Ye Meri Life Hai – Chirag Mehta – Page 21

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Should Google dump YouTube?

Analyst Opinion – It’s been two-and-a-half years since Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. At the time, the 18-month-old online video sensation was struggling to figure out how to convert its immense popularity into sustainable revenue. It’s still struggling. Which begs the question: Will Google’s patience eventually wear out?

It’s a valid question. Figures just released by Credit Suisse project $711 million in YouTube-related operating costs through 2009. A relatively paltry $240 million in ad revenue leaves parent Google $471 million out of pocket. As the deepening recession continues to send advertisers scurrying for cover, it’s increasingly clear that these numbers won’t improve anytime soon. How much longer can Google keep footing the bill?

Storing and distributing all those videos of kids making fools of themselves in their backyards and pets destroying the house isn’t cheap. While some conventional media providers have toyed with charging subscriptions, I doubt anyone would pay to see teenagers falling off their skateboards. After four years of free YouTube, users feel entitled, and will quickly find other ways to share teen-skateboard videos if YouTube initiates subscriptions.

Sell benefits instead of features

April 20, 2009 / Chirag Mehta / 0 Comments

Sprint’s new ad campaign, What’s Happening, is making some serious waves. The ads are brilliant examples of effective marketing and great presentation design.

Sprint spent a lot of money building a new 4G network and had to figure out how to show it off. They could have taken the traditional approach and created a campaign that explains the network’s new features (e.g. “you can transfer so many megabytes per second on our new network!”), but in reality people don’t care much about features — they care about benefits.

My favorite example of selling benefits instead of features was when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPod in 2001. He didn’t describe the iPod as a “4GB music player”; it was “a thousand songs in your pocket”. Big difference.

Sprint clearly understands the power of selling benefits because instead of focusing on what their network can do, their campaign demonstrates what people can do on their network, and on an incredible scale.

The ads are slick examples of how proper pacing, dynamic visuals, and the right amount of humor can make a fact and data driven presentation extremely compelling to watch. You’ll definitely find inspiration in these videos for new, creative ways to present your data in future presentations.

Source : Apollo Ideas

Salesforce CRM – The Service Cloud

April 16, 2009 / Chirag Mehta / 2 Comments

The Service Cloud is the new platform for customer service. You can tap into the power of customer conversations no matter where they take place. Harness know-how from the right experts, whether they’re on a Web community forum or having a dialog on Facebook. Suddenly, you’re part of those conversations. And thanks to new Salesforce for Twitter integration, you can now tap into one of the fastest-growing communities for conversations in the cloud.

GMail in Indian Languages

April 1, 2009 / Chirag Mehta / 0 Comments

Chandramouli Mahadevan shares his experience about Indian Language usage in composing emails …

It’s hard for me to imagine going without email for a day. It’s such an easy and convenient way to communicate with my friends and family. However, there was one limitation that bothered me: my family members and friends who prefer to communicate in Hindi did not have an easy way to type and send email in their language of choice. I am extremely happy to announce the launch of a new feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type email in Indian languages.

When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you should now see an icon with an Indian character, as the screenshot below shows. This feature is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you do not see this function enabled by default, you will need to go the “Settings” page and enable this option in the “Language” section.

When you click the Indian languages icon, you can type words the way they sound in English and Gmail will automatically convert the word to its Indian local language equivalent. For example, if a Hindi speaker types “namaste” we will transliterate this to “??????.” Similarly, “vanakkam” in Tamil will become “???????.” We currently support five Indian languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam — and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon.

We built this new feature using Google’s transliteration technology, which is also available on Google India Labs, Orkut, Blogger and iGoogle. I hope you find this feature useful to communicate with those of your friends and family who prefer to write in their native language, and it will be available soon to businesses and schools using Google Apps. Now back to replying to all those Hindi emails I got from my family and friends today!

