Tejas – You pronounce the J. It is NOT Tehas

They lied when they said you need to go to school to be successful in life.  That is SO NOT TRUE.

School didn’t teach me about some of the most challenging things that life throws at you.  It didn’t teach me:

• How to be a loyal friend
• How to let go of a friend
• How to get revenge
• How to build relationships
• How to break relationships
• How to deal with fights
• How to avoid fights
• How to win fights
• How to argue
• How to argue and win
• How to calm someone down
• How to date
• How to find a bf/gf
• How to figure out who is right/wrong for your
• How to find a husband/wife
• What to expect in a marriage
• How to know someone is your enemy
• How to know someone is lying to you
• How to know someone is being honest with you
• How not to hurt someone’s feelings
• How to handle money
• How to save money
• How to invest money
• Mortgage (definitely not about ARM)
• Credit cards
• How to be not get scammed
• How cruel and punishing the world can be
• How to be funny
• How to negotiate (definitely could have used this one)
• How to sale anything
• How to have a bubbly personality
• How to make everyone like you
• How to be social
• How to be talkative
• Know what to say when
• How to get what you want
• How to be popular
• How to cope with loss
• How to lead
• Know when to follow

If i were given chance to go back and not go to school, would i take that?  probably not, let me say that again, DEFINITELY NOT.

So what did i learn by spending almost half of my life in school and spending tons of money?  Umm quiet a bit.  Most importantly, how to find solutions to the things i don’t know about.  How to learn from experiences and how to avoid making same mistakes again.

Overall point:  it would be great if there was a class/school that teaches students about REAL LIFE and covers all/some/most of the above listed “How Tos’”.

BingTweets.com was launched today.  Of course it’s in Beta right now, but launch of it came from no where and it’s a great step forward for Bing and great partnership between FM, Bing and Twitter.  Way to beat Google   Overall, i like the way site is setup, it’s a great way to search web and twitter at the same time.  There are lot other sites that does similar things, like mixxr.co.uk and twiogle.com.  However, this comes directly from Bing and not from anyone else.

Here’s my wish list for Bing Tweets:

1. Customization:  It would be cool if portions of the site were customizable.  For example: “Trending Topics”.  It would be cook if they were just like “Groups” in Seesmic desktop.  You can assign users to a group and look at only their tweets.  I think this will make it lot more useful especially for businesses and it will make it more like a tool that doesn’t require any installation.

2.  Web  Slices: Web slices were introduced in IE8 and not lot of people are aware of it or actually use it.  It would be cool if “Tweets” were actual web slices – not sure if this is even possible.  That way no need to check the site again and again, just looking at web slice in IE will keep the user updated.

3.  Mobile:  Mobile version looks really crappy at least on my T-Mobile HTC WM 6.0 phone.  It would be cool to have a nice working mobile version of BingTwitter or at least abridged version

That’s it.  Overall, BingTweet is cool, good product.

Bing beat Google in this one.  One win at a time

T

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