My sister sent a lovely story as a forward and then it made me think about the Seventh Mass Media. This made me think a good way to help people visualize evolution of media is using a family tree analogy. Let me know how you like it. My family tree is different than what the story entails but I hope this make sense.

Grand Pa (Cinema – 1900) married Grand Ma (Radio – 1910) outcame daughter (TV – 1950) with strain of Richness+Mass
Grand Pa (Print – 1400) married Grand Ma (Recording – 1800) outcame son (Internet – 1980) with Curiosity+Interactivity
Pa (Internet – 1980) married Ma (TV – 1950) outcame (Mobile – 2000)!

I would say its a bit too soon to deciding its gender and its characteristics. Lets just wait and watch

The story my sister sent The Stranger

A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small Texas town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.

As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger…he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies.
If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn’t seem to mind.

Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet. (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)
Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home… Not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush. My Dad didn’t permit the liberal use of alcohol. But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular
Basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished.
He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.

I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked… And NEVER asked to leave.

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you could walk into my parents’ den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.

His name?…. .. .

We just call him ‘TV.’

(Note: This should be required reading for every household in America !)

He has a wife now….We call her ‘Computer.’

Their first child is “Cell Phone“.

The Seven Mass Media

1. Print (books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, etc) from the late 1400s
2. Recordings (records, tapes, cassettes, cartridges, CDs, DVDs) from the late 1800s
3. Cinema from about 1900
4. Radio from about 1910
5. Television from about 1950
6. Internet from about 1990
7. Mobile phones from about 2000

Some awesome use of Social Media by Skittles. Will be writing something here with these things (will make a good blog pos) – no time nowadays! uff!

Where does twitter go from here?

Skittles’ twitermania!

Twitter as a search engine?

Home Page

GobbledyGook

Twitter Chatter

Integrating Facebook

If you are born in 2002

TwitPoll

Couple of weeks back, Dad’s friend’s iphone started behaving a wierdishly and he by mistake hit the restore button on the iTunes! It went back to locked conditions and he asked me to look into it. I had unlocked this phone around Feb when his son sent it as a gift to him from the US. I had used Ziphone (took only 5 mins to unlock!) and thinking it would be a no brainer, I took up the issue.

But after one full day trying to poke around I was clueless and frustrated. I attacked the problem the next day and I seemed to have gone nowwhere! Afraid that the phone might have bricked, I gave it one last shot to restore it and phew I successfully managed to do it. Its was frustrating for me to actually diagnose the problem and solve it as I had no idea what the uncle did & I had not followed iPhone developments.

Just bloggin this in case someone else faces the problemo ;P. Here it goes …

• If you are getting error 20 (Version you are trying to load is older than the one you already have) check if you are really on DFU.(nice instructions there)

To put your phone in recovery mode simply:

1. Switch off the iPhone.
2. Hold the home button as you connect your iPhone to your PC/Mac.
3. Continue to hold the home button untill you see the iTunes/Dock Cable logo.

To put your iPhone in to DFU mode:

1. Turn on iPhone
2. Connect to PC/Mac
3. Open iTunes
4. Hold down power and home buttons
5. Wait untill red slider appears to shut down iPhone – keep holding the buttons.
6.Wait untill the iPhone shuts down
7. Release power button, keep home button pressed (if the Apple logo appeared you didn’t release the power button quick enough – try again!)
8. Wait about 7 seconds – iTunes should say there is an iPhone connected in “restore mode”

• You will have to install iTunes 7.5 not the latest one! You need to remove all traces latest iTunes completely! Then you need to download 1.1.4 firware and install it (press the shift button when you click Restore to install a specific firmware) You will most likely come across error 1601 or 1602.
• For exact instructions go to these links …
• I had to use iLiberty+ finally to dissect the problem
• Even then I was getting stuck with a problem where I had opened the phone but it was not recognizing the vodafone SIM! Duh, it was more like a iTouch! Final solution came when I understood the crux of the matter was the baseband doesn’t change automatically. You need another software called the KiPhone. One has to do this as people haven’t still figured out how to crack the latest baseband 04.05.04

Hope this helps i.e. savnig time. The 5 minute venture last time turned out to be 3 days of effort ;P Mainly stalled due to pathetic download speeds. Who says experience helps!

