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I’ve been wondering about the whys and the hows of the life, universe, big bang, etc. This is what I think:

Light travels very fast, but at a certain known speed. When you look at a star in the sky, you are not seeing it as it is today. Infact, you are seeing it as it was back when light first left it. Could be billions of years ago. So in effect, you are looking back in time. What this means is that if you were on that star somehow, you will see Earth,Sun, etc as they were billions of years ago and were getting formed ! So if in future space explorations, the farther we got out and look back at Earth, we would see the Earth’s history (at different times in the past).

There must then be a POINT at the far reaches of the universe at which we can see the universe itself getting formed. We could see the ‘big bang’ or whatever it was that created us, in action. One day, we’ll reach that point and answer these questions.

Currently, humanity is mostly focused on SURVIVAL rather than answering these questions. Counter-terrorism, food shortage, employment, Web 2.0! etc etc - thats what takes up our time and resources today. And that is understandable of course. But say, 5000 years from now, our priorities might be different, we will be far more scientifically advanced and evolved. And then we’ll know. We might reach THAT point where we can see the universe being born. Every day that passes, we get a step closer to that.

Also, I’m certain that there definitely is intelligent life in other parts of the universe. We just have to find them or they just have to find us. Imagine if that happens, how will it change our perspective on EVERYTHING ! All our current religions are human-based, won’t they become redundant if we discover aliens ? Will our ‘faith-based’ politicians want that to happen ? Also, won’t there be less conflict in the world then ?

And this is something that can happen in our lifetimes. It can happen tomorrow or 20 yrs from now. Those aliens might have already been at THAT point in the universe and they may already know the ‘answers’ to these questions, so we may not even have to wait 5000 yrs for it !

There is a lot going out in space at any given moment and we as humans should be paying far more attention to it. We are part of that environment. An asteroid or comet could be headed for a collision course with Earth and we may not even know about it until its too late ! Or how about radiation emitted by some black hole which is on its way towards us ! I read this article in the WashingtonPost recently which talks about how a jet of highly charged radiation from a supermassive black hole was destroying another galaxy in its path ! Even if we know if something like that was headed towards us, we might not have the relevant ability to deal with it. So we do need to be in contact with other advanced civilizations out there and find common ground in surviving in this incredibly hostile universe and also in finding answers to our most basic questions.

We need scientifically and space-conscious elected officials and we need dedicated task forces and budgets in the tens of billions for all this before it is too late. The President of the United States is someone who shapes our future as humanity, and that is why it is critical that someone of substance be elected. Unfortunately for us, Al Gore didn’t get elected back then. We now know he had the right ideas about global warming, etc. Currently, I like Barack Obama’s candidacy as he seems to be someone who is sufficiently open-minded and level-headed to deal with both today’s problems and tomorrow’s. The leading Republican candidates are veering too much towards ‘faith’ and despite their impressive personalities, I fear that ‘faith’ would be a major impediment to their support for scientific and space discovery. There is more at stake than the current existential problems of economy, terrorism, health, etc.

Also, it is great that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and others have donated billions of dollars for humane causes like fighting against malaria, AIDS, etc. But there need to be similar efforts and foundations for space/scientific discovery as well.

We don’t know WHAT we don’t know.

Some interesting links:
- Shouting at the cosmos
- Gamma ray burst (wikipedia)
- When SETI succeeds - impact of high information contact
- Rare Earth hypothesis (wikipedia)
- METI
- SETI (wikipedia)

What’s your opinion on all this ?

Haha…this is hilarious Check it out.

Having been involved with 2 start-ups in my early 20s, this hits close to home.

iPhone ? Nopes.

Wii ? Nopes.

I want a Kindle. No, not a litter of kittens. But this one:

This is the newly launched Amazon Kindle, a portable reading device. Watch the demo over here. The press release:

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nov. 19, 2007–Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today introduced Amazon Kindle, a revolutionary portable reader that wirelessly downloads books, blogs, magazines and newspapers to a crisp, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper, even in bright sunlight. More than 90,000 books are now available in the Kindle Store, including 101 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases, which are $9.99, unless marked otherwise. Kindle is available starting today for $399 at http://amazon.com/kindle.

