When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Amazon’s founder & CEO Jeff Bezos:
Last week I rode a seaplane (plane which takes off & lands on water) at Seattle downtown area and spent about 30 minutes over Seattle skies at low altitude.
Though it looks cool, it takes time to adjust in these smaller planes. These are unstable (compare to typical cross continent passenger one) and windy Seattle makes it more interesting( read as scary!).
Overall I enjoyed the flight with my family. Some more pics here.
If you ever had a Windows XP desktop, i am sure you remember this wallpaper, which was default wallpaper on XP machines.
This weekend, we drove to place called Palouse in Washington and found this… we actually discovered our desktop scene for real. It was a ‘Window’ to a great new world with miles long fields (no clue what they were growing in the fields, looks like fodder for cows, miles long!!).
It was serene, calm and breadth taking. Had a great time!
In startup world, we expect entrepreneur to be obsessed with his/her own products or offering. But what does it mean when you are falling in love with your competitor’s product?
No, I am not talking about phones here, but I think this would be applicable on them as well
Few things to infer:
What can you do now!
Have you been in love with your own competitor’s product? How did you dealt with it? Add your comments below.
You can also follow me at twitter @ruchitgarg
I discovered something amazing about Amazon.com this morning, while I was watching this interesting presentation on design treasures of Amazon.
Amazon.com makes $19billion every year and have total customer base which is larger than the populations of some countries combined and is known for its excellence in running experiments online based on customer behavior.
While the presentation overall is a great presentation to listen about design techniques, something caught my attention, a slide called Amazon’s ‘Negative Operating Cycle’.
Above explains the fact that why Amazon can sell products like iPod cheaper than most of the other companies including Apple itself.
Secret lies in the fact that Amazon can sell its product faster than BestBuy (for example) and uses the positive cash float to make money. What that means is they can take no-profit on most of their product and can still make money.
Interesting concept, maybe very common in practice n term in retail business, but very interesting to me. What do you feel about this?
Ever since I have been using IE8, one thing which annoys me is the dialog box below. Every single click ( almost) I get to see this and I have to click one additional button.
It’s a prompt for a potential Security issue, and I love that IE cares about security of my machine and data on it. But I really don’t like this message popping up all the time.
So I figured out a way to disable it
1. Go to Tools->Internet Options->Security
2. Select the ‘Security’ tab
3. Click the ‘Custom Level’ button
4. In the ‘Miscellaneous’ section change “Display mixed content” to ‘Enable’
I know that this makes my machine potentially vulnerable, but then, you know, I am a risk taker….
Thanks to my friend who helped with this setting.
I have my internet wireless router kept 2 rooms away from my usual working location at home here in Redmond, WA. I decided to run speedtest on my internet connectivity at home![783983213[2]](http://blog.siliconverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/7839832132.png "783983213[2]")
and I am surprised.
You are reading it right, these are real internet numbers and not because of some error.
My another machine which is connected over wire, shows much better numbers
![783998361[1]](http://blog.siliconverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/7839983611.png "783998361[1]")
Then I asked Vishwa who lives in Pune, India to run the same test on his connection and below is what he found. Ironically, he was getting this poor internet speed at Pune IT park.
![783994056[1]](http://blog.siliconverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/7839940561.png "783994056[1]")
Update: A friend of mine told me that, most of the internet service providers in USA do a trick so that when someone performs a speed test like i did using the site, numbers are high! Whenever you open a site, first few incoming/outgoing bytes from a new site will be marked for faster delivery and then packet speed for the later goes down slowly. This would make most of the speed test results inaccurate which are based on the first few byte test.
Yesterday night was graduation night for the Founder Institute Seattle chapter.
Proud moment for everyone involved. 16 companies got incorporated (Puzzles to PetCare to Satellite device for adventure tourists to music search, education online……)
Great Food, Great Pitches and some great advice from Adeo made evening perfect.
Congratulations graduates! Miles to go….
Few days back I started a survey to find if people really like facebook or twitter logins to log into other sites.
There are some great Facts & Figures available about the facebook, but then there was not enough data which conveys user sentiment if they want to use facebook based login to various other sites who implement facebook connect.
Results are here, and below is the data from this survey (all figures below are %)
Geographic distribution of survey participants
As expected most of them are using Facebook and some people use twitter as well
When asked about how often they visit facebook? Most of the people visit facebook pages multiple time in a day
Most of the people use facebook for personal needs than for business
I wanted to find what personality survey respondent have. Is she someone who jumps on whatever comes in front of her, like signing up for a new portal without reading much detail about it . My exact questions was “You find a new interesting site which require you to sign-up to get extended features, what do you do most of the time?” below is how people responded.
Coming to the question, I wanted to find if people really like using facebook connect or twitter based login to other sites. Below is the answer.
Conclusion: Roughly 70% people who took survey said they don’t want to sign-up to a site using facebook or twitter based login.
Note: Sample size of this survey is very miniscule as compared to the facebook overall user base and might not represent accurate behavior. So if you are considering using facebook connect or say twitter based login, use your best judgment 
You can now also follow me on twitter @ruchitgarg
In one of the product design forums, there was a discussion recently, if providing a facebook/twitter based login on a portal makes people concerned about losing their personal/private data.
Though it seems like a valid possible reason, there is no data available to support or against it.
Please take up this quick 30 sec survey- Is facebook your gateway to internet http://bit.ly/a2Mzjf .
Please share this on your network. Results will be shared on this blog.
You can also follow me on twitter @ruchitgarg