Figure just for illustration borrowed it from the FaceBook News feed.

Read the TRAI consultation paper on MVNOs in India (thanks to contentsutra).

Decent thoughts there. Nothing great though including some screenshots from the paper I think that are decent. For someone who has no idea on MVNOs the paper does a good job … The paper talks about how the licenses have been distributed as of now and then examines situations all over the world in terms of MVNO (lovely compilation). And yeah, there will be some entry barriers (cost and criteria) on MVNOs for sure I think!

Jeff talks about distributed university, I am not happy that he titled the post Google U. He writes on the topic of collaborative education – the new category: openguru I have opened in my blog. This post very clearly elucidates my thoughts (still abstract) on this topic:

Once you put all this together, students can self-organize with teachers and fellow students to learn what they want how and where they want. My hope is that this could finally lead to the lifelong education we keep nattering about but do little to actually support. And why don’t we? Because it doesn’t fit into the degree structure. And because self-organizing classes and education could cut academic institutions out of the their exclusive role in education.The real problem with this for society is that it cuts out the core business of the university, which also produces research and scholarship.The problem here is that the internet is unforgiving of needs to preserve old models and methods. It disaggregates ruthlessly.

So I think that education has a rude shocking coming unless it gets ahead of this change and figures out how to become less of an institution and more of a platform.

To top this, put it in context of India. 2 years down the lane – mobile is where most of the Indian population will be accessing online content, 3G hopefully will be up and running (regulation is throttling it). The desire to learn is very much there in the Indian culture. Name the city (rural or urban): education is valued irrespective of the social strata. And finally  demographically, a young population which needs & wants to learn and will learn how to use the tools pretty damn fast irrespective of cost.

The only barrier according to me is TIME.

I have been wanting to write this post for a long time but delayed it beyond 9 to 10 months! I finally have internet and computer to write from close a year after. As I am usually ‘do in the flow’ kind of person, my blogging i.e the core dump (put in geek terms) had reduced considerably Feel like a free bird. I feel like blogging in the morning before reading the paper / having the cuppa of milk or late in the night when everyone in my house has slept off

Coming back to the post – I am opening a new category in my blog today. Guess thats an indication of new area of interest .. ha ha. I am calling ‘openguru’. Quickly and abstractly the following tags explain the category well:

open, learning, collaborative, technology, internet, mobile, media

I get a huge sense of enjoyment when I am learning and I don’t this desire will ever go away (fortunately I have been good at getting things fast!). And I want to just point you to certain cool websites were you can learn. However point to be noted – they structed content for you to assimilate. Nothin collaborative about it!

• Video lessons lectures notes
• National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning – (IITs & IISc)!
• OpenCourseWare (MIT)
  • MIT World » Distributed Intelligence
• World Lecture Hall – (UT Austin)
• WGBH Forum Network | Free Online Lectures
• Entrepreneurs (HBS)
  • HBS Working Knowledge
• Knowledge@Wharton

I have used Knowledge@Wharton and am a regular reader, got the hang of it when I was invovled with their team to launch their mobile India website during their Indian Launch!

 

However yet to explore any other site. Do you have any links to throw? 

Join us Today (Sunday) for MoDeMo – a Mobilist Show and Tell Event

More Details at: http://www.modemo.in/
Location: ThoughtWorks Office, Bangalore

Tentative Schedule: (15 mins per Demo)
Morning Session ( 9am – 1pm )

Mobile Map Application that does not require GPRS, Vishnu
Foodie Hotline – Ubona Voice Search Engine, Vishal Lal,
Mobile Video Streaming, Kunal, Novix
iPhone and 3rd Party application, Siddharth
Mysore Dassara – Flashlite Based Application,Vivek,TheDesignTree
Online Video on Nokia Phones, Rajeswari, Nokia
Mobile Mandi Bhav , Parul Awasthy, TCS
Mobile Cruiser – Symbian Call Handling Application
MyDuniya – Integrating the Mobile and the Web World, Ganapathy
Game Developemnt Demo, Zarina
OpenGL based games, Selvan
Mobi-Winsk20,Nalin
Google my Location on Mobile, Ajay
Mobile commerece, mobile banking, Ritesh Mittal, NGPay

Post Lunch ( 2pm – 4 pm )

