Bindu's ramblings

Timbuk2 Artist Gallery Bags - Sponsored Post

2009-11-10T16:22:00.000-08:00

Timbuk2 Artist Gallery Bags - www.timbuk2.com

Check out the cool art on these timbuk2 bags... They have different artists every year. I have one that I got a couple of years ago. It has original art from a san francisco artist and was worth $450. I still use the bag and get compliments wherever I go. The ones with smaller paintings are reasonably priced as well

What should Google do about the new MSFT-Yahoo deal

2009-07-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

I was wondering last night what I would do if I were Google give the new MSFT-Yahoo deal.

The first question to probably ask is should Google worry about this in the 1st place? Short answer is Yes. Search is not a very sticky product and anyone with a better product and decent distribution can easily start taking marketshare from the leader. MSFT definitely has the money to pay for distribution and even though Bing's "search quality" is pretty bad (i.e Search results on Bing for most queries is much worse than that of Google's . Good example is the query - "How to do Good Seo" on Bing vs. Google ), Bing clearly does a decent job of the UX and latency. They are also doing a FANTASTIC job of marketing to the press and the world in general resulting in largely great coverage for the product. Now with the Yahoo search deal, there is some chance that GOOG might start seeing Bing taking some marketshare.

So what than should Google do? My answer, Google should adopt an extremely aggressive strategy against Microsoft

Innovate more on Search - All said and done. Google's search improvements are subtle and timid at best. It's amazing that Twitter launched real time search before Google did :). Google is hardly in the news for it's innovative search improvements. I would set an aggressive goal of one major improvement per month

Put more resources on Chrome, Promote it more - Chrome is gaining market share but where is the Mac version? Use the Google home page and the search results page to promote Chrome. Every Google page should have a promo for Chrome. Chrome is a good browser so Google should be able use it's massive distribution to market the hell out of this product.

Start taking the fight to Microsoft - The Chrome OS is still vaporware but Google Apps is a real tangible product. Google should spend a lot more time/money/resources getting large companies to adopt Google apps. Get 10% of the Fortune 500 to switch and MSFT is going to really start worrying. Google can actually offer to pay for the cost of switching and deploy IT resources to actually do some of the hard work that IT departments might have to do to switch. Also spend more engineering resources in developing the features these companies want. End of the day MSFT gets a lot of money from these large organizations. If you can cut of some key revenue streams MSFT is going to start to worry.

Develop on OS and open source it ASAP - These things take a long time to happen. This means Chrome OS should be high priority

Advertise - While Google is still very cool to the geeks. The masses don't find it all that cool anymore. It's Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that are the cool kids on the block. Big companies can be cool as well... Apple and Nintendo are good examples. Having an equivalent of a "I am a Mac" campaign won't hurt Google.

Anyways nothing like some good competition to spur some innovation. Let the games begin :))

My friendfeed wish list - 5 features/product improvements that would make me happy :)

2009-02-18T15:33:00.001-08:00

I have been addicted to Friendfeed lately and find it far more entertaining than TV :) These five features/product improvements would make me friendfeed a LOT more. FriendFeeders, I hope you are listening :)

Ability to address specific people in my posts/comments. Ability to say @paul or @spidra would be great. Especially if I want to draw that user's attention to my post. The @ posts could all show up in a separate tab or something. So I could click through to see all the @bindureddy posts and respond to them
Ability to read a blog post directly on FriendFeed. Clicking to the blog and reading takes time and energy. It would be much nicer if I could just click a zippy to read the blog post. This would be very much like Reader/iGoogle.
An easy way to scans 100s of posts/read state. Right now, the constant next page clicking is giving me RSI. I have also divided my FF into lists which actually doesn't work all that well for me. I hardly ever scan anything but my home feed. Read my ff post on this here
Power-user feature: If you comment and like stuff a lot, you end up spamming all your friends on FriendFeed. It would be really nice if I could turn that stuff off. I want my friends to only see my posts not my likes and comments.
This one has more to do with feel of the site than with any particular product improvement. Right now FriendFeed seems pretty much more for geeks/power-users than for normal people. Sometime ago, I got my cousin to try it and she wasn't sure what to do other than than to like a couple of people she knew. She has no feeds that she can import so she imported nothing. She left to go back and hang out at Facebook where she is on pretty much all the time. Part of the issue is the "liking technology" which makes FF seem like one large loosely-coupled community vs. small groups of people hanging out with each other.

Friendfeeding....

