Overzealous Valley recruiting?

When the adversary is reeling, couple that left-hook with the Long Melford! That seems to be what Microsoft is doing with their advertising for search jobs, obviously targeting the Yahoos who are looking to the exits and voting with their feet.

But two of the same banner ads on the same page within an inch of each other - that could only be a bug in the system, right?

Or is it - Buy one, get one free!

Reminds me of an interesting overzealous recruiting incident a couple of years back on Yahoo 360.

The Yahoo! resignation letter generator

You gotta see this if you haven't already. It is unfortunate when a company that has (had?) so much potential starts bleeding from all sides. It is a funny letter...but sad, even for folks who were at Y! in the past.

I left Y! before Jan 2007, and although I can't claim that my resignation letter was anything as entertaining, or completely explained why I was leaving, here's one line from it:

"I believe that Yahoo! has a great opportunity to win, if we execute."

It's all about execution....

6 cups of coffee today...0 tomorrow?

The latest and greatest is that you can (should?) have 6 cups of coffee a day to cut down your risk for heart disease! Wow! And it reduces stress too (at least for now).

The real question is - what's the next study going to say? Tea and coffee change your mental makeup? Every few months, it seems like you get a polarized reading of the benefits or dangers of drinking tea or coffee. Sometimes it adds stress to your life, sometimes it kills off calcium in your bones, sometimes it dehydrates - all I can say is that I need a cup of tea (prefer that to coffee in the AM) to wake up.

The good news right now is that, given the latest, a lot of people in Silicon Valley will be ramping up their coffee intake! After all, it is the most popular drug in the world! ...and still legal!

Minority games - Cinema 3.0!

Independent of whether you do it the AMD, Nvidia way or the Intel way (the differences still kinda fuzzy in my head), the future of movies is tending towards high-quality interactivity where the viewer is immersed in the plot and makes decisions that can drive the story in various directions. Imagine making decisions in a movie like Minority Report 3 that will take you to one crime scene versus another, or choose one suspect versus another. Some of these decisions will become implicit, like how much the viewer is sweating, or if the heart is pounding, when the last heart attack happened, and if there's aspirin in the bloodstream!

Is it a movie or a game?

GTA 4 seems to be headed in the same direction. My 13-year-old son was telling me things about the game (he's not allowed to play it) that I thought I wouldn't be talking to him about until he was 16!

I pretended to be nonchalant!

Helping Search be more helpful!

It's always gratifying to be able to do something that improves the experience of millions of people. It was very satisfying to launch the "fresh query suggestions" search feature. Check it out!

You should now see more timely related search suggestions on Google.

That's my cloud!

Today, a friend of mine told me about a bunch of engineers who just got handsomely funded for a "Cloud Computing" startup without even having something built. Wow! That's a buzz word! They must be on Cloud 9.

But remember that there are now big players in the cloud - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! ... Google (my team) just launched dead-simple search for web sites - Google Site Search)- it taps the power of the cloud - so while it may not be Cloud #9, it should be noted that Googol represents a very large number :-).

How friendly are the skies?

The West India Company

Globalization is here and now! Tata Motors just acquired the luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover from beleaguered Ford Motor. Not only is this a huge acquisition, it also turns out to be a symbolic one. The land of big cats has captured a big one - a preeminent sign of affluence, power and sleekness! And it just so happens that both brands are British. I'd go as far as to say that if not for the East India Company, globalization (at least from an India perspective) would not have been the same. Maybe I'd not be writing this blog post!

Now it is up for an Indian company to prove it can deliver on global quality standards. That may not be hard for Land Rover, given that it did not do too well under Ford (apparently last in JD Power 2007 rankings), but we're talking about being able to continue to develop a global luxury automotive brand like Jaguar. Given the positive reviews of the recent Nano, I'd say Tata is off to a good start.