First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

Orkut has finally decided to acknowledge that it is a rage in India by announcing that it will conduct special Independence day polls on the site. Google’s social network has been getting all kinds of bad press lately, not to mention threats from the Shiv Sena, even though the party patriarch’s grandchildren are fairly active users. I’ve always wondered why Orkut is such a big hit in some countries (60% of the traffic is from Brazil and about 15% from India) but a complete dud in Europe and North America. Very few Indians use MySpace which rules the roost in the US though Facebook is apparently becoming very popular especially among those who’ve studied overseas. In fact the whole “social networking” thing is a bit crazy and no one knows who’s going to survive and more importantly what can be monetized and how. The original pioneers like Friendster, LinkedIn, Ryze and Classmates have rapidly been overtaken and specialist networks like Youtube (videos) Flickr (photos) and Digg (News) have just complicated the whole thing.

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The social networking scene in India is displaying classic “bubble” symptoms. President of Reliance Entertainment, Rajesh Sawhney recently told contentsutra.com that Big Adda, the ADAG group’s social networking site would break even in 3 years. That’s an eternity in the internet business and thus such a prediction about something that nobody in the world has figured out how to milk, is pretty ambitious to say the least. The Indian arm of Sequoia Capital recently invested in minglebox.com adding to its portfolio that already includes dating portal fropper.com. I’ve checked out all these sites and while they seem interesting enough, I don’t see the need to sign up for more than one or maybe two such services. The other day I was in Bhopal and introduced to a local internet entrepreneur who runs scratchmysoul.com which claims to be the world’s only people mapping site. The project is based on the intellectual property of Raghav Chandra who belongs to one of the most important offline social networks in the country - the Indian Administrative Service!

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“Desis” seem to have gotten the short end of the stick as far as cashing out on the social networking boom in Silicon Valley is concerned. Jawed Karim, whose father is Bangladeshi, was the third, ignored co-founder of YouTube and only got crumbs from the sellout to Google (a mere $64.6 million as against $326 million each, for the other two co-founders). Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg is facing a high profile lawsuit from a group of former Harvard colleagues who claim that he stole their idea. One of them is a young man called Divya Narendra, who reportedly works for a hedge fund these days. In both cases the desis seem to have been the technical whizkids who did most of the backend work while the smooth talkers laughed all the way to the bank. In fact Indians or people of Indian origin are yet to make a big impact on what being called “boom 2.0″ in the valley. Possibly the most influential Indian 2.0 in the valley these days is Om Malik who runs the Gigaom.com blogging network. Its core competence? Extensive news, information and analysis of the Web 2.0 phenomenon - circular ain’t it?

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FULL DISCLOSURE: There is a rather large official “Tech 2.0″ community on Orkut.com

Mark Zuckerberg seems to have given the Indian media the slip. Facebook PR assured me that he wasn’t giving any official interviews and it seems no one managed to win the TechGoss reward for snaps/info of him in India.

Well, if this was indeed just a holiday/spiritual tour, then history suggests the first thing he’ll do, when he gets back, is get embroiled in a controversy! Confused? Hear me out on this one:

1. Steve Jobs visits India in 1974 for some spiritual nirvana and bums around a bit. He goes back to Atari and (allegedly) shafts poor Steve Wozniak while working on ‘Breakout‘. The incident becomes part of tech folklore…

2. Jimmy Wales visits India in January 2008 and after an interview at IIT Bombay, tells me he’s headed to the Himalayas for a few days of peace and solitude. He comes back to the US and gets into a mess after (allegedly) trying to influence his (then) paramour’s Wikipedia entry.

(Image courtesy Gus Freedman of Wikimedia Foundation under CC-BY-SA license)

3. Google Founders backpack around India ‘like a couple of sophmores‘ in October 2004. They get back and Google is soon faced with an extended run of controversies.

So now that we officially have a ‘three-is-a-trend’ conspiracy theory, expect the Z to be fire-fighting soon (Does this count?) If he takes the advice of a Guru on the IPO as suggested by Joy of Tech, it would definitely be controversial …

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

If there’s one workshop I’m itching to attend, it’s a “DIY Case Modding” session. I’ve seen Parvez in action slicing through metal, though I don’t know of too many others who make a living out of it in India.

Ours is the generation, straddling the analog, digital and now high-def. We remember taking photos with film cameras, watching scratchy VHS tapes, later VCDs and listening to cassettes before making the changeover to CDs. Stuff is getting outdated faster than ever before and keeping up with involves constant conversion of personal media into newer digital formats for convenience, archival value and easy access. If Con-version 1.0 was about converting VHS tapes and audio cassettes, then 2.0 involves disposal of what was once cutting-edge. The problem is that all this involves engaging in some fairly monotonous tasks that will never get done in the regular routine and cannot as yet, be outsourced easily. They’re best left to lazy days, whilst watching sitcom reruns, test matches or mindless movies that don’t need full concentration. Typical summer vacation stuff! Now most of us don’t have the luxury of two whole months like the good ol’ days anymore, but if you do, here are some summer tech projects I recommend. :

Music:
Apple has officially overtaken Wal*Mart & Best Buy as the US’ number one music retailer and while India has been slow to catch on to the legal download bandwagon, the future is pretty bleak for CDs. “Ripping” your CDs ie. converting them to a friendlier digital format like MP3 is relatively easy. You can use a program like iTunes if you’re an iPod user or the default Windows Media Player for one-click ripping. If you’re connected to the net, these programs automatically pick up song, artist and album information. You’re literally a zombie, ejecting, inserting and replacing CDs and before you know it, the music collection is fully wired!

