Perspectives

The Yahoo! Maps compass
Originally uploaded by shivku.

Although we sit and write code to make sure that You don’t even need a compass, we still like it the old way.

Sridhar got us these Keychains a little while ago.

… Was Awesome. Throughly loved listening to heavy metal after a long time. Some videos I captured. The Holy wars intro was as good as it can ever get.

If you haven’t, then you can listen to a few of them right here. I think they played in all the major metros in Radio Mirchi. Not sure about it. They have turned out to be pretty cool. Do you like any of them? Which one?

Bewafaa: Sonam told me that meant Disloyal. One more Hindi word under my kitty. The guy gets lost and by the time he turns up, his girl friend is already married to someone else. My personal favorite.

Directions: This dude wanted to go to Goa and ends up being in Nashik. And then gets a good bashing from his beloved.

Trekking:
A couple of guys get lost in a trekking trail at night. Sure, they could have sent themselves an SMS of the directions they need. Now, don’t ask me which trail it was.

Here in India, we speak several hundred languages amongst the billion of us. Even the Government officially recognizes 23 of them. No single person can possibly learn all Indian Languages in his lifetime and so, most of us make do with a few. Yahoo! India Maps ( http://in.maps.yahoo.com ) is no exception. After sitting through a lot of language courses, Yahoo! India Maps has now learnt to speak nine languages (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Oriya, Kannada & Malayalam) apart from English. Watch out for the “Vernacular” button along with “Map”, “Satellite” and “Hybrid” buttons to see an area in it’s primary language. We have covered the major cities and towns and will expand the “Language Map view” to other regions in the time to come.

Personally, Maps in vernacular languages is magical for me. Because for once, my Grand-moms and Grand-dads will get to see and understand what I do all day long sitting at Yahoo!.

We have also released “Walking directions” along with this push. If you are the one who walks, You could simply type a query like “Walk from Yahoo! egl bangalore to Yahoo! MG road, bangalore”. Alternatively, You could also choose the “Walk this Route” link on the right pane when you have driving directions.

I don’t expect you to have heard of Stuff White people like. I heard about it only minutes ago. And from what I see, it is (getting) quite famous (in the white land, ofcourse) and is quite hilarious (especially if you are not a white person). You probably already know of all the stuff they talk about in that blog if you have interacted with a bunch of whites and have been to the US atleast once. But you should still go ahead and read it. Rarely do you get to laugh so much at stuff you already know.

Anyways, this blog is not about Stuff White people Like. It is about stuff Brown people like. Yeah, Brown People. You, me, my neighbour, your beer buddy. We are all brown. In California, brown people call themselves (and us) desis, but they are brown too.

Kaysov is one of the authors of the blog, and he is not this funny. Not in real life. Maybe he learnt to be funny by going to Berkeley. Nevertheless, subscribe and spread the word if you like it. Kaysov has agreed to give me 50% of the stuff he makes out of adsense.

My dad used to be a master of pincodes in Chennai. He has been and around Chennai for such a long time that he can beat the Head Post Master to his Job. Infact, it was one of our favorite time pass activities. I used to get hold of an yearly diary that had Pincodes of Chennai city as an addendum and then I will pick and ask Pincodes of random and weird localities that nobody goes to in Chennai. And he used to be right every time.

Now, You don’t have to live in a city for 30 years to know it’s pincodes. You can leave that job to Yahoo India Maps . The next time you have a pincode with you and you are wondering where that place is, go ask Yahoo India Maps.

For instance, 600001 is Chennai GPO, 560034 is Koramangala, bangalore. Those are my places.
What Pincode are you?

060320081409
Originally uploaded by shivku.

On March 2nd, thirteen years ago, little did Filo and Yang know that they are going to create the most visited site on the planet.

They did and here we are. Happy Birthday Yahoo!. I love you.

Yahoo! India Next, which is an Indian clone of Yahoo! Next was launched a little while ago. Yahoo! India Next will talk about innovations and cutting edge technology that gets built in Yahoo! Bangalore for India.

I was asked to write about “Landmark based driving directions” that we launched in a India sometime ago. And I did. You can read about it here.

I also made this little banner for the blogpost.

I made an ad-hoc small “Yahoo! India Maps, Try it!” kinda badge which you can see on the right pane.

What do you guys think?

One of my friends who runs Hummaa, is looking for Software engineers and Senior Software Engineers who are cool in Linux, Apache, MySQl and PHP. If you are one of them or you know one of them who is looking for some cool stuff to do, let me know.