Roadside Indian Dhabas

This weekend we drove up to Sea Ranch on Highway One. On the way here, we came upon Sizzling Tnadoor -- an Indian restaurant with a picture perfect setting right on the Russian River. It came across as a bit of a shocker -- the last thing we expected on the drive up in Sonoma is a desi restaurant serving out tandoori chicken.

What to say, Singh is Kinng!

On a slightly different note, Akshay Kumar rocks the house in Singh is Kinng. On the non-mainstream cinema, Aamir was good. Blue Umbrella was great, especially because it gives stage to one of the finest actors India has -- Pankaj Kapur.

The "joys" of running a company

One of the many "joys" is dealing with "service providers."

Currently we are in the process of choosing a vendor to outsource our HR to. Having talked to multiple vendors, I realize that this is one of the industry that thrives on obfuscating the obvious. Everyone in this industry loves to wrap words in yarn out of management handbooks. Here's an example I pulled from one such site: "Our PEO services allow you to systematically and strategically enhance the total quality of your organization, which results in greater efficiency and productivity." WTF?

Sometimes it's the years and not the mileage

I've been a huge fan of the Indiana Jones movies, and I had been waiting for the latest movie to come out for more than a year now. One word: FAIL.

What a dumb, stupid mess. Everything seemed so unnatural. It seemed as though they had run out of all ideas. Low on entertainment. Low on fun. Low on creativity. Sometimes, the years do start to count more than the mileage.

That said, it seemed to borrow a few things from Tintin. There were at least a couple of references that I noticed. The notion of aliens was referenced in Flight 714. Though, I wouldn't say that's necessarily where they borrowed it from. The second reference was the scene where Harrison Ford is crawling in the cave... it seemed to have been framed right out of the Prisoners of the Sun.

I hear Spielberg is working on a Tintin movie...

FriendFeed picking up at Twitter's expense?

I've seen several messages flow today on Twitter that people don't tweet that often because they are on Friendfeed instead...

I recently installed Twhirl and it's great that the most recent version supports both Twitter and FriendFeed. I tried Alert Thingy, and it was terrible on the Mac. Twhirl on the other hand worked a lot better.

Talking of Friendfeed, it is a much more open version of the Facebook news feed. Facebook has clamped down quite a bit on what shows up in the news feed. In fact I hardly see any updates from apps in the news feed any more. All I see are updates from Facebook and its own applications (Photos, Wall, Video, Posted Items).

If feeds are here to stay, Friendfeed and its api can become powerful developer tools for growing web applications.

Tuscan Wines

Pooja and I were traveling through Europe this April and spent a good part of our trip in Tuscany. We stayed close to Firenze/Florence at a B&B in the countryside. The stay itself remains one of the best vacations we have taken and I highly recommend it.

A good part of our stay was spent driving to different parts of Tuscany and picking up on the foods and wines of the region. Just as many books might tell you, Brunellos from Montelcino are fantastic. I happened to try the Banghi at a restaurant in Fiesole, with their pasta in wild boar sauce, and the wine and meal rank among the best I've ever had.

The interesting things about wines in Italy is that the governing bodies -- DOC/DOCG -- tightly control the vintages of wines. E.g., Brunellos that you can buy are already aged 5 years, and they age well for another 10. You can't even buy a Brunello in the market that hasn't been aged 5 years. Similarly, the Chiantis are aged at least 2 years.

The wine tour at Vignamaggio was great. Someone claimed that the estate was the birthplace of the da Vinci's "Mona Lisa". The wines were great too. We lucked out here -- we had reached Greve pretty late in the evening and the tourism office there was able to get us a wine tour reservation at a pretty short notice.

Patent awarded..

I recently heard the patent for the Amazon Flexible Payments got awarded. That's super!

Back from GSP

I came back a bit early from GSP. We got selected to present at the Appnite, and I hear that it went quite well even if we did not win the Mackbook air.

I posted a couple of notes from the conference on data portability and Bring your own platform panels.

San Diego was great. We stayed at the Omni hotel in downtown, and managed to sneak out to the Oldtown for dinner and the La Jolla area for the afternoon.

Jambool is hiring

See here for more details.

If you know great software engineers who might get excited about working for a startup that's among the frontrunners in the social applications space -- do let us know.

