I have moved all my writings from 2006 to a single blog on Blogger.com Please visit for lasted posts!
Facebook went under the hammer at NASDAQ today. From a Harvard startup to a billion dollar public company – Facebook’s journey is filled with ambitions, grit and lawsuits. Here is a collection of links from around web about Facebook –
At NASDAQ –
Facebook goes public (via @cri) –
At Facebook’s Hyderabad (India) office (via Manoj Verghese)-
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: from Harvard hijinks to hoody billionaire
The social network’s stock market debut has made Zuckerberg the 23rd wealthiest person on earth but he’s no evil genius (via Guardian.co.uk)
EXCLUSIVE: Mark Zuckerberg’s Secret IMs From College
How Facebook Hacked NASDAQ Button
Some savvy Facebook engineers rigged the NASDAQ button to automatically post“Mark Zuckerberg has listed a company on NASDAQ – FB” to the CEO’s Timeline as he rung the bell to open the NASDAQ’s day of trading. David Garcia, a senior software engineer at Facebook, explains how they turned the NASDAQ on to Open Graph. (via TechCrunch)
Frankly, the movie was a disappointment. Intrigue should not necessarily mean silence. Silence is thrilling only when it leads to somewhere, it builds anticipation. In this movie the silence is – well, silent. For first 10 minutes of the movie, barring a few minutes in the beginning, Gary Oldman keeps on walking nowhere! You never know why this test of patience of the viewer?
Here is a similar voice about failure of the movie to give justice to John Le Carré’s original espionage story – Forget the Film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: See the BBC Original (Huffington Post).
I would rather recommend ‘L’affaire Farewell‘. Inspite of its lower rating on IMDB, I felt that the movie is far better than ‘Tinker, Tailor…’
Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their inlellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.
Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civihzation. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.
Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought.
As per Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) regulation, mobile consumers will be freed from unwarranted calls and SMS from 27th Sept 2011.
This was long overdue – but now has come into effect. Accordingly, the Do Not Disturb registry has been renamed to National Consumer Preference Register. Every telemarker needs to register itself with TRAI (Check registered telemarketers in your district here). Click here to know more about the changes.
Now consumers can choose to block all calls-SMS or choose which calls-SMS they wish to receive. Further, one can change his/her preferences after 7 days compared to 3 months earlier.
People who have already added themselves to DND will be automatically treated to have blocked ALL calls and SMS.
To know your current status, go here and enter your number.
Here is a quick guide to update your preferences via SMS:
You can register your preference(s) for commercial communications by sending an SMS to 1909.
Basically, there are 7 categories of registered telemarketers:
1. Banking/Insurance/Financial products/credit cards,
2. Real Estate,
3. Education,
4. Health,
5. Consumer goods and automobiles,
6. Communication/Broadcasting/Entertainment/IT,
7. Tourism and Leisure.
To partially block, you need to simply send an SMS to 1909 in following format:
START <number of desired category from above>
For example, to receive calls/SMS from Banks and Credit Cards, send following SMS to 1909 –
START 1
You can also send the SMS in following format for multiple categories –
START 1,3,4
To block everything (which is not recommended), send following SMS to 1909 –
START 0
Remember that START 0 supercedes all other options.
Also, remember that the shipment information about items from an eCommerce website are included in category no. 5 i.e. Consumer goods and automobiles. So you may want to receive SMS from this category.
What happens after one sends the SMS?
Basically, you will receive an SMS about confirming the options you have selected. Once you confirm that by sending a confirmation SMS, your preference will be registered and you will get an SMS with a registration number (keep it safe, you may need it).
START x STOP
You can similarly, use STOP to opt put of the whole blocking thing (if you are ok with all the calls and SMS). Just replace START with STOP in above instructions to bring this into effect.
Stumbled upon this nice piece by Jeffrey Sachs as he thinks this is an apt time to –
….reconsider the basic sources of happiness in our economic life. The relentless pursuit of higher income is leading to unprecedented inequality and anxiety, rather than to greater happiness and life satisfaction.
He goes on to present conclusions drawn by a gathering of experts in Thimphu – the happiness capital of world.
Third, happiness is achieved through a balanced approach to life by both individuals and societies. As individuals, we are unhappy if we are denied our basic material needs, but we are also unhappy if the pursuit of higher incomes replaces our focus on family, friends, community, compassion, and maintaining internal balance. As a society, it is one thing to organize economic policies to keep living standards on the rise, but quite another to subordinate all of society’s values to the pursuit of profit.
Yet politics in the US has increasingly allowed corporate profits to dominate all other aspirations: fairness, justice, trust, physical and mental health, and environmental sustainability. Corporate campaign contributions increasingly undermine the democratic process, with the blessing of the US Supreme Court.
Reality Is A Farce... 