Weekend Alas!!

From complete joblessness to a maximum workload, the shift happened smoothly, silently and extremely swiftly, inflicting a killer blow on all my plans, time and everything else.

So Friday was indeed very welcome, with prospects of an AZAADI night at Inflation, an indian disc. But ofcourse it took quite a while before i realised that my plans had been changed. Some issues that cropped up in our testing kept us at work till 2 AM on Saturday.
Things were just as good on Saturday, with me ending up in a theatre in the evening watching "Mangal Pandey".

The movie by no stretch of imagination seemed like a product of 15 years of research and 2 years of production. Aamir khan's splendid acting albeit the movie had little or nothing to offer. It was good in patches, but definitely did not deliver as expected. I probably raised the bar a bit too high. AR Rehman has done a good job as usual, but the songs were mostly unnecessary in the context of the movie and definitely got their timing wrong. So all in all, yet another movie where the less said the better.

Things showed no signs of improvement on Sunday, with me spending a good portion of my time in the office.

On the bright side, we did manage to get ourselves tickets for the AR Rehman show in Rod Laver Arena in September.

Zopa

"Zopa is a term taken from business theory. It stands for Zone of Possible Agreement and is the overlap between one person’s bottom line (the lowest they’re prepared to get for something) and another person’s top line (the most they’re prepared to give for something). It’s the way people negotiate all sorts of stuff - buying a car, getting a mortgage - even a teenager negotiating with parents about staying out late. If there’s no Zopa, there’s no deal. " - Thats what the Site has to offer in terms of explaining the term Zopa.

Its an idea thats very much in tune with whats happening around us. Its a revolutionary concept which aims at making some of the most basic purposes served by banks redundant.

Here's what they say about themselves :

" Here's the way the world works (and it must be right because it's been like this for hundreds of years...)

People who have spare money give it to a bank. Banks then do whatever they like with it. Some of it they lend to people who need to borrow. Some of it they give to their shareholders. Some of it they gamble on the price of tin, or the dollar going down, or whether there'll be floods in Asia. Banks make lots of money from all this, a fraction of which they give back to their customers.

Zopa though lets people who have spare money to lend it directly to people, like them, who want to borrow it. No bank in the middle, no huge overheads, no unethical investments.

To minimise any risk, the money each lender puts in is spread amongst at least 50 borrowers (and likewise each borrower gets their money from a number of different lenders).

Zopa is, therefore, for people who want to be a part of something new. Who want to join a community of like-minded individuals and lend to them and borrow from them in a trusting but secure way.

Zopa is for people who are looking for a better rate of return. Zopa’s interest rates aren’t squeezed by middlemen (the banks) because there are no middlemen - that’s the Zopa idea.

Zopa is for creditworthy people who earn money in new ways, in ways that banks don’t always recognise. People who are self employed, people who have peaks and troughs to their income, people who would be invisible to a bank’s credit rating system but are seen and validated by Zopa’s."

iSkoot brings Skype to your cellphone

With Skype making its code available to other SPs to provide services over skype, the possibilities of services that can be delivered are many. This has pushed Skype onto a new frontier : Mobile phones.

With a $10 a year software rental charges, iSkoot is offering long distance calls to any Skype user for nothing more than the cost of local air time to dial up from your mobile to your broadband connected home computer.

The idea is similar to making a call through your company's conference bridge or VOIP line or a normal calling card. Just that you'll need to dial into your own computer rather than the conference bridge number or calling card number.

The iSkoot founder, Jacob Guedalia, said his vision was to ''enable the individual to become his own long-distance carrier" by routing calls over a home or office computer connection, instead of AT&T or Sprint.

More worries for telecom companies!!!

The Battle is On

Microsoft has not taken time to respond to Google's Hompage.

Click on the title of this blog or on the links section for the link to their "Start" page, which owes much of its look and feel to the Google homepage. Nothing whatsoever on the page to indicate its a Microsoft page though, but for the small MSN icon on the top corner of your browser window.

Technorati goes Mobile

David Stifry Technorati's CEO informs us in his blog that Technorati has been optimized for mobiles.

For those who can try it out : http://mobile.technorati.com

IPTV

The economist has an article on IPTV - a direction in which most traditional telecom players seem to be moving in.

With major cable firms enticing customers with a "Triple-play bundle" of TV, Broadband and telephony services, Mobile operators and thirdly VOIP providers.

IPTV is the last ditch effort from Telecom providers to stay in the race. There seem to be lots of legal and technical hurdles for now between them and IPTV.

But assuming they do provide users with the required bandwidth, will they be able to ensure that the user is not putting the available bandwidth to buy third party services from other providers.

"If you cant beat them, join them.", thats the strategy some others like the indian Telecom giant VSNL are adopting. VSNL plans to buy Teleglobe, the worlds largest VOIP Provider.

"Every big telecoms firm is investing to migrate from old, circuit-switched networks to new internet-based ones, with Britain's BT probably moving fastest."

With BT, Verizon, SBC all taking their first steps towards IPTV. We should hope to hear and see more of it very soon.

Terms to look out for: NGN, IMS ...