Google wins by loosing

The results are in for the FCC spectrum auction. Google has lost the ‘C’ block spectrum bid to Verizon.

On the face of it, this sounds like a loss for Google, but per my earlier post, this is in fact the best possible outcome for Google. Google must have strived hard during the bidding process to loose while at the same time ensuring that a rival firm bid above the $4Billion minimum limit to keep the spectrum ‘open’. The auction ended with Verizon bidding just 3% above the FCC minimum.

‘Open access’ means that any network deployed on these airwaves would have to be open to any device and any application. That is contrary to the cellular carriers’ traditional walled garden strategy where they supplied the equipment and locked customers into their networks and favored their own content.

An experimental stock portfolio

I have recently created a portfolio with my stock picks. The intent like most mutual funds out there is to beat the indices – particularly the S&P 500.  Specifically in this case, the intent is to come out ahead of the S&P 500 by a decent margin by the end of 2009.

As an experiment, I have posted the portfolio holdings and its NAV (Net Asset Value) on this website under  ”My Stock Portfolio“. I will be updating the holdings and the NAV on a monthly basis.  Readers of this blog will have a chance to track the portfolio performance and make decisions for their own portfolios.

Note that this is an experiment and may be discontinued if personal or other situations  demand it.

Links in Print Media !

Here is an attempt by the ‘Old’ Media to cross the bridge into the 21st century web-centric world

Business Week in its latest print edition includes a paragraph at the end of most articles titled ‘Links’ where it lists snippets from related (older) articles.

The online version of the magazine which is a verbatim reproduction without many tweaks also carries the ‘Links’ section. The screen shot above is from a sample article in the Nov5, 2007 edition

This is a novel concept but falls short of fulfilling the intent of drawing readers online to related articles. A simple extension of this idea to include keywords in the ‘Links’ section that users can use to search on the website and go to the related articles would complete the cycle.

Data visualization at its best – A Gapminder presentation at a TED conference

It is interesting that one may be very close geographically to important events/activities but be quite oblivious of them. Such was the case with me.

The event that in question is a TED conference in Monterey, California. I very recently came across TED, long after I left the Monterey area. TED started out  as a conference that brings together people from the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design, but has grown beyond that to bring great thinkers and doers from these and other fields.

The presentation  in question is by Hans Rosling, a founder of Gapminder which is a Swedish non-profit organization which develops and distributes free software to visualize human development.

The presentation is located on TED and I would urge everybody to take a look at it. It breaks commonly held myths and stereotypes about the developing world and how it relates to the developed world economically and health wise.  Through a captivating presentation of statistical data in an animated fashion, Hans Rosling shows how Asian countries have really progressed in health and wealth over the last few decades.

The presentation is made using the Trendalyzer software developed by the Gapminder foundation that uses lively animation to depict complex global trends in anthropology and global economics. This makes the presentation really come ‘alive’ in a fashion I have not  seen before in any other statistical presentations till date.

You can play hands on with the Gapminder tools to understand the power of the software. The Trendalyzer software used to create these tools was recently acquired by Google who no doubt saw its value and my prediction is that we will see it as one of the Google Apps shortly.

Till then, if somebody can get their hands on a Beta copy of the software, I would be interested in trying it out (Drop me a line if you do have it!)

Grand Central – A single phone number for life for all your phones !

Yesterday, I received an invite to the public Beta of ‘Grand Central’ and promptly registered. I was pleasantly surprised by its features. (Grand Central has recently been bought by Google.)

Grand central (GC) enables you to register/pick a brand new phone number and then attach any/all of your phones (cell, home, office, etc) to that number. With this, when anyone calls your grand central number, one or more of your phones will start ringing (based on your settings).

There are lots of features apart from the basic / core feature that is mentioned above, but what stands out is the fact that you now NEVER EVER have to change your phone number as your actual physical phone numbers (cell/landline/VOIP) that are tied to specific service providers are shielded by your grand central number which you always own.

The other neat feature is that of a single voicemail box for all of your phones that are tied to the grand central number and the ability to manage those voicemails just like you manage e-mails.

What puts this service into high gear is its ability to direct calls that come to this GC phone number to exactly the phone you want on the fly based on who is calling. For example, you can direct all office calls to your office landline, friends and family to your cell phone etc.

The biggest hurdle that needs to be crossed by anybody using this service is the building of your contacts list and tagging them right (as a friend, family, office colleague etc). There are two ways to do this – do it yourself manually by importing from outlook, yahoo or hotmail or you let GC do it by having people who are not on your GC contact list identify themselves to the service before they are connected to you.

A missing link in this exciting new service is the ability to do a reverse masking i.e convert all of your calls from your different phones into the same single GC outgoing number. This avoids confusion at the calling party end as they expect to receive a call from you from the number they used to call you.

At this time, I am still debating on how best to start using this service starting from an empty contact list.

Kicking it off !

This is a brand new blog that will be dedicated to discussing topics in Technology and Management. Specifically, the initial focus will be on new developments in Technology, the field of Finance and the practice of Project and Product Management.

For the last few months, there have been instances in which I felt the need to share and discuss thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics. The idea of a blog as an outlet/ medium for this purpose seemed appropriate.

This being my initial foray into blogging, I searched for tips on how to go about the task and I stumbled upon an article by Rajesh Shetty regarding a ‘Blogging checklist’. I found this piece to be very pertinent and would recommend this to others, who like me, are starting out into blogging.

Please join me on this blog with your comments, critiques and thoughts of your own.

Happy Reading !