Intel's New direction

on Economist

Well, Intel has a new CEO and he has a tough task at hand with Moore's law meeting a physical roadblock and AMD chipping away its market share. It has other problems too ..

1. With AMD making its 32-bit processors compatible with 64-bit code, Intel faces the risk of Itanium becoming obsolete
2. Will Intels new strategy of focussing on rwhole platforms (combine associated chips and software along with the core processor) work ?
3. Will Dell continue patronizing Intel ?
4. How will Intel win the mobile game ?

With 80% market-share in PC business, it will be interesting to see how Intel reacts to the innovation challenge that it faces in the mobile era ...

India ranked 49 in E-Readiness

on Economist

Denmark is No.1.
US No.2
Japan 21
Taiwan 22
India 49
China 54 (some sadistic pleasure !!)

Denmark is still the best place in the world to do e-business, reports the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister firm of The Economist. It has ranked the “e-readiness” of the world's 65 largest economies to find the countries most amenable to internet-based business. The factors considered include broadband and mobile-phone penetration, as well as government regulation. America rose from sixth to second place in the ranking since last year. Britain fell from second to fifth place. India, despite being an IT superpower, is ranked only 49th.

Joel on Bad Code

on Joel

Look for coding conventions that make wrong code look wrong. Getting the right information collocated all together in the same place on screen in your code lets you see certain types of problems and fix them right away.

The Retailing Industry

A very good article on the world Retailing Industry and implications for India.

American mass retailing began in the late 1800s with Montgomery Ward marketing its products through general merchandise mail order catalogs, which was very effective at that time for reaching a largely rural society.

In the 1940s, the population began its movement to the suburbs as the economy shifted from an agricultural base to an industrialised nation. The first shopping center was opened, which would eventually be a significant factor in the decline of downtown retailing in the 1960s and 70s. JCPenney and Sears began their national mass retailing expansion, and the use of credit cards as major retail chains began. .......

CNN : Viral Marketing or Spam ?

on Wired

Earlier this month, blogger Nick Lewis noticed a strange post about CNN on his blog. The comment was critical of some new shows on CNN, but also included detail about the shows, their show times and the anchors hosting them. The same terms were repeated over and over, making it appear like spam. Something was not right.

Hackathon

on Bnoopy

Sustaining innovation for a startup, a rip off from Google's 20% idea.

We call it a "hackathon" and we got inspiration from the good folks at Atlassian. The idea is that you make a day-long event (at whatever frequency you want) where everyone works on something that is:

• valuable to the company
• but not what they're "supposed" to be working on and
• that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day

We started our hackathon at 9:00am and ended at 8:00pm. From 8:00-10:00pm we did presentations where each team member or group showed their work.

SNAP : News Filter

A pretty cool and easy way to find a particular news piece you are looking for. You can use multiple filters to narrow down your search.