Case against Macs

I recently had to get a new power cable for my powerbook. It cost me $80. Eighty dollars for a power cable?! So in some ways, four power cables = 1 phone??

My DVD superdrive stopped working -- DVDs just won't go in at all. I looked online for possible things, and nothing worked. So I went to an Apple store. Without even bothering to look at it, their solution was to replace it and get a new one. $330. Ouch.

It isn't under warranty so I have every intention of prying it open to see why it won't work. If nothing else, I might be a little bit better off knowing something I didn't earlier.

Replacing batteries in an ipod isn't a simple matter of turning it over, popping the sucker open and putting in a couple of AAs. Apple wants you to send in the ipod.

Agreed, you are trying to get the world back from Windows, but for crying out loud, do you have to make it this hard?

We should know fascism when we see it

We watched the movie Parzania. While we knew a bit about the riots, but the hard hitting movie made me go and read about this a lot more. Watching the movie and reading about the atrocities in Gujarat, it makes you detest the nationalist parties involved.

You can read more on wikipedia. The article by Arundhati Roy hit a nerve. Somewhere down the line, India will have to admit that the Gujarat violence was a pogrom, a genocide committed by the Hindu fundamentalists.

The likes of Mussolini and Hitler have come and gone, and yet fascism never stops to rear its ugly head. Yet, we as a society find it convenient to look the other way until it is too late. We are all too involved in our own daily lives to feel concerned about things that happened thousands of miles away -- until one day it blows up in our face.

Now Plants can talk

If there wasn't enough content being put online by humans, now plants can join the fray.

This is a pretty interesting setup by Botanicalls: the plant can now twitter you about the moisture content in the soil.

One wonders though... I need this twittering so that someone else besides my wife can actually tell me to water the plants. Or maybe once you start getting the twitter messages, you'll feel more compassionate to the plants -- as though they were indeed talking to you... "I'm thirsty!" I guess that would make you rush to the tap.

Couple of lectures

Over the last few weeks I had the good fortune of listening to two excellent speakers.

The first was Mohammed Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank and was awarded the Nobel prize in 2006. Mohammed Yunus is a terrific speaker and a lot more down to earth than most other public speakers I've listened to. His story on the "poor people's bank", as he calls it, is a phenomenal story and he tells it, seemingly, without any spice. For someone to have achieved a likely unassaiblable goal of countering poverty in Bangladesh and inspiring many others around the world, his humility is inspiring.

There were a couple of points he made that I wanted to jot down and remind myself repeatedly. While companies can strive for maximizing profit for themselves, they must pay heed to the planet around them and help maximize the overall benefit to the planet. He did not advocate it as an alternative to capitalism. This is a sentiment I've heard several times recently, and it is something worth listening to.

The other lecture I happened to go to was by Larry Lessig. This was Lessig's last Free Culture talk before he moves on to something different. Lessig's well known for founding Creative Commons and pushing for reduced restrictions on copyrights -- especially as they apply to the digital medium.

Lessig's talk was impressive and it is also impressive that the next challenge he is taking on is to end lobbyism and corruption in Congress. Interestingly, among the presidential candidates there were only two who push for lobbyists not funding congressmen's election -- Barrack Obama and John Edwards.

Lessig later also posted an online video on why Obama and not Hillary, that I am posting below.

Kids these days!

I've often gotten into discussions with people about the difference between how a teenager would view the world versus how an adult would -- the difference caused by the fact that the kid probably never saw a world without the Internet.

There was a time when you had to take driving directions from someone over the phone.

You couldn't just get your answers by typing a few words on a computer.

Dial up used to cost money -- and it used to make strange noises.

Today I saw its funny outcome on reddit: See for yourself!

Where does our food come from?

Have you not always wondered about the origins of food that lands on our plate? I know I have -- especially in the US, more than India.

In India, figuring out the food chain was relatively easy. First off, our family was entirely vegetarian. My father hails from a village not too far from where we lived, and his brothers and father were wholesale traders in fruits and vegetables. My father has always been passionate about finding the best (and cheapest -- but that's just with every Indian ;) and freshest vegetables, and I have always attributed it to his formative years, spent helping out with the family business. So, the food chain to trace for us was relatively easy. The pieces that were missing were -- what seeds, fertilizers and manure the farmers were using at the farms our vegetables came from. The land of Punjab -- the area where I grew up -- is known for its fertility, and as far as I knew and read, farmers were using the traditional methods of farming. As a result, what food we ate depended on what season it was, and how the rains have been that year and so on. Man had not taken over Nature in determining what food we ate. I believe this is still the case there, though it is changing.

