THE Y-AXIS by Rajesh Kumar

It is perhaps a very tough task to write about a company such as Google, which somehow has become part of our daily life in many ways. I recently read David A. Vise's The Google Story after resisting it for quite a while. I had earlier read John Battelle's The Search and left brief comments on this blog, but not quite kept my word to write more about that.Battelle's book is more about the core theme of Google which is search, arguably. He focuses a lot on other 1000 lb gorillas of the net, whereas David Wise is more focused on Google and Google alone. It is perhaps, very tempting, but not an easy task to write about Google as a company. This company did not exist 10 years back, and now commands a market cap of USD 155 BN .(Snapshot taken from Google Finance ). A company such as Microsoft which has been in existence for generations now(yes, in tech world 1975 is several generations) and unquestionbly a pathbreaking pioneer and market leader has an M-cap of about USD 294 B...

14 Nov was billed as World Usability Day.( In India, it has traditionally been celebrated as Children's Day ). So what exactly is the big noise about Usability. Ever come across a gadget you had to struggle to make use of? Or, a door lock that you had to struggle to open because the lock system was so complex? Or, a TV remote that refused to help? Or, the car fob with so many buttons that you do not know all the functions. Well, in the words of World Usability Day website it is all about 'making life easy'. Succintly capturing the dilemna, it says: "Why doesn't this work right? What am I supposed to do with this now?" Usability, undoubtably, is something that affects us in our daily lives. It is about user experience in using a product, rather, the ease of it. Imagine,your cousin gifted you a new mobile but you found navigation so clumsy that you had to put it back in the box and started using the old one. As products get more complex and manufacturers come ...

Internet Explorer version 7.0 (IE 7.0) was recently made available for download by Microsoft . Many users have already made the switch from IE 6.0 to the latest version. Many reviews have been written about it, emphasising on the look and feel. There is a very exhaustive review at Computerworld which readers may like to go through, especially those who are yet to move to this version. Most of these reviews have mentioned about the introductions of tabs as coming in quite late. However, there is a killer of a feature in tabs, that makes your web experience much superior to other browsers such as Opera (I like the pink !) and Firefox , which have had tabs implemented for a while. This is the concept of multiple home pages. So when I start IE 7.0 on my machine, it opens not one but three tabs(see the view) and loads three different sites which I have set as the respective homepages. Likewise, when I am browsing with an tab, and I click on the home icon , it opens three more tabs which lo...

All I wanted to know was BCCI's history, official version and looked up on the web. Unfortunately, I failed.In this age when class VII students(perhaps even younger kids do so) host their own websites, I was astonished that a search for BCCI official website on Google made me no wiser . Am I to believe that world’s richest cricket board does not know what a website is? Yes, I am talking about Board of Control for Cricket in India, the body that governs cricket in India. ICC, or International Cricket Council, has its own official presence on the web . 'Poorer' boards such as Cricket Australia , England and Wales Cricket Board , New Zealand Cricket have their own websites, where they have variety of content pertaining to the game. Pakistan Cricket Board too has a website . Is this not snootyness, or plain and simple disregard for public communication, that an organization that conducts the most popular sport in India does not feel the need for official content on the web(sup...

Google organized Wordmasters Challenge in several cities in India recently (30th September,2006). Word is that close to 3000 people participated in this event. (See Harshad's report on the event here ) The winners are supposed to be declared today.Wonder who won it and what did the winning entries look like. Does anyone have a clue on this? Updated:Nov 9 , 2006:I just decided to send a self-addressed-stamped envelope to Google. If and when I get a response, I will update this post. Updated:Nov 16 , 2006: One week and no response received. Yes, a self-addressed stamped envelope with a covering note was indeed sent to Google's Bangalore office on the address specified in the event leaflet. Snailmailed on 9th Nov. So much for the mission to organise the world's information and make it accessible to everyone :) Updated: Nov 29, 2006: I did send a second letter to Google, this time by courier, assuming the previous postal mail failed to reach them. The contents of my letter to G...

Google has come out with a new service called Docs & Spreadsheets.(The docs part comes from a company called Writely that Google acquired some time back) That left me wondering. Who is the targetted user for this? A person who has a PC and internet access, but not have a word processing programme. Or the roving sales guys? Appears quite an unlikely scenario. Luckily, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is not about word processing or about doing spreadsheets. It is about collaboration, and word processing, if I may say, is just incidental.In typical Google style of understatement, this is quite feature rich, allows multiple users to collaborate on the same doc and mail it off . The 'docs' part is reasonably okay, but I still cannot visualize a scenario where I would use it.It is compatible with other Word Processing such as MS Word and Star Office etc, allows you to save the doc in PDF mode(a good value add). The spreadsheet part, to say the least, is quite sad. As Amit Agarwal ...

Most phone brands nowadays give a software on a CD or through their website that helps you back up your phone data on the PC, transfer music and images, as well as help you synchronize the contacts list with the email programme. These programmes connect your PC/laptop with phone phone through cable, infra-red and Bluetooth. Nokia PC Suite offers all of what I mentioned in the opening sentence. However, I have been using another, less talked about feature on the PC Suite, which I consider the star of the pack. It allows you to type your messages on the PC/laptop screen as you would type anything else, and then send it out to the phone network by transferring it to your phone on one click. Not only that, it will also pick up the phone numbers so you do not have to specify the destination number, only type the name as you have them on your phone, and it would suggest the number by reading from your phone. Want to send to multiple friends, well, this software would give you the same flex...