Category: General

“The truth is, it is still an open question whether the growth of cannibalism around the world is due to the blogosphere”

Funny article from Anil Dash.

I was recently gifted a fancy coffee machine by my parents — a Nestle Nespresso machine. It’s a razor – razor blade business model (though they definitely don’t send you a free “razor” when you turn 18, this razor is expensive!). You buy a Nespresso machine and then you buy coffee capsules for it from them for $0.49 / piece. I don’t know how this compares pricewise to the more traditional, less-yuppee coffee grounds approach to making coffee, but the nespresso system is clean and fast and the coffee is good and on price, it sure beats daily $4.00 cups of cappuccino / espresso at Starbucks. So I’m generally happy with the machine.

But I had to make a quick posting about their website. It’s really, really bad. I’ve used it twice. Both times I’ve been completely bewildered when trying to buy the coffee capsules. First, they make it so you can’t buy the things anywhere else (to quote from a 3rd party website, “To make sure Nespresso capsules are the freshest they can be, Nespresso handles all coffee orders through their web site”) and then their site is terribly unusable. Lot of money spent on fancy graphics and animations, cryptic navigation, and who knows what else. Somebody at Nespresso, please, please, please spend some money and hire someone with an eye for usability to redesign your site!!

The coffee machine

$0.49 apiece!

Before I switched over to bloglines from Newsgator for Outlook, I was using this newsgator for Firefox plug-in so I could right click on an RSS feed and subscribe to it in newsgator.  This is something I have been missing since the switchover to bloglines (though on almost every other count, I’ve been happier with bloglines vs. having my blogs in outlook) and now the Google Toolbar v2 (in beta right now) gives this feature back to me with it’s subscribe feature.  Visit anypage configured with an RSS feed and the subscribe button lights up — click it and subscribe yourself to the feed in bloglines (or in any number of other feed readers — see below).

India have always talked about brain drain — the phenomena of India’s top talents, educated in India usually by schools where tuition is heavily, heavily subsidized by the government, leaving India for the West. Hell my Dad was part of the so-called brain drain — he topped in his States (Madhyapradesh), went on to study at one of India’s top technical universities, paid very little for it (something like 50 rs / month! About $10 USD / month at the exchange rate back then), and then ended up here in the States. We moved back to India when I was in high school and my Dad maintains a lot of activity in India, but I digress…

Now the reverse appears to be happening — Indians that came to the States from India are moving back to India to pursue professional opportunities there (Gaurav and Ashish at Tekriti are prime examples of this — IIT educated engineers working for Microsoft in the States moving back to Delhi to start a software company in Gurgaon). And, as CNN writes in this article, Americans are going to India (and not Americans like me with Indian ancestry) to pursue opportunities there.

On my recent trip to India, I felt at times that I was inside some sort of strange mash-up, whether it was while I was at BarCamp Delhi and heard engineers talking about Chris Pirillo’s Gada.be, whether it was at my uncle’s house in North Delhi (the older, more conservative part of Delhi) giving a demo of Beyond TV to my cousins while they asked me very astute and challenging questions. I expect to see this mash-up trend continue and it’s something that I’m excited about.

And as a sort of aside, my favorite mash-up story is one that I recently heard from my friend and co-worker, Soham. Soham has an American friend of Indian descent who recently took a sabbatical from her job at Andersen Consulting in the Bay Area to move to Bombay to try and make it in Bollywood. She’s a talented dancer and since she’s been over there, she’s made it into a few TV commercials and as a dancer in several Bollywood movies. Great, but to make things even more interesting, she scored a gig as a dancer in this Bollywood extravaganza as a dancer so now she’s touring the States as a dancer in an Indian production!

Evan Williams links to Steve Pavlina’s post about how to become an early riser. (And Steve, as it turns out, is the author of a bunch of articles on software marketing that I’ve read and am a fan of)

BarCamp is coming to Houston. (I recently attended a BarCamp in Delhi)

I’ve suspected that Microsoft’s Windows Mobile was headed towards alot of traction in the mobile space since I switched to a Cingular 2125 from an old Nokia phone and this story today confirms it:

Microsoft Wins Biggest Phone-Software Order, Rivals BlackBerry

I suspect that Microsoft is throwing a lot of money at carriers and handset manufacturers to seed the market with their products (case in point: you can get a T-Mobile SDA for $30) but in this case they really have a great product that I think will do well beyond the purchased marketshare.

