Parisista » Technology Lifestyle

Apple’s Next Gig: A Digital Camera?

indus — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:48:49 +0000

Josh Kopelman points to Kodak’s Winds of Change video which got released onto YouTube. While I was watching this video, I was also watching Apple’s stock price. This got me thinking. What would be Apple’s next gig. An iCam? A Digital Camera from Apple is long due.
Interestingly enough, Apple had a digital camera up its sleeves, which went by the name QuickTake and was discontinued when Steve Jobs took the helm in 1997.
The digital camera vendors shipped 100m units in 2006 and the market is growing at 15% with total sales being pegged at $25 billion. With Apple’s brand name and possible integration with it’s suite of desktop authoring tools like iLife and Aperture, it can be easily speculated to capture 2% – 5% of market share, if and when it comes out. This would give $1 billion – $2 billion in additional sales. It would also boost the sales of Apple’s software products.
Compare this with iPhone; it is aiming at 1% of the total 1 billion unit sales of the $115 billion Mobile phone market, which would add another $2b – $5b in revenues in next few years.
Makes sense? Eh, I can speculate at least. Remember, iPod came out in a crowded MP3 Player market, which was considered “mature” 5 years ago.

Founders at Work

indus — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:38:24 +0000

Samir Patel, an old buddy and a fellow entrepreneur just IMed me, that he has started a blog to share his ideas on entrepreneurship. His recent post points to Guy Kawasaki’s copy of the book, Founders at Work. Apparently, this book has broken a record of sorts of having the most stickies in it.
Keep Blogging, dude!

Bar Camping at San Francisco

indus — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 16:20:35 +0000

About 150 geeks got together this weekend at Microsoft’s San Francisco office for sleeping bagging. Free food, drinks, plenty of booze and schwag. This was a free event (not even a single dime!). I was able to have better offline discussions with peers than I had at ETech. The food, drinks, booze etc. were quietly delivered by the sponsors without a single marketing pitch. Remember those blah-blah sessions from the sponsors of the “paid” events!
Nima Dilmaghani who is a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft was the host of the event. Hats off to him for standing up and getting this place for us! I’m impressed; Microsoft allowing 150 unknown people, with unknown “police” credentials, to use their facilities, conference rooms, showers, etc. etc. for 48 hours.

Left-to-Right: Chris Bauman of Sproutit.com, Indus(me) and Nima at Microsoft during BarCamp
Tag: BarCampSF, BarCamp

LinkedIn: How to virtually add any known connection

indus — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 12:56:15 +0000

It all started when I was looking for a former manager of mine. I had lost all the TPAs (”touch-point attributes”) of him. Then I found him on LinkedIn. The challenge was to get in touch with him without jumping through various degrees of separation. I finally managed to connect with him by guessing his e-mail address!

Here’s what you need to do:

You have to know the name of the person and the name of the company that person is working for (We are not trying to spam, spammers use the name dictionary attack)
Next, the idea is to find out the pattern of e-mail address for that company. Go to Google groups or simply Google search. For example, if your contact works for HP — type “@hp.com”. You will get a lot of results for a large company esp. in technology space. The trick is to filter down the search results by adding an extra keyword in the search parameter; say we add, mySQL (a “commercial” open-source database). One of the result in the top 5 has a link to a forum which gives the answer as firstname.lastname@hp.com. There you go, you now have the e-mail address pattern for your target contact.
Here are the three most common e-mail patterns:
- firstname.lastname@example.com (most common on Microsoft Exchange platforms)
- firstname_lastname@example.com (common among Lotus Notes users)
- flastname@example.com (common on Unix based mail servers)
Thanks to the pattern, you “know” the person now — Just shoot a LinkedIn invite.

Easy(maybe you already knew!)

Disclaimer: I’m not a spammer, nor I derive any revenue from hacking, spamming or doing anything like that. Nor, there is any hidden idea to discredit LinkedIn or it’s great service. I’m just an ordinary next door geek who wants to make things easy with some automation in life.

Who’s next on Google Hiring Radar?

indus — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 23:11:43 +0000

Cerf, Apple’s Andy Hertzfeld, Alta Vista founder Louis Monier, Adam Bosworth of BEA/Crossgain, Mac Mozilla Chief Mike Pinkerton, FireFox Lead Engineer Ben Goodger, Java evangelist Joshua Bloch, Microsoft Windows architect Marc Lucovsky, UTF-8 co-creator and original Unix team member Rob Pike, the list goes on and on. Google is hiring the who’s who of the software programming world — people whose text books students read and software evangelists whose products we install.
With DEC Labs gone, XEROX PARC being reborn as Parc, Inc and now the deptt. which invented UNIX at Bell Labs on the chopping block; Google is giving them a breather/opportunity to continue the advancements in software.
Well, Google is not just doing search but also re-search on how to own the content and the content delivery framework.
Next (sometime in a future post): Why Google might buy Akamai?

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish

indus — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 13:44:09 +0000

Seth Godin points to the transcript of the commencement address of Apple CEO Steve Jobs to graduating Stanford students: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505
(I actually read most of it in the latest edition of Fortune magazine).
It’s a nice reminder — connect the dots, ask questions and don’t settle unless you find the right answers.
Other interesting bytes:
1. You’ve got to find what you love.
2. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. (Don’t be trapped by dogma

Apple Believers vs. Krishna followers

indus — Fri, 27 May 2005 19:57:53 +0000

Lightens my day

Linux Farm at Microsoft

indus — Wed, 11 May 2005 14:21:44 +0000

The Channel9 team(Charles Torre, et al) at MSDN sat down with Martin Taylor & Bill Hilf of Microsoft. Martin is a General Manager of Competitive Strategy and Bill is a Linux developer and Microsoft Technical Director of Platform Strategy.
The interview is in two parts(Part 1, Part 2). The second part culminates with a tour of a lab running 13 different distros of Linux, Websphere, MySQL, etc.