John Hammond from Little Rock, Arkansas, paid more than $800,000 for a nice little place in New Delhi which he spotted on the web. The money was paid through an account in Cayman Islands (the account has been closed since, with the money gone. Cayman has wonderful money laundering laws).
The scammers tricked Hammond into a protracted make belief negotiation, which lasted for more than 6 months. They even mailed him the title deed of the PM’s official residence, 7 Race Course Road.
To his ultimate shock the “buyer” only found this out when he flew to India and saw scores of security guard, outside the mansion.
$800,000 amounts to Rupees 3.5 crore (Rs 35 million). The money is enough for an average desi Joe to live life King size for the rest of his life.
Indian PM’s house sold to Arkansas Businessman
May 12th, 2005Linux Farm at Microsoft
May 11th, 2005The Channel9 team(Charles Torre, et al) at MSDN sat down with Martin Taylor & Bill Hilf of Microsoft. Martin is a General Manager of Competitive Strategy and Bill is a Linux developer and Microsoft Technical Director of Platform Strategy.
The interview is in two parts(Part 1, Part 2). The second part culminates with a tour of a lab running 13 different distros of Linux, Websphere, MySQL, etc.
Michael Dell in Mohali, India wearing a Tilak (on his forehead)
May 6th, 2005
The story at CNET News.com.
The Age of Engagement: Mary Meeker at AD:TECH 2005
May 2nd, 2005via Corante, Emergic.
Mary Meeker, the venerable analyst at Morgan Stanely presented at the AD:TECH conference in San Francisco. According to Meeker, the Internet has “nowhere to go but up.” The session was packed with datapoints:
- Google:5b global searches (+62% YOY, 2/05); 355m global unique visitors(+36% YOY, 2/05)
- Broadband:135m global subscribers (+51% YOY); 35m in America; 63m in Asia
- Yahoo!:917m multimedia streams; 40m My Yahoo! users
- Digital Music:300m cumulative iTunes; 16m iPods
- Blogging:27% of US Internet users read blogs
- Wireless Internet:196m messaging subscribers in China; No. 1 in world
- VoIP:33m registered users (4/05)
- Shanda Networking:2m peak concurrent online gamers in China
- PayPal:72m accounts (+57% YOY); 22m users
- Broadband:S Korea broadband penetration of 70%; No. 1 in world
- Ad Spend: Internet Ad Spend at $120 per home vs. $898 for Newspapers
However, the Big Media Channels are Going down:
- Music: 2004 sales down 21% from 1999 peak
- TV:Network TVs audience share down by 1/3 since 1985
- Radio:Listener-ship at lowest level in 25 years
- Newspapers:Circulation declining
- Magazines:Circulation peaked in 2000; now at 1994 levels
Browser Wars: The bad guys vs. The good guys
April 24th, 2005Interesting comment at IEBlog: “The so-called browser wars have fundamentally changed. It’s no longer Microsoft vs. Mozilla vs. Opera et all. Now it’s the good guys vs. the bad guys. The bad guys are the phishers, malware distributors, and other miscellaneous crooks looking for a quick score at the expense of the browsing public. ”
We’re all in this together.
Gauri Nanda invents Clocky: MIT Media Lab’s Project helps the oversleeper
April 12th, 2005No more ‘easily-locate-in-the-dark-and-tap’ activity on Snooze button of your morning alarm, unless you can find the clock from one of the several random places it can hide in your bedroom.
Put simply, Clocky is a robotic alarm clock, which rolls off the bedside and wheels away into a quiet corner.
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Quoting the inventor, Gauri Nanda, “I’ve been known to hit the snooze bar for up to two hours or even accidentally turn it off and then wake up shocked”.
How about a pillow, which vibrates and bounces and roars until you wake up. Just another idea in the kitchen bag…
FeedBurner: Employees, Entrepreneurs, (E)Investors energized, everyone expecting Exit
April 11th, 2005Feed Burner’s press release was aptly titled — FeedBurner Fully Financed For Future Feed Formatting Fun. Nice title, eh 🙂 How about this signature at the end of the release — “Employees, Entrepreneurs, (E)Investors energized, everyone expecting Exit” ?
Last week, Feed Burner announced the completion of a second round of $7m. Draper & Mobius are now joined by new investor Sutter Hill. Feed Burner manages 40,000 active feeds, including mine.
The company is still in the process of figuring out the right business model. Thing to consider — if the feed items are teasers (i.e. first few lines of the item), the feed drives traffic to the website. However, if the feed items are complete entries then there is little or no traffic to the website. Aggregators and users will shy away from the service if the non-feed content in feeds turn out to be intrusive. This will be an interesting space to watch with “ads in feeds”.
Public Beta of Packaged Software: 10 steps for a successful Beta Program
April 5th, 2005Recently, in a discussion I came across with a ‘How to do a Public Beta of Packaged Software’ question. What came out was a list of 10 bullet points. Not that I am an expert on this topic or I have successfully ran public beta programs for million (or billion) dollar corporations — I just happened to participate in a few.
Here’s how a successful public Beta program should be run (not in any particular order of appearance):
- Public Bug Parade
- Moderated Discussion Forum
- Moderated Chat amongst Beta Participants
- Incentives to Bug submitters
- Build announcements
- Visible Change Log of Builds
- Easy Feedback form
- Incentive for Referrals
- A certificate or tchochke as a Thank You note to each Beta participant
- Beta Program should run from a community website (Sales/Marketing pitch is the last thing Beta-users are interested in)
Update: Gautham proposes the 11th step (The Microsoft way of running a successful Beta Program) — Release the code, make people pay, and then fix the bugs.
Next Part: More details
Bo Peabody’s Completed Exercise: Better to be Lucky than Smart
March 28th, 2005Found the following on Page 90 of Guy Kawasaki’s book, Rules for Revolutionaries:
Exercise
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Write a an essay answering this question: Why is it better to be lucky than smart (assuming you’re smart enough to know when you’re lucky)?
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Amazingly, Bo Peabody’s book (excerpted here) is the completed essay (and the real-life exercise!).
Scary Dot-con saga of Infospace
March 20th, 2005Ravneet Grewal reports about never known facts related to Infospace, it’s founders, options which were never given to employees, lawsuits, push-to-IPO, founders cashing out before the bust, employees selling their mansions to founders, lies, SEC lobbying, endless. The original story as part of an investigation done by Seattle Times.