Perspectives

I took this picture a real long time ago, From one of our Yahoo! offices in Bangalore. After an agonizing wait, Yahoo! India Ourcity is out and is doing good. Many people have already covered this and you could check it our for yourself and conclude about it’s worth.

What is cool is, this product was a hack to begin with and was taken to completion in style by my friends in Bangalore. It is a beautiful example of the hack culture that is catching up inside of Yahoo! and you can expect many more of these meta sites (Should I say , mashups?) out of Yahoo! in the time to come. Ourcity will also add your city (Chennai, Mumbai et al ) soon, so wait and watch.

The picture above exemplifies the sort of thing we are trying to do here as Yahoo! India. We are trying to get closer to India, closer in a way that you would love. Did you notice Yahoo India Frontpage now carries content in about half a dozen Indian languages ( Tamil, Hindi,etc ) ? There was a time when I used to disagree on localization of content in India. My claim was not all that incorrect either. Read on.

There are about 300 million Indians who can read and write in English. Technically, they should be able to consume Indian content in English too. We probably have about 50 million people online in India. The power users will be much less. So, we have scope for another 100 million people (Not sure how many years that will take) easily before we can claim the growth is hindered by language. I put forward this idea to Jimmy Wales when he was in India a while ago and he sort of seemed to agree.

But, since then, I have a different mind set. I am starting to see that Tamil content makes a lot more sense and carries originality when read in tamil. It instantly becomes closer to my heart and I somehow tend to like it. Maybe, it is just that I am not used to reading tamil online and the novelty of that fact attracts me. Maybe, I am unintentionally trying to improve my tamil reading skills. But one thing that changed my perspective was, I was introducing “The Internet” to my mother the other day and one of the first things she asked me was “Can I read Mangayar malar ( A tamil ladies only monthly ) online?”. That was a killer. I had to change my mind.

Either ways, I am pretty excited about this entire development. And I hoping more and more people will volunteer to not just translate content in a local language, but create real content with the end audience in mind. An article about Brad Pitt makes very little sense in Hindi, you would agree.

Computer for sale.. Send me a note
Originally uploaded by shivku.

This is my home (Chennai) computer, roughly about seven years old. It is a pentium celeron something Mhz, has about 30 G HDD and a 64 M RAM, comes with a CD ROM read/write and I can give you that white Numeric 0.5 Kva UPS for free. Price very negotiable. Let me know.

Tip: Why not buy this and gift it to your people at grandmother’s place in your hometown?

More For sale items coming soon…

I was perusing my fortune cookie screensaver today when I came across SCUM (Society for cutting up men) manifesto. It is a pretty interesting read. I agree to many things she is trying hard to convey. It is just that she is using the most extreme words and thoughts to prove her point (One of the qualities, she claims, that belongs to man).

I also see that most of what she says is mostly bullshit. But on the whole, funny and hilarious. The best of them all :

“Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the y(male) gene is an incomplete x(female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.”

RSS feeds in bangalore
Originally uploaded by shivku.

I didnt exactly see the real action on ground, but from what I have heard, the past few days surely have been troubling for many of us, bangaloreans. For instance, I was returning from chennai and many of friends asked me to get off at KR puram. I had my bike in Cantt. Thankfully ( or should I say unfortunately) I slept over KR puram and I reached cantt. But seeing so many 60 year olds getting down, I asked RSS to go screw themselves, picked my bike up and drove home.

And then we were advised by facilities to get home soon today. Which I just did. Again loss of valuable productive hours to many like me.

And I dont even think there is reason enough for the right wing or the muslim bodies to get agitated about. But I guess these folks dont need a reason.

Welcome to India’s first interactive maps portal, MapmyIndia They give you an introduction to the open webmail project and also suggest you download it from sourceforge.

What do you think has happened? Maybe someone installed webmail on the production box instead of his box? And hence the docroot got screwed up?

Either ways, It is hilarious and I hope they take care of the first interactive Indian map site better.

This is a test blog to check if the "Mail to publish" feature of blogspot. I am planning to use this along with GetJar's Mobile Blogger and get Moblogging going. The "Blogger Mobile" feature seems like will work only for the US phones. Sucks!

This is a sample blogpost from my new nokia n 73. Even as i am trying to figure things out.. It is only fitting to say i am having lots of fun.. Oh this phone simply rocks

I am not sure how long this has been around, but I just saw google with tons of better India data. Zoom in and you know what I am talking about. It is still not searchable ( Geocodable, to be precise). But my guess is, it is coming very very soon.

Google has done a brilliant job with the look and feel of the map. It just somehow seems to blend and merge with the US maps. That translates into a seamless user experience. Kudos!

Boundaries are all over the place in Jammu and Kashmir. But I guess, we dont know what is J&K and what is not, ourselves.

Many of their National highways are broken. But, that I guess is a data issue more than Google’s.

Though they have all the railway stations in place (with a cute little icon), I dont think they understand the importance of railways in India. Or to be specific, Mumbai subarban is way more important than a random road that runs across colaba. In the future, I think India driving directions have to purposefully consider connecting places also on public means of transport. People in India go to places. They dont necessarily drive up there. Right now, this translates to making railway stations and possibly the lines prominent on the map. Atleast in selected cities and suburbs.

I love the way they are using gradients of a selected few colours rather than using hundreds of colours.

They also have the one ways spot on. They have an unintrusive arrow that gives a feeling of which way is one way. Lovely!

And a last mention at the choices of icons for places of Interest. Actually, I have no words.

Rock on! Google.