Tejas – You pronounce the J. It is NOT Tehas

Calling out to all the teachers.

Question:  How do they track if teacher A’s methodology to teach math is better than teacher B’s?  Is that even tracked?

Reason why i’m asking this quesiton is: it’ll be cool, if someone tracks the performance of teacher A’s students over the next 3-5 years and see how they do in math compared to teacher B’s students. 

In the example below i assigned random grades to all the students between 60 and 100.

Based on above, teacher B has taught the basics of match (multiplication, division etc.) well to his/her students than teacher A.  Of course, there are several assumptions we are making here about the student. 

Why do this?  If there was a way to look at historical data and see which teacher’s methodology is better, it should be taken as a best practice for all the teachers.

I was kinda shocked to see Bing in Gmail.  Very nice – i like. 

Also, from today onwards you should be seeing Bing Ads on TV – everywhere.  Check out first of many to come TV ads: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137044.  Other ones are more funny – wait and see

As an official launch Space Needle was turned orange yesterday.  When i searched for “bing space needle”, i got good description (which was nice) but upon clicking on it, it took me to images page – i actually wanted to see the image of space needle as orange.

Bing’s everywhere.

T

Recently i have noticed lot of people getting their Vine invitation on Twitter, so today was my day.  Installed it without any problems on Windows 7 and so far runs pretty well.  So here’s my review of this new tool.

1)  First of all even before i got the invitation, i checked the videos they have on Vine.net and videos made no sense to me.

2)  Installation was quick.

3)  After logging in, i selected my place and radius

4)  I think best part was local news by zip code – but again am i going to log into Vine to see what’s happening in my neighborhood or turn on TV and check local news?

5)  To stay in touch with people you care about, you need to invite them and you can create groups:  family, friends, etc.

6)  To send an alert you simply need to click on “Alert” and you can type in your message and select your group. 

My question is:  In case of emergency, will i go online or send a text (to special personalized number provided by Vine) or call my family to tell them everything is ok?

Call me old style but i prefer calling people than to send text – it just takes too long.  I don’t even have unlimited text on my phone   Getting back to Vine, only advantage i see is sending a message/text to a GROUP on Vine – well you can also create a group on phone and send them all same text message.

7)  You can also post a report to your family/friends about what you are up to etc – like status updates.

That’s all i have discovered about Vine so far.

I think this just another tool – nothing extraordinary in my opinion.  I kind of understand what they are planning to do, overall purpose is to help people and keep family/friends updated in case of emergencies – just need to make videos lot better on the website saying what the clear purpose of the product is.

I’m no basketball expert.  But here are the top 8 things Dallas needs to do to win game 5:

1) STOP the turnovers – this is giving Denver momentum

2)  Play more defense

3)  Be more aggressive

4)  Stop the 3-pointers

5)  Stop the inside game.  Way too many dunks

6)  Dirk needs to continue playing hard – though he needs some help

7)  JJ needs to step up, play like he did against SA

8)  Stop the fast break points

A month ago i finally decided to jump on the bandwagon and started “Twittering”.  When Twitter was first introduced it didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.  Someone told me, Twitter is like Facebook’s status updates.  Now i know better.  To me, Facebook is to connect with your family/friends and share pictures/notes.  Twitter is more about finding and following people/businesses that i find interesting.  People i follow include, WSJ, ComScore, Hitwise, Silicon Valley Insider to name a few.  I follow these people for most update to news – ok i’ll admit it i’m a news junkie  

So how do you use twitter to your advantage?

Well first by not twitting about things that people do no care about.  Twitts like this

makes me want to say: And i care because?  So i categorize these kind of twitts and people as social – that’s what facebook is for. 

Twitter and also Facebook are more about taking advantage of people power.  Do you know what is the #1 influencer when someone is trying to purchase something?  Family and friends.  Consumers value opinions of family and friends more than any ads or articles.  That’s where Twitter comes into play.  If you are looking for good thai restaurant in Brooklyn, NY – ask other Twitties.  Twitter is useful if you want information about ongoing sale or want an opinion about which camera to buy.

If you are a business owner, twitter is a great way to get consumer’s opinion about upcoming product release or to keep track of what people are saying about your product in real time.  The best example is, couple of weekends ago i visited this great vegetarian restaurant in union square called Maoz.  After having a great falafal, i twitted from my phone about how great the food was.  Before i got home, Maoz already re-twitted my comment and started following me.  I have never seen anything like this.  Maoz is using social media/twitter to it’s advantage and keeping track of what’s being said about it’s food and restaurant.  For website owners/bloggers, it’s a great way to drive traffic to your site/blog (just like what i am going to do to this blog post ) and have a loyal followers.

To summarize, you can use twitter to get opinions about things you are consider buying, get real-time restaurant reviews, opinions.  For businesses, it’s a great way to keep track of what customers are saying about your product and drive traffic to your business.

Tejas

Do you remember Cuil?  Whatever happened to those guys?  They had their 5 minutes of fame and disappeared.  Cuil was supposed to be the next “Google Killer” -  yeah right.  You know what i would want “Google Killer” to be?  Nothing like Google.  Something different and innovative.  Everyone copied G’s clean page  with a text box format (look at Live.com, ask.com), because Google was getting lot of attention.