I love reading. And with this device, I can take my passion of reading almost everywhere I go. Some bloggers think it isn’t beautiful enough. But I think following is what matters here:

- electronic paper display - less glare than a normal computer screen.
- wide variety of content - books, etc already available, and through Amazon’s own network (no need of wifi connectivity).
- portable form factor. looks like a book.
- long battery life

Facebook got valued at $15 billion recently when Microsoft purchased a 1.6% stake in it for $240 million. The news wires and the blogosphere have been burning with the story. Ever since, people have been trying to calculate why exactly is Facebook worth so much, when its competitor and a larger ’social networking’ rival, MySpace, got bought out completely by News Corp for $580 million just 2 years ago.

There is precisely 1 reason why Facebook is worth $15 billion (and even more), and that is: IDENTITY.

50 million people have already linked up their real world identity with their online identity on Facebook and that is what makes it so valuable. It is almost like a ‘country’ now in which people ‘live’ when they are online. A good chunk of the populations of the US, Canada, UK and various other countries has now been combined into a single abstract entity called Facebook. Facebook’s decision to force people to register with their actual identities is what has enabled this. And the decision to create the Facebook platform, on which others can build applications to access this community of real people is what has further propelled it forward.

So while Facebook, which launched just 3 years ago, has made a series of brilliant moves, the other major Internet companies can only now speculate on what could have been. Lets starts with the IMs. The 3 major instant messengers - MSN, Yahoo and AIM - each had tens of millions of users who had nicely added and organized their contacts on these services. But the extension from their desktop client to the web never came. Sure…you could send a file to your IM contacts…but what about inviting them for events ? Or seeing their birthdays ? Or their photos ? Or how about a history of their ’status messages’ (which is what the Facebook news-feed is in effect) ? Nah…the IMs never built these services…and their frame of reference was restricted to the ‘IM client which ran on the desktop’. And they never opened up their platforms properly, choosing instead to be a closed system. Facebook will surely release its own desktop-based IM client one day, which will already have tens of millions of users on launch. These IM services are in for a rough ride, as well as their parent companies. [Read this related post I wrote back in March 2007]

The other social networks, especially MySpace and Orkut, have appalling interfaces, fake profiles, and are already too late in opening up their platforms. Facebook has cornered the developer buzz already; the major Google announcements coming up on Nov 5th are unlikely to make a dent now.

Apart from the IMs, the social networks, …a whole bunch of other web companies are / will face increasing heat from Facebook. Case in point: Evite. It was just a nice event organization company, but Faceook is that + 5500 more (and growing…the number of Facebook applications). As a result, Facebook already has more event related pageviews as compared to Evite, which the Facebook presenter at an event recently was glad to point out. A lot of startups will get squeezed here.

Facebook will continue to increase its user count and is on its path to a major IPO in 2-3 years, after which it is going to be a substantial threat to the major web companies - Yahoo, Google and Microsoft.

Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook), the drop-out from Harvard, is the Bill Gates of our time, the drop-out from Harvard. He couldn’t have made it through Google’s recruiting process (no PhD!), and Yahoo didn’t think his company was worth $1 billion last year. Tsk tsk. Now I understand why Steve Ballmer said recently that he will buy 20 web companies a year - Google and now Facebook…all within a few years ! Its better to get them early !

The 2nd FacebookCampToronto was held on Oct 9th at the MaRS Center. Ami Vora (from Facebook) started off the event with a compelling presentation, including a description of the term “social graph” (which is the essence of Facebook….to see what your friends are upto). The privacy question which followed wasn’t that well addressed though. Some other notes from the event:

Facebook has 43 million users so far, and doubling in size every 6 months ! They are adding 250,000 new users every day and are the 5th most visited website, between Google and eBay.

5500 applications so far, out of which 84 account for 90% of the usage. 9 of the top 20 apps are from 3 development shops.

