Its not surprising that the reason it does not get implemented is because of procrastination.  It is rarely a technical limitation. We get caught up in so many other things that we forget prototyping the idea and then getting it to the finish line . That has been true with me as well. I think Seth Godin has got this right in this video. Its all about “Quieting the lizard brain”. As he mentions in the video, it is a simple idea but tough to embrace. But one will only know if a idea will work after it is prototyped.

Some of the things I will strive to do this year

Write down every small Idea I come up with and add a deadline to prototype

Prototype the idea and figure out if its worth pursuing the idea to the finish

Finish in time (as Seth Godin says “ship” in time)

Hope that helps if you have been planning to buy a new domain.

Well anyways, I wanted to attend this conference to get my hands on the device, see how it looks and feels like to have one.

If you did not know already, there are two versions of the Kindle.  Kindle with 6 inch display, wireless works globally and the Kindle DX (DX stands for Deluxe) which has a 9.7 inch display, works on wireless in US.

I got to play with it for about 10 minutes and here is my opinion about the Kindle especially if you are going to use it in India.

I clicked a few snaps of the Kindle through my phone. It can be viewed on my flickr photostream here

First, the good part:

No Glare: Kindle uses the E-ink technology that does not strain the eyes and works quite differently from,  say a LCD screen.  I never got to test it but I believe one can read it with full sunshine on the device.

Free Wireless: It supports 3G where available or switches to 2.5G. Basically, wherever you have EDGE available you can use the kindle to download the books through wireless from the Amazon store. The wireless connectivity is completely free. The end-user will have no interaction with the wireless service provider. It is all taken care by Amazon. India, I believe Amazon has tied up with Vodafone.

Takes a minute to get a book: Ordering a book and getting it all happens within 60 seconds. This of course, depending on what connection you are on.

Highlight or add notes: I found this quite useful. I could highlight a text or add notes to a particular word or sentence. Searching through the text is easier too.

Light in weight: The kindle weighs about 284 grams and its sleek. It feels like holding a 25 page hard bound notebook.

Built-in PDF reader: If you have got e-books downloaded (in pdf format) from a source other than the Amazon store, you can still read it in the kindle with its pdf reader.

Stores a lot of books: Can store about 1500 books. This should be enough for most (if not all) readers. Even for the voracious readers.

Not just books: You are not limited to read just books on the Kindle. You can subscribe to newspapers, magazines or periodicals and even blogs. I saw Indian Express and India Today on it. I am sure there will be more Indian publications on it sooner or later.

Before I go about listing the issues I saw with it. I would like to make sure that due credit is given to Amazon and its Kindle team. They have really worked hard to get this device out in the market in the current form.  In fact, Kindle and all the other ebook readers are solving a real tough challenge in transitioning the traditional book readers to go the e-way.

Now for the downside or I would like to call it enna Kindle(ah)?^[1] points.

Cost: The 6″ Kindle has a MRP of USD 259.  The order to India would cost more than that because of the duty and other taxes. I see this as a major hurdle for the Kindle to be successful in India. I do not see a lot of book readers shelling out Rs.12,500 (without the duty) to just get started off on reading. Over that, it costs another $9.99 (Rs.450) to read a new bestseller. Prices might or read as *will* come down over time but not so drastically.

Only gray-scale display: Currently, the E-ink technology that Kindle is based on supports only gray-scale. So you can not enjoy a pretty, colored picture on a book or newspaper.

No book sorting or categorizing: It does not provide the feature of categorizing books you bought. For example, you cannot separate out the fiction and non-fiction  books into different categories on the Kindle display.

Issues with scroll on PDFs: Scroll while reading a PDF is not page wise. Rather it is just a arbitrary scroll. I got the same text I read already displayed after clicking the scroll button.

No full-fledged browser: Kindle comes with an “experimental” browser that allows users in India to browse limited set of websites like Wikipedia.  I believe the reason being, Kindle is marketed or to be used as a ebook reader rather than a  Internet browsing device. Today, I carry around a Smart-phone and a laptop while on the road.  But not too long ago, I had a mp3 player on that list as well. With the smart phone I got rid of the mp3 player. Now, I read the latest news and listen to my MP3 on my smartphone while travelling. So if the Kindle is going to be used only to read books, that is another device to my travel list.

