sergey and Larry. Jack Welch. Examples abound.

Jay, from Bangalore

Innovation and Outsourcing

The Company as a "Globally Integrated Enterprise" is fast replacing the "Multinational Corporation". In the process, national borders and associated privileges are vanishing, jobs are going where talent is available at competitive rates, and outsourcing is becoming irreversible.

Read On...

Jay, from Bangalore

What would you like to have?

ideaburger exists to serve you. With really yummy ideas, Game changing innovation, and lots of fun.

What would you like to have served here? Please let me know. Mail me at jay.ideaburger@gmail.com

Jay, from Bangalore

Who invents the next big thing?

"It's always youth questioning assumptions.", says Reed Hastings, founder and chief executive of NetFlix.

"They have the courage and willingness to do so -- we have mortgages."

Read on...

How Google works

How is it possible for Google to process 10 billion Web pages and terabytes of information on Google servers to bring us search results in milliseconds? Read about the workings of the Google magic here.

View Robert Scoble's video peek into Google here.

Jay, from Bangalore

Build your website your way, says Microsoft...

And offers Microsoft Expression Web. Download the beta here.

Ten lessons of entrepreneurship

Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, about the ten lessons of entrepreneurship

• Tell stories
• Concentrate on creativity
• Measure the company according to fun and creativity
• Be different, but look safe.
• Be passionate about ideas.
• Feed your sense of outrage.
• Make the most of the female element.
• Believe in yourself and your intuition.
• Have self-knowledge

Get more of the ten lessons here.

Happy Thanksgiving

Tom asks - "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

I say - live it, share it, celebrate it, and sacrifice it, if need be...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Jay, from Bangalore

Creating an Innovation Roadmap

Steve Crom asks us to visualize, identify, engage, create, and implement - an innovation road map, to get the wheel of innovation fortune turning in our favor.

Get the article here.

But I disagree. Innovation, by nature, belies structure. However, you can create an organizational structure that encourages innovation, and once Innovation happens, structures can channel it to good use. But structuring the Innovation process itself is something else altogether.

What do you think?

Jay, from Bangalore

InnovationJam

The largest on-line brainstorming session ever
More than 150,000 people from 104 countries participated in InnovationJam, an on-line brainstorming session sponsored by IBM, creating more than 46,000 ideas, including the 3D Internet, Simplified Business Engines, and Smart Healthcare Payment Systems.

IBM will invest $100 million over the next two years to pursue ten new businesses that were spawned by these ideas.

"Collaborative innovation models require you to trust the creativity and intelligence of your employees, your clients, and other members of your innovation network," said IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Samuel J. Palmisano. "We opened up our labs, and said to the world -here are our crown jewels. Have at them".

Read on...

Jay, from Bangalore

Internet Advertising crosses $4.2 billion for the third quarter of 2006

The Internet Boom 2.0 is here to stay, driven by massive growth in online advertising. The third quarter results is a 33% increase over $3.1 billion in Q3 2005.

Read on...

Fancy flying with a Jet Pack strapped to your back? POSSIBLE!

Got $200,000 to spare? Strap on your jet pack and get going. Caution: up there, just don't forget Newton's Law!

Jay, from Bangalore

Wi Fi Spray!

"Do you live in a polluted environment such as Los Angeles? If so, you've probably experienced the heartbreak of data transfer slow-down. WiFi Speed Spray™ can overcome the effects of pollution, increase fidelity, and provide you with the fastest wireless data transfer possible. Approved by the FCC, and 802.11b compliant! Compatible with Windows and most versions of Linux".

Read on...

This one is from j-walk.com. Hint: Good with a pinch of salt!

If you enjoyed that, you'll want to try this and this...

Jay, from Bangalore

Zimbra, the coffee shop startup

This one started in a coffee shop in Palo Alto, CA, way back in 2003, and is now competing with Microsoft Exchange. In between, they raised $30.5 million in venture funding, and created a vibrant web community.

Zimbra has about four million users, and even Bill Gates had to admit that "they've done a good job," even if Zimbra "doesn't even come close to the things that Exchange does."

For more meat on Zimbra, click here, here, here, and here.

