Year: 2001

I have joined the Boston Consulting Group at Mumbai.

The subject-specific Scout reports, which were a prime source of my information, are about to be discontinued from the end of the month. (No funds.)

George Gilder proposes that while Moore’s law drove the IT revolution through processing power, today it’s bandwidth that’s driving it — through Gilder’s Law. This ties back to what an Economist survey says about focus shifting from software to online services.

Why is America named after Amerigo Vespucci, and not Columbus? Perhaps because Vespucci reached there first. Or perhaps he marketed America better. Ironic.

eBay will delist items associated with Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, etc. Yahoo is cleaning its porn content. AOL is, however, using neural networks to automatically filter content.

There’s a lot you can do using e-mail, including upload FTP files, create home pages, send snail-mail, translate languages, play games (blank e-mail), send a fax (no subject, “help” in body), track webpage changes, etc. The full details are available at the Accessing the Internet by Email FAQ

I just realised that website search engines aren’t the only place you can search for information. There’re search engines for FAQs, webrings, mailing lists, newsgroups, encyclopaedias.

The Economist suggests that just as focus of the computer industry shifted from hardware to software, it is now shifting from software to online services. Which means that the computer (hardware and software) will commoditize and only web services will make money.

Scientists have decided not to publish in journals that do not make their archives available for free. Cheers!

Ellen won a spam case against Kozmo. If you get unsolicited e-mail from a company, you can sue them. Unless they have an opt-out mechanism.