Angelina Jolie and Michelle Obama on VSee

VSee (a desktop videoconferencing solution that Hrishi’s company makes) is supporting UN’s World Refugee Day.

Angelina Jolie and Michelle Obama are going to use VSee to talk to refugees in Chad (Darfur) and Pakistan, on Sat June 20. VSee will be relaying the feed on http://wrd.vsee.com – you can ask questions to the refugees directly.

This event aims to raise awareness and an opportunity for fund-raising. Please spread the word around so the refugees get as much support as possible.

Oracle website …why?

I do not spend a lot of time on the Oracle website fortunately. But whenever I have to, it baffles me how anyone can stand it. For the last 1 hour I am trying to renew our membership of the account. Yes, we want to give money to Oracle, so that we can continue “trying” to use their crappy service. But they do not seem to have figured out the basics on ecommerce.

First off the site is slooooow. You are never sure after clicking a link if anything is going to happen next.

Second off, it is inconsistent between Firefox and IE. I keep flipping between the browsers, and there is no gaurantee which one of them will work.

People are talking about the 3G of web, and I think Oracle is stuck in Web 0.1. It’s hard to believe they are a part of the bay area. Harder to believe they are #1 software providers in many areas. But its hardest to believe that some of the brighter people I know work for this organization. I am feeling frustrated and saddened alternatively…..

Sirius – seriously…

Its sort of odd that I am writing about Sirius today, the same day DOJ has approved their acquisition of XMSR. But this article is no financial commentary on it…its about my experience with using Sirius radio for about 6-months now.

Anyone who sees it in my car, inadvertently asks “why”…so here are my many reasons for using it.

- It has a much bigger catalog that the local channels. I almost forgot some of the rocks songs because they were never played on the local radio channels.

- They play the Beatles.

- There are 5 rock stations on my shortcuts. Some more that I did not select.

- I love to switch between songs, food, cnn and npr on the go.

- Food Channel is very relaxing to listen to when driving back from work.

- The financial channels have some very good reports especially if you on a long drive.

- It’s access is reasonable when driving to Tahoe. It could be better.

- Often people are happy between their CDs, ipods and the local channels. I like to explore new music through the radio and the unknown is exciting. If you don’t like the surprise then there’s always going to be one channel which has something interesting going on.

- I miss the local channel RJs sometimes, but never the SleepTrain mattress advertisements.

So for $12 a month it feels like good value for money if the commute is a bit long. It surprises me why not many people I know use it.

A blog, many readers, some musicians and one video….wow!

Although I try not to generally link to articles that can be found easily on popular sites….this one was hard to pass up on. I am big fan of Scott Adams…almost becoming a bigger fan of his blog than Dilbert. So a few days back he somehow found out that the popular songs are the ones which have simple lyrics, validating his claim with Beatles. He invited the readers to come up with any lyrics….with some basic rules about limit, grammar and content.

A band from Germany picked up the best suggested lyrics and wove them into a sing….with a pretty catchy tune. Another fan picked up the song and created a video out of it. All this in about 2 weeks. Here’s the video:

This is one of those web 2.0 incidents which amazes you! Its like its own world out there….and one in a million times it turns out to be truly fabulous.

Why Internet is not ready to replace TV yet..

Last week our TV broke down. Our options were whether to spend a couple of hundred bucks on a fuse to get it repaired or get a new one. We have been contemplating the latter anyways. But while we optimize our options, I am stuck figuring out a mindless activity which helps me unwind every evening.

I consider myself reasonably technically savvy in terms of what’s out there ….let’s say 7/10. On other occasions, Rishi helps me out. So between the two of us, we have tried the following internet options in the past week. I think the problem is both in content and the experience. Some of the content issues that I experienced/felt were:

