Globonomics!

I resumed attending my NLS classes last week. However, it is going to be focused solely on trying to bridge the gaps where I had not attended last season else there will be repetition. I need to take up the exams also due in February 2010 and that will bring this law school course in IPR law to a logical close and ready for application to the real world.

amazon.com kindle2 (India)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/26/amazon-kindle-2-review/

amazon.com listened to me as I prayed for an International version of the kindle as Jeff Bezos wrote what sounded like music to my ears (rather what looked like a treat to my eye – since I was looking at the screen as I read it!)

This is not the first time that such customer centric companies such as Google, Apple, amazon.com have listened to our concerns and addressed them!

I had blogged earlier here, here and here on how and why the amazon.com kindle is not available for purchase in India and who it’s competitors were and what were the tricks of the trade one had to adopt to lay one’s hands on one of them albeit with access to less than half the features. Now we have ALL the features PLUS an affordable kindle almost at our fingertips! How cool can it get?

I did some quick checks and here are some bare facts before we start counting the chicken before they hatch: Read the rest of this entry »

Anaryst - the board game - unboxing#1

I bought this first of it’s kind IPR game. My love for IPR is well documented in past posts and I have even been attending National law school for the last 1+ year in the specialized course run by them on IPR law.

This looks to be a very promising game designed and developed by an IPR lawyer, Pravin Anand. Kudos to him for recognizing the need for something of this kind and this will definitely go a long way it educating our youth and the younger genre on the importance of IPR. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long time since I blogged about this endeavor I have undertaken.

I have to say that I found this course more demanding than what I envisaged. I had to postpone taking up my examinations to Jan 2010 due to time constraints I faced in balancing both my studies at NLSIU and my work schedule that has become hectic. I had 4 papers and 1 viva voce that I will take up in January 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Moving up the value chain in blogging!

Content on a blog is king. Yet, many bloggers I see (I have been guilty of this myself!) use repeat content and not much of it appears unique.

I take a pledge: Even if my frequency of posts becomes irregular (it already is, by the way!), on my posts, I will hereon try to make a conscientious effort at putting together unique and different content.  This is not some syndicated web content that you can easily see in some other form on web pages of periodicals or news websites or online journals from where the idea germinated.

We blog with a purpose and that should be served – ensuring the information we disseminate is genuine, unique and interesting (jara hatke! in Hindi) and if taken from other sources, the root of that source is taken than going by heresay!

Goes to show how poor India is when it comes to innovation. We don’t even figure on this heat map. For a larger link to this picture, please see: http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/innovation/building-an-innovation-nation

I have been researching these to see if it made sense purchasing either one of them.

My conclusion is that the amazon.com Kindle 2 is first of all not even made for India so it makes no sense paying $399 for a product with everything else adding further to the cost (the leather casing is extra, the LCD protective cover is extra). amazon.com never designed the Kindle 2 with India in mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for not blogging about this earlier. I did not have access to broadband Internet at my home for the last 3 days and was working off my Blackberry for office related tasks.

While the economic and financial implications have been written about far and wide and everyone is busy reading the tea leaves, what are the lessons one take’s away from this? Before I begin my analysis, I would like to remind my readers that I had blogged on Corporate governance and sound accounting practices as early as 1.5 years ago on this very blog: http://ecofin.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/importance-of-accounting-for-the-business-world/ and on http://www.accounting101.wordpress.com AND on Corporate Ethics here: http://ecofin.wordpress.com/2006/11/16/corporate-ethics/ more than TWO years ago! Read the rest of this entry »

After quite a hiatus, I was back attending my classes at law school today. The patents aspect were really informative and knowledge rich! The class was on for almost 3.5 hours at a stretch.

It’s not so easy. I was watching a lot of training sessions to understand how they do their search so efficiently and effectively.

It turns out, there is quite a logic that runs at the backend and none of it is fluke. They hire PhD’s to do stuff and even here, they try to understand the context of the user’s abstract search query in real world terms and usage and application. ex: a simple “Dr.” can be used in multiple contexts. One could be the real doctor. Or it could be “Drive” that form a part of some US addresses. Or it could be “denominator”. Or it could be “Dr.” and coupled with its other search terms. The permutations and combinations are just mind boggling and yet Google almost always gets it right – doesn’t it? HOW DO THEY DO IT? 

It is only after their built-in artificial intelligence kicks in to give users’ not just a sorted relevant search result list but one that makes sense to them as well. This is no easy ask and hats off to the folks at Google for getting this right.

I listened to a lot of presentations and keynotes from:

who is a workoholic and most of her presentations gave me a new dimension to understand GUI, usability and user experience.

http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#marissa

Google truly is a world-class company and I have blogged about them about an year and a half ago as well on the book – The Google story which I found enthralling as well.