Do we need Cable ?

More and more people are cutting their cable subscriptions and are using services like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon movies, Google Movies to get their entertainment.

Is traditional model of distribution of content through Cable relevant ?

What should on be on TV as "live" or What should be broadcast on TV for everyone ? It doesn't make much sense for TV channels to broadcast movies and traditional TV shows when only a fraction of people who receive the broadcast actually watch those shows. It would be more efficient to only broadcast events like news and live sports events which have value for being available immediately when the event occurs. These events and content becomes stale as time goes on and will have close to zero value after a certain period of time.

An ideal TV will only broadcast news and live sports events and every other traditional channels will be only available on demand and will be grouped in various Genres as done in Netflix or Hulu. I can imagine that TV show producers would argue that taped fake reality TV show audience can be tricked into believing that those shows are in fact real by broadcasting new episodes at the same time to a certain market. Even if exceptions are made for these "reality" shows there's no need to have broadcast the reruns of these shows. The channels could go from "live" mode to on demand mode once the broadcast event is complete. After all there's no economic or social value in getting everyone to watch "The Black Swan" on HBO at the same time!

Google's biggest contribution is not the search engine.

Most people think of search engine when they hear the word google. Although search engine is one of the biggest contribution from Google by becoming the yellow pages for the internet tubes. The impact of programs like AdSense is often misunderstood.

"Google AdSense is a free program that empowers online publishers to earn revenue by displaying relevant ads on a wide variety of online content".

AdSense has provided a great way for a large number of people to monetize their knowledge and as a result thousands of people have started sharing their knowledge on their websites or blogs. These AdSense powered websites have contributed in a big way to productivity of both the authors and immensely for the readers and therefore the economy.

You can read more about the impact of various products in this report published by Google. The impact of knowledge sharing is not documented in this report and that I believe would be biggest flaw of this report.

Economics behind Groupon and LivingSocial

Groupon and LivingSocial are two of the fastest growing social media companies in 2010. Together they are expected to gross about $2 billion in revenues in 2011. Groupon recently rejected an offer to be bought by Google for $6 billion. Groupon is also in talks with Meryl Lynch and other investment bankers to do an IPO for an estimated $ 15 billion.

Have you wondered what's the secret behind the success of these companies ? The reason these coupon companies are popular is because they are able to provide services like house cleaning, massages, sushi, rock climbing, sky diving etc from local business to consumers at discounts anywhere from 50% to 90%!!!

How do they provide these discounts ? How can companies afford these levels of discounting ? Is the high levels of discounting sustainable ? Here's my theory on how the Groupon / living social / social coupons work. There are several benefits of social coupons.

Social coupons provide a direct marketing and advertisement for many new and small companies. Instead of spending the money in media buys and promotional events new companies can promote themselves by selling their product / service to customers at a steep discount and they are guaranteed to get a certain amount of customers.

Social coupons are acting as advanced resource management systems for many small firms and thereby reduces the slack in their system and improves productivity of smaller firms and their resources. This is the biggest invention / contribution to the economies of small firms by social coupons. A spa or tanning salon will have to employ certain number of employees to address walk in customers. The span owner do not usually have a very accurate method of estimating how many customers they will get on a given day therefore they will have some employees who will be waiting for customers and this means employees will have to be paid while they wait for customers to show up at the firm and hence the average price of the service goes up because it includes both the actual cost of service and also the cost of employees who are waiting. By using social coupons these small firms can plan their resources in advance sometimes even for couple of months so that they can reduce the time wasted by their employees in waiting for customers and as a result the cost of the service will come closer to the actual cost of hiring employees who perform the services.

Then there's the economies of scale, A small firm which knows in advance how much raw material it needs for the next month or year can manage to get better prices from their suppliers by getting into long term contracts thereby pushing the cycle of efficiency one step back into the supply chain / economy

Stocks and Options

Stocks are forms of investments while options are a zero sum game that can be used for insurance or as a speculative tool. Here's a link from investopedia confirming this.

Five things about time travelling

I have tried to understand time traveling and relativity for several years and had several attempts to learn it from the web.