Here’s what i don’t want “Google Killer” to be:

1)  Not a search engine

2)  Not a personalized page  (iGoogle or personalized Live page), but

A hybrid of Facebook’s alerts and things that are important to me.  I want my browser or my computer to learn which web pages i visit everyday and present me those pages or simply open them up for me only the first time i launch my browser.  I want to know what my friends are up to and who has uploaded new pics – just like Facebook.  However, i also want “Google Killer” to be accessible at all times – on my phone especially.

Overall, i don’t want my “Google Killer” to be anything like Google.  Google is just a search engine (a smart one, might i add) – my life does not revolve around doing new searches everyday but rather it revolves around my family/friends (FB), what’s happening in news that impacts me directly/indirectly, how can i save/make money, how can i improve myself financially and otherwise.  Now, if you can give me all that information in one screen (like executive summary), you’ll be my hero.

It is great to part of this historic election that took place today.  Outcome was what lot of people expected it to be, Obama to be our next president.  What makes this guy so great?  His charisma, him maintaining his cool.  When he made a great acceptance speech, not many people had a dry eye in the crowd.  He reminds me what i have read of JFK.  It’s great to see what those words actually means.  He gives people hope, something to look forward to, he unites America and it’s people coming from all different background.  He is man next door.  He puts a smile on people’s faces which is much needed in these tough times.  People are proud to call him our President.  I have never seen this country as excited about it’s politics, it’s President or anything of sort. 

When i was standing in the line this morning to vote at 6:30AM, a mother tells her little girl this:  “You will read about this when you are in high school”.  This is truly the historic day that will change the face of America for years to come.  Obama has given people hope that if he can become a first black President of America, anything is possible.  That hope alone is a first great step that will guide the people of this country and give back the confidence in it’s markets that is much needed. 

A lot of work needs to be done.  War needs to be ended peacefully and tactfully, terrorist needs to be detained, financial system needs to be strengthen. 

But for now, hope will do

Source:  abcnews.com

There is this cool site called:  brandtags.net, which tells you exactly what people think of your brand.  I learned about the site from newsletter i get from AdAge, here’s the full length article.  When you go to the site, it randomly displays a logo of a company, user is asked to type one word/phrase response when they see that logo (tagging).  Thus the name Brand Tags.  At first it made no sense to me, but when i looked at this page , it gave me insight into what consumers think of when they recall a brand.  Very interesting concept.  So for fun, of course i wanted to compare Google and Microsoft.  Google had lot of tags as, ones that stood out most to me were:  amazing, awesome, big brother, cool, god, information, innovative, Internet, and search.  That gives you really good idea of what people think of when they see Google logo.  Privacy is of course one of the main concerns consumers have, but they also find company “innovative” and “cool”.  A recent poll by Businessweek ranks Google at #7 in the list of top fifty employers to launch career with (Microsoft is at #13).  Going back to BrandTags.net, i looked up Microsoft and tags associated with that brand were:  big, bill gates, boring, computers, crap, crash, evil, monopoly, software, windows.  hmmm, lot of people associate Microsoft with Bill Gates, Windows, and Monopoly not surprisingly.  Overall, it is interesting to do brand comparisons and get an idea of what people think of when they see a company’s logo.

Now let’s talk about BillG and Jerry’s ad #2.  Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the link to the Ad#2.  So this is full length ad and of course TV is not going to show 4 min ad.  Part 2 makes little more sense to me, than the first one did.  This ad is about connecting with people and actually understanding what they want from MSFT products.  Would like to see what 30/60 second ad would look like and which parts they would edit out.  I still think, ad lacks substance and the story line, it is different though.  Oh also, BillG is a good actor   Other ad that i have seen running is about Mojave Experiment, which is cool, just wish they showed what people were looking at and saying “WoW” to.

T-man

Google Chrome came as total surprise to me.  But why not?  Makes sense from Google’s POV.  However, i think it is going to do more harm to FireFox than to IE.  Have i downloaded it?  Nope.  If i’m not going to download IE8 beta, why should i download Chrome Beta?  Plus Chrome has lot of features that IE 8 does (no, it’s not other way around).  Either way, great move by Google.

Today Google stock price drop drastically.  Silicon Valley Insider blog has pretty interesting insight:  “Wall Street Journal – The Justice Department has secretly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. Vice Chairman Sandy Litvack, for a possible court challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising.”  Really?  that’s interesting.

Oh another interesting thing is, Yahoo promoting Firefox on their homepage.  This was actually happening before Chrome came out.

Lot of people have written about the latest Microsoft ad (Bill G and Seinfield ad).  Yeah at first look, it didn’t make sense to me either.  What was the ad about anyways?  They did not talk about anything until the last 10 seconds, what was that about?  Just like outside, internally there was also lot of discussion about this ad.  Here’s my view:  we are used to seeing one thing or another being sold to us in every ad.  Be it, iPhone, car, food, whatever the case might be.  MSFT ad was different.  It didn’t want to sell anything, it is building up to a bigger story.  Hopefully 2nd ad will make more sense and add to the overall story.  Why does ad have to sell something, why can’t it be a story line?  Plus it served the purpose it intended to do:  to generate buzz (unfortunately, mostly it was negative).

Instead everyone jumps on a dislike the ad bandwagon, because it is NEW concept and more importantly it is by Microsoft, so just because couple of the blogs said, it is horrible.  Everyone says, yeah it must be.  We let other external factors cloud our judgement.  Basically, we do not have our own view of things or do not know what/how to think.

Yeah first ad did not make sense, so give it a chance.  Let’s see if the new upcoming ads will add to the story line and make more sense.