In comparison, there is a feeling of mystery behind food we get in the US. First off, the farmers' markets are relatively rare. So the food is mostly obtained at the supermarket. At the supermarkets, irrespective of the time of the year, you get the same food. Potatoes and onions, apples, oranges, bell peppers, you name it -- what season it was, or how the weather had been that year never mattered when it came to determining what to eat. At first glance, it seemed all positive. This is what a developed country is about -- industrialize the agriculture, empower the farmers to grow and feed what people want. A little naive, don't you think?

A recent book I am reading -- Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan -- attempts to trace the food chain that gets hidden behind the meals we eat. It is an enlightening read, and I very strongly suggest that you should read this book. You will never look at your food the same way again.

There are several observations that the book arrives at that are worth remembering. I note them here for lack of a better place to remind myself of these later.

1. Everything is connected. The author makes this zen-like observation about farms -- and he doesn't extrapolate it to anything else. But it is hard to not think about everything the same way.

2. We are what we eat. I recall Hemant telling me this once upon a time. This is true of the meat you eat as well -- the cow that's fed on chemicals and corn will lead to beef that has those compounds, and they will end up in you. It is surprising how apathetic we have become as a civilation about what we eat.

3. Food is a primary reason behind how large our brains are. Koala bears evolved to have a very small brain because they only eat eucalyptus leaves -- and as a result their brains shrank over time because they didn't need to work hard at trying to figure out how to get the food. Humans evolved with a much larger brain because of the complex nature of our meals. This does make you wonder if apathy towards food is going to end up making you dumber.

4. Not everything is suited to be done at large scale. This is especially true about farming. The scalability comes in dumbing down the process, and being able to repeat the same thing again and again.

A good sign for America

Here's to hoping the man makes it all the way to the White house!

Taare Zameen Par -- A (slightly) different perspective

The recent Hindi movie, Taare Zameen Par, was a refreshing change as far as movies from Bollywood go. It lacks all the loudness of the commercial cinema, and tells its story with a lot of love. Yet, it has the polish of a well made, well produced film -- something that the offbeat, non-commercial movies lack.

The reviews of the movies have mentioned it as a story of the kid who goes through a low and comes out tops thanks to the helping hand provided by his teacher. People find that they could relate to the kid in many ways. I actually had a slightly different experience -- I related just as much, if not more, to the teacher. In many ways, I felt this was a story of the teacher as much of the kid.

A review complained that the teacher having admitted to having dyslexia was a fault of the movie -- where I felt that was the whole facet of the movie that took it to higher level. Just as much it was the story of the child finding his way, it was the story of the teacher in some ways resting his demons. The story of the teacher wasn't developed as well -- but you could see him looking for himself in all the kids he spent time with, and trying to save them the pain he might have had to go through. Finding a child who he felt was a reflection of himself, the teacher finds a path too.

It may well be a viewpoint far removed from the majority of the movie goers. Anyone care to share what they thought?

Random tidbits from Bollywood movies

Some random tidbits you might not know or might not have noticed...

1- Movies "Andaz Apna Apna" and "Mr. India" are related through their principal villains -- or rather their principal villains are related. Crimemast Gogo claims Mogambo to be his uncle ("Mogambo ka bhatija, Crimemaster Gogo!")

2- There is a sequence in the recent movie "Taare Zameen Par" where the kid is daydreaming class, imagining himself to be a space traveler -- a clear rip off of Calvin's alter ego Spaceman Spiff.

3- In "Om Shanti Om", one of the stars who comes in at the premiere is clearly channeling Mithun Chakravorty -- and Mithun himself shows up in a later song in the movie to do the same dance moves.

If you haven't seen "Taare Zameen Par," you should.

Only a couple of weeks ago...

I didn't realize I had posted only about a couple of weeks back. It seems a lot has happened in these two weeks.

