Mark Wilcox has posted a remarkable account about what could have possibly lead the top management of Nokia to opt for Windows Phone platform.

Did Nokia forget that their business and product life cycle had become much shorter compared to that of many other industries? The credit for shortening the life cycle obviously goes to Google and Apple.

Amplify’d from mobilesoftware.tumblr.com

On February 11th, one of the giants of the mobile world gave up control of their own fate and put it into the hands of Microsoft, the desktop software behemoth that has never managed to get a solid foothold in mobile.  How did that happen?  Did it really have to happen?  What will be the results of this bizzare marriage?

I still don’t know what to make of it.  I feel for the people that have been negatively impacted by this move.  I really wish that Nokia still had the sisu to go it alone – they’re clearly not the great Finnish company I once worked for.  The mobile market is a big and interesting space.  I find myself agreeing once again with asymco – there’s plenty of room for another disruptive challenger.  At the moment the most likely candidates are RIM or HP’s evolution of WebOS. Both are big and capable but that kind of scale isn’t essential either – there’s plenty of money to be made for people with the right vision and execution. Read more at mobilesoftware.tumblr.com

This is a very disturbing trend!

I have the wost fear about off the shelf Ayurveda medicines in India. It is extremely difficult, for me, to judge the genuineness of those nicely packed herbal stuff in shelves of shops.

I am also worried about expiry date of food products sold in India. I am not sure about know who decides about those expiry dates and how.

The same holds good about organic food products in India. Those products are expensive. Are they really organic?

Amplify’d from www.newsweek.com

If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic lowers bad cholesterol, then—after more study—it doesn’t. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study finds that it doesn’t (and that it raises the risk of breast cancer to boot). Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not—as a study released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide, we rely on it. Read more at www.newsweek.com

http://www.colby.edu/colby.mag/issues/84n3/ivory.html

As told by Edward Witten (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten).

URL:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12043294

This seems to be the trend in India. It will interesting to learn the good reason of pricing E-Books higher than that of corresponding paperback editions.

There is nothing to say further. I only hope the Indian publishers realize that we also have a goal to save paper and, hence, trees.

At the same time this does not mean that E-Books are more enjoyable to read than paper books. But that is a different aspect which need not affect the pricing of E-books.

Amplify’d from www.infibeam.com

Awakening Giants, Feet Of Clay : Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India (Paperback)

List Price: 495 Our Price: 371 You Save: 124 (25%)

Also Available in: Edition Price Availability Ebook, Pdf 2010 1,146 917 In Stock. 0-0 business days Ebook, Epub 2010 1,182 1,123 In Stock. 0-0 business days Read more at www.infibeam.com

To appreciate privacy concerns of social networks, I suggest that one should go through The Real Life Social Network v2 (http://slidesha.re/fjF7wF).

Amplify’d from www.bothsidesofthetable.com

Why did Web 2.0 emerge and are there any lessons to be gained about the future? [cheap accessible digital hardware] Why did Twitter emerge despite Facebook’s dominance? [asymmetry, real-time, curated RSS / link-sharing] Why did MySpace lose to Facebook & what can Twitter learn from this? [encouraging an open platform where 3rd parties can make lots of money] Does Facebook have a permanent dominance of the future given their 500m users? [chuckle. ask microsoft, aol/time warner & google] What are the big trends that will drive the next phase of social networks? [mobile, locations, layering of services, data management, portability & more] Read more at www.bothsidesofthetable.com

It is interesting to note that Wikipedia also says (http://bit.ly/dFRs50) that our eternal urge to do more and more with less and less is leading to increased system complexity, information overload, stress and strain for the people who must control the ephemeralized systems.

Eventually nature will take care of us though it is difficult to predict when and how.

Amplify’d from paulgraham.com

In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software. The reason tablets are going to take over the world is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force. Read more at paulgraham.com

A PIL, on Tiger Tourism, WP no. 12352/2010 has been filed by Bhopal based NGO Prayatna, on September 9 seeking a ban on tourism in core areas, notification of buffer zones and implementation of annual conservation plans.

The analysis done by Avinash (http://bit.ly/fbLBVg) aptly drives home the point. Wildlife conservation is not about wild life, it is about people. To save the tiger, we need not direct all your attention to the tiger. We have to target the people.

Amplify’d from www.openthemagazine.com

Wildlife tourism is mostly concentrated in areas where tigers and other big animals are relatively abundant. So the nature of tourism has a direct bearing on India’s more successful conservation stories. Since such success stories are still few and far between, the country had better not take chances. Read more at www.openthemagazine.com

Startups are not about new open source or proprietary technologies. They are about new business models.Theodore Ts’o explains it appropriately.

Amplify’d from thunk.org

Startups, by and large, aren’t about technology — at least, not the Web 2.0 startups like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Groupon, etc.   They are about business model discovery.

If you have the heart of an entrepreneur, and you are willing to roll the dice (since 9 out of 10 startups go belly up; those are the ones that failed to find a viable business model), then sure, go for a startup.  And understand that your job will be to make something that works well at a small scale, quick, dirty, and cheap.  If that means using some proprietary software, then that’s what you should do.  Hopefully you’ll get lucky and win the IPO lottery. Read more at thunk.org

We intend to double the tiger population in next twelve years from now. But it is easier said than done.

To understand the important of tigers in conservation of our ecosystem visit http://bit.ly/icBKmp.

Amplify’d from blog.livemint.com

It’s easier said than done, as India’s experience with tiger conservation shows. But the problem has another dimension. A recent Worldwide Fund for Nature and Traffic International report pointed to illegal markets for tiger parts near Myanmar’s borders with China and Thailand. Much of the poaching in countries such as India can be traced back to the demand generated in these lawless regions. Read more at blog.livemint.com