Download the Zimbra Colloboration Suite here.

Jay, from Bangalore

Gandhi on Customers

Here's Gandhi's take on customers.

A Customer is the most important visitor on our premises.

He is not dependent on us.
We are dependent on him.

He is not an interruption on our work.
He is the purpose of it.

He is not an outsider on our business.
He is a part of it.

We are not doing him a favour by serving him.
He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so!

I just posted this on tompeters.com, as a comment.

Jay, from Bangalore

Design Lesson-1

Average user, average result
If you just try to understand the average user,
you'll get average results.
Read on

Here's Ziba's take on Ethnography, and it's impact on design.

Jay, from Bangalore

Google Guru!

The Google Literacy Project. A great resource for teachers, literacy organisations and anyone interested in education. Created in collaboration with UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning.

Access the Google Literacy Project here!

Jay, from Bangalore

The paradigm shift in offshoring

The newest offshoring trend is not call centers or back-office processing. It's not even software development.

It's Rand D, Product design, etc. In short, offshoring is shifting from critical non-core functions to core functions. Now, THAT is a paradigm shift!

Read on...

Jay, from Bangalore

Google discovers the power of speed...

Most web companies mesure success by the amount of time visitors spend online with them. But Google disagrees. Marisa Meyer says Google would rather have visitors spend less time, but do it more frequently.

Read On!

Authoring a high impact business plan

A high-impact business plan is essential to the success of any business. But how do you create one?

Here is a handy guide, and a step-by-step business plan workbook from Mastercard.
Plus, here is the Carnegie Library Business Plans and Profiles Index.

You will also find this Small Business Planner useful.

Making Google Better - 2

Search Within Search

Search for any popular keyword in Google. You will get...more results than you can handle.

Imagine, if you can lock this search result and search again, INSIDE IT. And do it all over again, and again...

The results are likely to be fantastic. Sergey and Larry, are you listening?

Jay, from Bangalore

Now, Indian companies are inspiring management best sellers

The World is flat, observes Tom Friedman, foreign affairs columnist of The New York Times.

His inspiration ? Infosys, the Indian Company.

And Infosys agrees. "Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world", Nilekani (Infosys CEO) explained. What happened in the last few years is that there was a massive Investment in technology, especially in the bubble area, where hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, underseas cables, all those things".

At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper , and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - email, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development.

When all of these things came together around 2000, added Nilekhani, "they created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced, and put back together again- and this give a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature...And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together."

Read the Infosys take on the flat world here and here.

The Indians deliver sophisticated services globally with the right people,in the right place,and at the right time, says Steve Hamm in "Bangalore Tiger", a McGraw-Hill book on Wipro.

And Azim Premji agrees - “We’re pioneers in establishing the global delivery model,which the whole services world is adopting today,”says Premji.“This model gives customers more value for their money.It will make the world more competitive,to the advantage of the customer."

Read the Introductory chapter here.
Read the BusinessWeek article here.
Access the Bangalore Tiger blog here.

But wait, the biggest of them all, TCS, is yet to inspire a book!

Jay, from Bangalore

Newspapers are dying -- faster than we think

Hardly 20% of Americans read newspapers, and that figure is dropping drastically.

Circulation of The Los Angeles Times dropped 8 percent. The three top U.S. Newspapers- USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times- are all loosing readers. And this trend is gaining momentum.

Read all about The Future Of Newspapers here.

Quarterly Results are ...results!

Quarterly Results are results, not mission statements.

Jay, from Bangalore

The "Go Point"

"Ultimately every decision comes down to a Go Point - the decisive moment when the essential information has been gathered, the pros and cons weighed, and the time has come to get off the fence", says Michael Useem, professor of management and director of the Center for Leadership and Change at the Wharton School.

Go for the Go Point Here!

Jay, from Bangalore

Businesses are built. Brands happen...

Great businesses are built... one smile at a time. Build your business passionately, even ruthlessly, and the brand will happen. Like it happened for Starbucks.

In "Tribal Knowledge", Marketing and Customer Experience Guru John Moore explains the making of one of the greatest "Lovemark" brands ever - Starbucks.

Get the presentation here.

