Param Aggarwal writes here.

Dreams. They are beautiful. They will take you to a different world. You will experience good things. You will have fun. A dream of your dreams. But no, no further than that. Please don’t ever wish them to be true. They are just good in your dreams only. Let a dream be a dream. If a dream really meant to be real, and make you happy at the same time. It would just be real. You would move earth and moon for this real thing you want. Whats a dream then? Dream dreams, but make reality.

The future. It is fun. Speculating on the next big thing. What will create the most value for people in the future? What will go? Where should we move accordingly. So I want to make some guesses at where we are heading in the next 5 years:

1. Computing. Laptops and desktops will become niche, only to be found in professional environments. Something you will call a workplace. Tablets and phones are your new computers.

2. Creativity and arts. They will shine again. Digital, the very child of technology, will bring forth a new interest in the arts. Arts, in the form of music, books, videos and new interactive forms will become more independent with you and me creating and publishing content. Publishers are over. Middlemen are over. Everything will be free to taste. A great leveling of availability of knowledge across continents. Everyone creates art and shares with everyone. Everyone can access all and any of this creation and share with their friends. Big name artists, authors and actors, directors will become less relevant. There will be new more talented people you will know about each day. There will be new competition and this will bring out the best in arts.

3. Medicine. Consultant doctors will become less relevant. Surgeons and researchers will become more important. There will be tools that you put in your home that monitor your health each hour. Just like the weight machine, thermometer and sugar level meter in today’s age. On the curing side, better more versatile medicines will become common. That is, medicines that can modify themselves based on your illness. Not feeling well in the stomach? Just take a tablet, not to worry, what exactly is wrong. With the democratization of diagnosis tools, healthcare itself will be democratized and more affordable.

4. Materials.The current materials that today’s products are made of are like yesterday’s iron and stone. The first era was of discovery of elements, with new elemental materials being discovered. Then there was an era of mixing. Alloys and compounds were discovered, to mix and match the best of the best. Now there is surface and shape engineering. You engineer the surface of a material just the way you want. Just like etching silicon. And do you want a material that bends a lot? Metal that behaves like rubber? Just control the spacing of the molecules. You can engineer the material to ‘grow’ to your needs. Just like organic chemistry.

5. Politics. Any country that is not democratized, is in for a collapse. Any country that is a democracy, the government just got weaker. The people? Stronger than ever. The internet is the biggest democracy.

Most of the stuff is sourced from Hacker News and Daring Fireball. So I won’t credit them specifically.

Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay, It’s Only 90 MB
http://torrentfreak.com/download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay-its-only-90-mb-120209/
I clapped my hands after reading this. Just imagine. Soon, there will be no need of a tracker site. The torrent client on first starting up, will simply download such a daily file. And from then on, you can make searches within the client itself. Pure distributed ingenuity. I am amazed.

I have a bad feeling about this
http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this
An article about how there is a revolution being given birth at this very moment. A turn of technology and freedom in the digital world. So rebellious. So beautiful. Power to the people. This feels like a religion to me. I say to you too, “Rebels, the force will be with you. Always.”

Using libuv and http-parser to build a web server
http://vimeo.com/24713213
(techy) libuv is a library to handle I/O on sockets by juggling through them. Hence it does not wait for a response. http-parser parses the HTTP coming to read the header key-value pairs. Node.js uses this along with the V8 Javascript engine for scripting server behavior in Javascript. Here is a video demonstrating what is going on at the base.

Geeklist
http://geekli.st/invite/twilio
An amazing social network for geeky people. Just linking to show that Facebook is not the end of the world. Innovation is still possible. (code: shazam)

Heroku Buildpacks
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks
Heroku allows you to just upload you code. Installing the environment, running the server, managing the network is all done automatically. Now add to that the power to create your very own custom environment. Just kills Amazon EC2. (For a minute ignore the technical aspects. Look at the potential.)

