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 !

Something new I did not know about till today ..

The original meaning of the English word “man” (from Proto-Germanic mannaz, “person”) and words derived therefrom was used as a designation for any or all human beings regardless of gender or age. This is the oldest usage of “man”. In Old English the words wer and wyf (also wæpman and wifman) were used to refer to “a male” and “a female” respectively, and the word “man” was gender neutral. (This is still seen even today in certain words. For an example, there is the word “werewolf”, which literally means man-wolf.) Later, in Middle English, “man” displaced wer as the term for male humans, whilst wyfman, which eventually evolved into “woman”, was retained for female humans. Since then, the word “man” has been used to refer both to humanity as a whole (e.g., “Mankind”) and to male humans.

Free Rice is in the news now and I am addicted to it from the moment I read it on Seth’s blog.

Its interactive, fun, educative, immersive and supports a good cause.

I could swim upto level 40 on it but I am happy that the time I spent chasing the road to no town was helping a good cause after all ! I donated around 2000 grains finally. By no means a big measure but a reasonably better way to spend time online compared to my usual searches for youtube content

Hope you will enjoy it like I did !

It is not an easy to thing to write simple and meaningful sentences. I once read a wise quip somewhere:

I first write down my thoughts in a first pass. Right after, I go back and find ways to make it shorter!

Seth Godin did two posts around this thought in the past few days. The first one was about how there are fewer words per sentence now in the most selling books than a few years ago.

The second one was about how attention spans are getting shorter.

I concur that people would like to derive meaning from every minute detail of their lives - every second, every random action, every thought, every person they meet ..and would like to make the most of it. It is, ofcourse, possible to convey such meaning in pithier sentences, fewer sound bytes and shorter time frames.

I cannot help but wonder..
If only there were room for a longer moment, to understand and let communicate what is truly meant and felt inside..we would certainly have more meaningful commercials to begin with. Even better yet, we might have better and deeper relationships to bank upon.

Yeah ,we had a hindu correspondent in campus last week and he was talking to a few bloggers in our college .Myself,sp2hari,suren were there .

And today when i landed up in college ,swami showed me the paper which had my name right on the second column

here are the scanned copy of the paper

I think its pretty cool ,although a link to my blog would have been great. You never know some traffic is welcome .

As a kid growing up in India, I would hear about the Dandaka Aranya, Dwaraka, Gandharva, Tushara etc.

But where exactly on the map of India are they located ? How far are they from each other ?

Here is an awesome map that hopes to answer some of that :

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/EpicIndia.jpg

I had some fun going through some of the names - the ones that got me thinking :
- Andhraka (around Krishna basin)
- Telinga (around Godavari )

I belong to this area and those that do know about the socio-political border dispute going on in the State of Andhra Pradesh between the Telangana and Andhra regions. I did not know those names are derivations of names of ancient kingdoms.