It looks like values are the last thing on mind in the M & A scene. Webfives, a company that specializes in the video & music sharing through mobile phones market, got bought over by a big company called Microsoft. ughh umm.

I love some Microsoft products like Excel and the idea that it saw value in and acquired a smaller company like Webfives but it is hard to understand why they have to shut down the current service itself.

This throws a direct contrast to what Google did with YouTube, despite taking over it almost an year ago. They made sure that the synergy worked well to create a better video search, a core Google function. At the same time, they continuously improved YouTube to make it more engaging and immersive.

They could have argued that YouTube infrastructure or staff is a redundant expense that needed to be shut down. But, they respected the differences and let both cultures bloom by working together. Now, that is a much smarter merger.

I wanted to do this post on top hindi movie dialogues and quotes in 2006 for some very long time. Now that 2007 is drawing to a close and we are running out of time, I decided to blog some of the best hindi movie quotes in 2006. better late than never ..what do you say/think ?

3. Pyar Aur Maut

This one is from Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. Amitabh plays the playboy father-in-law who breaks down when he realizes that his daughter-in-law is cheating on his son, but never opens his mouth before his son after an oath. Eventually, he becomes sick and prepares to die in silence.

He plays some very meaningful last minutes on his death bed, with his daughter-in-law on his side, where he renders this powerful sentence very casually.

Pyar aur Maut unbulaye Mahman hothe hai beta. Un dono pe kisee ko adhikaar nahee hotha.

[Love and Death are uninvited guests, my dear. No one has control over them.]

Saying so, he calmly advises his daughter-in-law to leave his son and do herself a favor.

2. Vinamratha !

This did not have the same seepage as our #1 but the ingrained irony is great! Coming from the same movie (Lage Raho Munnabhai - 2006), Vinamratha is the Sanskrit word for politeness. This is the way Arshad Warsi thinks his goon boss Munnabhai can win the heart of the movie’s leading lady - a Radio Jockie played by Vidya Balan of Parineeta fame.

But what cracks up the audience is how Munnabhai bashes up some characters in the movie to bring them to senses and tells his love interest that he tried to use ‘Vinamratha’ to win their hearts.

‘Usko maar peet ke Samjhatha tho woh thoodee mantha. Vinamratha se Samjhaya Na!’

[ If I bet him up or bashed him (which he does already), he would not listen at all. That is why, I taught him with ‘Politeness’ ]

The undercurrent of this dialogue runs directly against the core of the movie but also represents the initial conflict that the lead role Munnabhai goes through to change his inner self.

1. Gandhigiri !

This catch-phrase presented the whole era of Gandhian ideology in a new light in ‘Lage Raho MunnaBhai’, the runaway hit of 2006.
Munnabhai, the goon, is guided by his inner voice (and his recent reading spree on Gandhian ideals) to leave Gundagiri (goon lifestyle) and adopt the much harder path of non-violence, truth and peaceful resistance to injustice, coined in one simple, catchy phrase that he comes up with - ‘Gandhigiri’ !

Gundagiri tho koyee bhee kar saktha Hai ! Kya thum mere maarg par chal sakthe ho? Uska Naam hai Gandhigiri !

[Any one can lead the lifestyle of a goon. Can you follow my path? It is called Gandhigiri !
- Munnabhai’s inner voice, dressed as Gandhi, speaking to him]

The idea struck a cord with hoards of crowds that were drawn to the theatres to watch this movie. People in India started using this in their protest marches as a new way to draw attention & press. Even Indian immigrants in US of A chose to send flowers to the consulate general in a floral protest against a change of rules that could have delayed their green cards for a long time!

All of a sudden, there was a new way to protest from the streets of Calcutta to our capital D.C. ! Now, THAT is a Hindi dialogue/quote/phrase ingrained into popular culture !

These are the ones I could remember. If you can recall more, hook me up please

Someone from madpilot.com.au left a weird comment on one of the posts that taggy did a few days ago.

The post was about how taggy used twitter to post cricket scores to his friends who are interested in tracking them on their mobile phones.

The comment was surprisingly relevant but was bordering on spam, considering the fact that it was very abstract, not to the point and was likely generated by some spa-m-achine.