Thanks to the success of some of our apps on Facebook, we ran into scaling issues the last few days. We went from one box setup to two and then to three very quickly. This was the one of those times when years of dealing with large scale problems at Amazon comes in handy. Above all, we were particularly pleased with the fact that our component based distributed system design allowed us to scale out with little headaches, and it gave us considerable flexibility in optimizing our systems.

Quite a few friends are now in the midst of their own startups, and when I share my lessons learned, I actually don't harp much on building scalable systems anymore. Product and monetization comes first, and I still believe if you need to build things to scale you'll be able to handle it. Just make sure you have the engineering talent for it. That said, if you are building applications on platforms like Facebook where, just maybe, your applications can ramp up to 100,000+ daily active users in a few days, you'd better plan for scaling upfront. I think, it would have been much more costly for us to scale had we not built our systems well the first time around. But even then, every such problem is unique, and you will have to handle new problems when you do run into scaling issues.

In the midst of this I managed to sneak away to Hawaii for a short trip. If you haven't been to the big island of Hawaii, I suggest you pack a bag and go. Snorkeling on the west side -- particularly the Cook monument -- was probably the best we've experienced in the state of Hawaii.

Facebook ads: More hype?

It's no secret we've been developing apps on Facebook for Jambool. And where the more involved apps have had a hard time taking off, the brain dead ones are rocketing up. In the last one week we added more than 50,000 users without spending a penny on advertising. Now there's got to be some value in that.

Facebook announced today that they are coming out with "Facebook Ads." Techrunch covered the announcement in New York. This stuff has been speculated for a long time. Facebook already has their ad network -- it's called Facebook Flyers. And going by the ads I see on them ocnsistently, my guess is that they are not doing that well. We even tried using them sometime ago, and ad clickthrough as well as conversion from these ads was abysmal. So are things set to change with the new release?

I don't think so.

I'm trying to understand what they are offering, and here's my understanding. Facebook does provide advertisers the ability to target ads for specific demographics and user attributes (age, location etc). But this is what they do with Facebook flyers -- and afaik it is not a successful program. I think the important factor in ads that helps convert users is not as much just the targeting but the context that the ad is displayed in as well. This is where Facebook seems to be missing out. They talk about beacons and insights -- that people can be walking billboards for brands they love, and spread the virus into their network. So you can publish your purchases etc to your friends, advertising the web site you bought it from. While useful, I would wait to get some numbers on this data to see if this is really worth anything. Because my friends bought "something" at Ebay doesn't make me jump on and go to ebay. It reeks of advertising, not a recommendation. Besides being a privacy concern, I am not convinced that users will want to have their purchases get published to their friends.

The talk about "Insights" seems to be wishful thinking. They "will be able" to track how much people are talking about the brands in forums, which forums and brand pages the user goes to, and target the ads better. I suspect that there is no data that they have to back up their claims -- What is the actual impact they can make for a brand? It isn't even anything new. Companies like doubleclick and Google have cookiess in just about every browse out there. They know which sites you go to, which brands you visit, etc etc. Or at least they are in the position to. They may not know the specific age and sex and favorite color and pet peeves of every user, but when you have enough data about the user through the kind of sites he/she visits, this data starts to become irrelevant -- especially if the end goal is to just target the ads for that user. Age and sex be damned, just show the ads to the user that he or she is most likely to click on. That's the best service you can do to your advertisers and publishers.

It also seems that Facebook is not really providing application developers a new avenue to make money. They seem to be intent on being the publisher for all ads, and attracting the advertisers to put ads -- including application developers. At least I did not read anywhere that they are providing a means for developers to monetize through Facebook ads. This, I think, is where they are missing out. There is more money to be made by sharing the pie with developers than with getting the developers to pay for getting traffic. This would mean, that developers will continue to stick with the existing ad networks to get ads for their pages, and as a result, advertisers will also continue to advertise on these networks.

So my reading of the Facebook ads is that it is more hype than substance. Life's going to go on just as it was.

Facebook ad to app install conversion

Just posted another update on optimizing ads to app installs on Facebook.

Give it a read if you are interested.

We also launched an update on Balloonz: users can not create their own fillings to put in the balloons. Today, just five days after launch, we are crossing 3K users!

Have you thrown a balloon yet?