I think I finally got a good hold of it after reading "About Time" by Paul Davies. The book has hundreds of theories which have continued to be speculation rather than successfully proven facts. The first 3 or 4 chapters of the book are useful though. Here's the 5 things i took away from the book.

1) There's no universal time. There's Earth time which most of us follow and there's other more dynamic time which changes like another physical dimension in space due to gravitation and velocity.

2) Time can be slowed down by both gravitation and by velocity. Gravitational time dilation and Velocity time dilation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

3) You can travel to the future but you CANNOT travel to the past. For example you can travel on a spaceship at high speeds close to the speed of light starting in 2010 for five years of your local time measured by your clock on space ship and when you return to earth you could find that you are 2030 earth time. Twin paradox is a good example for this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox

4) Experimental results have proven time dilation and therefore its not science fiction but real physical phenomenon.

5) Maximum speed that can be achieved is the speed of light and this precludes traveling to the past and also prevents from causality violations like the grandfather paradox in which you travel to the past and kill your own grandfather and therefore prevents your own existence etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox

There are other interesting things in the book but I think I have covered the important ones here.

How Sarah Palin made my Yahoo id secure

Governor Sarah Palin's yahoo email id was hacked on Sep 17 2008. You can find more about the hacking here. This incident exposed the weakest form of password protection Yahoo practiced for years. The hacker used the reset the password option of Yahoo mail to reset Sarah Palin's email account to reset the password to a new password and then logged in using the new password.

Until this incident happened resetting password in yahoo was very simple. The three steps to hacking are as follows. Click on forgot password link on the mail.yahoo.com page after entering the username. Yahoo will ask you answer to a secret question. If you can guess the correct answer of this question then Yahoo will let you reset the password to a new password of your choice. How convenient!! As long as you know someone's pet's name or birth city or mom's maiden name this three steps will enable you to get into their yahoo mail account.

Unlike Yahoo, Gmail and other online accounts do not let anonymous users / hackers to reset your password. When password reset option is used in Gmail, Gmail sends a reset link to the users's secondary email account and Gmail requires the user to go to secondary email address to reset the password. This adds additional security to the system.

Within few days of Sarah Palin's password hacking incident I tried to reset my password in yahoo and found that it was a walk in the park for anyone who knew my first pets name, which includes almost every one of my friends!!! People at Yahoo must have been embarrassed by this incident that they finally decided to change the password reset option of Yahoo mail accounts. As the result of the change any reset attempt on my yahoo mail will result in sending a reset password link to my secondary email and thanks to Sarah Palin my email is more secure.

Although the governor couldn't convince enough people to vote for her she has certainly helped us in making our Yahoo email ids more secure.

The shrinking web

The launch of Apple iphone shook the smart phone market and has resulted in a fierce competition for dominance of smart phone market. On Monday Nov 10 2008 wireless research group NPD released a report revealing that Apple Incorporated’s iPhone 3G had become the top-selling handset throughout the United States amongst adult customers, thus having outrun the Motorola RAZR phone.

No matter who ends up being on top of this smart phone war, one thing is clear, consumers are getting a wide range of options accessing internet from their mobile devices and as a result almost all popular websites have developed mobile phone friendly web pages. The graph below published by Nelson shows the rapid growth in mobile access in US. If this trend of 30% growth in mobile users continues for 5 years, more than 150 million users would be accessing internet from web pages.

Currently all the top 10 websites in Alexa.com's most visited sites have a mobile version of their websites. As of Nov 2008 the top 10 sites are Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, Live.com, msn, wikipedia, ebay and AOL. If this trend continues almost every website will have a smaller sized, mobile friendly webpage. Many of this websites will continue to have both wide screen and mobile webpages running in parallel so its not a complete shinking of all the pages of the web but if you consider the average size of all the webpages you will notice the shrinking.

If the last 5 or 10 years saw non-IT companies being aggressive in getting their web pages ready for the regular internet users and the next 5 years should see more and more non-IT companies developing mobile friendly pages not only because it is necessary for revenue generation but also for making their businesses visible to a wider population. It is also a good time for developer to finally have a compelling reason to use MVC ( model View Controller) and other architecture patterns which have the separation of visualization, business logic and data at its core.