Ravi’s Rants

If you don’t know what a “Mashup” is, fret not.

You’re now going to witness one of the greatest “mashup” tools ever developed…

Full story: Introducing Ubiquity

“Twit” is no longer just a mean word

I signed up for Twitter a while ago. But I never “got it” - until recently - when I figured out the awesomeness of microblogging.

Seth Godin wrote this on his blog:

“My goal in creating this blog is to spread my ideas and keep me from having to write a book about every single thing that pops into my head. I’m an amateur, not a professional.”

“Micro” blogging takes this and turns it on its head - and completely frees me from even the “gotta write a meaningful post” world of “macro” (a.k.a “the usual style of”) blogging.

Microblogging lets me put out stuff that is interesting, stuff that I want to share with my followers, but is too trivial to take up space on my blog.

Though many folks use it in a more social and personal context (”watching Spiderman now”, “woke up late”, “eating lunch” types), it has a much more powerful and serious side to it that is just begging to be taken advantage of.

Now I’ve started leaving behind a trail of my online activities on twitter - for my tribe: Web sites I’m visiting, articles I’m reading, videos I’m watching, books I’m reading…

Whether you twitter or tumble or spoink, do it so that you can make meaning for your followers.

I invite you to come stalk me

Quite frequently, I am reminded of how we take certain things for granted, while it could be something completely new/interesting/educating/shocking for someone else.

Using Google Alerts for competitive research is one such “thing”. During a chat with a friend the other day, I casually mentioned how I use Google Alerts to keep an eye on my industry, and it completely blew him away, while I’d actually been doing this for as long as Google Alerts have existed (and before that News.com alerts).

So, for what it’s worth, here goes:

I use Google Alerts to set up specific alerts for specific keywords.

When Google first finds any new or existing content (blog posts, web pages, forum discussions, etc) anywhere on the web that it hasn’t indexed before, that contains these keywords, Google sends me an email with a link to this newly-found content.

And if a publisher has password-protected their content, but still allowed Google to index it (using the “password-protected content” sitemaps feature), then Google emails me a little blurb of that password-protected content!

So, basically I have set up tens of alerts, the first one (vanity “alert” ahead - quite literally! being my own name (”Ravi Jayagopal”). That way, I always know the instant (or within a few days at worst), if anyone is blogging/writing about me or my products.

Here are some of the alerts you could create:
1. Your full name
2. For all your product names
3. All your web site urls
4. Each and every one of your competitors’ names
5. All of your partners’ names
6. Name of any industry expert (or their web site url) whose blog/site you follow (like I have one for “Seth Godin”
7. The name or category of your industry: For eg., right now I’m a month away from launching a very powerful “Access Management” software to manage subscription-based web sites. So, some of my alerts include the keywords “subscription”, “content”, “download”, “security”, etc. Yes, I do get some false positives, but who cares!

The kind of stuff Google finds on a daily basis thanks to these alerts, not only help me keep a tab on myself, my customers, my competitors, and my idols, but it also gives me a lot of new ideas, new features for my products, and great new ways in which I can make my product remarkable!

So go create your alerts today.

My “Video Unit” link wasn’t available yesterday when the announcement was first made.

Was able to see it today.

“Linked” my Adsense account with my YouTube account.

Got the confirmation from Google in a few minutes (they do warn that it could take up to 12 hours).

Created my “player”, got the code.

The ads load asynchronously, and they seem quite on target from the other sites I tested so far.

Way to go Google!

I found this amazing site yesterday through one of the feeds on LinkOverLoad.com. Awesome video coming right up…

Animoto basically turns your pictures into a fantastic MTV-style video, with some great soundtracks available on their site for free, or you can use your own audio - with your pictures almost flashing in rhythm to the beats of the soundtrack, with some great-looking special effects.

When I signed up, uploaded my pictures, picked a great-sounding track they had on their site (for free) and tried to create my video (remember, their software supposedly creates all of this in an automated fashion), I got this very friendly error message:

Hi there,

We’re sorry to inform you that we have experienced an error in the
production of your recent video, “Beautiful People”. Rest assured, we’re
on the case and we’ll have it rendered as soon as we can–but, depending
on the complexity of the issue, it could take a little time.

We’ll email you the moment it’s ready. Thanks for understanding!

…

That didn’t bother me, as they are still in beta, and still hammering out the rough edges. What did surprise me, is that they promptly sent me this email the next day:

Hi there.

We’ve finished your video, so it’s time for you to go take a look.
Head to:

http://animoto.com/play/…..

We hope you like it! Give us some feedback when you get a chance to
let us know what you liked and how we can improve. Remember, no two
Animoto videos are ever the same so keep making videos and see what unique
pieces you can generate.

…

I excitedly clicked over, and was simply blown away by the results (see video below).

Remarkable idea, great (almost perfect) execution, instantly viral! Pass this along…

Video from Animoto.com

From the Wikipedia:

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol. The protocol was originally designed and created by programmer Bram Cohen, and is now maintained by BitTorrent, Inc.

BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the whole of the corresponding costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead of the distributor alone servicing each recipient, under BitTorrent the recipients each also supply data to newer recipients, thus significantly reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source as well as providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence upon the original distributor.

From AP: BitTorrent to Launch Movie, TV Downloads

Bram Cohen on the BitTorrent Entertainment Network

BitTorrent main site

So is this the start of yet another monopoly?

Why hasn’t anyone else gotten into this? It’s not like there are major infrastructure setup pains involved - just buy a darn satellite and start broadcasting - it’s not like it’s hard to do for someone with a lot of cash and people - something that matches all media companies!

Content is the big challenge of course. So any of the big guys with content, could easily started a satellite radio service. So why hasn’t anyone done it?

When are they going to make it easy for you and me to start our own radio stations? Oh wait, we can do that already ….

Ok, now I get it. It is because On-broadcast (push) radio cannot compete with On-demand (pull) radio.

The consumer wins, after all.

And you also thought that the crazy hand-waving, screen-manipulation stuff Tom Cruise did in Minority Report was just computer-generated special effects.

Just wait till you check out (below) Jeff Han outdoing Tom Cruise with the multi-touch displays.

The cool thing about Apple is not that they put one of these displays in the iPhone - it is that Apple simply had to be the first to bring it to the consumer. In spite of the big players like Nokia and Motorola and Sony, why is it that only Apple can blow people away like this? Is it great technology? Or simply great marketing?

Yep. It’s final. Apple = Uber Cool. Even if I don’t own a single Apple product!

Be it in your career or in your business, do you similarly strive to boldly go where no man has gone before?

Continue reading…