• Netflix online movies – the selection is still shallow. Most of the new movies are not online yet. In fact the day we wanted to see the movie and registered, the site was undergoing 2-3 hours of maintenance.
• Bollywood movies – registered for a monthly subscription on bwcinema.com (btw, great site for relatively new Bollywood movies). I like Hindi movies, but I could only watch 1.5 in 2-3 days. I don’t think I can watch at any faster pace. In general full length movies feel like a big time commitment. Its not something I look forward to every evening.
• You-tube – bad quality, short videos. Great for few minutes, can’t watch it at length.
• Hulu.com – this is NBC and Fox’s online site with full length, high quality episodes of many of their programs. Good site, but still lacking in content. We are done watching all the 30Rock episodes already.
• Southpark – we have watched this from various sources. I like it but after a few episodes of those high pitched voices I am done…
• The late-night shows are a favorite. I miss my daily date with Leno and Conan.
• I miss the the KQED and Discovery programs. One moment you think that it is just another program shot in the wild, next moment you realize that you spent the last 90-min watching it from the edge of the couch.

Out of content and experience, the former issue is probably the easier one to resolve. Experience wise, a few annoyances were a bit surprising.

• After 9-10 hrs of staring at a monitor, I want to watch something a bit further away and bigger. Yes, I know I can hook up my computer to the TV, etc….but my TV is out of commission. Remember?
• The decision making in the infinite world of the internet is not too exciting at the end of the day. It’s surprising but the predictability of the 10 channels that I get and the fixed menu is preferable sometimes. Yes, even the rererereruns of Seinfeld and Friends.
• When I am cooking, TV is a good, chatty friend in the background. For some reason Internet has not given me the same feeling yet.
• I do miss the mindless channel surfing. Didn’t realize it before, but it helps me unwind.

Many of the issues that I faced are technically solvable today. But I do feel as that as someone who is comfortable with technology, I already miss the TV within a week. It’s going to be many years before the older generation or non-tech people, people still with dial-ups, etc would replace their TV with the internet.

VSee – Video Conferencing for Small Teams

In an evening MBA program, its often hard to physically meet your teammates after a full day’s work. My team for Econ consisted of two of us from Bay area and one of the team-members was actually residing in San Diego. Even when everyone is in the same location, it’s hard to drive down to a Starbucks 30 miles away at 7:00 pm.

So after our first meeting of debating whether a certain curve was “an inverted bath tub” or a “kind of hockey stick”, we switched to this video-conferencing solution: VSee. And yes its free to download and use, indefinitely!!

Vsee is a peer-2-peer video conferencing solution. It’s really easy to set-up and use. They also provide an integrated audio, document sharing and chat option. Where these guys score over other consumer video-conferencing solution is the low-bandwidth requirement. So people on slower networks also have a pretty good video experience. At cable speed, it’s almost life-like. Yesterday, in a 90-min meeting, the connection dropped only once. So it’s pretty stable. Now instead of describing the curves, we just share them (if you have a soft copy) or show the hard-copy in front of the camera.

Another reason I like it, that compared to a phone conference, video conferencing prevents you from multi-tasking. You have to concentrate on the discussion at hand. I personally think that its useful to be fully engrossed in a meeting than trying to do 3 things in a half-ass way, especially when its a team meeting with 3-4 people where everyone’s input is important. I get more out of these meetings.

Last but not the least, Hrishi is working on this product currently. And I am seeing it grow every week, so it’s pretty personal.

For part-time MBA students or other small disparate teams, I highly recommend video-conferencing. I think there’s a stigma attached because of bad v-con experiences of the early 2000s, but the experience is very different now with the increased network speed. So give it a try…

Bookmarks Dilemma

I had been troubled by bookmarking for a while. I knew the whole thing about social bookmarking through del.icio.us, etc. But I was looking for something seamless, and personal. Currently, I own three computers – the old iBook, the new MacBook Pro and the work Thinkpad. Unfortunately between Windows/ Mac/ PowerPC/ Intel etc its not all consistent. There were some recipes which were on my office computer, something which I bookmarked as ‘lunch-reading’ at my home computer, Haas and business school information was all over the place. The time in trying to re-search this information was making my web experience quite inefficient. The situation is as bad when you re-organize your bookmarks, or delete some of them. It seemed that if I was using at least Firefox across all platforms, then I should have a consistent web experience.

That’s when I found Foxmarks. It’ s a Firefox add-on, which can also be found here.

