Smart Phones!

The world is a new place now. Over the past decade I had used one form of smart phone or other.

It all started with an LG Stylus phone on Sprint network back in year 2000. I loved that phone primarily because of its ability to synchronize contacts with Outlook through a cable. And of  course I was able to use the stylus to doodle on one of the built in applications. Then it was various forms of Windows Mobile Phones for several years. All funky names, but synchronization to Outlook was a standard feature. Over time the synchronization morphed into synchronization with Exchange server. That also meant that I got access to mail and calendar.

Last year I had tried the iPhone which was great. The applications on the phone were a delight. It was a sea change. Touch screen, great hardware, and applications meant the life of an average user was significantly improved. Leisure time became play time with games. Social parties were filled with app-talk. Jog time also meant use another application to track jogs. And many more. Creating the applications was not particularly easy, but money at the end of the pipe lured lots of developers to come in.

Now there is an ocean of smart phones with touch screens, fantastic hardware, and a promise of rich applications are making their way into market. I hope that applicaiton development becomes even more easier.

Gaming and Education vs. Gaming and Economics

Yesterday I had a lively conversation about computer games. We observed that the use of computer and console games peak in advanced economies of the world like United States, England, Japan, etc. At the same time we found that gaming use is limited in big countries like India and China. Why so?

It is easy to associate higher levels of education in advanced economies. It is equally easy to associate that the advanced economies also have advanced economic condition - meaning both disposable income and disposable time that allows the citizens to afford the costly consoles and games. Despite continued price wars, owning and using computer or console games easily can set one back by several hundred dollars. This means that only families or individuals who can afford the same will buy these gaming systems.

In United States or Japan, console games have been a stable diet for the past 30 years. Each generation of game consoles have grown the number of users who can play these games. Now easily we have a world wide penetration of 100M+ households with game consoles. I doubt if this penetration ever reached 1B mark! 1B+ mark is reserved for cell phones - more about that another day. There are numerous reported studies that indicate gaming can help brain to grow - especially games that involve strategy and tact. I had observed personally that several nerds (okay ... really smart people) have a very high disposition towards console games. These are also usually pretty educated people - who can earn and afford high priced gadgets like the console games. If indeed games foster education and easy learning - many do, why would the emerging economies not invest in getting game consoles?

A certain level of education guarantees certain level of economic livelihood and leisure time. Read Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.) for compelling arguments. Now if we look at countries like India or China, there is a strong desire for education. Parents invest a LOT of energy and money (may be not money in $$ terms) to educate their kids. At the same time there is no critical mass of economically affordable population to afford time and money to buy into the console lifestyle. Instead if I may call the current generation as the 'A generation' for the Asian kids, they are all learning to get educated and get settled well economically. Definitely the 'B generation' and 'C generation' - the youngsters of the 'A generation' will be able to afford more time and money to get game consoles ... paving path for new environment.

I expect that more game console distributions will happen alongside the growth in educated and economically settled population.

There is a massive counter argument to consider as well. Gaming happens when there is no other viable alternative even if game consoles were available. In United States, it is well proven over the many years of observation that the game players have other activities on the christmas day (celebrating christmas of course) or during big ball game days. In those days the console game usage declines a lot. Similarly we can expect the kids in India (if not China) having a better weather to play outside and not be huddled inside the home to play console games. Not to mention the continued power outage and that too planned power outages do not give the right environment for games to be played.

Perhaps with the arrival of 4.6 Billion phones, games will be a hit on the cell phones.

Youtube Therapy - with right selections

Yesterday we watched a few videos on YouTube. Mind you - these are watched my 5 year old. We selected lullabies and piano renderings. Wow! what a collection - there are so many videos out there with nice (mostly amateur) performances. It was definitely relaxing and enjoyable. It is amazing to see the creativity of millions of people. Not to mention the creativity of the founders of youtube to harness the potential and bring this to millions of people.

I wish Youtube had a way to set parental or content control settings to ensure we can let my daughter watch selective videos. Perhaps we also need a way to just select the right content for me at the right time. Need to play with Youtube more.

Sit and Chat Time

Finally yesterday I had the time to sit and chat about what is happening around us. We had a very beautiful (almost) summer day - sunny and bright - that is a rarity in the pacific northwest. It was nice and relaxing to sit and chat. We found nice Crate and Barrel's wicker sofa to sit down having the sun shine on us.

