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Friday, May 29, 2009

Short film - SIGNS

Very Cute short film.


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Thursday, May 28, 2009

Google [Success Stories -1]

I m planning to write about some of the successful ventures and starting with the story of Google.

How it started...
The founders of Google didn't intend to create a search engine, when they started. In the year 1995, two Ph.D students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, decided to work on someting interesting for their Ph.D research project. They worked on understanding the Mathematical properties of the links in the world wide web pages. They designed an efficient web crawler and a page rank algorithm for this project.

When analyzing the results of their research product, it occured to them that a search engine based on this Page Ranking algorithm would give better results when compared to some of the search techniques that were available then.

Thus the research project evolved into a Web Search Engine. They named their company as Google Inc.

Initially they ran this new search engine under their university domain and on September 4, 1998 they started the company Google Inc in a friend's garage.


Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin


The First break
By the end of 1998, their crawler had crawled about 60 million pages but at that time there were several other popular search engines like Yahoo, Hotbot, Excite.com, Lycos etc. The same year, an article in Salon.com praised Google's search results were better than its competitors. This feeling spread, and that time period was the beginning of the dot-com bubble and Google's this search technique was seen as the future of the Web search. The rest is history!!!
Google's Home page in 1998

Google's Revenue and Growth...

as Google Search became more and more popular among the users, they introduced sponsored ads in their search results. These advertisements based upon the keywords turned out to be the treasure for Google as it constitute major portion of their revenue.

During early 2000s when many other dot-com companies were suffering to generate cash flow, Google was growing in both popularity and revenue.

The company went public on August 19, 2004 giving Google a market value of about US$23 billion.

Today's stature
They didn't stop with the search engine. They acquired Blogger (a web blog hosting company). Then they came with GMail, collaborative service named Google Docs and Spreadsheets and lot more.

Today the brand Google is one among the very few popular software companies in the world. They have achieved this in just 10 years.

Lesson for start-ups :
# Google efficiently solved a problem of the Internet users and had a powerful business model on that.
# Google was not the first to invent the web Search Engine but they were the best in that.

if you have any points/facts to add, please feel free to post them as comments. I will add them to the post.

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Google Suggestion and Bill Gates Daughter

Today, to search some information I was typing "Bill Gates" in the Google's text box, and the moment I typed the character 's', Google suggestions were shown in which the first option was "Bill Gates Daughter" that had more than 1.4 million results!!!!
This is intereting. Gate's daughter seems to be more popular than Gates foundation ,history, biography and everything associated with him ;-)

Most interesting part is that this popular daugher of Bill Gates is not his real daughter. One or two years back, the girl in the below image was rumored to be the Gates daughter. There were plenty of mail forwards with these images.


ahh... now you must be knowing why Gates Daughter (this rumored daughter) is more popular than him.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

100 Great Personalities in one Painting

Found this great picture in Anand Nataraj's blog. There are more than 100 world known Great Personalities in this one painting. Amazing work by the artist. (Click on the image to view the clear image)


I was able to find very few in this picture.
  1. Lenin
  2. Bill Gates
  3. Pele
  4. Adolf Hitler
  5. Charlie Chaplin
  6. Vladimir Putin
  7. Saddam Hussein
  8. Bill Clinton
  9. Einstein
  10. Shakespeare
  11. Winston Churchill
  12. Bruce lee
  13. Abraham Lincoln
  14. Mahatma Gandhi
  15. Che Guevara
  16. Fidel Castro
  17. Marlon Brando
  18. Yassar Arafat
  19. George W Bush
  20. Prince Charles
  21. Mother Theresa
  22. Aristotle
  23. Michael Jordan
  24. Mike Tyson
  25. Osama Bin Laden
  26. Jackie Chan
so this means I am about 25% informed!!!
Not Bad [:-)]

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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Chennai traffic and Pollution

Every time when I drive in Chennai, I see at least one out of ten vehicles emitting too much of smoke. Most of these vehicles just look like the popular Kosu Marundhu Vandi (Mosquito Fog Truck)

We all talk about the health problems because of smoking in public places but no one seems to be bothered about the equally dangerous hazards with this vehicle smoke.

Its really sad to see even the vehicles that are used for commercial purpose (autos, sumos, taxis), in such bad conditions. Their owners should be kicked off. They earn all their bread and butter from these vehicles, but still they don't bother anything about the vehicle (and the environment).

This is yet another problem, where the public should realize their responsibilities.

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Friday, May 22, 2009

How the Vodafone ZooZoo ads were made? - Behind Scenes Videos...

I knew the ZooZoo characters in the recent Vodafone ads were not animated ones, but are real human beings wrapped in that white costume. Below is one of the behind-scenes video (Chhota Credit) on how the ad was made.


There are few more videos available in the YouTube site.

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Friday, May 15, 2009

few reasons why IPL 2 is not that exciting..