Heard about Adonomics.com - provides metrics on Facebook applications.

A fund called fbFund, backed by Facebook’s original investors is giving out grants of $25k-$250k to developers. Details at developers.facebook.com.

50% of Facebook’s user base returns every day.

London is the top city in terms of no. of Facebook users, followed by Toronto with about 800,000 users. Vancouver is #3. Infact, of the top 30, 11 are Canadian cities.

Low barrier to entry in terms of getting an app up and running. Some presenters noted that they developed their app within a week.

Roy Pereira talked about interesting ways of marketing an app on Facebook. He noted that there are 18 wishlist apps already - which one a user chooses comes down to an interesting logo/description. Viral marketing is basically how an app spreads on Facebook. Use the mini-feed, news feed, profile page, among other things to promote your app on the profiles of users who have already added your app.

Advertising on Facebook is still evolving. It hasn’t hit the golden goose as yet (as Google did with AdWords). Current advertising methods include sponsored stories and groups, banner ads and flyers. Regardless, hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on it already.

Greg Thomson, the developer of “My Aquarium”, who has developed a total of 10 apps within a few months and has an install base of 8 million, talked about monetization. $3/user/year and possibly $10/daily active user are his estimations on the value of an app (derived from value of each user). He noted that there haven’t been any major acquisitions of Facebook apps as yet.

There were some interesting demos at the end: My Wishlist, DreamBook (7000 users so far), DogBook (over a million users now).

Okay….so that’s all great: Facebook has a huge and rapidly increasing loyal user base; which is attracting a lot of $$ from advertisers, investors, etc. Some apps have done pretty well. But on the flip side, I think there is already some saturation. People who have already added too many apps (say, even around 15) now have cluttered pages, so they will get increasingly less likely to try out new apps. Maybe the platform has already peaked. But the barrier to entry is low:

idea -> form team -> design -> code -> test -> deploy on a cheap server -> promote -> find out if it sticks.

So it is definitely worth a shot, and of course, the better/more compelling/unique your idea is…it’ll have better chances of success . Next FacebookCamp in Toronto is in early December. Meanwhile, another DemoCamp is coming up on October 29th.

The 14th DemoCamp in Toronto was held on Monday, Sept 17th.

Here’s what rocked:

The people. Where else can you bump into other folks who are really passionate about technology and are working on some neat idea Turnout was almost 250.

The venue. Toronto Board of Trade hosted the event at their fabulous conference room located in the First Canadian Place. Quite impressive.

The food. This was a free event and they still managed to arrange some good food.

2 demos:

- The most impressive one was by Chris Thiessen, who has developed a site called zoomii.ca (still in private beta). The website displays Amazon.com’s books in a virtual bookstore (basically a HUGE image) - arranged in aisles and shelves. Impressive use of javascript.

- AideRSS had a decent demo as well.

3 Ignite presentations:

- by Greg Wilson, who is out with a new book called ‘Beautiful Code’.

- update on the first StartupWeekendToronto, where a few people got together and basically created a product from scratch over a weekend (www.lobbythem.com) and now plan to pursue it as a business.

- update on the first ever FacebookCampToronto which was attended by almost 400 people.

The rest of the demos and presentations weren’t that exciting. Overall, it was a very fun event and thanks to the organizers (David, Jay and others) and the sponsors for making it happen. The next DemoCamp is on Monday, October 29th and will be held at the University of Toronto. FacebookCampToronto2 is coming up on October 9th and StartupWeekendToronto2 is also coming up soon.

Here’s an imaginary conversation between me and someone who is clueless about this thing called “RSS feed” which is popping up everywhere:

“What is a RSS feed ?”

RSS is a fairly new technology and stands for Rich Site Summary. Lets take an example - what is your favorite website ?

“CNN.com”

That is a pretty popular news website. Now, the page ‘cnn.com’ contains the latest news headlines, some ads, links to other websites and a whole bunch of other things ! But, and it gets interesting here - there is ALSO a copy of this page which contains ONLY the latest news headlines, and that page is called cnn.com’s ‘RSS feed’. It is just a summary of the main website, and that’s why it is called ‘Rich Site Summary’ ! Almost every website these days has such a page called a ‘RSS feed’. Those little orange icons popping up everywhere - that is a link to the website’s RSS feed.