Video:
With the new high definition format, ‘Blu-Ray’ players and discs, trickling into the market, VCD is officially TWO generations behind the curve, even as DVD reigns supreme. As most people upgrade to big-screen TVs, VCDs will look stretched and awful. The only displays that will justify their existence are the ones on small portable media players such as the iPod Touch or the Cowon A3. Ripping VCDs though is much more painful than CDs. You have to pop the disc into your PC and open the MPEGAV folder, in which you’ll see many files with .DAT extensions. Typically, the largest sized file will be the movie while the rest will be annoying trailers that VCDs usually force on you. Rip the movie into a compressed format such as MP4 using a program such as Free iPod Video Converter available at jodix.com. The next problem is that most VCDs are spread over 2-3 discs, which means you have to repeat this fairly time-consuming process for each disc. After half an hour or so you’ll have three MP4 files which need to be stitched together. Yamb is one of the simplest programs for this and can be downloaded free at softpedia.com or download.com.

Documents & Photos:
This is most worthwhile one. Buy a basic scanner, and just put your head down for a whole day - you won’t regret it. On most flatbed scanners, you can arrange four or five photographs in the preview and select them individually for final scanning. Some of the higher end visiting card scanners are easier to use for small 4×6″ photos. Most scanners will save multi-page things like passports or contracts into a single PDF file - all you have to do is remember to ’scan as document’ and not as ‘image.’ Trust me, the effects on quality of life of this one-time painful task are immense. About nine months after the fun and frolic, when nasty surprises come your way (I’m talking about tax deadlines, whatever were YOU thinking?) you’ll be grinning like a Cheshire cat!

I would highly recommend outsourcing these tasks to your kids, especially during hot summer afternoons, when there isn’t much to do. If you have some to spare, do get in touch - don’t worry, I have considerable experience in exploiting underage labour for technological pursuits. I remember one particular summer vacation just after first year of college, when I wanted all my hand-written articles and essays converted into digital format. Having just turned 18 and with more interesting things to do, I decided to offer my 13-year old brother the task. About a week of 4-hours-a-day labour for 50 bucks. My brother couldn’t believe his luck: “FIFTY whole bucks AND I get to use the computer? All to myself? Which means if I type it out fast I can use the remaining time to play games? Deal!” Sigh. No wonder, the Indian IT industry was my calling as a journalist - I’d understood the business model way before its time!

I’ve been avoiding getting onto Twitter for a long time now hoping to maintain one last bastion of sanity in my wired world. My colleague Aalaap, a ‘Twittervangelist’ of sorts,  recently conducted a “Why Are You Not On Twitter?” session at BarCamp Mumbai and even that didnt shake my inertia though it got me teetering on the brink!

It was this news item about Twitter coming to an arrested journalist’s rescue in Egypt, that finally had me convinced. I’m now well and truly on my way to a Twittered existence. Of course, I realised how “behind the curve” I was when, promptly, the very day after I siged up, TechCrunch officially declared the Web 3.0 manifesto - less Twitter, more peace!

follow abhi2point0 at http://twitter.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

From the discussion it seems that AMD is once again on the radar of hard-core gamers with the new Phenom processor range. A recent AMD exec I met told me that folks there have decided to forget that there was a year 2007 and are moving on!

Most people though don’t seem to be very comfortable with the thought of slapping on ATI graphics cards and I don’t blame them. We’re still to see the fantastic synergies that the AMD takeover of ATI was supposed to herald. Maybe AMD should also acquire a high-end motherboard company and sell pre-packaged combos instead of getting people to opt for trial and error?

Coincidentally, I bought my first graphics card today. I’ve always messed around on test PCs and somehow never got around to buying a card for myself. The task was complicated by the fact that I have a slim cabinet which can only mount half-size metal plates. I scouted Lamington Road in Mumbai and was met by puzzled looks! Finally Gulbir of Prime ABGB gave us the right street lingo, asking his guys to rustle up a “low-profile card”. The highest-end low-profile they could muster was an XFX 8400 GS with 512 MB.

Some commenters warned me that I could be violating the Google AdSense terms of service with the first ever “contest” post on this blog.

However, I felt otherwise and emailed AdSense support for some guidance. I got an unhelpful automated response and decided to leave it at that. Today though, I received an email from them threatening to shut down my account:

Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. (Full email here.)

Here is my email response:

from Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan mail {at} techtonic {dot} info
to adsense-support@google.com,
date Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 3:51 AM
subject Re: Issue # 372209 Google AdSense

Dear AdSense Support,

Firstly, I’d like to remind you that I voluntarily brought this to your notice through query #258677301 some days ago.

Secondly, I have decided NOT to change the content of my post because in no way does it (in my opinion) violate the spirit of the ToS. It is clearly a sarcastic statement in a humourous context, clearly related to the content of that particular post: (http://www.techtonic.info/2008/03/01/march-08-contest/).

It is blindingly obvious to anyone who reads the post that there is no malicious intention to direct readers to clicking the ads. Nowhere else on the site, is there any attempt to encourage readers to click ads. My site has all original content and is not in the SEO business. I have no intention of changing the content and will gladly face the consequences.

Best Wishes
Abhimanyu

Agree with my stance? Disagree? Comments?