Mobile Photo Application, Manish
Mobile Adult Literacy, Aditya Mishra, TCS
Mobile Photo Blogging,Varun, Fonearena & MoMo Chennai
Mango Application Framework,Sunil Maheswari, Mango Technologies
Mobitop – a Mobile Application Platform, Lalit, Mobisy
Opera Mini Browser, Navjot & Sagar
SMS Gupshup – Mobile Social Messaging Platform, Tathagata, Webaroo
SMS Social Networking in Babalife , Sean Blagsvedt Company, Babalife

Post Tea ( 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm)

Zook.in – Mobile Social Search, Sameer Shishodia, Ziva Software
Mobile Visa Money Transfer, Naveen Thangiah, mChek
Entreprise Tracking with Mobile LBS, Anand, Mobiance
Activ Mobs

Open Group Discussion ( 6 pm – 7 pm)

Discussion about Mobile and India: SMS, GPRS, Apps & Hardware

Just Twttrd about it Its going to be exciting – mobile geeks time it is!! All Mobile enthusiasts are welcome to attend if they have time. Just register (for free) up ahead. I think we might also allow spot registration …

Well Well – finally here it is! Google India has launched SMS services and here are the details.

Shortcode:
54664 (5GOOG)

Types of services:
Local , Weather, Glossary, Movies, Q&A, Translation, Web Snippets, Calculator, Currency Conversion

I have loved the concept esp with relevance to India, this was something I tried and did succeed when I was in Mytoday. We didn’t take it to the next level as the management didn’t want to go that route. I like that I can query for:

• movies and theatre phone numbers!
• Find Thai restaurant
• Rs to US convertor

Coming to some improvements / cribs I have:

• Its taking more than 2 mins to get the sms back. common this is google I expect things to work quicker! I think they will have serious scaling issues!
• Relevant text ads? or Deals?
• Now that they have sms act to together … google calendars and reminders ??
• A look into their mobile privacy policy
  • Sometimes, we record your phone number. We record your phone number when you send it to us; ask us to remember it; or make a call or send a text message or SMS to or from Google. {how clear are they going to be with this? I have my reservations!}
  • If you use location-based products and services, such as Google Maps for mobile, you may be sending us location information.
  • Certain of our products and services allow you to interact and share
    your information with others. Please consider carefully before disclosing any personal information or data that might be accessible to others.
  • The Nail on the Coffin - Google adheres to the US Safe Harbour privacy principles. For more information about the Safe Harbour framework or our registration, see
    the Department of Commerce’s Web site.

My advice – use at your own discretion … Anyway, I am going to go ahead and use it! Remember its on an average 2 bucks a pop!

Mobile
Facebook + iPhone = UltraCool
Airtel ties up with Affle for improved SMS-Telecom-News By Industry-News-The Economic Times
FrontlineSMS: The complete entry-level SMS text messaging system for NGOs and charities
SMS your ECG to ER
ReporTwitters
m-learning – 2 years28082007 Alexander Hayes » SlideShare
“If it doesn’t work on a billion phones, don’t bother” » SlideShare

Starting up …

blog.pmarca.com: Luck and the entrepreneur, part 1: The four kinds of luck

Innovation Forum

Talking with the Receptionist, Pausing When You Speak (Leadership Success) – Knowledge@Wharton

The Flip Side of Entrepreneurship by Glenn Kelman

Bruceclay.com – How to Bounce Back From a PR Blunder

The Official Palm Blog: A Message to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers

On a day of market turmoil;words of wisdom from Warren Buffett

Management Methods | Management Models | Management Theories

Startup Weekend

Media – Photo and Film

Announcing PFCOne : The Online Film Festival for One Minute Movies : PassionForCinema

FlashFlavor » Blog Archive » i’ve got a hotstick

gemma & justin barkhuff » about us

Whazzup Mumbai !!! (Bombay): Film Clubs in Mumbai

Benji’s Studio Lighting and Posing Tutorial

The Morning News – Still Life

General Fun
Learning by living: dare to buy
Gapminder
AlterNet: Are Men Threatened by Funny Women?

