Introducing Voonik

I have started my new venture, http://www.voonik.com. Wish me Luck.

Voonik.com provides a free online personal stylist that helps people dress well within their budget. A dedicated style expert will offer style advice and hand-select recommendations, based on the customer’s style preferences and body type.

Our technology will meld machine-based predictions with the power of expert curation to help solve the timeless problem: "What should I wear today?"

Voonik.com is a startup founded by like-minded people from companies including Amazon, Zoho, HP Research Labs, IBM, Fresh Desk, and Aryaka and from institutions including Indian School of Business, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras Institute of Technology, Pearl Academy of Fashion, and Image Consulting Business Institute. Voonik is based out of Chennai.

Did you see the Unsubscribe link?

I am fed up of being a member of social networking websites with all the reminders and matching mails they keep sending to my mail Id. So I decided to go and unsubscribe to all these websites but boy, that wasn't an easy task ...

In no website was I able to find the unsubscribe link. So I decided to delete all the information but even that wasn't easy. Some websites didn't allow me to delete my own information. I tried to modify those info by replacing them with junk characters but in vain. The website informed me that the modifed content will be approved only after review. Who will approve the junk characters?

I know I can unsubscribe by calling their customer care number (which will be a US number) but I hate calling any customer care, after some bitter experiences.

Related to my previous post, My roomie Krishna pointed to some applications built on Ajax that do the work of WORD and Excel as I mentioned in my post. -> http://ajaxian.com/by/topic/office/

AJAX effect

Now that we have released the alpha version of our product, I will have some free time to blog ( till the beta release demands me) ...

The technology that has got my vote in the recent days is AJAX ... I am nowadays using meebo.com to chat and it is built out of AJAX ( just by three people, you know ...) Earlier I had aversion towards browser based chatting but AJAX gives a feeling of an App even when I am inside the browser ... This paves way to a lot of promising new ventures - Think of word or excel inside a browser with drag and drop, macros etc ... Take it even further and think of an entire desktop inside a browser ( a feel of Google OS, huh ...)

Yahoo Mail Beta is going to give a feel of outlook to its web based mail ( Does anyone know how can I can be one of these Beta users?) ... and yes, its possible only cos of AJAX ...

Things look good

I have managed to get things under my control. All that was needed was a little bit of clarity, time management and process among the chaos. Some exciting things have happenned on the work front. Still life is hectic but I made this choice.

Our first client who used our beta product has gone live and have become a huge hit. This has tremendously increased our confidence in the product and everyone is looking forth for its release.

I would love to share about our product and the client stories but only in the latter part of next year. Till then its confidential ... SShhh...

And Lord God made my life hectic …

I almost decided to close this blog. My life has been very hectic for the past few weeks. I work non-stop from morning to night and still I have more than 40 items in my follow-up list. More than 6 books are waiting in my book shelf to be read. I gave got mails enquiring why I am not blogging. People who mail me seeking advice have been frustrated waiting for my reply. I feel very tired at the end of the day and it’s almost impossible for me to blog or reply for mails.

But the interesting fact is though I work so hard, at the end of the day, I see that I have not accomplished much. Whatever Time management I do, things do go awry and I can’t stop mails that ask why their tasks take so much time to finish. The interesting fact is that I am still an average employee and even if I manage to do all the work I get, I will still be an average employee. Because I can never become a superstar if I just do the work given to me and do nothing beyond that. But I am struggling even to get my daily jobs done. When I don’t even have time to mail or blog, how can I think of things beyond my duties?

At the end of the day, it looks like I am doing something wrong. Let me try to figure that out and will keep you updated on what I find. I can’t promise frequent blogging but will try to put some discipline in my blogging.

The ipod phone story ...

So it has been a year since Motorola announced ipod phone and till now even Google earth has not yet got a glimpse of it. People could be accusing Apple for going to Motorola even after the bad experience it had in its early relationship. But I read somewhere altogether a different perspective.

Jobs knows that his designer Jonathan Ive could have come up with a better ipod phone than giving the deal to Motorola. But all Jobs wanted was a news that some phone company is creating an ipod phone. Think deep and there’s no downside for Apple in it. Even if the phone fails, blame is on Motorola.

If Apple created the phone and if it succeeds, there’s a problem for Apple. The cellular network providers would ask Apple to send the songs using their network and would take the bulk of the fee in their already hefty pocket. Apple doesn’t have any power to negotiate as it has no presence in cellular industry.

Now the puzzle solves itself. Now that Motorola is creating an ipod phone (though Jobs is the one who persuaded Motorola to do it), Jobs can strike a good deal with the network providers. All he has to do is threaten that their customers are just going to complain against the providers if the ipod button in the phone is not supported by the providers. Jobs didn’t really need to have the phone but just a news that the phone is underway.

Jobs played the game beautifully and stroke a great deal with Cingular, the network provider. Now Cingular and Motorola are marketing the phone and the bulk of fee would go to Jobs. I wonder how this great strategist lost to gates.

The Russian Pencil

For long time, I was under the impression that asking the user to type the text given in the form of a garbled gif while registering for an email account is effective. I was sure that there is no way to automate this till I heard this piece of news.

There was a Porn website that wanted to create a lot of email accounts but was unable to automate it due this garbled text procedure. There were a lot of hackers working to automate this procedure but in vain. The owner was frustrated about this but he did come up with a solution to tackle it. He just asked the viewers to type the text shown in garbled form to get access to the porn content.

This news is from our MD, who was earlier heading the Yahoo India division. It reminds me of America which struggled to find a pen that could write in Space where there is no gravity. Russians just solved the problem by using pencil.

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Checkout my new blog : http://weirdweirdblog.blogspot.com/

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