For my records
- LAR : Last Available Room. This is the term used to define the last available room in inventory for a channel.
Archive for the ‘Rantings’ Category
Industry Jargon : Hotel Industry
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010I like to be in control of my destiny
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010I don’t have a Facebook or twitter account and that surprises a lot of my friends since I am such a geek 
. And the reason I keep (kept) giving was that I want to be in control of my destiny. In this case, destiny being content. While Facebook and Twitter provide you with a easy way to connect with friends/relatives/stalkers etc, I believe it gives a lot of leeway on control over the content for the companies running these applications. I have all the means and ways to communicate with my friends and advertise what I need to world. How I do that? That is a blog post that I have been “drafting” for the last couple of months ..Hope to publish it soon. And looks like the wider audience is finally waking up to it.
Check out this article on ReadWriteWeb regd how the tech leaders are calling for a boycott of Facebook and advocating for an open social networking protocol (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_web_industry_leaders_quit_facebook_call_for_o.php).
Another article on the same website, speaks about a study by the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, which shows that Twitter is really not a social networking site, but more of a medium to broadcast your content (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/study_twitter_isnt_very_social.php). Doesn’t really support the argument I made earlier that Twitter is not going to make it..but it certainly supports the notion that once the hype is gone the influence of twitter as a medium will decrease.
Lessons of the Trade : Easy method to detect lame salespeople (companies)..
Friday, April 2nd, 2010Some background.. I get an email from a sales rep from one of the biggest telecom provider. The sales person attached a 4 MB document that shows the services offered by the company in one page.. Yes, a one pager document that is 4MB in size!!.. And this document tells me how this company can do everything other than wash my dishes for me..that they are biggest and baddest out there.
Do you think that this person even gave a minutes thought before filling up my mailbox with a 4MB attachment? Nope.. will he be getting my business? Nope.. It is not that the sales rep sent me such a large attachment, but because the company that can supposedly offer the best technical solutions out there cannot figure out a way to show their offerings in a single page without bloating it. Shows that the company is not innovative and thinking of customers.
Maybe I am being harsh here.. but then I have pretty high standards .
Six Signs that you aren’t cut out to be a CIO..
Thursday, March 11th, 2010The first five reasons are in this video.
The sixth reason.. you are actually watching the video above to decide if you are cut out to be a CIO .. Come on people!!
Satirical take on arranged marriages..
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010My colleague/friend KP wrote a hilarious post on arranged marriages in India. Check it out at www.kprabu.com/2010/01/great-indian-arranged-marriages.html .
PS : Yes, people do speak with each other before agreeing to get married and No, elephants don’t walk around in the streets in India .
Welcoming 2010
Friday, January 1st, 2010Wishing everyone a Happy New Year and hooping this new year will bring you joy, luck and health. Isn’t it amazing how quickly the first decade of the 21st century passed away. I usually don’t make new year resolutions, but last year for some reason, I decided to. Here’s a recap of them
Write at least 3 times a week on this blog
How did I do with this? Not as well as I wanted to. Here’s a chart showing the postings per month
I started well in January, but then as with most new year resolutions it didn’t last for more than a month
. But I started picking up again at the end of the year. Hope I can continue the trend.
Run one half marathon ever month in a different state
Don’t laugh .. seriously this was something I have been wanting to do for a long time and I thought this was the year. But alas little did I know that I had to work so many weekends . I barely managed to run 3 half marathons and that too in only two neighboring states. Won’t make any promises..but hope to do better next year. I should mention that I did register for 3 races in different states for the first three months of 2009.. Just didn’t make it to the races
Even though I didn’t stick with my resolutions, 2009 was an interesting year. Accomplished a lot at work, but more importantly gained a life partner .
Morale of the story.. Don’t make resolutions. Just do it!! .
Wikipedia Needs You!!
Monday, December 7th, 2009As you check the list of charities and gifts you need to contribute to for this holiday season, please put Wikipedia on your list . I did my part by supporting the annual Wikipedia fund raising effort. It is not easy and cheap to be running one of the most popular (6th most popular as per Alexa’s latest figures) sites on the Internet.
Donate.. Share..Enlighten
Here is the link to the donations page http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Support_Wikipedia/en
Never Give Up : Part 2
Thursday, November 19th, 2009A follow up on my post, about a South Korean woman’ attempts to get a driving license despite failing it hundreds of times.. She finally passed the exam on the 11/6/2009 in her 950th attempt (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8347164.stm) !!!
Congratulations, Mrs Cha Sa-Soon !!
Reminder for the rest of us to never give up .
Humanity or Clicks?
Monday, November 9th, 2009Thought provoking article on TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/nsfw-after-fort-hood-another-example-of-how-citizen-journalists-cant-handle-the-truth/) about how folks are obsessed with being the “ones” with the first to take a cool picture or tweet about something rather than trying to help the people in need they are taking pictures of..
Twitter is not going to make it..
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009Pretty dramatic prognosis eh..Esp, after all the hype that twitter is getting in the media, one would think that the whole world uses twitter. Here’s why I don’t think twitter will not be such a darling 2/3 years from now. It might still exist in some shape/form (I think it is going to be acquired and integrated into a larger offering), but it won’t be the buzz word anymore.
First the good part.. Let’s take a look at some data from Compete and Alexa (companies that provide web statistics about sites) in comparison to facebook and myspace (the 800 lbs Gorillas of social networking)
Traffic Ranking :
Similar data from Alexa (where the long term data is available for free, unlike Compete)
No surprises here. We see that the ranking of Twitter has gone up drastically and is staying there..
Reach :
Interesting trend. One would expect that the reach (i.e. the number of people accessing the site) would go up as drastically as the ranking, but it is not as linear. Facebook is doing pretty well in this statistic.
Page Views :
I think this is to be expected. Twitter does not rely as much on page view due to the design and nature of the site.
Looking at all the data above, it looks like twitter is in a good place right. Now let’s add another dimension to the analysis. Let’s take a look at how Google views twitter. “Google Insights” is a service offered by Google to help analyze the “search” volume of keywords across regions and timelines. Since Google has ~70% of the search engine traffic, this is a good way to observe the trends.
Here is a graph showing the “interest” starting from 2004…
Zooming into the last 12 months..
Interesting to see that while facebook is getting more and more “interesting”, twitter is not catching up. This might be due to two reasons.
- Twitter really did not promote it’s search function until July 2009, meaning the search engines did not have a way to scrape the site and as such did not have a lot of content to show to users.
- Twitter partnered with Google and Bing in Oct 2010 2009 to index it’s posting. Again, this means that the search engines just got to the data and it might take some time for them to start showing the data in the search results.
I don’t know if this is conclusive evidence to show that Twitter will not make it. Twitter definitely has its place, but I don’t think it is all that the media has hyped it to be. Even though the media hype has driven more and more users to Twitter, the company has to yet come out with an viable business plan. I think that businesses are flocking towards twitter, because users are.. but once the fad passes on, the world is also going to move on.
P.S : I don’t think I need to mention to anyone looking at the data presented above that MySpace is on a downward spiral . Who still uses Coldfusion to run a site?? That is so 90s!! .