This morning when I got up the first thing I saw was an image of Apple 2 with RIP Steve Jobs written on screen. It took me time to realize what has happened. It was a shock. A shock because I believed this time also he is going to pull back from setbacks that life keeps on throwing at him.

In 90s I knew who Steve Jobs was, but had no idea how his product looked like or how great were those. Reading tech articles, I had general idea about how good he was. Sometimes in 2004 I saw an iPod and I was surprised by the product and great mind behind this.

What really made me a fanboy was his Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005. I heard this for first time and I was so impressed that I printed the speech and mailed it to my father, with a note saying, “you know father there is this guy called Steve Jobs, he is the founder of Apple Company and read how amazing this guy is”. Those three stories that he talks about were such an inspiration for me. His struggle in beginning and trying to break boundaries, challenge the conventional ways was something spectacular. I was so inspired that first laptop I brought, I got “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”, engraved on it.

All this time I knew him as great innovator and visionary. But in 2007 when iPhone was unveiled it struck me how my thinking of him as innovator was an understatement. Ad story does not stop here, apart from all this he was the greatest marketing guy ever. His skills in marketing are not comparable. I never missed a single Apple event after 2007. I watched them not because I wanted to get the news first; I wanted to see him deliver those speeches. It was just a mesmerizing experience.

I should be a good example of his marketing skills. I am a person who does not listen to music, but after seeing his iPhone announcement I could not resist and bought iPod Touch soon afterwards. Using his products over years have taught me what actually experience is, and how to create customer experience. No one does it better than Steve Jobs.

He has such an influence on me that I would often say that one thing that can keep me in US is a job at Apple, for anything else I am returning back to India. I always tried to imitate his business style in exercises/simulation we did. I would always quote his example when arguing and when someone would quote his example, I would say, “he is an outlier, his examples don’t count.”

Rest in peace Steve Jobs, you are an outlier.

This is a post I am writing en route to Delhi. I was on Bangalore airport when I saw the new about blast in Delhi High Court. Was I shocked…No. I am neither surprised nor shocked. Why should I be shocked, it’s almost a monthly routine now. Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmadabad, Hyderabad or any big city, which has too many humans and good business, it would have had blast sometime in past 2 years.

I was not shocked, that does not mean I wasn’t sad, I was very sad. More sad on the part that what is happening in the country. Why are we not able to curb this terrorism, which is causing us so much damage? It’s not a new thing for our country to face, we have been facing this for last 20 years at least, so we should be prepared for such things and how to handle them.

What currently happens after a blast is as follows. One team starts investigating, other team overtakes it, our politicians start condemning the attacks, then police (or similar agency) puts in a lot of effort and catches few people, then they are stuck in judicial system awaiting punishment, media finds something new to talk about, people forget, politicians forget and somewhere we have another blast. The cycle goes on.

Why do we do all the actions afterwards? Yes, there is another set of opinion – you don’t know how many attacks our intelligence has saved. I agree with them, that is a fantastic job, but not enough. Not enough considering this has been going on for two decades now. We have too many people in our country does not mean value per life has reduced, its same everywhere in world.

Then there are politicians. Like today Home Minister said –“It was not intelligence failure, we didn’t have intelligence”. Then someone from opposition party said –“no intelligence is intelligence failure only”.  I agree nice play of words, but that does not solve the problem. You can condemn attacks, walk out of parliament or do some other political drama but that does not solve the problem. Even Pakistan condemned the attacks, what does that mean, nothing.

And what is happening with the people we are catching? Why are they not getting proper punishment on time. Why is Kasab still is jail and has not been given what he deserves. We have videos of his shooting during Mumai blasts, what more proof do we want to punish him. It’s been two years and he is still in jail and we are spending money on his. Keeping him in there long will again create situation as we had today. Some organization will attack some place and threaten to do the same if we don’t release him. Some other organization might hijack a plane and get him released. Why not punish the guilty and show others that if you choose same path what will be the final destination.