We talked about our life - how we started, where we are, and where we are going. Lots of exciting fun and painful topics came up. We inventoried our current worry list. The best part was that we had conquered and solved all the past worry items. I am sure the current ones will fall off the list too.

Okay back to the sofa. We had ordered a sofa as well. Not from Crate and Barrel, but from Costco. The sofa is to arrive today for our patio. We are looking forward to this in our backyard. We can relax and enjoy the backyard. Our new sofa also will have a confirguration in which we can assemble it as a sleeping sofa. This summer will be fantastic.

Not just names - passwords are hard too!

I was driving home yesterday evening when NPR was informing me about passwords. Especially they talked about what we all universally know about. An average user (includes me!) has many many passwords to manage. As a result the user tries to find the easy way out - reuse the same password everywhere or create minor variations in the password. Naturally this leads to poor security measures. What can the poor mortal do when every site wants to hide behind a secure wall and require password!

NPR went on to talk about an elaborate research work done by Microsoft. Presumably Microsoft researchers saw an opportunity to encourage all users to just log into Windows and have bliss. See the Micrsosoft research paper here. The study is very enlightening to see that range of passwords users try out, the strength of such passowrds, frequency with which users change passwords etc. Mind you, the study is baesd on the selective distribution of the special application that the research team created to study user habits. One could have done this based on similarity of passwords on Microsoft's ID system - windows Live ID, or working with other such massive vendors - say Amazon.com, eBay.com, etc. The security and privacy laws will prohibit anyone from getting access to the secure password data.

Nonetheless, we live in a world we are governed to remember funky sequence of letters and numbers if not all the fun special characters we learnt as punctuation marks in elementary school. We live in a world, where the rate of proliferation of secure sites far outnumbers the capacity of human brain to remember various things. Let us hope that all the research yields better solutions. Say for example, my computer camera will look at me and instantly recognize that i am who i am. And perhaps the keyboard will recognize that I have the same old keyboard habit which makes me type errors in and use backspaces once every 5 or 10 characters being typed!

Till better solutions arrive, let us have fun remembering the funky passwords :)

KIN - friend to phone!

Yesterday I caught this announcement about KIN.com. Wow! that is a very short name. How in the world do folks find domain names with such small names. I started digging into this. Aha! KIN is well funded - it is coming from one of the billion $$ software companies - Microsoft. No wonder, they can afford to find such nice domain names. Why am i talking about domain names - observe that I had difficulties getting the domain names sorted out earlier today.

Dictionary.com has excellent meanings for this more than 1000-year old word - Dict: KIN (see dictionary directly to avoid any copyright issues). KIN is a nice word to use for friend ... it sounds poetic, romantic, and melliflous. A stronger meaning includes 'descendants of the same family'. Perhaps the hardware devices being marketed by KIN.com belong to such a definition. If I indeed buy one of these phones, i would rather load it up with more friends than family. Famliy have a way of becoming friends too (see facebook!)

Switching to the real KIN.com message - the announcement is for a new kind of phone. It comes out as a couple - Kin1 and Kin2. Or perhaps corporate speak - i should say - Kin One and Kin Two. In these days of application filled hyper phones (read iPhone) what does Kin have to offer? Social Connectivity they say. Yes, the primary purpose for my phone is to interact with my friends and family (barring a few marketing calls that i have to handle). More than applciations, i definitely want to know if my friend's son went swimming, or the daughter won the chess tournament, or better yet if the weather was great at nearby ski resort (because one of my friend went there over the weekend). Kin does make sense.

For now i am awed by the name - short, sweet, and meaningful. Nice job Microsoft. Is the product that good too?

Getting a blogger name!

Several repeat attempts are required to get a blogger name. Creativity is flowing deeply in the world. And all creativity comes to a halt, if we cannot even name the thing. Any place we start life, we have to first state a name - be it facebook, twitter, blogger, email address, website, etc. I wonder what will be life like for folks who start life in then next decade - will we be out of all names? Perhaps not. More new inventions are in the making to simplify naming.

After all a name exists to discover and connect with someone, something, some place, etc. As long as there are sentences to describe something, we should be back in the business with an easy name.

Good news! I got a name selected for my blog site. The name combines some word from mother tongue (Tamil) and world tongue (English). Let us see how long we can run with this new name.