Security: Though the guy in the commercial (we were shown in the conference) pocketed the Kindle into his Jersey. With the hot weather in India, hardly anyone would wear a Jacket with a long pocket. So carrying it around should be in a bag else people are sure to lose it. So if one loses the Kindle, anyone can subscribe to a number of books and the owner will be billed for it. One of the attendees asked that question to the presenter, the answer given was “It is like a credit card, anyone can misuse it if one loses it”. Well, my argument is that the Kindle is not so small to be kept in a back pocket.

The Verdict:

If the question is if I would buy a Kindle or any other ebook reader device? No, I do not think a device can yet give me the same feeling of reading a hard copy book.  But that said, may be I will buy a device which does not strain my eyes while staring at it for long that also works as a:

1. Ebook reader
2. Lighter and compact Internet browsing device
3. Music player
4. Cell phone

T-Shirt Giveaway:

I got a T-Shirt at the Conference that does not fit me. It is a white T-shirt of size “L” (they did not have XL size) and has “Amazon Kindle Chennai” written on it in black. You can view the picture of it here. If you like to have it just contact me.

BACK TO POST enna kindle(ah)? or pronounced as kin-da-la? in Tamil means asking a person “are you joking?” . This is all in good humor, no offense meant.

Almost all of them suggested to put up Ads. This is one good option and might help twitter make some money.

However, twitter for business might sell well too. Businesses can run this customized and secure software on their Intranet or Extranet to provide product updates. In addition, internal teams can use  it to maintain pending tasks, schedule appointments etc.

Another idea would be to offer “no-ads” Premium accounts.

Any other ideas?

I opted to do the manual upgrade just to be aware whats going to change.

It is quite simple. Here it is in 3 simple steps:

1. Download the latest version from http://wordpress.org/download/ and extract the contents of file.
2. Overwrite all the files and directories with the new version except for wp-content directory. wp-content directory has all your plugins, themes and other customization. If you overwrite this directory, you will lose all your customization.
3. You are done. To confirm the upgrade, login again to your wp-admin page. You should see the upgraded version number in the bottom right corner of your admin console.

Now as the wordpress upgrade document suggests, reward yourself with reading that book or article you’ve been putting off or write a post about the upgrade. Just like I did now.

Have you been using WordPress? Have you encountered any issues with it?

A malicious hacker trying a dictionary attack would use a password dictionary that has much more than just 370 passwords.

Instead,  I would have liked to see twitter stop accepting passwords that is not complex ( a password less than 8 characters long, has a CAPITAL and a special character). Right now, it does show a password rating during signup but it accepts passwords other than the “too obivious” ones.

OR

Have twitter use two-factor authentication like WikID

Ofcourse, this leads to the same old argument on choice of  “easy to use” or “more secure”.

However, this is required by my registrar (GoDaddy) to contact me periodically. Ofcourse, there is a paid solution from the registrar itself to make  a private domain registration. But, I was wondering if there was a free and simple solution.

After some google search and quite a bit of reading found a simple but effective service called myprivacy.ca

What does myprivacy do?

1. Provides an email id with a @myprivacy.ca domain. Emails to this ID will be forwarded to your valid email ID.
2. Allows  (with no filtering)  any email from The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) and a set of  participating ICANN Registrars.
3. Everyone else gets a simple challenge email.  The sender needs to respond with a reply to this email. This happens for the first email that a sender sends to you.  Once you approve the sender, that email ID is whitelisted.

Whats more, you can have a whitelist of email IDs or domains you want to allow without sending a challenge email. This helped me as GoDaddy is not in the list of participating ICANN registrars. I had to just add its domain name in my whitelist.

That’s it! Simple and easy. Though, I am using this to block spam from originating from whois information this can be used for general purpose (private) email too.

So, how are you protecting protecting yourself from SPAM? Do you know of a better solution than this which is free?

Send in a comment in this post or send a tweet as @r_prathap in it.

I was asked by couple of my friends questions like:

1. What does it mean for facebook users?
2. Do I need to stop using facebook?
3. Is Orkut any better?

Reading the privacy policy, the major cause for concern is that Facebook allows search engines to index your profile pages.

So should you stop using facebook? YES, if you can . If not, following the below guidelines can help reduce the risk upto an extent.

• Review your privacy settings on facebook
• Set everything in there to be viewed by “only friends”
• Do not “Accept” any friends unless you know them

More detailed information and how to better configure privacy settings are here 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

Lastly, go watch this video and know for yourself how your information on facebook can be used by fraudsters.

Let me know what you think.