gattoo's posterous

Why I like Windows 7 phone?

Today I hooked on to the Microsoft Windows 7 phone announcement. I already bought Blackberry Gemini a few days back and absolutely happy about it.

I heard some generous commentary by the same guys who dumped the Microsoft Phone experience for the likes of Apple and Google.

I like the news for one reason only. There is some one out there who can challenge the mighty and powerful just by delivering something right. It happens everywhere and happened in mobile space today.

Not to say MS is not powerful, but it has been taking a beating on mobile and web front for a long time. Hardly a leader now.

No matter whether MS is successful. I see some doubts on the business front. But it looks formidable on features.

If leaders are born, so are challengers.

Buzz

Buzz will certainly replace blogging tools we are so used to over the years.

Buzz First Impressions

One Buzz (remember yahoo! ?) has come and gone. In the second Buzz, Google has played a few master strokes:

1. Raced up a known devil, Gmail, after the social monsters like Facebook and Twitter. This benefits Gmail users enormously. They don't need to be taken off from their favorite web app that also offers them a social experience. MAIL WILL NEVER BE PERSONAL AGAIN.

2. KISS (Keep It Social Stupid).

3. Linking Buzz with Google Profile. Google Profile is a real winner here. I don't know how Scoble and others are missing this. The major impact will be on sites like LinkedIn. Matching a personal Google profile (mine is here) with a social network is a home run.

4. Learned from failures like Google Wave. Wave should have been originally brought into Gmail, as pointed by Paul, father of Gmail, who is now with Facebook.

5. Almost killed social, locational start-ups like foursquare.

6. Google doesn't require paying Twitter for its search efforts now. Buzz will provide it. It also brings Gmail into Google Search (and other way around) from the rear side. Gmail search results are lame till now. This will change.

Will it role?

I started it but blocked it in my Inbox. read how i did it here. I am interested to know how we all use it.

Why we need google to announce a better social product

I have been hearing a lot about Google launching a social service to take on Facebook and Twitter. Personally I think we need such a thing.

I am a regular user of Gmail on my Blackberry as well as web. I do not still value Facebook and Twitter even though everyone seem to drool over it. Why? because I can not use it along with Gmail.

If Gmail provides such a service, it would be a god opportunity for many people like me to actually use the social networks.

Rackspace -- fail

A problem I never encountered on normal hosting:

Is it the end or the begining?

I do to Apple what Apple does to Flash

It is not tit for tat but, I hate QuickTime just the way Apple hates Flash.
Both have no single reason for this hate.

For me, QuickTime comes with Apple bloatload. iTunes and tons of its other applications like Mobile helper (sic), Safari etc.

Will iPhone price reduce?

With iPad selling at $499.00 should we see iPhone (almost 1/6th its size) prices low? It takes an arm and leg to buy iPhone in unlocked world?

Can we ever see multitasking in the Apple hardware sans Macs? Won't anyone open 2 books simultaneously? Or, we need to wait for 15 months to get our hands dirty with iPad 2.0?

Why Apple gives one and takes away many? Like 1st gen (i was a fool to have one) iPod Touch sans a microphone makes it useless in many ways, iPad without speakers (I don't see it on Apple.com's iPad feature list) makes twice as much useless. Useless as an  education aid, or presentation gadget. Leave movies, music. Phone, anyone? Nobody would anyway throw an iPhone for iPad because it had a speaker. TIRED.

a tale of 2 live blogs

1/27/2010; 1000 hrs.

The most important time in the life of Engadget and Gizmodo.

How did they fare?

Gizmodo:

Engadget:

Engadget was flawless. Robert Scoble was right when he told us all about Engadget Live event.

Internet in 2009

Email

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Find the report here

What makes a leader

What makes a leader?

The same things that make any person what he / she is made out of.

Lets share:

• Culture
• Past
• Clarity
• What he/she wants to end up one day.