Jay, from Bangalore

Marketing Sherpa goes the JotSpot way...

Read the news here.

Why Jotspot sold to Google...

Hear it straight from the horse's mouth...

"JotSpot is now part of Google

We're writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you'll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we're focused on migrating JotSpot to Google's systems and datacenters. We'll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won't be inconvenienced.

Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?
Google shares JotSpot's vision for helping people collaborate, share and work together online. JotSpot's team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Groups.

What does this mean for JotSpot customers?
We believe that joining Google will accelerate our team's vision of offering users the best collaboration platform on the web. Google shares that vision and presents us with the world's best environment for delivering on it. We'll be taking advantage of Google's world-class systems infrastructure and operations expertise to ensure that access to your JotSpot is fast and reliable. We can't share any of our plans publicly just yet, but we can tell you that we're incredibly excited about the possibilities. We can't think of a better company to have been acquired by.

Will paying customers still be charged?
We will no longer be billing customers for the use of the service. Although you will still have use of the product at your current pricing plan, we won't charge you anymore when your current billing cycle expires.

What about security and privacy?
Your data is yours — that doesn't change at Google. We will continue to work to ensure the privacy and security of your data. Furthermore, Google is as committed to privacy and security as we are. Since the user information you provided to JotSpot will soon be transferred to Google as part of their acquisition of JotSpot, we want to provide you with the opportunity to retrieve your user information and cease usage of the JotSpot service before the transition. If you do not wish to continue using JotSpot, send an email to privacy@jot.com in the next sixty days and we will reply with instructions for retrieving your user information.

Answers to more frequently asked questions are available at http://www.jot.com/. If you have any other questions, please email support@jot.com.

In closing, we wanted to offer our sincere gratitude to you — our customers — for believing in us and helping us achieve success. We look forward to continuing that relationship at Google.


Best wishes,
The JotSpot Team"

Do you "arrive", or do you just "show up?"

Are you enthusiastic? Asks Seth Godin.

Jay, from Bangalore

From "Golden Vaporware" to "Cash Cow"

From "THE HACKER CRACKDOWN - Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier" by Bruce Sterling. If you are innovative, this could also be your story...

Bell's Golden Vaporware

Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like institutions do, like laws and governments do.

The first stage of any technology is the Question Mark, often known as the "Golden Vaporware" stage. At this early point, the technology is only a phantom, a mere gleam in the inventor's eye. One such inventor was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named Alexander Graham Bell.

Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world.
In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville made an artificial talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin. This weird device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber "lips" and "cheeks." While Melville puffed a bellows into a tin tube, imitating the lungs, young Alec Bell would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.

Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell "phonautograph" of 1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's ear. Clamped into place on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.

By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds - - ugly shrieks and squawks -- by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current.

Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star, or, the "Goofy Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's most ambitious gadget yet, reached this stage on March 10, 1876. On that great day, Alexander Graham Bell became the first person to transmit intelligible human speech electrically. As it happened, young Professor Bell, industriously tinkering in his Boston lab, had spattered his trousers with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson, heard his cry for help -- over Bell's experimental audio- telegraph. This was an event without precedent.

Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work very well. They're experimental, and therefore half- baked and rather frazzled. The prototype may be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought to be good for something-or-other. But nobody, including the inventor, is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators, and pundits may have very firm ideas about its potential use, but those ideas are often very wrong.

The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows and in the popular press.
Infant technologies need publicity and investment money like a tottering calf need milk. This was very true of Bell's machine. To raise research and development money, Bell toured with his device as a stage attraction.

Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone showed pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread. Bell's stage telephone was a large wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown Brownie camera. Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped up by powerful electromagnets, was loud enough to fill an auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the organ from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities. This feat was considered marvellous, but very eerie indeed.

Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted for a couple of years, was that it would become a mass medium. We might recognize Bell's idea today as something close to modern "cable radio." Telephones at a central source would transmit music, Sunday sermons, and important public speeches to a paying network of wired-up subscribers.