That brings me to the point, why am I writing this blog post? I don’t know why I am writing this. I wrote a post ‘Impact of Blogging’ after Ahmadabad serial blasts, trying to prove that blogging does not do anything to solve the problem. It is my form of “condemning” the attacks. I am kind of helpless here. I don’t know what to do, what can we do to solve this problem. This is just a way for me to vent out my anger.

It’s been over a week since I have started using Google+ and till now it has been a brilliant experience.  This is a set of features I really like and could differentiate it from Facebook, it’s biggest competitor, even if Google acknowledges that fact.

Circles – People might really like the idea of Circles because of privacy implications, but for me I like because of totally different reason. I don’t keep a lot of things private, but I always worry about spamming a set of people who are not concerned with the kind of things I am sharing. For example, I have these two best friends who I really want to talk and share a lot of information, but I don’t like to share technology related news/analysis with them as they are not techies. Now, I have a way of spreading the news to set of people I want to share with and neglect others.

Circles also help me categorize the news that is important to me. I created a Circle Geeks2Follow and am using that feed page as Google Reader shared items. Google Reader shared items had a problem that it did not contain the comment thread or could maintain the real time feedback. Now, I see the immediate reaction of people and don’t have to wait till one needs to write a full post. This is same that could be achieved at Friendfeed, but combining both experiences makes it great. It also solves the issue of now having threaded conversation on Twitter.

Huddle & Hangout - I see a lot of advantage of these two features, both of them deal with groups and that’s where most of my conversation takes place. Hangout would be one thing that I would surly like to use on my podcast, this way we could capture audio and video in a very synchronized way. Hangout is also useful in doing some group meetings, because this does not involve installing clients, changing firewall settings and so on. Another feature of hangout that I use most is watching youtube videos with friends. This has given a totally new experience of watching videos and has taken it to social level.

Huddle is useful for communicating while traveling. We do a lot of our business communication via N1 and always had issue of not having group chat functionality on phones. Huddle solves it and also makes it more SMS like, thus solving the issue of not wanting everyone to be online to start the conversation.

Search – One thing that will improve drastically is search results and I have already started seeing the impact of  social graph. This morning I searched for ‘Google Plus Features’ and third search result was from Matt Cutts, and it read – Matt Cutts shared this (image below). Definitely as more users build in, we will see a lot of improved results.

Improved Search Results

Everything else is more or less the same, similar to other social networks like Facebook. I drastically reduced using Facebook because of lack of energy there and most of the people spending time on Zynga. One main feature that I liked about Facebook was it’s event system. It used to work well when I was in grad school. Was very useful in planning events. Google+ needs to add that into their system as well, Calendars is already a good feature just it needs to be integrated with Google+.

Feature Wish List

Mute should permanently mute the post and I don’t need to see any comments that have been put after my comment, I also don’t need a notification mail for that. I am using mute post as a ‘read post’ feature, to clear of my stream. One way to solve is to add another feature called ‘read’.  So, if I have read and commented then I should get notifications and if I commented and muted, then I should not get any notifications.

Android client for Google+ also needs a mute(and read) functionality, as I am consuming most of the content on my N1.

Similar to Picasa integration, we should have YouTube integration too. I have a set of videos on Youtube and none of them got imported to Google+ and I added few videos to Google+ and they are not on youtube. If that functionality can be added, it would be perfect. Of course here an option would be given, if you want to make the video public or not, as youtube does not have same privacy settings.

Overall, it’s been a very experience with Google+. Surely early adopters like it a lot, we will have to wait and see how masses will react to it.

Post American World

Since I read the books The World is Flat and Confessionals of An Economic Hitman, I have been suggested by many to read Post American World by Fareed Zakaria. Finally I got a chance to finish it, I took long because I did not like the start of the book. The book starts with “Rise of the Rest” which is a series of facts, which were related but did not make much sense. There was coherency in the facts, but I found lack on analysis. May be because it was an Audiobook and was read by Fareed Zakaria himself and he could not deliver the same depth as many of the artists provide.

Once he moves out of those initial series of facts, he starts connecting the dots between India, China and United States. The way each of the country has grown in past few centuries and what differences makes them behave in certain ways. His analysis of how each of the cultures grew, fell and grouped again is mesmerizing. Many scholars like to show a snapshot of society, but Zakaria was able to give a proper perspective from different areas.