The reason for doing this newsletter was an incredible urge to share at the largest scale possible. Was done at Facebook, but not everyone appreciates it. Only jokes and photos are what work there. Not world changing technologies.

I hope you join me in this quest of understanding the world.

Thanks.

The song playing on the radio was ‘chitti aayi re aayi re chitti aayi, watan ki mitti aayi’.

And it brought to my mind the beauty of physicality. The touch of paper, the smell of the ink. The knowledge that the person who sent it had touched the same paper.

I wished that I could send such a letter that would sing this song, when opened.

And it clicked me.

The first episode was the postal service. Physical mail.

The second was email. It digitized post entirely.

The third episode would be something that combines the beauty of both. I don’t know what it might look like. Imagine.

But I do know this:

“Intelligent electronics has the potential to bring back the lost physicality of the digitized IT world.”

Just thought of this today. I believe this will be the defining idea of my entire career.

There is this huge thing going on in the industry. Change.

IBM had quit the PC business 5-7 years back and shifted to enterprise focus. PC business went to Lenovo. Lenovo’s biggest market is China. Apple’s revenue passed Lenovo’s revenue in China.

HP had bought Palm. Now HP is going to discontinue WebOS, Palm’s OS. They will discontinue their phones and tablets. HP is also considering spinning off their PC division. HP is the largest PC maker in the world by volume!

Nokia and RIM consistently missing revenue and profit estimates. They are not the leaders anymore. They were the industry leaders just 5 years back. (Hint: before the iPhone)

Microsoft buys Skype. Why? No one knows.

Google buys Motorola. A software company buys a hardware company. A software company that gives everything for FREE!

Gosh.

There was a promise of better times,
a promise of brighter hours,
a promise of an easier life,
a promise of satisfaction.

The promise was kept,
the dreams reached,
the wants gained,
the desires fulfilled.

And then the stars seemed brighter,
the wind seemed cooler,
the moon seemed whiter,
the heart seemed happier.

But it was just another night.
Again.
And there was another promise.
Again.

Be arrogant about being yourself.
Be selfish about doing great things.
Be envious about unfulfilled dreams.
Be devilish about criticizing yourself.

The new bad is good.

A Question of Purity of Photography

Photography means ‘painting with light’. It is an art form just like painting. A photo sensitive film is taken, exposed to the scene that is to be captured and developed. The film, the camera and the chemicals used are all tools of the trade.

Recently the essence of photography has come under question for the use of post-processing tools like Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture. Why shouldn’t the camera do everything?

In film photography, if the film is under or over exposed during a shot, the only way to correct it is to use chemicals while developing the film. This is a fix. No chemical can bring back the details lost to improper exposure. Chemicals are not a way to make photos, they are a tool to enhance them.

Hence the existence of post processing tools is in no means an excuse to improperly light your subject expecting to be able to fix it in post processing. These tools exist to give you creative freedom. They allow us to give a dramatic effect to photographs. They allow us to turn it from what the eye sees everyday into a work of art.

In art, nothing is impure. What matters is the form and expression of the photograph.

Visiting Windows Phone 7

I see six smartphone platforms currently:
1. Apple iOS
2. Windows Phone 7
3. HP WebOS
4. Google Android
5. Blackberry OS
6. Nokia something-something.

Out of them, 1,4 and 5 have a huge market share and 1, 2 and 3 are really really well designed.

Today I read an article about 2, so lets talk about that.

Windows Phone 7 is the first thing I have seen out of Microsoft that is realy really fresh and original. It is inspired by the design of Zune which was meant to be an iPod competitor.

Let’s first get a feel of what it looks like: Windows Phone Website

Just see the screenshots here, to get an idea: Windows Phone 7 on Wikipedia

Here is an interesting video that talks about the design decisions that went into this Metro UI: The Context @ CTIA: Windows Phone 7 Overview on YouTube

See? It’s pretty different, right? A very very minimal design. No gradients, shadows or borders. Basic colours and no UI or chrome or buttons. Just content. The focus is on the content. And this is a very very good design perspective. I’m impressed. I am happy to see that the competition is actually pretty good for iOS. It’s just that Windows Phone 7 is not perfectly implemented. It’s a good idea but not properly taken through to completion.