RhymeZone rhyming dictionary and thesaurus

Nano City

AdMob – AdMonitor

NAMI | “A Day in the Life” Contest

Social Networking and Communities

Unit Structures: New Essay: The Vibrancy of Online Social Space

White Label Social Networking Solutions Chart, Part II

My Social Media Toolkit : [chrisbrogan.com]

How to Save the World

Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph

PR 2.0 – Silicon Valley

Main Page – Facebook Developers Wiki

Personal Productivity

Get Off Your Butt: 16 Ways to Get Motivated When You’re in a Slump | zen habits

Peaceful Simplicity: How to Live a Life of Contentment | zen habits

Web Worker Daily » Your Information Manifesto: 21 Tips to Deal with Info Overload

100 Mile Diet: Local Eating for Global Change » Getting Started guide

Just read Fred’s article Vibrancy of the online Social Space and wrote a comment there … given the fact that my blogging is coming down I think I repost the comment to the article as blog post. Some snippets from the article:

as I log in, I am engaged by a cross-section of my social relationships. In an instant, information is revealed, opportunities are discovered, and a website becomes a social nexus – from which I can derive a sense of gratification, meaning and identity.

In her 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described the sidewalk ballet of a vital urban environment. Jacobs argued that a vibrant and diverse city should possess four characteristic design elements, the first being that a neighborhood should be multifunction, creating activity throughout the day. Next, a city should have short blocks and its buildings should be multiform, creating interest and promoting exploration by inhabitants. Finally, Jacobs argued for density, in which different populations intersperse, affording variety and shared resources.

Applying Jacobs’ criteria to an online space creates a challenge; as a neighborhood jumps from the physical to the virtual, the nature of its goods changes.

Arguing for shorter blocks, Jacobs felt that this type of design would foster exploration by city dwellers. The “short blocks” analogy is alive and well in online social networks, where the ability to browse and explore fellow network participants fuels use. In a social network, we enumerate our identity as we describe our interests, tag each other, and post on walls and message boards. These “digital traces” are often hyperlinked, permitting endless point-and-click exploration of the social space.

Indeed, online social networks are concentrated; in this sense they are unlike any neighborhood. Social networks allow for the centralization of one’s network in a single place; geographic boundaries are rendered insignificant as we connect across place and time. The social network allows the work friends to intermingle with grade school friends in an odd, often awkward dance.

In a study conducted at Michigan State University (Lampe, 2006), researchers found that friendships in social networks often began offline and migrated online, rather than the other way around.

The social cost of relationship maintenance decreases; the birthday card is replaced with a wall post. We can certainly lament the depersonalization of online interaction, but we can’t impugn the outcome – we are able to manage larger collections of friends with less effort than ever before. Do these extended friend networks increase sociality or simply introduce new digital tethers to our social life? That is a question we’ll work towards answering, as the effects of these digital publics on our real world is explored.

We flirt, we interact, we do business, we seek out information and gratification, finding a complex social world at our fingertips. While the digital spaces we inhabit will have a good deal in common with our cities of concrete and granite, they are unique places with unique challenges. While the technological emphasis of relevance and searchability will create new types of interactions online, it would be wise for developers to pay attention to Jacbos; they will find both the meaning and the letter of her laws instructive.

My comments:

Fred … nicely written will read this again and hopefully get back with more thoughts. From my personal experience, I see myself making more friends either in the offline or real world and enriching the boards in social networking sites like playing a game of scrabble or doing fun stuff.

However, I make more chance exploration kind of encounters in communities like Flickr and Flickr communities and special niche communities for like minded topics. When we have meetups – I like the interaction and then choose to go online hoping to find the people I liked online and grow the bond richer.

I have never come across party like behaviour in the online space. And yes, I haven’t tried second life as the bandwidth is very less in India. (Feel frustrated about that once I moved back from the Bay Area.)

But, there is one thing you should consider: the influence of the mobile and information convergence it brings on! It was also very interesting to see Steve Jobs showcasing facebook’s beta iPhone site What happens as a next step as your social internet sphere moves with you on the go. What happens in countries like India and other where majority of population in a year or two is going to experience SNS primarily through the mobile??

I am just putting a screen shot from couple of applications to aid your thought process of the visualization of my facebook social sphere. Remember its going to be only 3 months I am on facebook and I am loving it completely. I have around 225 contacts on facebook and around 375 contacts on orkut – all decently meaningful ones so that my interactions there don’t get diluted!