IIMB PGP99 Birthday calendar
The IIMB PGP99 Birthday calendar is online. You can add it to Google Calendar, iCal or Mozilla Calendar. Here’s the XML version.
Why is nanotechnology popular now
Why is nanotechnology in the top Google queries from India?
Meet the Author
Meet the Author releases short videos of authors introducing their books on Google Video. It covers fiction and non-fiction, like James Surowiecki on The Wisdom of Crowds, Richard Dawkins on The Selfish Gene, Jeffrey Archer on False Impression and Frederick Forsyth on The Avenger.
The Search
I was reading John Battelle’s The Search , and realised: We don’t sit down on the computer and say, “Let’s do a search”.
True. We want to get something done. We know it’s out there somewhere. We search.
So every search on a search engine is a commercial opportunity. Contrawise, every site must let people to do what they want to do on the site.
Think… What do people want to do when they’re on YOUR site?
Google Calendar released
Google Calendar is out. But for some reason, it’s too slow for me.
Shrink a market
Grow by shrinking a market.
For every dollar of revenue Microsoft made, it took away six dollars of revenue from their competitors. Every dollar of Microsoft’s gain caused an asymmetrical amount of pain in the marketplace. They made money by shrinking the market.
How to be a successful Evil Overlord
How to be a successful Evil Overlord. Hilarious. Some excerpts:
- My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.
- When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought, I’ll shoot him and then say “No.”
- One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
- I will not have a daughter. She would be as beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero’s rugged countenance and she’d betray her own father.
- If the beautiful princess that I capture says “I’ll never marry you! Never, do you hear me, NEVER!!!”, I will say “Oh well” and kill her.
Packaging
Packaging can make a huge difference to products. It really hit me when I saw this bottle of Heinz’s ketchup. My two big problems with normal ketchup bottles are: (a) the sauce spills to the side of the bottle and sticks to the cap, and (b) it’s tough to pour the last bits of sauce — you have to hit the bottle a lot.
Now, I didn’t know I had these problems. But when I saw this bottle, it hit me. You keep the bottle upside down — so it’s easy to pour the last bits of sauce. And they way the nozzle valve is designed, the sauce doesn’t stick to the cap. Perfect! Since then, I don’t buy any other ketchup bottle. Even if I WANT ketchup, I don’t buy it unless I get this bottle. Packaging made be brand loyal. (Caveat: I’m not REALLY brand loyal. I’d buy any ketchup with this packaging. But only Heinz has it right now.)
The same thing with honey. The same packaging with honey gives me a third advantage. I can drink a bit of honey directly by holding up the bottle over my mouth and squeezing it. Plus, I don’t need a spoon. Because of this, my consumption of honey has shot up to 1 bottle of honey every month. Further, I have started spreading honey over ice cream these days. Note: packaging changed my eating pattern.
So, impressed by all this, I wandered around superstores, exploring the innovations in packaging (mainly in food). I will shortly blog about that. In the meantime, here are some innovative packages introduced around when Heinz’s inverted ketchup was.
Speed up your torrents
Speed up your torrents. Particularly, get rid of the Event ID 4226 problem.