Ack : Chandramouli Mahadevan, Software Engineer

Crisis of Credit Visualized – Jonathan Jarvis

March 22, 2009 / Chirag Mehta / 0 Comments

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

New in Gmail Labs: Photo previews, offline access, and more

March 21, 2009 / Chirag Mehta / 0 Comments

Try out these and other experimental features from the Labs tab under Settings:

		YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, and Yelp previews Instead of just links, see previews of photos, videos, and reviews right in your email.
		Undo send Oops, hit “Send” too soon? Give yourself a grace period of a few seconds to cancel sending, then edit your message before sending again.
		Tasks mobile Take your to-do list everywhere you go. Just go to mail.google.com/tasks from your mobile browser
		Offline Make Google Mail work even when you’re not connected to the internet.

123456 – World’s most common password

March 20, 2009 / Chirag Mehta / 0 Comments

‘123456‘ is the most common password used by people on the Internet.

Obscenities, names of fast cars and even ncc1701 – the ship number for Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise, have made it to the list of top 500 worst passwords of all time. Compiled by Whatsmypass.com, the list features passwords most commonly used by Internet users.

And topping the list of the most common password is 123456, followed by “password” in second place.

Other popular password choices were first names, repeated letters and numbers, pop-culture references. Even batman, bond007 and cocacola made it to the list, reports the Courier Mail.

Trivia

The website said that almost one out of nine people use at least one of the passwords mentioned on the list, and one out of every 50 people use one from the top 20.
In fact, a study commissioned by digital communications agency @www found that an average adult had as many as 15 passwords to remember.
But 61 per cent of people used the same passwords for as many different accounts as possible in order to make life easier.

Google Voice: Coming soon

March 20, 2009 / Chirag Mehta / 0 Comments

Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.

Google Voice is currently available for GrandCentral users only, but will be open to new users soon.

Health – Important Tips

March 4, 2009 / Chirag Mehta / 0 Comments

Answer the phone by LEFT ear.
Do not drink coffee TWICE a day.
Do not take pills with COOL water.
Do not have HUGE meals after 5pm.
Reduce the amount of OILY food you consume.
Drink more WATER in the morning, less at night.
Keep your distance from hand phone CHARGERS.
Do not use headphones/earphone for LONG period of time.
Best sleeping time is from 10pm at night to 6am in the morning.
Do not lie down immediately after taking medicine before sleeping.
When battery is down to the LAST grid/bar, do not answer the phone as the radiation is 1000 times.

Ack : Care Taker

Famous Sayings – Who Said ???

March 3, 2009 / Chirag Mehta / 0 Comments

It was the first day of a school in USA and a new Indian student named Chandrasekhar Subramanian entered the fourth grade. The teacher said, ‘Let’s begin by reviewing some American History.

Who said ‘Give me Liberty, or give me Death’?
She saw a sea of blank faces, except for Chandrasekhar, who had his hand
up: ‘Patrick Henry, 1775’ he said.
‘Very good!’

Who said ‘Government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the Earth?’
Again, no response except from Chandrasekhar.
‘Abraham Lincoln, 1863’ said Chandrasekhar.

The teacher snapped at the class, ‘Class, you should be ashamed.Chandrasekhar, who is new to our country, knows more about its history than you do.’

She heard a loud whisper: ‘F*** the Indians,’
‘Who said that?’ she demanded.
Chandrasekhar put his hand up. ‘General Custer, 1862.’

At that point, a student in the back said,’I’m gonna puke.’
The teacher glares around and asks ‘All right! Now, who said that?’
Again, Chandrasekhar says, ‘Al Gore to the Japanese Prime Minister,1991.’

Now furious, another student yells, ‘Oh yeah? S**k this!’
Chandrasekhar jumps out of his chair waving his hand and shouts to the teacher , ‘Bill Clinton, to Monica Lewinsky, 1997!’

Now with almost mob hysteria someone said ‘You little shit. If you say anything else, I’ll kill you.’
Chandrasekhar frantically yells at the top of his voice, ‘Michael Jackson to the child witnesses testifying against him- 2004.’

The teacher fainted. And as the class gathered around the teacher on the floor, someone said, ‘Oh sh*t, we’re f*****d!’
And Chandrasekhar said quietly, I think it was George Bush, Iraq ,2007.’