The QnA session at the end is pretty interesting.
Posts Tagged: google
27
Aug 09
Top 50 Technology and Business Books – Part 1
1. Direct from Dell by Michael Dell – Talks about Michael Dell’s early life, obsession with computers and electronics, founding of Dell and Dell’s direct to customer business model.
2. iCon Steve Jobs by Young and Simon – Coming together of Steve Jobs and Wozniak, starting Apple computers and Steve Jobs eventually performing the “greatest second act in the history of business”
3. Business @ Speed of Thought by Bill Gates – Interesting insights into Bill Gate’s vision of the future of computers. A few interesting examples from Microsoft too.
4. Winning by Jack Welch – How Jack Welch single handedly changed the course of General Electronics leading from the front as CEO.
5. The Google Story by David Vise – An amazing book on the formation and rise of the Google we all know today. A must read.
6. The Dip by Seth Godin – Seth describes how the “dip” is inevitable and is the biggest differentiator between success and failure. Like many of his blog posts, the book is short and precise.
7. Men of Steel by Vir Sanghvi Well known Indian journalist interviews the czars running a few of the largest businesses in India.
8. One Minute Manager by Blanchard and Johnson – Management can be simple. A must-read if you want to learn how. Read my complete review of the One Minute Manager.
9. The Road Ahead by Bill Gates – Another great book by Bill Gates about his vision of the future of computer science.
10. Good to Great by Jim Collins – Your product is good. What differentiates a “good” product from a “great” one? This book has the answer.
The above is the first post from a 5 part series of book recommendations.
25
Aug 09
GMail Wishlist – Features I’d love to have in GMail
1. Tagging conversations
Search in GMail is useful but not perfect. A common problem I face is not being able to search for a particular email thread just because I don’t know what to search for.
Ex. I call up my friend Asok and ask him to email me his mobile number. He sends me a blank email with his phone number in the subject. No text, no words, just the number.
Say, I need to find his number a few months later. By then, a few thousand emails would have cluttered my inbox and the email I’m looking for is lost in the haystack. Of course I can short-list emails by using filters (“from:Asok”, in this case) but this may not always work.
A possible solution – The ability to tag a conversation and search by tags seamlessly. So I could tag the above conversation as “asok mobile number” and later search for “asok mobile” and fetch the email.
2. Sharable permalinks for email threads
GMail assigns a unique URL to each email message, which look something like https://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/12345abcdec79ed9d . If you send an email to more than one of your contacts, it would be great if I can later send this URL to one of those people and it opens up that email thread in their inbox. This could be incredibly useful – you can refer to a previous conversation with a simple URL. You can share this URL, put it as a reference in your bug tracker etc.
What do you think about these ideas? Do you have any ideas you wish to share? Post a comment.
13
Apr 08
Orkut Mobile and Orkut Low Bandwidth released
Orkut has released a mobile version of the site, which can be accessed from your mobile phone on http://m.orkut.com. The mobile version allows you to read your scraps, view your friend’s birthdays, friend updates, browse through your friend’s list, view their profile (though not everything in the profile can be accessed) and send them scraps.
There is no support for communities as of now. The mobile version still seems to be a pre-release version as there is no official announcement about it so far from Google.
Orkut has also silently launched a low-bandwidth version of the site to allow better browsing from dail-up connections and other low speed connections. The option is available in the “General” tab on the settings page. Selecting this option disables images in scrapbook, profile pages and user’s homepage.
19
Mar 08
Google or SiteAdvisor. Which one do you trust?
SiteAdvisor (a Firefox plugin developed by McAfee) shows a website as potentially safe whereas Google says that this site may be harmful to my computer.
If such is the case, I may have been clicking on dozens of harmful sites going by recommendations of SiteAdvisor just because Google has not “identified” those sites as harmful. Or maybe, this site in the picture is harmless and Google’s message is only a false alert.
To click or not to click… That’s the question.
18
Oct 07
Searching for music on Google
Yes, we all know Google can be your search engine, your calculator blah blah.
What about searching for MP3 downloads through Google? Simply copy paste the following URL on your browser’s address bar.
In the above example, I use “Nirvana” as the band I am searching for. You can change that to whatever you would like to search for.
(If you liked this post, please drop a comment)
18
Oct 07
That YouTube video was great! Can I save it?
The bandwidth consumed by YouTube alone today is equal to the bandwidth consumed by the whole of the Internet in 1995. That surely gives you some idea of the revolution YouTube has brought about in cyber space.
You often come across videos on YouTube, Google Videos etc. which you wish you could download and save on your PC instead of streaming it online whenever you wanted to see them.
A FireFox extension called VideoDownloader lets you do just that. The extension installs itself as a small icon on your browser’s status bar. Whenever you wish to save a video, just search YouTube, find the video and open it. Next, click on the VideoDownloader icon. The extension would automatically locate the video’s path and offer downloads in various formats, which include .FLV (Flash Video) and .AVI
Be prepared that the downloads will be hefty and the site may not support download accelerators or resume functions. (No, don’t get excited. The video quality won’t be much better either.) In case you choose to download in the FLV format, you need to download another software called the FLV player (You can get it from www.download.com, the Godfather of all download sites.). As an alternative, you could also download a neat piece of software called Replay Converter using which you can convert your FLV files into AVI and other widely accepted formats and play them in your regular media players.
Now that was all about video. There are also plenty of tools to rip streaming audio off the web, and save them as an MP3 file. (If this is legal to do so is still a matter of discussion). Obviously, it would be foolish to expect great bit-rates, though the sound quality is definitely hearable. I have been ripping a lot of audio from online radio websites (Good ones include Pandora*, Last.FM and Smashits.com), and the main tool in my inventory is called TotalRecorder. (A quick survey on ripping software reveals that the popular software Audacity is also one among them). A quick tip while you rip – Make sure you mute the microphone before you start ripping. Secondly, ensure that you set your software to ignore mute gaps, incase the audio starts to buffer while you are recording.
Talking about FireFox extensions, there are plenty of them available. But the ones I personally use and recommend are DownThemAll!, IE Tab, McAfee Site Advisor and PDF Download.