Girish's Blog

Data need not be dry as dust. Hans Rosling's amazing presentation at TED will change your mind regarding how data can be presented and about the growth of the world economy. If you thought this was amazing, see the followup (all the way till the ending). The seemingly impossible is possible !

I've just spent a week in Bangalore talking and hearing about connectivity for emerging countries. Living in the United States, one takes many things for granted - water, power, transportation and most importantly connectivity which has become an essential utility. Most emerging countries lack the capability or the will to deliver water, power and transportation to their citizens. However, a large number of organizations are coming up with innovative low-cost solutions to provide connectivity in the hope that this digital inclusion will mitigate the effects of lacking the other three utilities. There have been a number of stories in the local press about Tata Communications launching the world's largest WiMAX network (another company in the group recently launched the world's cheapest car). Inspite of the hype, the state of connectivity is abysmal - there are only 2.9 million broadband connections: a penetration rate of almost 0.25 % However, hidden behind all this brou...

AOL announced that it will stop supporting Netscape from Feb 1. In almost a decade the company grew to symbolize the Internet boom, it's IPO the start gun for the dot-com boom, it went through the M&A process which symbolized the excessive valuations, had an epic battle with Microsoft(which realized the power of Free! No purchase necessary) , it lost market share, became obsolete and now it's dead. It seems to have gone through in a decade what most companies go through in about 50 years. I still recall the very first time I used an Internet browser - in 1995 when my then employer, Tata-IBM, installed a common machine on the 7th floor with Internet access and offered eligible employees an opportunity to use it. I got an approval from my manager and launched Netscape. Until then I had e-mail which all the cubicle dwellers on my floor accessed on a DEC VAX machine and a link to IISc that went down every couple of days and stayed down for a few days. I then heard about ...

The Hindu has the story of how the Government of India issued Letters of Intent for telecom operators: ... representatives of wannabe telecom companies literally got into fist fights and blows in a bid to be the first to get the letter of intent. At 2:45 PM The DoT announces that Letters of Intent will be issued at 3:30 PM ...a representative of one of the applicants got a hired goon to ensure that it was his company which was the first to enter the gates. Finally LIs were issued to nine companies. Real estate giant Unitech got LIs for 22 circles, Datacom for 22, BPL and Shyam got 21 LIs, Idea for 9 circles, STel got 6, Spice got only 4 though it had applied for pan India, Swan got 13 and Tata Teleservices got LIs for offering CDMA services in 3 circles. If all the companies convert the LIs to licences by paying the entry fee, the Government will stand to get in excess of Rs 7,000 crore.

Over the last few months I've received invitations from people I've never heard of belonging to social networks I've never heard of either. I have been asked to join Yaari, Doostang, Spock, Spoke, Blue Chip Expert, Friendster, Facebook and Orkut. I've also received invitations from hi5, Ringo and Plaxo. Of course I need a username/password for each of these services who believe they are providing a unique value proposition to me. And another oddly-name company - yodlee.com offers to help you aggregate all your username/passwords for your financial institutions. The NY Times' David Pogue had a recent column on the Dr.Seuss inspired dot-com names has a link to dotomator.com in case you are inspired to start your own Web 2.0 startup. May the force be with you - go forth and create your own domain !

The Transport Control Protocol(TCP) is thirty years old. The Register reports on the invention of TCP: On November 22, 1977, as it motored down the street somewhere south of San Francisco, a souped-up delivery van sent some information to a computer lab at the University of Southern California, 400 miles away. No one can quite remember what the information was, but that really doesn't matter. What matters is the way it traveled. It didn't travel as the crow flies. It traveled from San Francisco to Boston, before a trip to Norway and Britain. And from Britain, it bounced back to Southern California by way of a tiny town in West Virginia. And it didn't travel over one data network. Thanks to a certain protocol called TCP, it traveled over three: a wireless packet radio network covering a few California hilltops, a satellite hookup bridging the Atlantic, and the Arpanet, a wired network that would go on to much bigger things. Jon Postel's RFC 793 , written in ...

After 14 years of Windows, we finally defenestrated it and upgraded to a Macbook last week. The out-of-the-box experience was a dream compared to what we've seen with the two Dell machines we purchased over the last 4 years - no junk ads proliferating on the desktop and system bring-up with minimal user interaction. The system came loaded with Mac OS X Tiger and an upgrade DVD for Leopard. Upgrade was a breeze - load the DVD, agree to the license conditions, and within 20 minutes it was up and running. This is something I would never expect with a Windows system. I've only used the Mac for web browsing so far - the real test will come when I start processing my photos, videos and home-audio recordings on it. We've already hit a hitch with the home-audio recording - the digital audio recorder records in the WMA format which, of course, Apple does not support.