His analysis of Great Britain and US and an effort to draw a parallel between these two superpowers (of different times) is excellent. He has chooses the facts wisely, not getting overwhelmed by different theories and kept the book simple. That’s the beauty of the book, it keeps the flow, and guides the reader in direction of his thinking.

The book ends with his suggestions towards US and how it can cope with rise of the rest. He has a set of suggestions, which he has concluded from the facts provided in the book. It’s a very good book for people who likes to understand modern growth, differences between east and west, and how each culture has risen and fallen because of its strengths and weaknesses which again are relative to time.

If someone is interested in questions like why a country like India who was rich enough to build great wonders like Taj Mahal, but could not rise with west, then this is the book you should be looking at.

Tomorrow we play one of the crucial games of the year (yes, this year, not of four years) when we face Sri Lanka in World Cup Finals. I don’t know why this game does not excite me much. May be because we have played Sri Lanka too much in recent time or may be because I feel so many similarities between Indian and Sri Lankan team. May be because I would have supported Sri Lanka for World Cup if India exited earlier. There can be many reasons, but this game does not enthuse me as an India-Australia or India-Pakistan final.

Most of the let down in energy comes from the fact that both teams are similarly placed – heavily dependent on batting line up, masters of spin pitches, donning heavy spin attack spearheaded by one fast bowler. This makes both teams adopt similar strategy and that does not make me happy. I wanted it to be a battle of bat and ball, but it seems like a contest of bat and bat.

But that’s not the biggest thing going on in my head. Sachin Tendulkar is the key, not because he will play a crucial role in game but because this is his final World Cup. We need to win this cup for him. If we succeed, India’s greatest star will get the gift he deserves.  If it was just up to his performance we would have secured at least four out of five cups he has played in, but cricket is a team sport and there are too many aspects for a victory or failure than just an individual’s brilliance.

Then is the idea, that it might be the last time we will watch Sachin Tendulkar bat in a One Day International. And if that is going to be the case then I want time to stop now, I don’t want to see what happens tomorrow, I don’t even want to imagine what happens afterwards. World Cup or not, without Sachin Tendulkar, cricket will never be same again.

The post and spreadsheet provided by Amit Agarwal on How to Create a Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs is extremely useful.  But for last few days, I have been wanting to send attachments along with the mail merge. I tried many options but was unsuccessful, finally a set of combinations worked for me and I am sharing that spreadsheet so others don’t have to go through the same trouble.

Follow the above provided link for understanding how to use Google Docs for mail merge, after that is working fine, you can use the following spreadsheet. This is the spreadsheet which can be used to add attachments to email. I have an editable column F13 where you will have to provide Document ID. Once you provide the document id, the steps to send emails are exactly same as mentioned by above blog post.

How to get Document ID:

Step 1: Upload the document that you want to attach on Google Docs.

Step 2: While uploading the document make sure that the option ‘Convert documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings to the corresponding Google Docs formats’ is checked. If you do not check this option, your documents will not attach properly.

Step 3: Open the document and go to the URL. You can to use the id value as document id. Example: If URL is

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B_7_CbUovM_8YWJhYmQxNjktOTdiNS00ZWMyLTg3MzEtNGE3MWVhMjQyYTc4&hl=en

then the characters in bold are document id. Copy and paste them into the F13 box. When you send the mail, document with id will be attached.

I have added another feature of getting the remaining mail count of the day. That can also be accessed from the menu and count is shown above on the spreadsheet.

Since you joined as CEO of Yahoo you have been on one mission – call it downsizing, righsizing or cutting fat. The mission is clear to cut off all the services that are not generating revenue for the organization. Over last two years we saw a lot of services go down and some were for good, for example Geocities. May be world does not need geocities anymore but there are services which we all love and could see potential for Yahoo.  World does not need another social network or a clone of twitter in Portuguese. And that aligns with my understanding of working with your core competencies.