This product is pretty neat, and most of all it’s seamless. You don’t know that its working for you in the background. When you close your Firefox window, then it updates a central server with all your bookmark information. When you go home, and fire up the Firefox, it automatically updates it with the latest bookmarks. I still do not know if there is a limit to the number of computers you can sync this from. But if anyone is juggling between 3-4 notebooks, this is a great way to have all your bookmarks updated all the time. Yeah, some people can question about the security issues, but it does not bother me so much really…

Get a Free MacBook Pro (well for $416.87)

(This post is not a spam and numerous people with time on their hands have tried this successfully. With that I will I’ll stop defending the legitimacy of this post.)

This was by far the most shady project I had undertaken, but my thought was that an investment of ~$400, could have an upside of $2000 in return. I also knew of a good friend who had successfully received his MacBook Pro (MBP) for $200. My work was not so busy and I was waiting to start with the business school, so I had some time to spare. With this thought, I embarked on this journey sometime in late April.

The summary of the project was – enroll in one of the “get a free macbook pro” offers, read the terms and conditions, re-read the terms and condition, and read them one more time, buy some products, stay enrolled for as long as needed, cancel the offers, fill some more stupid forms and get your MBP. For the benefit of folks stopping by to read about this saga…here are some timelines.

• 4/23 – Registered a new email address. You don’t want to use any regular email for such an offer. This HAS to be a spam email address. even today I get about 70-80 spam email messages every day.
• 4/25,26,27 – Read the terms and conditions. I really read them more than 3-4 times to make sure there were no big loopholes. I kept a copy of the terms and conditions of the program. For my offer, I had to sign-up / buy 21 products and was allowed to cancel only 2 within 60 days. Reading this multiple times also let’s this thing sink in and you realize whether you want to take this highway or not…
• 4/28-4/29 – Made a spreadsheet of the offers that I would enroll in. I started with the Platinum offers, and worked backwards to Gold and Silver offers. Many of the offers are repeated in all the stages, so you want to be careful. My spreadsheet contained the expected $$ each offer would cost me for the required enrollment time. At the end of this analysis, I realized that if I was very careful I could get an MBP for about $400. I also did a worst case analysis that if I slipped by a month on all enrollments, then it would cost me an additional $200 or so. (not too bad huh?)
• 4/30 – I started enrolling in the offers one-by-one, starting with Platinum
• 5/12 – I had enrolled in all the 21 offers. I could only cancel 2 to stay eligible for the offer.
• Some very important things to remember when enrolling for the offers
  • Read the conditions of each offer
  • Make a copy of the terms and conditions
  • On the spreadsheet, maintain each time you communicated with the offering company – enrolling, calling them, sending email for cancellation, etc.
  • Figure out when you can stop the offer legitimately after the minimum enrollment period. Write that date in the spreadsheet. Make an Outlook reminder.
  • As soon as the minimum required time is over – call them up. Cancel.
  • If you don’t cancel, then you might have to spend additional $ on sending refunds, etc. Suddenly this thing can become very stressful. Just be organized.
• 5/12- 7/12 – Keep a track of if the rewarding company (this is the company which sends you the gift, and makes money from people enrolling in the offering companies) is acknowledging the offers you have participated in. Sometimes it can take 2-4 weeks. Typically all this is streamlined, and can be tracked online. I had problems with only 2 offers that had not been reported.
• 7/20 – I got an email from the rewarding company confirming some information. I had send my tax paying status information, notarized. I sent the information the next day. You do have to pay the tax on this gift.
• 7/28 – They sent another form requesting proof of all 21 offers. I gathered all receipts, email confirmations and credit card bills to proof my legitimacy. I made this information so neat, that there was no way they could question me anymore.
• 8/10 – Yeeeaaaaahhhh!!!!! I got a brand new MacBook Pro neatly packed in the beautiful Apple packaging.

Yeah, so I guess if you can be organized and have time on your hand, these offers sometimes work. My total time would have been 50 hours or so, but its a lot of constant attention. Be ready for that. I guess the rewarding company was not too worse off- I am still using 3 of the offers. 3 out of 19 is a pretty good marketing conversion.

If you are reading so far, and would like to try it, then shoot me an email. I could send you the spreadsheet I used to track this mega-saga, and help you get your marketing dream come true