Fog blankets bangalore

Early to bed, very early to rise and caught a wonderful sight




Above: View from my balcony
Below: Caught while walking my dog











The view really makes me miss ooty & kodai, places I used to visit very often as a kid. A visit is overdue I guess.

This is a treat after 2 hard days spent working on shotgun.proto.in where team phoenix (my team) were 2nd. Slept quite early (before 11, don remember when I last did that.......high school may be) as we havent been sleeping much during the event.

These pics were taken around 6:30 AM on 25th, January 09

Marketing, the smart way

Marketing & Brand buildiing is always a challenge for new firms for two reasons
1. They are inexperienced in it
2. Its quite expensive

But there many cheap innovative marketing strategies I have come across so far. One of them is how the plastic company Cello built its brand in Chennai years ago. They ran advertisements in the morning paper that random calls will be made to residence in the city and if the call was answered by saying "Cello" instead of "Hello", they would win something. The entire city got grip of it and by eod, every household knew the word Cello and the company made its brand well known overnight.

Today I heard of another smart way a shoe company is marketing its products. Its taking advantage of a very public event. If you didnt get it still, its the Bush shoe throwing incident you can watch here. Apparently, Ramazan Baydan claims the shoe's were a model manafuctured by him, the Ducati Model 271, after which sales have sky rocketed.

I've heard a lot about how startups find marketing quite expensive but if an innovative idea or public event is used the end result can be far more rewarding.

Cheers to Ramazan Baydan.

Google Inline advertisements

Gone are the days where we could read news without having to navigate through advertisements bang in the middle of the text!!

Hard paper never had them, FREE mail from Google doesn't have it, but sites using google adds have them. I'm sure its a decision made by the hosting site and not google but it sucks big time so I decided to do something about them....blog :)

The following image is an example



Well I've seen articles broken into several pages so visitors generate more clicks and see more adds but this is ridiculous. And this wasn't enough. They wanted more, so now they break the articles into several pages and put the advertisement right before the navigation pane, that's right, it actually makes you search for the navigation pane, see the below image.



Now was that to confuse the visitor or make him read the adds, I would love to ask the sites usability "expert".

Here's the link to the article from which I took the screen shots : http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pirates-aden/389328/0

Indian Space Prowess

My friend Vijay sent this article to me and I wanted to share it with all of you :)
I was apparently published in the Qatar Tribune

I think we Indians need to really appreciated (more) the work of our scientist and our government without which this wouldn't be possible.

Always proud to be an Indian and hope to make India proud of me one day.

Wouldn't want anyone to state examples of where we lag behind, but applaud what India has achieved.

Jai Hind

P.S: The image was taken from QatarLiving (http://lmnop36.googlepages.com/Qatar-Tribune-27-10-08.jpg).

Brewhaha

Well I'm blogging after a very long time and I'm going to make this more frequent.

I went to this eat out called Brewhaha with my friends today. Its supposed to be this happening joint setup by B school grads and you got lots of games to play with and I've heard a lot about this place but hadn't visited it till today. And I was totally disappointed at the state of this place. It was appalling. There where these mattresses and pillows that were really really dirty and the joint looked like a very shady place. I was wondering what happened to the place. The last time I heard about this place was that it was the venue for a meet of young entrepreneurs. Plus there was nothing much to eat and most of the items on the menu were not available and the items on display looked stale. Man, it was quite disgusting and I'm never going back to that place. I should have taken pictures but I kinda forgot.

Well, what I took away from the place was that its not enough to set up something good, its more important that you maintain the standard and be consistent, else its of no use at all. You don't set up a business to give you returns for a short term. I may be wrong in this case cos I don't know why it was in a bad state but there's no excuse to keep the place so filthy. I don't see that in any other joints so why this one. With the hype it had, I'm sure they were making a decent amount of money to pay for laundry.

You get a lot of joy in building things, but I sure its gonna wash away all the happiness if it ends up in a bad state a few months later!!!

Xiangqi

Was gifted a Xangqi board by a Chinese colleague at work. Its a chinese board game kinda like chess but actually a lot different. You can read more about it @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi. The pieces for each player have different names. Its gona be tough memorizing the names itself. Dont think Ill ever get to play this mainly cos I wont be able to find someone to play with.

I love the board, it looks antique and I like the wood work. Never been gifted something in a very long time so I guess it felt nice too. Actually I felt great being gifted something so unique.

Here are the pics.

Counter for Physically Challenged

The picture says it all!!

This was taken on 7th July, 2008 at the Yeshwanthpur railway station in Bangalore.