I was at a business dinner organized by Silicon Valley Bank a few nights ago along with a few other CEO clients of theirs. It was good to hear and share thoughts about globalization, wage inflation, innovation and different views about the economy. Everyone shared their frustration about (difficulty in) hiring, wage inflation, on-site vs. offshore development etc. During the course of discussion, one of the CEOs asked me "will you start your next company in Silicon Valley"? "Absolutely" was my answer which surprised many CEOs. However, it shouldn't come as a surprise to mos  read more »

We are only weeks away from starting the beta on our public site. We have had lot of debate internally whether we should continue with the alpha on our protected site or allow broader user community to participate. Finally, our fear gave in. Yes, there is a risk of getting attention "too soon" but then there is no substitute to learning from a broader, untainted audience about their pain points, their needs, their wants around gadgets. Clock is ticking and everyone is furiously working to make sure that we have fixed all the major bugs, are category complete for the launch and are op  read more »

New York Times Technology Writer David Pogue has, untill today, remained a creature of mystery to me. I've spent many a long, sleepless night pondering the motivations of a man so deeply committed to gadgets and gizmos, a man who strives to inform the masses of new inventions, trends and business in the tech market. He is humorous, yes, intelligent, of course, but who is the real David Pogue, I ask, and when, oh when, will he reveal his true self to me?  read more »

We are down to 53 bugs. Major ones are in the areas of incomplete data for some of the categories and ranking. Team is confident that we will be able to fix the critical ones before the public trial. We are also installing and configuring the servers for colocation deployment. Plenty of regression, performance beaselining, monitoring and contingency planning needs to be done. Anyone who has built a service network can sympathesize with all the work that needs to be done for us to be truly ready. I am sure we will have hickups, some users won't find deep content for some of their queries, some  read more »

According to Greenpeace electronic disposal is responsible for 5% of all waste worldwide. And thanks to the hypercompetitive cell phone market and cool-obsessed tech consumer, e-waste is also the fastest growing component of worldwide waste, with users upgrading their electronics more frequently then ever. I know. I had no idea either. It turns out most Americans didn't. That's 'cause the majority of e-waste is sent to China and India, and despite China's 2000  read more »

In last few years, it has been amazing for me to see all the exciting development in the consumer electronics industry, the conversion from analog to digital and FCC's mandate to phase out analog broadcast alltogether, from VHS to DVD to HD-DVD and Blu-ray, from tape to CDs to iPods, you name it. Every piece of electronics you owned has gone through major changes. One subtle change taking place in the home theater system environments is the move from CD mega changers to hard-disk based servers. Here is  read more »

San Francisco hosts the GeekFest of the week, Supernova 2007, with a warm up starting today and the big deal starting tomorrow. There's also a bake-off of hot new start-ups call Connected Innovators - Michael Arrington of TechCrunch moderates and Geek VC, Paul Kedrosky is rumored to be one of the judges.  read more »

There was an article in Washington Post that talked about "Product Placement". How the traditional, subtle product placement in TV shows and movies is making a leap into the scripts. Forget about fast forwarding using your Tivo's skip button, it is all part of story-telling. There has not been a huge cry from actors yet, but it will at some point. You can read about different aspects and implications including FCC's regulation regarding disclosures here. The other extreme of this new br  read more »

The self-proclaimed online tech gossip rag, valleywag, coming to you straight outta S.V. (Silicon Valley represent), is pissed at greenpeace and other long-haired hippy environmentalists about coming down hard on Apple for their apparent lack of greenness. Man, are they pissed. Apple forgoes an online rant, replying to the environmental smackdown by announcing some new green initiatives, reminding us that Steve and Steve were once hippies themselves.

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Today we reviewed our progress and readiness for the public alpha. Good news and not so good news. Good news is that the team fixed majority of the 23 major bugs we had last week. We have only a handful left and the team knows the fixes. These bugs will be behind us in next couple of days. But we are only half way through the operational readiness. We baselined our systems, we know the performance limitations andpossible bottlenecks and are now discussing various alternatives to deal with them. And then we want to move our systems to a colo to ensure high availability once we open up the site  read more »