Like, lets see their ad: New Windows Phone 7 Official Commercial TV Ad on YouTube

Do you see? They don’t really get it. This is not an ad that makes me want to buy this stuff. The idea or design is never enough in itself. The software is buggy and confusing. Apple is good at that, they are consistent and they simply don’t provide the features that aren’t well implemented yet.

Here is an in depth review I read: ignore the code: Windows Phone 7

It’s a good critique of UI design written by usability expert Lukas Mathis. You should actually try reading completely. User Interface design is going to become more and more important as technology matures and a good user experience becomes more important.

(This is why Apple has finally found success these days. Because they are good at design. “Technology alone is not enough” they say: Steve Jobs: Technology alone is not enough on YouTube and Apple - iPad 2 - TV Ad - We Believe on YouTube)

And now the next version called ‘Mango’ has more interesting stuff coming that is pretty interesting: Joe Belfiore shows off Windows Phone Mango on YouTube

I am really impressed with the work Microsoft’s phone division has done. Specifically the design philosophy and ideas. They are not just copying Apple but doing their own thing. It’s so much fun to see and follow such amazing competition.

You don’t profit in a monopoly, you work harder : A lesson from Apple

Total Profit = Profit per Device x Number of Devices Sold

Every high school pass out knows this equation. To maximize profit, you can either maximize the profit per device sold or you can maximize the number of devices sold. Profit has the tendency to stay constant. If you reduce the profit per device, the number of devices sold will increase.

Hence you either decide to price your product high, so that you can make more per device sold and call yourself a premium company or you can sell a large number of devices and call yourself a mass market company. In the end, the profit is the goal.

Now in a monopoly, it is pretty obvious that you would want to price your product at a high rate because there is simply no one else in the market. While, to enter an existing market you would want to reduce the prices on your product and try gaining some market share.

But Apple beats conventional wisdom, again.

The phone industry was as competitive as it could be at the launch of the iPhone. There was no monopoly, just cut throat competition. Apple should have kept the price of the iPhone low to be able to slowly leach in and gain market share. After all Apple itself said that in the next year, it would like to gain at least a percent of the market share. And that was an ambitious goal.

But Apple decided to sell the iPhone at a high margin of upto 40%! The iPhone is a pricey phone to say the least. And still, today four years hence, the iPhone has captured 5% of the mobile phone market. That is staggering.

In 2010, Apple launched the iPad. There was nothing like it in the market. It was an instant success. A monopoly in the true sense of the word.

Apple should have priced it at a thousand dollars. After all there is no competition! But again, beating conventions the iPad was priced at half of that, with just a 25% margin.

And therein lies the brilliance of Apple. Because it worked. Apple is making a ton of money. Both the product lines have been incredibly successful.

In the phone market, they knew that if you provide the customer with a good well thought out experience they would be ready to pay for it. So people who can afford a smart phone would most likely get the best phone available. And they made sure that this best phone was the iPhone. After all, reducing the price by 10% would not have increased sales by 10%.

In the tablet market, it was necessary to use the monopoly to establish total market dominance. And we see how it has worked. All the other competitors were quick to come out with their clones, but they failed to compete on the price.

If Apple had learnt nothing from the PC era, and had priced the iPad at an exorbitant rate, the competitors would have competed successfully on price and Apple would have again been left to a tiny market share. Thankfully, Apple did not err again.

A low price made it very lucrative to prospective buyers who didn’t have much idea how they were going to use this entirely new class of device. It was safe to try out this device solely on its ‘cool’ factor.

It is very interesting to see these traditional economics failing to apply as we enter this amazing new post PC era, and as Apple shapes the future of the tablet era, or more appropriately the iPad era.