Cat's Cradle

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity" - one of the many catchy lines from the book "Cat's Cradle". I swear if someone can tell me history of human stupidity he or she will have my full attention (not to laugh about it but to avoid people laughing at me in the future).

I got this book from my Boss, I must admit he has got a great collection, and I got 2 days to complete it. Am done with it now! Folks, If you ever heard about Bokononism and Ice-9, these are the creations of Kurt. Go ahead and take a look at those explanations in wikipedia :) it's fun to read.

[***/*****]

Virtual Earth ! My first take

Microsoft! Well I agree I was never a fan of them but I swear no one, till now, been able to convince me to hate them. When some one told me about VE, I was thinking this will be another MS sales stunt but let me tell you I'm impressed with the first look.

Turn-on

• 3D Map!
• Programming API (Kinda easy to use)
• Map Cruncher (Huh! its yummy)

I promise I will be back with a details study on Google earth and Virtual earth, meanwhile take a look at where I am right now in VE (fifth floor of that white building :-))

BOOM.in !

Boy India is still a fascinating place to be!

India is one of the most significant place when it comes to Software, IT research, BIO, BPO etc and we've our GDP growth at 7%. That's the present and our future is termed as 'one of the fastest growing economies in the world'. I did some research as to figure out where India is heading with WWW (or rather online industry). Let me share some of my findings.

As per the 2005 emarketer study, around 27.7 million internet users exists in India and we spend around $ 36 million for online advertising. Another projection says that 27.7 million is going to be 67 million by 2010. Now lets do some math, this shows ~ 142% growth in 5 years!

Look at the % of population which is exposed to the web, 2.7% in 2005 and 5.8% in 2010. In five years the online users are getting doubled, and that's where I put my bet on!

eBay.in, makemytrip.com, travelguru.com, arzoo (out from its graveyard) ... all of them are set to try their luck, am sure it's not the .com burst.