Few matches in this IPL 2 , were really interesting, with all the thrills of a T20 match.
Few big runs scored... Plenty of big sixes hit... some good catches taken.. and lot more...

but still I find this IPL 2, not that exciting for following reasons:
  1. not being played in India
  2. bad weather conditions during the starting of the tournament
  3. the strategy break
  4. Dugout Interviews - just when something exciting happens at the pitch
  5. DLF maximum and Citi moments of success - too much of jun-gu-cha for the sponsors
  6. Mandhira
  7. Ranjit Fernando
  8. Rameez Raja


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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

few things you will have to know about Gratuity...

What is Gratuity?

This is the cash amount given by the Employers to its resigning/retiring employees who had served their organizations for more than 5 years time. This is something like a cash reward from the employers to its loyal employees.

In early days, only few generous organizations gave gratuity to its employees, but later the Government made this mandatory (the Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972) for all employers with more than 10 employees.


When will you be eligible for the Gratuity?

Only those who are hired on company payroll as Employees and have worked for more than 5 years will be eligible for this Gratuity amount. It is to be noted that the training period (if any before the allotment letter) will not be considered for the service period.
It is always better to discuss this with the concerned persons, when joining an organization.


What will be the gratuity amount?

Gratuity amount will be calculated based on the daily salary (Basic+All Allowances) during the time of retirement/resignation. As per the Government act, Gratuity amount is the 15 days daily salary multiplied by the number of years worked in that organization.

Assume your monthly salary is 25,000/- per month and your company normally has 25 working days/month, which makes the daily salary to be Rs. 1000/-. Hence after 5 years of service, the graduity amount would be 1000 x 15 x 5 = Rs.75000/-


Will there be any tax on this gratuity amount?

For employees working for private organizations, the gratuity amount up to Rs.350000/- is free from tax. However for Government employees this limit does not exist - i,e. any amount is non-taxable.

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Monday, May 11, 2009

The New Google Chrome TV ad...

This is the new TV advertising campaign from Google to promote its web browser - Google Chrome. This ad is being shown across some parts of the US



Google Chrome made some impact when it was launched, but after that I feel it had failed to some extent to its competitors like Internet Explorer and Firefox. I think for this reason, Google have got into this traditional advertising - which they had avoided for many years.

According to the Google team, this ad was made as a fun project by the Google Japan team but was later planned to be used for TV ads.

The ad looks nice!!

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Thursday, May 07, 2009

The Vodafone ads - ZooZoos

For the first time, when I saw one of these Vodafone Ads (all family members screams on seeing the mother trying some beauty tips) I was so irritated. I thought last year, during the IPL, Vodafone had good ads - i,e the small dog pug running behind a small girl.


but the next few ads featuring these white funny egg-like-head shaped cartoon characters, were really attractive. These characters are named "ZooZoos" - good name indeed.

These ZooZoos characters and the ads are created by O&M Ad agency for Vodafone, to create some awareness about some of the value-added services offered by the phone company. According to the ad company, they have planned to launch one ad everyday during the IPL season 2.

The most interesting part in this ad is that these ZooZoos characters are not animated characters!!! They are real human beings (mostly thin women) dressed up in white dress stuffed with foam.

once again, Vodafone have made some catchy advertisements!

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Tuesday, May 05, 2009

IPL 2009

IPL 2009 have reached the interesting phase. One single win take a team to the top slot and one loss take another team to the second half of the poits table. Hope the tournament gets more interesting in the coming days.

When every teams are trying their best to rech the semi-finals, its very sad that Kolkata Knight Riders are almost out of the tournament. They do have some of the best players in the game, but unfortunately it didn't click for them this time too.


News say that the Kolkatta Knight Riders' coach wants more than 4 players in his playing 11. If this is true - can someone please tell him that this is suppose to be Indian Premier League!!!

Even if the KKKR team have missed to make some mark this year, this blogger who calls himself as a fake IPL player from the KKKR team, have certainly made his precense felt in the blog space.

Here are some the best from his latest blog

While our fielding coach was busy browsing naukri.com....

I am waiting for the day Bhookha blames global warming for our performance.

We wake up, go to the ground, get bashed around, return, go to sleep, wake up, fly into another city, get bashed around again, go to sleep... and the sequence continues.
very funny!!!

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Friday, May 01, 2009

SRK's good gesture


First of all, I don't know why only in mumbai the voting marks are kept in the middle finger.

and almost every celebrities who came out of the voting booths, showed their middle finger - which also gives some other meaning.

However there was one exception, Our King Khan SRK. Instead of showing the middle finger, he showed the entire hand to the photographers.

...and when his team is losing in IPL at South Africa, this is a real good show from SRK!!!

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How to run PostgreSQL under an administrator account in windows?

Earlier PostgreSQL will not run under any administrator account in Windows computer for some security reasons. However after 8.2 release it is possible to start the database under any administrator account as follows:

1. Open a command prompt and go to PostgreSQL_Home\Bin folder.

2. Execute the below command to initialize the database
initdb.exe -D PostgreSQL_Home\data

3. Execute the below command to start the database server
"pg_ctl.exe" start -D " PostgreSQL_Home\data"


Now the PostgreSQL server will start, even when the currently logged in user is an adminsitrator.

However now I am seeing nearly five instances of Postgress.exe in my task manager - well another problem to solve for tomorrow :-)

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