The Seed

I came across this beautiful story shared by Ramki. I enjoyed it.

A successful business man was growing old and wanted to choose a successor to take over the business. He called a meeting of all executives together.

He said, "It is time for me to step down and choose the next CEO. I have decided to choose one of you." The young executives were shocked, but the boss continued. "I am going to give each one of you a SEED today - one very special SEED. I want you to plant the seed, water it, and come back here one year from today with what you have grown from the seed I have given you. I will then judge the plants that you bring, and the one I choose will be the next CEO."

One man, named Jim, was there that day and he, like the others, received a seed. He went home and excitedly, got a pot, soil and compost and planted the seed.

Everyday, he would water it and watch to see if it had grown. After about three weeks, some of the other executives began to talk about their seeds and the plants that were beginning to grow. Jim kept checking his seed, but nothing ever grew.

Six months went by - still nothing in Jim's pot. He just knew he had killed his seed. Everyone else had trees and tall plants, but he had nothing. Jim didn't say anything to his colleagues, however. He just kept watering and fertilizing the soil - He so wanted the seed to grow.

A year finally went by and all the young executives of the company brought their plants to the CEO for inspection. Jim told his wife that he wasn't going to take an empty pot. But she asked him to be honest about what happened. Jim felt sick at his stomach, it was going to be the most embarrassing moment of his life, but he knew his wife was right. He took his empty pot to the board room. When Jim arrived, he was amazed at the variety of plants grown by the other executives. They were beautiful -- in all shapes and sizes. Jim put his empty pot on the floor and many of his colleagues laughed, a few felt sorry for him!

When the CEO arrived, he surveyed the room and greeted his young executives. Jim just tried to hide in the back. "My, what great plants, trees, and flowers you have grown," said the CEO. "Today one of you will be appointed the next CEO!" All of a sudden, the CEO spotted Jim at the back of the room with his empty pot. He ordered the financial director to bring him to the front. Jim was terrified. He thought, "The CEO knows I'm a failure! Maybe he will have me fired!"

When Jim got to the front, the CEO asked him what had happened to his Seed, Jim told him the story.

The CEO asked everyone to sit down except Jim. He looked at Jim, and then announced to the young executives, "Behold your next Chief Executive! His name is Jim!"

Jim couldn't believe it. Jim couldn't even grow his seed. How could he be the new CEO the others said?

Then the CEO said, "One year ago today, I gave everyone in this room a seed. I told you to take the seed, plant it, water it, and bring it back to me today.

But, I gave you all boiled seeds; they were dead - it was not possible for them to grow. All of you, except Jim, have brought me trees and plants and flowers.

When you found that the seed would not grow, you substituted another seed for the one I gave you. Jim was the only one with the courage and honesty to bring me a pot with my seed in it. Therefore, he is the one who will be the new Chief Executive!"

If you plant honesty, you will reap trust.
If you plant goodness, you will reap friends.
If you plant humility, you will reap greatness.
If you plant perseverance, you will reap contentment.
If you plant consideration, you will reap perspective.
If you plant hard work, you will reap success.
If you plant forgiveness, you will reap reconciliation

Music DB & Playlist

Was Searching for IMDB for Music and the closest i could come to are

http://www.allmusic.com
http://www.soundunwound.com from Amazon
http://www.last.fm

Allmusic has more data, much structured but less usable.
Soundunwound,got me confuse with SoundHound app, is cleaner UI but not enough data.
Last.FM got me interested but still need to work on UI.

Problems I faced were following

Cant browse through Bollywood Numbers in-spite of having such a large industry
Difficult to track lyrics etc.
Finding and managing playlist/favorite songs
No recommendations.


Anyone to game to solve this problem?

Google on Music

Sometime back Google launched music locker service (Google Music) where you can upload all your music to the cloud and listen to it from anywhere.

I could not have the first user experience as it is limited to USA. While browsing through the Demo video, I had the feeling that the Pandora is next in line to be acquired by google, just like Riya/Like.com for improving image search.

Google Music also seems to be integrated part of Google Docs.

Pandora : www.pandora.com
Google Music: music.google.com
Google Magnifier: a music discovery service. http://magnifier.blogspot.com/

बेटियां तो सिर्फ एक एहसास होती हैं

श्रीमान शैलेष लोधा (तारक मेहता) द्वारा लिखी कुछ खूबसूरत पंक्तियाँ अपनी बेटी के लिये

क्या लिखूँ ?
कि वो परियों का रूप होती है
या कड़कती ठंड में सुहानी धूप होती है

वो होती है उदासी के हर मर्ज की दवा की तरह
या ओस में शीतल हवा की तरह
वो चिड़ियों कि चेह्चाहट है
या कि निश्छल खिलखिलाहट है

वो आँगन में फैला उजाला है
या मेरे गुस्से पे लगा टला है
वो पहाड कि छोटी पे सूरज कि किरण है
या जिंदगी सही जीने का आचरण है

है वो ताकत जो छोटे से घर को महल बना दे
है वो काफ़िया जो किसी गज़ल को मुक्कमल कर दे
क्या लिखूँ ??
वो अक्षर जो न हो तो वर्णमाला अधूरी है
वो जो सबसे ज्यादा जरूरी है