I also ran into Dipsu this weekend at Rice’s Beer Bike. Dipsu’s a friend of mine from Rice, my neighbor my freshman year and an up and coming doctor here in Houston. He’s beginning his cardiology residency next year and I’ve found him to have become pretty damn tech savvy since we knew each other in college. Anyways, Dipsu had a new phone with him. What kind? A T-Mobile MDA. I was surprised. I quizzed him about his choice of the T-Mobile MDA since the last time I had talked technology with a Doctor (at least a year ago) the PDA of choice was the Palm. His comment: “All the medical apps are moving over to Windows Mobile and away from Palm — the last thing I would have done was buy a Palm device.”

Go Windows Mobile!

A piece of evidence that Mark Cuban is right that TV won’t be replaced by TV (at least not anytime soon): Even though digital music is pretty popular, 90% of all music is still purchased on CDs. Reed Hastings mentioned this in a recent interview that he did. This is same reason why I think that good old PVRs and TV time-shifting technologies are going to be around for a long time to come, even though TV shows are increasingly available online through channels like AOL’s In2TV and Apple’s iTunes.

I started testing Riya, the much-talked-about face recognition company, and here are my notes so far:

– There are people I don’t care about having Riya recognize — I’d like for them to NOT show up in the manual training. There’s isn’t a way to tell it to stop showing me certain faces so at this point, when I go into manual training, the first three or four rows are full of poeple that I just automatically skip over. And this makes each training “session” less useful.

– The first thing I wanted to do after I did some “training” was see what faces Riya had properly recognized based on my training. The way I see it, face recognition is the reason why people are going to use Riya so it’s the place a user should be taken after they’ve done the work of uploading and “training” (instant gratification). As it is, I had to hunt and peck for this screen, I wasn’t automatically taken there.

– On the “People” tab, I want to have a count of how many photographs it’s found for each person I’ve trained it for… This would be a good measure for me to quickly get an idea of how well it’s done.

– On the “People” tab, the left and right browser arrows don’t appear to work in the “Browse unrecognized faces in your photos” section.

– I’m curious about the percentage of faces (in my photographs) that Riya has recognized on its own. I have the total number of faces recognized, but I don’t know how many of these were because I specifically said this face = this person. On one end, this number could be zero (this is the scenario where I’ve taught Riya 100% of faces in my photographs) and Riya would be adding no value. On the other end, It could be something high and that would indicate (assuming a low rate of false positives) that Riya’s recognizing a lot of faces.

– The uploader wasn’t as effective as it needs to be — it should have had Picasa-style directory selection/de-selection. As it is, I do a lot of exports from Picasa and so I have lower-res duplicates of a lot of my images at My Pictures/Picasa Exports/[Album Name]. And all of my native resolution pictures are at My Pictures/[Album Name]. So as a result, a believe Riya’s uploading a lot of stuff twice.

– I manage all of my photographs using Picasa. It would be nice if Riya integrated with this so that it picked up edits / crops / rotations that I have made to photographs (Picasa doesn’t change any of the source image files, it just stores the changes in an INI file and applies them whenever you try to do anything with the file outside of Picasa like send it out for a print, do an export, email photographs, etc.). If there was integration, I could also tell Riya to only worry about the photographs that are marked with yellow stars.

– Is Riya uploading the high-resolution images (3-4MB per image)? Or is it just doing image processing locally on my hard drive (utilizing the higher-resolution data) and then uploading a lower resolution version of the image along with the results of that image processing to Riya? Does image recognition quality get incrementally better at higher resolutions and then plateau past a certain resolution?

– Summary: So far, it’s been fun and interesting. But what I really need to do is assume that Riya will integrate nicely into my photo ecosystem (ie my multiple cameras, my portable hard drives full of photographs, Picasa, and flickr) and figure out whether this facial recognition stuff is actually useful. It’s certainly cool, but why do I need to have photos referenced by person? Does it improve the photo sharing experience? It’s more often that I want to share photographs from an event or by theme, but it’s not too often that the theme is a person. I can think of some instances where it would be useful, like if I’m putting together a slideshow for someone’s birthday — then having all the photographs of that person is useful. If I’m looking at really old photographs, I think it might be useful to be able to pluck out photographs by who is in them. Maybe. Like I said, this is one that I have to figure out.

1600+ photographs uploaded so far, I’ll continue to report on how well the technology works and, ultimately, how useful I find it.

Tag: riya