Delicious has been my favorite site for long now. Without it, arranging the links would have been a very tough task. Those tag clouds that we have created help us day in and out. You had bought this company and did not change much in it, except integrating with yahoo id and creating some nice Firefox plugins. That was great, the site had worked well and we didn’t want to change it. And that Firefox plugin made the site more useful then ever. I believe the content generated via delicious is very precious, where else will you find curated data in such format. How else can you have hundreds of thousands of geeks working for you and arranging the links from all segments. This could be a perfect way to utilize it into your search (or anyone else’s search).

An Offer

It is inevitable that Yahoo would let delicious survive, but we want it to work. Lets have a deal, pass us the code and data, we are ready to maintain it and keep it alive. We can collect donations and host the system on our machines.

- Del.icio.us Fanboy

Much anticipated game from Zynga seems to be very addictive in first

sight but loses it charm. I would keep this review short, because usually people don’t write reviews about Social Games. This is sort of review of Zynga and their games.

Zynga seems to be one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley these days, with venture capital from Google and great reviews from everywhere, it seemed like Zynga had found the secret sauce of making money in “social”.

Ctyville seems like the mix of the games Zynga brought last year. It is a cross between Farmville, FrontierVille and Playdom’s Social City. Actually, it would be better if I say, Zynga copied the idea of Social City and added aspects of FrontierVille and Farmville into it. This is nothing new for Zynga, they get the idea from some other company’s game and incorporate it with a lot of social feature. But this time they missed the trick – they could not expand on the idea on ‘we build the city’. And then what, this is the problem, a city would be build in couple of hours and player would have nothing more to do. Seems like the game was hurried and creativity was missing.

This game is too social. Zynga games always had the element where people need the help of neighbors, and if one does not have enough friends playing the game they can buy virtual currency with real currency. Here at every step one has to either ask help from neighbors or has to buy currency. They had over done it and it irritates the players too much. That makes the games bottom line as either spend real money or wait, there is not fun aspect to it, or something that can keep player interested.

Games seems like a lot of waste of time for accomplishing nothing, as compared to Farmville. I would like Zynga to use that secret ‘book of social gaming’ that is talked about and how Zynga has cracked the code. If they continue to roll out games like these, I don’t see the future of social gaming getting anywhere. May be times have changed and we like to Jump the Doodle or use Anger of Birds to kill the pigs.

More than 5 years ago, I got my first salary and the first thing I did was head to bookstore. I was surfing the books and found the book – Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character). I had no idea who Feynman was or what he did, but Geo Philips introduced him as Nobel Laureate in Physics and the book as a FUN autobiography.

I started the book with not great expectations but by the time I finished chapter one I was blown away with the awesomeness. The book is simple, straight forward and filled with adventures which range from designing Atom Bomb to safecracking, being at particle accelerator to topless bars, travel to brazil or to subconscious. At no point it is a book from physicist to physicist or common men. It is a series of anecdotes by a common man, that Feynman describes but albeit being simple these are very important lessons.

I am a big fanboy and always wanted to adopt several of his characters in my life. Few weeks back I sat down to write a letter to a friend who I was gifting this book to. I was overwhelmed by the fact that I have too many things to write? So to make things clear I read the book again. After reading I could write nothing less than – “He has been the greatest influence in my life, and I thought I would share that experience with you.”

The book of stories is so simple that it directly affects your life. There are no complexities, just simple facts that anyone can understand. His experiences helped me realize nothing in this world is complex enough to understand, it just need a new perspective and by breaking things into parts everything becomes simple. His life is a lesson and he has pictured that beautifully in this book. I would recommend everyone to read this book once, you don’t need any knowledge of physics or any science to understand this book. That is one of the great qualities of Feynman that everyone understands him.

Over five years I have read a lot of books by Feynman but this remains my favorite. After this book, everyone grows.

PS: Now there is a new edition of the book which combines Adventures of Curious Character with it’s second part Further Adventures of Curious Character. I would recommend people to get that book (Classic Feynman: All adventures of Curious Character) as it comes along with an audio CD.

Feynman’s popularity cannot be summed better than this XKCD

Alt Text: Maybe someday Science will get over its giant collective crush on Richard Feynman. But I doubt it.