NetSujit World

This morning, the readers of the Times of India (print edition) newspaper were in for a pleasant surprise. The newspaper carried an advertisement for Volkswagen on the last page that looked like a regular print ad but with a difference. As soon as people turned to the last page of the newspaper, the ad would start talking by itself.

Volkswagen Audio Ad in Times of India

The magic lies in a small speaker that activates itself when you open the last page of the newspaper. Suhel Banerjee, who captured a video of this ad, says that the audio clip goes on to play in an endless loop till you close the paper.

Reading the online reactions, most people seem to have been left impressed by Volkswagen’s marketing though the ad did create some confusion at one of the airports as Lakshmipathy Bhat points out:

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You may not need a briefcase to carry your laptop in the near feature. Just roll the computer and wear it like a shoulder handbag.

Orkin Design, a design firm in Germany, has created a amazing concept computer that can be used both as a laptop and a tablet (slate). It features a large multitouch screen, USB ports, webcam, stylus and everything that you probably look for in a computer.

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It’s always interesting to me to see technology data trends repeat themselves, even when the technologies themselves are seemingly completely different and designed for different purposes.

Case in point: blogging versus Twitter. Although Twitter is often referred to as a micro-blogging service, some have also suggested it is better compared to a social network, like Facebook. But the data clearly show how Twitter is simply another form of blogging, on a much smaller scale.

Last week, The New York Times’ Douglas Quenqua wrote a story examining all of the orphaned and abandoned blogs on the Internet:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

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Do you have an old computer monitor that’s gathering dust someone in the corner of your house? Or do you have plans to buy a new PC for performing only basic computing tasks like writing documents, email, chatting, browsing websites, etc.

If you said yes to any of the above questions, read this.

Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator here, has just launched a new device called Net PC, which as the name suggests, is a low cost computer designed specifically for cloud computing. The device is powered by Windows XP (not Linux as you would expect) and costs INR 5,000 (or $100) in India.

To get started, you just have to plug in the USB modem or the broadband Ethernet cable into the Net PC and you’re ready to go. The device weighs a mere 500 grams and is small enough (11.5cm x 11.5cm x 3.5cm) to fit in one of your trouser pockets.

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Let’s face it, most people are sheep. It is much easier to follow than to lead, and on Twitter it is no different. A full 80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers, according to an analysis of seven million Twitter accounts provided to TechCrunch by Web security firm Purewire (which operates TweetGrade). What’s more, 30 percent have zero followers.

Does this mean nobody is using Twitter? Or that they are using it more as a one-way information consumption service?

The fact that an estimated 32 million people around the world visited Twitter.com alone in April certainly indicates that there is something going on there. It just may be that Twitter really isn’t as much about two-way micro-conversations as it is about one-way micro-broadcasting. Indeed, a recent Harvard Business School study suggested that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce more than 90 percent of all Tweets.

Here is how Purewire breaks down activity on Twitter by number of followers, followings, and Tweets:

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The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”

I, too, was skeptical at first. Evan Williams was Twitter’s co-creator. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood?

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Google.co.ma, the domain name for Google Morocco’s search portal, was taken hostage by hackers yesterday reportedly for several hours before the problem got fixed.

There’s a bit of confusion about how the hack was performed exactly, but it appears as if the hackers found a way into NIC.ma, which controls the DNS for the country, and targeted the Google domain name especially. The domain was pointed to a different server, and the web page above was shown when people tried to access the search engine. Google apparently at one point automatically relayed visitors from Morocco to Google.com instead of Google.co.ma, but it took a while to get the latter functioning correctly again.

Zorgloob.com claims that this isn’t the first such incident this year, as apparently the websites for Google Algeria and Google Puerto Rico were taken hostage by hackers last month too.

There can be several reasons why you may want to switch email service providers.

Reason #1:

Your existing email address gets too much spam so you plan to dump the old account and switch to a new email address (a form of email bankruptcy).

Reason #2:

You are leaving your existing job for higher studies and need to transfer all personal emails from the Microsoft Exchange server to your new university email account.

Reason #3:

Your ISP’s email service isn’t reliable and you therefore plan to move to a free web based email service like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.

Reason #4. You think the new email service from XYZ Inc. offers more features than your existing mail provider and hence want to make the move.

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