Gesture recognition and the like

When I was working on my thesis at IITK, my guide, Prof Mukerjee was also involved in another field - gesture recognition. At that time, I was always a bit skeptical on whether gesture recognition will find an immediate (or short term) commercial use. Turns out, it will indeed be used. Recent reports on Venture Beat suggest that Gaming will soon be using gesture recognition in interesting ways.

At IITK alone, my junior and good friend Rahul Banerjee's work was focussed on gesture recognition, and so does Mondal, Maji, Pal and Mukerjee's work point to some work in gesture recognition.

Interesting Google Feature

As you might have noticed that I use Google Adsense on my blog. I don't earn much money, but I like to use it to see what kind of ads are presented on each topic. The most impressive part of Google Adsense has always been about the way it automatically detects what ads to show. Context senstive ads helps publishers in having relevant ads on their sites helping them make money. Of course, it can go horribly wrong sometimes, but generally its okay.

So, today I was very surprised to see this on my blog.

It seems Google has introduced a new feature where you can simply request an ad for a particular topic instead of the Google guys doing it for you. Or does it mean they got no clue on what to show and therefore decide to ask readers of my blog? The last post was about acting. So when I typed acting in the box, it took me to this page.
I can't understand why the same ads could not have showed up in the previous page? Interesting days these are.....

Knol and the like...

For techies like me, it was another week where Google has launched yet another initiative. The list of fields they enter into, or intend to enter into, is getting longer. Android for Telephones, Green initiatives on Google.org, Bidding for telecom spectrum, GOOG-411, Open Social and the latest - Knol. Knol is their initiative to build up an encyclopedia based on community inputs and is expected to compete with Wikipedia. This project has got me thinking.

The code word Knol was given because it is supposed to be a "Unit of Knowledge". Since it is, I actually started thinking about how one could measure the value of a certain piece of knowledge into knols? For instance, how many knols would Theory of Relativity be? and how much would be Newtons Laws? or in Computer Science - how many knols would be Quicksort? What about Bubble sort which is not practically used? Would that mean its knol would decrease?

I am looking for answers, and if anybody got any answers, do leave a comment....

Me, Myself and TechNews

My day never seems complete unless I pick up my daily dose of news, specially Tech news. While my appetite for regular news is fulfilled by the Good Old Times of India paper edition delivered to my home, much of the tech news I consume come from a bunch of blogs. My personal favorites are TechCrunch (Michael Arrington, Eric Schonfield and co.), Digital Daily (John Paczkowski), Boom Town (Kara Miller) etc.

Recently, I found two innovations by separate companies very useful in my constant search for good content in this space. First is Google Reader's Discover option. I use Google Reader to consolidate all my subscriptions and use it as one place to read all content. Now, they introduced "Discover" feature which lets you know other related blogs using a bunch of parameters. I discovered the Docu Drama Blog, Venture Beat, Serving Both Sides and Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed using this feature.

The second is LinkedIn's "Most read Articles" pertaining to your company. I love this. It is kind of still buggy as it announced Yahoo's Reorg news as the latest which, in fact, is a one year old news. I have already reported it to LinkedIn's customer service. I am sure LinkedIn will fix this bugs in near future, but as it is it is still a very attractive feature. As I blogged earlier that I love LinkedIn for its various features, but this one does make me comeback each other and check up interesting stories. :-)

Today's picks for me:

• A startup with well over a billion in investments
• Anger against Facebook
• When at Ugenie, all of us were discussing a possible follow-up apps to Books iRead, a very successful Books Cataloging application on facebook that we had launched. One of the ideas was Books iWrite. Unfortunately, we didn't launch it, but Some guys have launched something like that.
  
• Searchers from India is bothered about fed rate cut
• Programmers Dress Code, and following on from there, The Quiz to differentiate serial Killers from Programmers. I scored a 7/10 - "It seems you know your Java Beans from fava beans, your slashers from slashdotters".
• Australian company uses Iodine to perform better water-cleaning.

Startups Galore

I am back from my trip to Delhi/IITK. It was an eventful trip, but nothing as striking as to come in touch with 3 people all planning startups. Aditya Chadha, my good old classmate from Delhi University days had already touched base with me 3-4 weeks earlier about getting some info about a Mobile-payments based startup out of India. I have allowed him good use of my networks and promised him whatever logistics support I can give him.

Similarly, when I landed in Delhi, I met a junior who is working on an idea in the Health care industry. When I further travelled to IITK the next day, I called up one of my professors who was immediate in inviting me over for dinner. Over dinner, he told me about one of his students having incorporated a company and asking me about whereas options of funding it and the process involved in building up a team. While we were still at it, another of his students, Mohit Mundhra walked in (and I knew him from my days at the campus) and he informed me that he has started off a company (Aurora Systems) in Bangalore and is waiting for his thesis to get started on work.

Thats exposure to 4 people planning startups in a gap of month. Its rather striking how so many people want to throw in a promising but predictable career to have a go at a startup. Mind you, these are not guys who want to work for a startup, but want to start something off on their own.

I myself started off in a start-up and worked for one more startup before moving to Yahoo recently. I think it is very courageous but the right thing for these guys to do. They have an idea and the passion to go after it and nothing but to take that step.

My best wishes to all the 4 parties involved and I hope I can contribute in whatever way I can, within the restrictions of being in Yahoo.

Update: Michael Arrington at TechCrunch wrote a really good piece - "The Twice Shy Entrepruener" about old guard versus new guard startups and their techprueners. Read it.