ये नहीं कहूँगा कि वो हर वक्त साथ साथ होती है
बेटियां तो सिर्फ एक एहसास होती हैं

वो मुझसे ऑस्ट्रेलिया में छुट्टियाँ , मर्सडीज़ टू ड्राइव ,
५ स्टार में डिन्नर, या महंगे आइपॉड नहीं माँगते
न वो ढेर से पैसे पिगी बैंक में उढेलना चाहती है
वो बस कुछ देर मेरे साथ खेलना चाहती है

और मैं कहता हूँ यही
कि बेटा बहुत काम है. नहीं करूँगा तो कैसे चलेगा
मजबूरी भरे दुनिया दारी के जवाब देने लगता हूँ

और वो झूठा ही सही
मुझे एहसास दिलाती है
कि जैसे सब कुछ समझ गयी हो
लेकिन आँखें बंद कर के रोती है
जैसे सपने में खेलते हुए मेरे साथ होती है

जिंदगी न जाने क्यूँ इतनी उलझ जाती है
और हम समझते हैं, बेटियाँ सब समझ जाती हैं

Greetings!!

May you achieve all that you have been striving for
May your treasured dreams come true in this New Year
May the days ahead bring New hopes and success

Enjoy the journey ahead.

déjà vu

When I was a kid, I could only think of computers through sci-fi tv serials on DD. Computers were portrayed as a person with all great wisdom. Whatever you ask it has all the answer.

Now when I think back, I wonder how simple interface we talk about but I could hardly see any around.

Last night a friend referred me a site Ikea.ca . There was a simple interface for automated chat assistant program "Anna". A simple Eliza like chat program, with a twist. What ever you talk about related to ikea, the other pages is automatically redirects it to that page. (Reminds me of our AI course assignment of GoSSIP, a similar chat bot for IIT-Madras with different learning modes but didn't redirect the user to those pages.)

I'm not sure how well "Anna" is programmed in comparison with ALICE or other similar program but I liked the way the technology has been used for better use.

"Anna" animation looks very primitive, I found a better animation demo at haptek.com

Later I saw a " 2D to 3D image transformation" demo from a single image done by research team in CMU.

There are good enough "Speech to text" technologies available.

I just had a wild dream, what if you combine all these and make a single powerful application.

• Speech-to-text
• Search(I'm feeling lucky ;-) )
• answer the question
• redirect user to relevant places
• Emote as per user interaction
• Talk 2 user (text to speech)

I guess every kid in this world would like to create his own skin(interface) depending on whom he thinks knows everything.

I Like it

Riya.com, a photo search company, has launched a new image search engine called Like.com

Riya.com have been putting lots of effort in photo search. I was just wondering how will they position themselves when they said "We aren't so much about searching for images as much as we are about searching with images."

With photo search I could visualize some of its applications in genealogy, social networking, dating and matrimonial sites. Photo search application could also be used by police and other similar organization.

There are many other image search engines but they all search on meta information attached with the image. Accuracy of the result depends how well that information is tagged. Like.com adds another dimension of image search which is a true example of searching with images.

As of now this is just limited to jewelery, handbags, shoes and watches search but as and when this expands to another categories this could be another mode of CPA based advertising.

I like their Riya's strategic move in the image search world. Very good work done.

Whats Next on Net

With Internet the world has shrunk.

People are making new applications to ease life of the user. System are getting more complex every day and end user expectation level is rising.

We have moved a long way from text based gopher to world of multimedia. Web 2.0 is the new buzz word you hear now. I'm seeing lots of interesting applications using this technology.

In a nutshell different phases of Internet evolution

1. Plain text based information sharing
2. Hypertext documents - interlinked documents
3. Use of simple graphics and colours : evolution of graphical browser.
4. Animation : world of flash and gif
5. Web 2.0 : web based application got simpler, lots of desktop application are morphing to work over web.

But whats next?

I guess now is the time for hypermedia. System will evolve to incorporate 3D world inside the box. Its just the time when someone make a interesting application using VRML and people will just jump into band wagon. This should not be standalone applications but the next generation application which will built over the previous stages. In my opinion all that is required are

• A simple 3D browser,
• Easy to design 3D world

Lets see who makes the first move.

A real estate site showing the 3D virtual tour of the location would be interesting ;-)

World Beyond

Let me narrate a scenario before I put forward my views.

In a jungle of infinitely long disjoint pipes and tunnels, there used to be many colonies of different creatures. The used to travel all across those pipes all their life. This pipe was all their world. One fine day somehow someone got and idea and said this to its fellow members that there is another world beyond this pipe. There exist another pipe just next to this. Everyone laughed. It was declared MAD and imprisoned. None was able to digest this idea.

In another scenario, the creature can move and visualise things in two dimensional plane and one of them proposed the idea of three dimension. Guess what? Same FATE with it also.

Now in our three dimensional world, where we live today the same things are observed every now and then when someone talk about  time-machine, time travel, space folding, tele-transportation etc

Its not easy to digest new ideas which we can't perceive with our senses. The tools which we develop are also limited to our senses perception.

Just because of our limitation of perception we can't not argue for non-existence of the world beyond but at the same time we just can't accept any such ideas though. I guess that's where the HEART rules over your MIND.

Things which we can't explain, even to ourselves, are in existence mostly because of our believes.