Sony Reader!

Sony came up with a fabulous idea and I found it very intuitive.. A e-book reader!! This probably is not as big a breakthrough as a walkman, but I am sure it addresses a very big need. I will surely go out to a Sony store and check it out. Books have always been a pain to read on a computer! First and foremost my computer screen is too bright..all screens seem to affect me no matter what I do with the brightness and secondly I really cannot carry my desktop monitor to my bed, not even my laptop (thats where i read most of my books).

This book reader from Sony is surely going to be helpful, but I will wait for the rate tag to dip a little bit or should I say byte :)..It is around $400 which is a ridiculous price for this! If it had been from the apple stable, I would have probably paid that! ( It would atleast be aesthetically stimulating :)). Being from Sony, their UI sucks big time..The only good design I saw from them was their VAIO. Actually, I would love it if Apple could give us a book reader..Somehow PDFs and iPODs share some common area in my brain as Apple just seems to make "sleek and organized" products at the same time :) and that is what a book reader should be...sleek, organized and light.

Here is the link for Sony Book Reader just in case you want to see it! It looks ok on their website but looks a lot more clunkier in the picture above. Hopefully it is atleast as beautiful as on the website and hopefully it has a light in it so that I can read a book on a flight or well .. without disturbing my wife in the night :). I know if Apple had come out with this, it would have all this and even more.

Successful = Confidently Ignorant

All you need in this world is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure

-- Mark Twain


I didn't say that, but I surely believe in it! "Ignorance is bliss", not because not knowing makes you a better person but because the fact that you don't know it allows you to learn it..allows you to grow as an individual. But, learning can only come when we are confident about what we "don't" know! It is so very easy to stay confident or act confident about something that you know thoroughly, but exercising the same composure in times of duress i.e (when we almost don't know anything about something) is not too easy..but, the fruits of doing so are just very sweet. I just remembered something from a movie I was watching last night.."If you want to enjoy the rainbow, you have to withstand the rain" (Well, I like both rain and the rainbow .. I guess rain is not too high on everybody's list :))

Well, to end this I will say embrace Ignorance with both hands and more if you have more than 2 ;)..flaunt your ignorance because it will make you more comfortable with it and then go ahead and learn! A little after that pick up something else, flaunt it and learn about it..that is the recipe for success!!

What would life be without learning..A growing body without a growing mind is the worst disease for anybody...

Creative ?

Advertising never stops to amaze me!

Some are funny, some are creative, some have a very good feel to them, some you remember because you hate them so much and some of them are just very creatively located !!

I was browsing and ran across this one. Hope you guys like it too! This is a German Ad for a job website and is located on vending machine. I have never seen anything this creative on a vending machine. All I see is an occasional splash of letters in different colors!

Btw, if you have time and if you are in a setup where you can laugh loudly, do look at this website. Some ads here had me in splits ::D :D :D

http://veryfunnyads.com/

Enjoy Life when it seems too short :). When it seems too long, just get some good friends around!

Howzzat??

My wife sent me out on an errand to get her some "anti-dandruff" shampoo and I happily trotted out of our small, humble apartment. I went to Walgreens that is almost nextdoor and went to their shampoo section and I started looking ... looking, I am still looking ... and then found her a shampoo! and then I looked, looked .... .. to see if I could find something better i.e a better "anti-dandruff" shampoo! The whole process probably took me 10-15 minutes which is a lot considering the fact that I live in an internet age where product listings are made on the click of a button! I wondered for a second if I was spending my time wisely? How would it be if I could do execute my manual searches the way I did them on the internet..
For my current scenario, I would have searched for dandruff shampoos on the internet on any site like Amazon.com and I would get back a set of results.
This is possible because products are associated with attributes before being stored as inventory on the internet, but that is not the case in the real world...This made me think...
Can we make our real world as convenient as the e-world? I think we can! RFIDs can be used to do this...Product manufacturers when they make a product can associate it with attributes and product displayers at the retail outlets should be able to read and understand them. Attributes can be classified as one major, 4 or any other wise number of minor attributes. Retail shops can have search assistants alongside products and customers can use the search assistants to enter what they want. If the search criteria matches with the "major" attribute of the product, it glows in red and if it matches with a minor attribute, it can glow in green. If the search criteria doesn't match anything, then of course status quo! no glowing or anything...

This whole situation would be a win-win, if done efficiently. Customers would ofcourse benefit from superior service and would have a lot of extra time in their lives to invest on something better (hopefully they aren't couch potatoes!!). Manufacturers can differentiate their offerings better and gain over competition..They can introduce a product and play with the product attributes and see how they can position their products better. Having a fixed number of attributes is important because product manufacturers would end up advertising their offerings for everybody...(Everything for everybody would make life even more confusing..)
Search providers like Google can get into this space and provide personal search assistants and kind of extend their Adwords program to the retail world..i.e take a commission from product manufacturers for selling a product through the device!

Hope this idea catches steam some time, and some day, some time, we will have this world somewhat better...But, what will people do with that extra time they save??..Now, that is a question to ask :)..Maybe, think about making life more efficient and sensible? Life surely changes..Thoughts of today might be norms tomorrow!