To all our Telugu and Kannada readers, Happy Ugadi/Yugadi today !

We hope and pray that this year brings for both You & us more knowledge, wealth and resources to share with and care for our loved ones (in our case, it is you again!).

Once more, at WoW, We hope to make this an entertaining and informative Year for you through this portal.

–Uday & Archana Jarajapu

Here is a funny video displayed at CES 2008 celebrating Bill Gates’ last day at work and his work aftermath.

I must say it would be really interesting to see how the likes of Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs or, to stretch a little further, the Google boys - Larry and Sergin would follow that up

Zachary Scheidt of the China Stock Blog wrote an interesting article on how evaluating virtual currencies with respect to real ones creates a few interesting problems to solve.

He takes the example of GA, a buzzing new Virtual world teeming with Chinese gamers, to make his point on whether evaluating virtual currencies is as simple as it looks.

I like what he says here ..

what happens when the currency is virtual, such as in a role playing game with “virtual” goods and services and no physical “real world” transactions taking place. Do the laws of supply and demand still apply?

I believe they still do - only as long as there is value in “saving” the virtual currency in its indigenous shape, however. In other words, if there is a bank out there that pays people interest, no matter how small, for saving their virtual dollars (yemen or sprutzi or bucks or whatever u want to call it), I think there will be a residual value associated with the currency.

The bank may, in turn, double as a marketplace for gamers to trade virtual goods and virtual currencies from one game to another for a ’small’ transaction fee. This will make it a viable revenue model for the bank to sustain on. Also, it can offer ‘virtual loans’ to gamers to be repaid over a fixed time span (real ofcourse ).

The Aha moment arrives, ofcourse, when a gamer walks to the closest food court of grocery store and swipes his thumb to pay for his food from his virtual bank account. Now, THAT would turn more than a few eyeballs.

We spent the new years’ eve at Sandadi 2008 listening to live Telugu Music from the new & happening band - Aavakai.

They are also known as “drumstix” in the non-telugu speaking community and produce live entertainment shows and concerts in Telugu and Hindi. Surya & Sushmitha, the founders of Aavakai, are good friends of ours. Surya is the talented musician that tied the band together while Sushmitha manages their rather large group of talented musicians.

The response for Sandadi 2008 was tremendous but the place was a little too crammed for 500+ people. But what would you do when you are only on your second show as a band and are already sold out completely ? You try and deliver your best. And that is what Aavakai did. They chose a wide variety of Telugu songs and tried to reach out to the whole Audience.

Dinner and drinks were served at the Sandadi 2008 venue as well. The Food from Peacock India was good. All in all, the Audience seemed to have a blast at Sandadi 2008 and were up on their feet through out the event.

We enjoyed the electric ambience of Sandadi 2008 as much as everybody but felt that the true musical depth of this band has not been presented last night. To be honest, I liked their debut better than Sandadi 2008 , the New Year event. I hope they will continue to improvise, perform, enthuse and enthrall the bay area audience going into 2008 and for many more years to come.

A DARPA funded project has found an allegedly benign way to fight sleep deprivation. Cant get em loved ones to sleep? No problem…Just tell em you love em and mix a little Orexin with the morning coffee…

Oh! and make sure you got it labelled properly so you donot mix it with Sugar or Salt (or Cooking Soda).

Its the Year end and Thank you notes are in the air. Suddenly, the whole world feels like Paris.

I donot know if I have said this before (and I donot think I say it enough) but…

Thank You for being such wonderful readers. Your continued audience(ship) is why we write and your feedback means a lot to us. Not head over the heels lot but a little-smile-with-morning-coffee lot :). Yes, your votes, comments and email do cheer us up…sometimes even make our ‘the bad days’ better.

On the word of Thanks, Apple is thanking God for Japan while American stock markets seems to be thanking God for Steve Jobs’ continual love saga with his half-eaten fruit.

The Year end is here. You know what to expect

You must be getting tired of going through all those lists being published. Both the mainstream media and the blogosphere take their own pleasure in sifting through the year using some crazy new list.

Here is a nice list on the most influential webbies that Forbes did, which I liked.

The www is ever changing and ever growing. You would think fame on such a fast changing system is short lived. well, guess again !

The Forbes list says nearly half of 2006 toppers did not make it to this one. Well, I am surprised that even the other half made it :). The list is relevant too. However, it might be interesting to know what the criterion for the list is.

Do they use Google Trends or some sort of a people search engine ?