You can put these links of RSS feeds of your favorite websites into a program called a ‘RSS Reader’, where you can view all the headlines from all these websites. Think about it… instead of going to each website individually, you can get all the info you need in one location.

This is a very powerful idea, second only to the idea of ‘e-mail’, and that is why there are a whole bunch of RSS Readers to choose from and millions of RSS feeds out on the web.

Quick, what has been your most annoying software experience in the past few days ?

Chances are, if you are one of the tens of millions of people using MSN Messenger, it would probably have been the mandatory upgrade which was forced down upon you when you tried logging in. You could either download and install the new 8.1 upgrade or not be able to use the app at all. Those were the choices people were given. Not good.
And I didn’t find it a particularly smooth and intuitive experience downloading and installing the new version. My folks are…gasp… still without MSN because it crashed while trying to upgrade. Thankfully, the web-based IM Meebo is still around and I’ve been using that instead. Though I wonder how long can Meebo last, since it seems to be missing a business model. But the app is great !

Now for the other side of this story. Here, read this blog post on it by Anand, the security PM for Windows Live Messenger. Apparently, a security vulnerability in previous versions of MSN was serious enough to warrant a “mandatory upgrade” and inconveniencing tens of millions of people. Excerpt from Microsoft’s Security Bulletin on it:

The vulnerability could allow remote code execution when a user accepts a webcam or video chat invitation from an attacker. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of the affected system.

Ok…now how significant is the % of people who accept webcam / video chat invitations from unknown “contacts” ? And isn’t MSN built in such a way that only your contacts, people whom you have approved, can initiate invites for webcam chats ? Duh !

So yeah…this is a very serious security vulnerability for folks who are adding unknown “contacts” and then accepting webcam invites from them. In other words, people who like living on the edge. I think if Wal-mart sold “The world’s top 10 computer viruses - collector’s edition, now for the low everyday price of ONLY $9.99 !”, some people will actually go and buy it and install it on their computers’

Here’s the 80-20 rule: Do what’s in the best interests of the 80% of the users, and don’t let the minority guide the experience of the majority. Simple democracy concept.

Tough decision for the Windows Live PM here, but in my opinion, it was a bad call.

Logged into my hotmail account today and found it in a major state of disarray. Have a look at these screenshots.

Basically, every single item on the page (in menus, tabs, etc) got displayed here. Hotmail has a pretty javascript / AJAX heavy interface, and as a result in the html there would be a lot of divs - which get displayed when clicked / as needed. What you see in these screenshots is all the divs in the main hotmail html page getting displayed at once. Try printing an AJAX application’s main page and you’ll get something like this (I encountered this while working on my own AJAX-heavy application).

Now, is it a boo-boo on the part of Hotmail and anyone else out there saw it like this as well or is it just my setting ?

(I viewed it on IE. Btw, I have the IE Developer Toolbar installed).

Hmm…its midnight on Sunday, Sept 9th and I just came across this recently released tool called Windows Live Translator.

Ok..time to take it for a spin. I can read/write French, so let’s try the French-English translation.

Here’s the French input:

je m’appelle varun mathur et j’habite a Toronto. J’ai un chien. je suis un informatique et j’aime mon ordinateur. Je vais aller a Macchu Picchu en Peru pour mes vacances.

The English output:

I am called varun mathur and I live has Toronto. I have a dog. I am a data processing and I like my computer. I will go has Macchu Picchu in Peru for my holidays.

Nice stuff. Tried a few other variations as well. Though it is not totally accurate, it gives a “good enough” idea of the meaning behind the sentence. 8/10 is what I would rate it as,atleast on the French-English translation.

Now, I haven’t looked deep enough, but hopefully this app will open up some sort of API so that more neat applications can be built using it, especially for mobile devices.