Nice Work!

That is what is great about the internet, other people taking your ideas and molding them into something that is useful for them.

Fantastic!

Nonetheless, I decided to check out the website. So, I decided to type in the url (instead of clicking on the link) and went to their site. It turns out that they have some pretty cool products!!

One of them that really fascinated me enough to sign up was their social version of a time tracking system called …

Twitter was always fun and now iam starting to do some things with it .

Inspired from Myles ,but his work was in ruby and i dont know much of it and iam lot comfortable with python .

so here is how you can get all the cricket updates of india matches right on your mobile when you are out roaming or on your gtalk while the cricket sites are banned in office .

• Login to your twitter account at http://twitter.com
• go to http://twitter.com/meninblue and choose the follow option
• or if you are logged in to your gmail,gtalk then give ” Follow meninbue” command and you should be receiving my updates
• And yes if you want to have the scores on your mob ,then dont forget to give out the phone details in the account section

And i must warn you ,this script runs every 2 min so incase you dont want to be spammed ,follow only when you are comfortable with it !

http://twitter.com/meninblue

and thanks to sp2hari for helping out with html parsing and 2s for telling me about XPATH ,i figured out html parsing is lot tougher than XPATH and would definitely recommend it more than html parsers !.

And yes ,dont be surprised if some posts are truncated ,twitter allows only 140 chars and so i had to truncate the commentary else, it wont get posted !

PS:the libraries used are twitter,urllib,urllib2,sgmlib and XPATH ,source code will be up here soon,or if u want it then mail me at theyaga@gmail.com. will mail u the code

I have been mucking around this portal called Moola for sometime today and it makes perfect sense to me - as a revenue model and as a business model. Check it out! you might be in for a surprise !

You play in a death match mode, pitted against another player of similar level and the woo is doubling your cash reserves everytime you win ! Lose though, and you lose it all !

Essentially, that means moola needs to give away only a penny per user from its cash reserves. Unless, ofcourse, you lose your penny like I did and chose to invite friends or tell them where you live!

Given today’s CTR of 1-2%, I would say this model has a pretty good chance of being successful. The flash interface is pretty cool too! (tuh-da-da, Moola makes me lose control…:| )

Amazon launched Kindle, its version of the electronic book reader yesterday in a fancy NY setup that reminds us of the recent Apple Keynote where the iPhone was launched. Jeff Bezos seems to have done a good job explaining the features of the Kindle, if the blogosphere is some indication. It may lack the glamor of a Steve Jobs keynote but that is an entirely different conversation.

In the first day of the launch, there were some very strong,polarized opinions on the future of the Kindle. Some thought it was cool because of the seamless Amazon service and the sprint EVODO connection that it was bundled with. Some thought it looked like the next generation etch-a-sketch.

Some authors and publishers wanted to be in it and some say ‘no way Jose’ (or is it Jezos? J Bezos? Jeff Bezos? Get it? … ).

Regardless, I think the Kindle is the start of the digitization era for the last bastion of analog technology - books and print media. I like how the EVODO service was bundled into the device but donot like how you would have to pay to read blogs that you would otherwise get on the Internet for free.

All in all, from the reviews and press notes, I think the Kindle scored well in terms of screen readability and seamless uploads through the Sprint EVODO connection. It lost a few marks on User interface design and may lose big time on trying to make people pay for free content.

Most of all, I think it will create a market long forgotten till the Sony e-reader came out - the digital reader segment. Hopefully, this will push the iPhone and other portable devices into creating a better reader experience. To Kindle and beyond !

Excerpts From the Publishers Weekly review as published on the Amazon web page ..

Yet another easily digestible social marketplace commentary from the blogger/author who penned Purple Cow and Small is the New Big, Godin prescribes a cleverly counter-intuitive way to approach one’s potential for success.

Smart, honest, and refreshingly free of self-help posturing, this primer on winning-through-quitting is at once motivational and comically indifferent, making the lofty goal of “becoming the best in the world” an achievable proposition-all you need is to “start doing some quitting.” The secret to “strategic quitting” is seeking, understanding and embracing “the Dip,” “the long slog between starting and mastery” in which those without the determination or will find themselves burning out.