Ravi’s Blog

As all the newspapers and the web is buzzing - jerry yang is stepping down. Sad to see you step down Jerry! But who are you passing this baton to?

All the press release from yahoo seems to say is that they are going to be looking for a new CEO and when the new person is found, Jerry will transition the role. Are you pulling a Steve Jobs and staying on as “Interim CEO” for couple of years? I hope so.

Jerry - Now that you announced that you will step down once a competent CEO is found, let’s hope that your detractors shut up and let you focus on running the business. I hope you can continue your good work and kick butt with YOS ( which i think needs a lot more resources and lot more focus ). Keep the company focused on product innovation and process automation.
Also, I request you to fire those losers at tech ticker. It doesn’t help to have your employees publicly rail about every one of your little steps in the name of reporting.

A humble reminder to folks to get out and vote today It looks like Barack Obama will be leading US and the world for the next 4 years.

I, for one, is looking forward to the change. Barack Obama’s Presidency is going to be great for US image across the world and most importantly, I am hoping his presidency will be good to citizens of USA.

Hyderabad and Indian RealEstate has been feeling blue for the past year. This global downturn has affected not only the capital markets but real estate. After holding the prices steady for the past year, it seems that sellers are caving in.
I have been in touch with some real estate agents in hyderabad and they are saying how tough the market got.
Bharat Iconia has apparently reduced their pricing by 30% from the prices mentioned on their website. You can now get units in the iconia towers for Rs 3000/sqft. Emmar-MGF slashed prices by Rs800/-
Word is that land prices around hyderabad have moderated as well. If you know of any concrete reductions in prices, post them in comments.

I tend to read Eenadu and Andhra Jyothy quite frequently - atleast once a week. These two are telugu language newspapers covering local happenings in Hyderabad. Since I got my mac, I had a hard time getting them to work properly. Today i realized why. I was installing the firefox add on Padma which is supposed to help me read indic scripts. So first thing i did is uninstall padma.
Next, download the True Type Fonts from both Eenadu and Andhra Jyothy and copy it into /System/Library/Fonts/ directory. Now, firefox should be rendering the fonts correctly!

If you are a startup, techcrunch is a great place to get a bunch of beta traffic from. Most of the people who post take a positive look at new products, evaluate and make encouraging comments. Even they have something negative to say it is usually constructive.
The great thing is, you get a lot of traffic at no cost. You can argue about the quality, nonetheless, you get a lot of traffic. You get indexed by search engines quicker and getting listed on techcrunch says that you have built a product with reasonable quality. This worked as a great PR tool!
In the boom times, they really did not have anything negative to publish about companies unless it was outrageously bad. Now that times are tough, every business model is being put to test, startups are not liking the potential negative coverage. Added to it, Michael Arrington’s tone has changed - reflecting his current doom & gloom outlook for economy. Techcrunch deadpool and layoff tracker are now getting a lot more attention. Deadpool has been around for a while and layoff tracker is new.

Entrepreneurs are not liking the negative coverage and are acting like cry babies. They make up some weird excuses about how coming up with new business models is hard and how “efforts should be lauded”. Tech crunch is on the defensive, explaining how reporting the failures is also part of their job.
I have two words for these whining entrepreneurs - GROW UP.

Continue reading Shocking - Techcrunch is not just a PR tool for startups

I came across this september 25th post from Henry Blodget on Alley Insider. This post digs deep into Yahoo! & Google’s numbers, bringing to light some interesting differences. Basically, Yahoo and Google operate at ~60% gross margin, but Yahoo! has a net margin of 7% versus ~30% for Google.
After this great number crunching, Mr. Blodget goes on act as CEO and decide how to “improve” yahoo to make it more like google. He proposes series of people cuts, improving the overall margins to 20%. The bulk of the cuts are in sales & marketing department and R&D. He proposes ~1800 people to be let go from sales/marketing, and ~1000 more from R&D.

Here is where i think he misses the point. The assumption underlying with Mr. Blodget’s analysis is that even after cutting people yahoo! and its processes can retain the same revenues, and support the operations for those revenues. Not only that, with reduced r&d they will be able to continue to innovate, keep the product line competitive and ensure future revenue growth.

Continue reading Yahoo Fat Farm

Rumors abound that yahoo! is going to layoff “some” folks once again. Considering that these are coming from a reputable sources - Henry Blodget, Wall Street Journal, & San Jose Mercury - and with great detail, there must be a lot of truth to those rumors.

All the people I know @ yahoo! are super talented and I hope yahoo does not make the mistake of letting them go. Nonetheless, these are tough times, and my prayers with everyone of them and yahoo!.
When i recently talked to few friends at yahoo!, the mood was optimistic, and positive. I hope this continues and yahoo emerges stronger than before.

I discovered google charts api via jeremy’s blog. I have to agree with jeremy. This is a pretty cool api. I wonder how easy it is to hook up the google finance data to this api. I suppose like all financial data, the difficulty might be in the contracts relating to (re)distributing financial data and not the technical difficulty.

I started looking at code.google.com and found that they have tons of apis for various products. This is quite impressive. I like the Ajax Search API, Android, and Open Social APIs as well. One lesser known api that i wanted to use is Safe Browsing API. I always wanted to build a safe browsing plugin for firefox and IE. May be someday.

When i read the book The Alchemist, I felt a connection to the concepts/ideas presented in that book. The first concept is that of a personal legend - a path, a story that drives person’s life journey. Intertwined into this, paulo coelho’s hero - santiago - connects with various elements of nature as he wills the universe to guide/help him along his path. This is quite an interesting concept. The idea is that through your mind/soul you can connect with the elements of nature in a profound way that bends the laws of nature and time. This idea resonated with me quite a bit. Mind over Matter manifested not as creating things out thin air, but as communication with powers of the universe and results through that.

Continue reading Mind Over Matter

I posted about aamir khan blog couple of months back. At that time his blog was on lagaandvd.com. Since that time he moved his blog over to AamirKhan.com. Strangely, he ends his old blog without any reference to plans of moving over to new site. It took me by surprise, but i found his new blog.