Wednesday, March 26, 2014

The List

The List: Mobile Gaming

































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Audio: One Of The Next Big Things?

I would put audio in one of the next big things category. Textual conversation is nice, it sure is efficient, but if so much is gained, so much is also lost in the process. Would you argue that SMS has finally managed to displace in person meetings? I don't think that will ever be possible. If online video has not managed to displace in person meetings, what are the chances of SMS?

SMS is convenient, it is efficient, and by now it is also cheap. Free is cheap.

There is an inherent richness to audio that textual conversation simply does not capture.

There are a few things that get in the way of audio. One is bandwidth. Audio files are half way to video. They take so much space. There are huge hurdles in search when it comes to audio. We don't have machines that "read" audio files as readily as they read textual files. A comparable search engine for audio files would figure out the language of the audio files and their content, and there would be the option to translate the content into a language of your choice.

Maybe literacy is overrated. And I mean literacy even for the literate. It has always amazed me how the so-called illiterate masses of the Global South tend to be so verbally gifted in their mother tongues. It is a waste that they do not fall under the knowledge worker umbrella.

There should be buttons attached to the comments sections of top blogs that would allow you to join group, real time audio conversations on the topic at hand.

Audio blogging is not as easy an option as textual blogging right now. Believe it or not, I was a huge fan of what the Twitter dudes had before they gave up on it and launched Twitter. I have missed it since.

The best way to reach out to the "illiterate" masses of the Global South is to tackle audio. 
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Thursday, March 20, 2014

San Fran And New York

Out of fog Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge a...
Out of fog Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco in fog and crepuscular rays. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
San Francisco is not a "city" the way New York is a city. San Fran is not big enough. It is not dirty enough. It is not Delhi/Mumbai enough.

Why San Francisco Is Not New York
For one thing, today’s San Francisco is much more of a company town. Go into any bar in San Francisco and you will hear people talking about their start-up, or a battle they recently had with a line of code. Stop by a coffee shop in some neighborhoods here and you will be surrounded by venture capitalists being pitched a new idea for a new app. All of these people rarely, if ever, interact with people outside the tech world...... In New York, if you meet someone who works in tech you feel like you’ve met a long-lost relative. Bars, coffee shops and restaurants are a mishmash of people from vastly different industries. ..... The lack of diversity between social groups in San Francisco isn’t going to change anytime soon, as the number of tech employees in the Bay Area is only going to continue to rise. ..... in the early-90s, tech workers made up less than 1 percent of city workers in San Francisco. In 2000, tech employees had risen to 3 percent of the workforce. By 2013, that number had passed 6 percent. ..... Unlike New York, which arguably has more economic, social, and employment diversity than anywhere else on earth, San Francisco’s tech-on-tech layering has created a not-so-little echo chamber. As I wrote last year, people seem to build products here that would make the rest of the country scratch their heads. ....... In San Francisco .. (I know of one successful founder who owns an old beat-up 1985 Honda that he drives to his secret private jet.) ....... When I came across a passage in the book, “The Annals of San Francisco,” about the 1840s Gold Rush, I found the answer to that question...... “Despite the amazingly high cost of living and the extraordinary opportunities for frittering away money, everyone in early San Francisco was supremely confident that he would soon be able to return home with an incalculable amount of gold,” the author writes in the book while describing the city decades ago. “Everything was conceived on a vast scale, and there was always plenty of cash available for any scheme that might be proposed, no matter how impossible or bizarre it seemed.” ..... Well would you look at that. It seems that San Francisco is the new San Francisco.

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