The Android-Chrome merger saga
Articles with the following titles would be considered a joke 1. “BMW is planning to merge its series i5 cars and Motorrad bikes” 2. “P&G is planning to merge tissue paper and toilet paper” 3. “Arm and Hammer is […]
Startup valuations
In 2001, Amazon’s share price crashed from 100$ to 6$, they had to do a 15% layoff. But it was Jeff Bezos’s perseverance, tenacity and grit because of which Amazon survived. As several startups from the Bay area to Bangalore get a mark-down […]
Voice Interfaces: The Missing User Interaction Element
Apple Siri, Google Now, Amazon Echo, and Microsoft Cortana have garnered a lot of press lately. But one thing which is still missing out is voice-native user experience. Let me illustrate that with the evolution of user experience on touchscreens. […]
File size should always be of “long” type
int getTextFileSize(String fileName) { return (int) (new File(BASE_DIR, fileName).length(); // WRONG } A 32-bit signed int can deal with ~2GB worth of data. And if your code is not going to deal with files larger than 2GB, why worry? But what […]
Standardization
Standards exist so that products from different vendors can interoperate with each other, for example, sending email from Gmail to Yahoo! mail, and use common interfaces, for example, sockets for electrical appliances. The standardization does not always have to come from […]
When marketplaces work and when they don’t
Thanks to Uber’s meteoric rise in valuation, several startups are trying to mimic the idea of building marketplaces with instant gratification. So much so, that there is an aptly titled poem, “Uber for X“, devoted to this. Though the jury is still […]
Thoughts on Tizen
Users won’t buy a phone till they know that their basic set of apps is available on the device. That pretty much rules out players like BlackBerry 10, Jolla, Ubuntu OS, and Firefox OS. Even Microsoft is still struggling. OEMs like Samsung, HTC, LG, and […]
“Material design” and Google’s strategy
Android Before 2008, smartphones OS market was fragmented. There were a few big names like Palm and Symbian, but most phone manufacturers were doing their custom operating systems. For example, Motorola alone had five operating systems. In 2008, Google came out with an […]
Thoughts on Bitcoin (part 2)
Here is a summary of things that have happened since I wrote the previous Bitcoin blog post.
Internet activists, the advent of snap judgement and Internet’s permanence
In 2013, we saw how internet activists’ snap judgments about the interpretation (or misinterpretation?) of jokes at pycon destroyed the professional career of two individuals (Source: A Dongle Joke That Spiraled Way Out Of Control). The internet activism first sympathized […]