At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense. In fact, Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this philosophy of the telephone was successfully put into everyday practice. In Budapest, for decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was a government-run information service called "Telefon Hirmondo." Hirmondo was a centralized source of news and entertainment and culture, including stock reports, plays, concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours of the day, the phone would ring, you would plug in a loudspeaker for the use of the family, and Telefon Hirmondo« would be on the air -- or rather, on the phone.

Hirmondo is dead tech today, but Hirmondo might be considered a spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer data services, such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy. The principle behind Hirmondo« is also not too far from computer "bulletin-board systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s, spread rapidly across America, and will figure largely in this book.

We are used to using telephones for individual person-to-person speech, because we are used to the Bell system. But this was just one possibility among many. Communication networks are very flexible and protean, especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently advanced. They can be put to all kinds of uses. And they have been -- and they will be.

Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination of political decisions, canny infighting in court, inspired industrial leadership, receptive local conditions and outright good luck. Much the same is true of communications systems today.

As Bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled system in the real world of nineteenth-century New England, they had to fight against skepticism and industrial rivalry. There was already a strong electrical communications network present in America: the telegraph. The head of the Western Union telegraph system dismissed Bell's prototype as "an electrical toy" and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent. The telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor entertainment -- but not for serious business.

Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical record of their messages.
Telegrams, unlike telephones, could be answered whenever the recipient had time and convenience. And the telegram had a much longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone. These factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike technology -- at least to some.

The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched.
In 1876, the United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph wire, and 8500 telegraph offices. There were specialized telegraphs for businesses and stock traders, government, police and fire departments. And Bell's "toy" was best known as a stage-magic musical device.

The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow" stage. In the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in the world, and matures, and becomes settled and productive. After a year or so, Alexander Graham Bell and his capitalist backers concluded that eerie music piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the real selling-point of his invention. Instead, the telephone was about speech -- individual, personal speech, the human voice, human conversation and human interaction. The telephone was not to be managed from any centralized broadcast center. It was to be a personal, intimate technology.

When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold output of a machine -- you were speaking to another human being. Once people realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie, unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call" was not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another human being, someone you would generally know and recognize. The real point was not what the machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a person and citizen, could do *through* the machine. This decision on the part of the young Bell Company was absolutely vital.

The first telephone networks went up around Boston - - mostly among the technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment of the American populace that, a hundred years later, would be buying personal computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph continued to scoff.

But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous.
A train crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut. Forward-looking doctors in the nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's "speaking telephone" installed. An alert local druggist was able to telephone an entire community of local doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid. The disaster, as disasters do, aroused intense press coverage. The phone had proven its usefulness in the real world.

After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass. By 1890 it was all over New England. By '93, out to Chicago. By '97, into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it was all over the continent.

The telephone had become a mature technology.
Professor Bell (now generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree) became quite wealthy. He lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various laboratories, which were now much larger, better- ventilated, and gratifyingly better-equipped. Bell was never to have another great inventive success, though his speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic transmission, manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction, and Montessori education. The "decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound intensity, was named after Bell.

Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was fascinated by human eugenics. He also spent many years developing a weird personal system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist.

Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a hypochondriac, and throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four A.M., refusing to rise before noon. But Bell had accomplished a great feat; he was an idol of millions and his influence, wealth, and great personal charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him something of a loose cannon on deck. Bell maintained a thriving scientific salon in his winter mansion in Washington, D.C., which gave him considerable backstage influence in governmental and scientific circles. He was a major financial backer of the the magazines *Science* and *National Geographic,* both still flourishing today as important organs of the American scientific establishment.

Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and similarly odd, became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-century science-fiction writer and would-be social reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson also trod the boards briefly as a Shakespearian actor.

There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell, but in years to come there would be surprising numbers of people like him. Bell was a prototype of the high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs will play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the technical frontier, who can carry the power and prestige they derive from high-technology into the political and social arena.

Read the Full Book Here

Jay, from Bangalore

Google acquires JotSpot, and Wikis are centerstage...

With 300,000 free users and 30,000 paying customers , JotSpot was not exactly invisible before Google stepped in.

The real news is the new dimension that Google brought in to Wikis, in their quest to help the world create, manage, and share information online.

Get more on this here here. here, and Here.