I had a chance to meet and listen to a CMU professor Luis von Ahn last Friday. He along with Manuel Blum invented concept of CAPTCHA on internet. Captcha is scribbled text image used along with the web forms, which makes it difficult for software to mimic human responses. He is doing some great job  with gwap.com and has already done something known as reCAPTCHA (which I would delve a bit to explain my point here)

Concept behind reCAPTCHA is same as that of CAPTCHA but here, information collected from the user on internet is captured and utilized to digitize books. (read more about it here), a very novel way of utilizing micro human cycles, which when put together can be equal to many work years worth.

If you had already read about reCAPTCHA, its making software learn how to read scribbled texts and ultimately make it so intelligent that software can read correctly an old yellowish New York Times maybe from 1900s. Did it rang any bells, yet?

If captcha is a success because of current state of software’s incapabilities to read scribbled, not so readable text, by virtue of reCAPTCHA (side effect), software would be intelligent enough to read them and hence devaluing all the goodness captcha brings in, in my own lifetime.

We axed our own leg.

Another great example which motivated me to write this post is Anatomy of Twitter Attack which details about how hacker leveraged information so readily available on the social networking site and used his social engineering skills to guess passwords and compromise a service used by millions of people in the world.

We made some great sites, and than social media sites and then added search on it and boom!. All your information is available for a bad guy, just google it. We solved a problem of getting connected with family and friends but then we made an opening (a huge one) for hackers to get all this information for his benefits.

I am only relieved with the fact that likes of Luis would always certainly come up with a better solution poised in front of us at that point of time.

This is an interesting graphical representation of how twitter has evolved from the days of SMS to what we are seeing it today.

I was pondering over with the thought of, if I could possibly post links from my blog ( as i publish them) to my facebook account. It might be interesting for my friends on facebook to read a detailed version of a story after an interesting status update.

So here I go, i have done some magic, and if this works, you would be able to see this post on my blog and a short link on my facebook profile.

YouTube has recently launched an application for windows mobile phone enabling me to watch their videos on my HTC Tilt. Its quite a fun.

I can now watch small video clips while waiting in queue to pick up my medicines at pharmacy and many more occasions..

I talk about this a lot to my friends. Having a breathtaking technical breakthrough idea is not the ONLY way to start a successful company, what matters is ‘user experience’. Experience which can Attract new users, experience which can Engage users to stay on a use your product, experiences which can retain users to your product and experiences which are good to be Monetized in future.

Bit.ly a URL shortening company, which recently got funded with 2 million USD. Some people have shrugged the idea and told that its just 10 lines of code…so what? If they have been able to attract, retain their users to come back couple of times in day to use their services, I am sure they can monetize it as well.

I am sure VCs are no lame to fund them on any other ideas. They must have a team and potential plan which can be milked later, like analytics and click tracking as mentioned by Fred .

Good days ahead for Bit.ly

After Academic earth, YouTube announced its dedicated channel www.youtube.com/edu for educational videos. First cut, it appears that they have same purpose, provide educational videos from various institutions.

I liked Academic Earth’s layout but given that youtube already have huge user base and deep pockets, I am sure they can change the game.

When I was in college there were many concepts I just could not understand and I wished if I can get someone to help me understand that complex topic. There were just to less of resources available at disposal.

World seems to have changed a lot, thanks to internet.

I found this interesting site today http://academicearth.org/ thanks to TechCrunch, which hosts loads of free to watch video lectures from subject matter experts. Astronomy, Engineering, Computer Science, Political Science..you name it.

Its such a great resource for faculties. Its a great resource tool for them to explain concepts. Just grab that not so much used auditorium and play these videos.

Sounds fun and productive.

Ever wondered where do you get those emails promising to increase your power.

Below is the distribution of spam email origin on global map. India stands at #3.

You can read full report at Symantec website.

And I am going to miss it .

I have been running my blog on wordpress for many years now and no doubt its one of my all time software.

Matt Mullenweg , founder of WP is coming down to India as part of next wordcamp along with Om Mallik ( one of the famous tech blogger I read) to talk about blogging as an alternative strong media channel.

Not that I want to understand the proven concept, but meeting them in person or at least seeing these people, talking live would be enriching experience.

I upgraded my Dell M1330 couple of days back to Windows 7 beta from Vista and I am quite amazed with it.

It just works…

Apart from me liking Internet Games on Windows 7 for obvious reasons, there are tones of great features which makes it hawt!.

If you have not checked it out, download it now and do not forget to checkout games.