2009-02-04T00:04:00.001-08:00

Lately I have not been posting too much on my blog... However I do friendfeed - http://friendfeed.com/bindu

My brain on music

2008-12-26T23:47:00.000-08:00

Writing this post more as a note to self... Music has always had a strong effect on my mood. As a child, I would get up and start dancing every time a favorite song of mine came on TV. This was pretty unusual as I was a very shy kid. I would be afraid to say hello to strangers but did not seem to have a problem with dancing.

Every time I am feeling low or depressed, I just need to listen to good music and there is an immediate effect on my brain. In some ways it is similar to a glucose/sugar high. The effect does not last for long however. I am happy for a short period of time, about 15 mins. after the music stops playing and I go back to being in the mood I was in before I started playing the music.

Clearly music has a profound and interesting effect on the human brain. Something I need to read up on...

My $0.02 to start-up founders - Recessions are a good time to start companies

2008-12-18T10:43:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a lot lately about how many founders are stressed out about raising money, laying off people and weathering through recession. IMHO recessions tend to be better times to start and grow a company than when the economy is doing well.

- If you are laying people off, it most likely means that you hired one too many. Most web start-ups don't need too many people. Yet I see people growing their company to 15-20 people, sometimes without a product or user growth/revenue. If you are just starting, be very very careful about hiring. My own philosophy is to find people who are really passionate about what you are doing and offer them a larger equity share vs. trying to hire another 'employee'. You are much more likely to find talented passionate people interested in what you are doing during a recession than not.

- Web companies should focus on business model and revenue AS WELL as user growth. Trying to focus on user growth alone unless you are confident you will grow at a viral/phenomenal pace is a bad idea. There are numerous times, where I have seen start-ups come with good ideas which gain some traction and die off once the fad dies. Keen.com from the early 2000s was one such and I am sure every one can think of a cool web start-up that died because they couldn't make money. Sometimes it might take some time to figure out how to make money. Don't even think about raising a 2nd VC round if you don't know how you will be making money. Betting that your start-up with get acquired for millions for dollars because it has some traction is a pretty risky bet. Remember most large companies don't acquire start-ups during risky times. Use the recession to experiment with revenue models/ways to improve user growth vs. focussing on raising a 2nd round

- Don't raise funding unless you really HAVE TO. How many times does one hear that and how many times does it get ignored? This might sound a bit heartless - but it is better to lay people off and get down to a really small size and focus on user growth/business model than to spend your time worrying about pay-roll. Remember that services such as Amazon EC2 etc help you run very large jobs without buying expensive hardware. If the only reason you need the VC funding is to get more hardware because you are growing phenomenally and you have a great business model, getting VC money should be slam-dunk. Recessions help you focus on the bottom line vs. spending all your time competing with other start-ups to hire good people

- If you really HAVE TO raise VC funding for whatever reason. Put in the effort to make your case on why your company will provide real value. I will grow to be a multi-million pageview site because this is a fun/viral concept and I will make money by advertising is a bad pitch. Show strong early user growth and some revenue growth before going to the VCs.

- The number of companies started during recession usually tends to be pretty low which means you will have less competition

- You don't have to worry too much about the opportunity cost of doing a start-up. Recessions tend to be ugly times for large companies, so you are not missing much by leaving a large corporation to start your own.

That said this time around it might be a tad difficult to get talented people to leave large successful companies (e.g. Google) and join start-ups as everyone is predicting that the recession will be a really long one and people tend to prefer to have safe jobs.

LinkedIn badly needs a facelift - better UX and fewer features

2008-12-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

I rarely use LinkedIn except to respond to invites. Today I decided to play around with it a little more and I was a bit horrified about how badly designed it is.

The biggest issue seems to be the that the designers are trying to fit a bunch of disparate features into the site. The multiple nav bars - one on top and one to your right increases the clutter considerably.

My guess is that in an attempt to increase engagement on the site, the PMs have added a bunch of random features. They have the ability to update status, a news gadget and even a amazon reading list widget!

I suspect LinkedIn is mainly used as a online resume hub and to find jobs/contacts. They probably would be much better of designing a very streamlined experience around this core focus and adding features that increase depth in that area. They would also be better of killing a few features that are not being used too much. Right now, they seem like a really un-cool, cluttered, 'professional' version of MySpace/Facebook.

Google's Friend Connect and Facebook Connect - Not really the same

2008-12-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

I am not really sure that comparing Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect makes much sense. They are basically two different APIs/products with different purposes.

Facebook Connect allows you to basically take your Facebook login, profile and friends with you to any site and see the site and site's data through Facebook's 'social lens'. Examples include - See all the videos favorited by my Facebook friends on YouTube or all the products bought by my Friends on eBay. Facebook connect allows you to easily weave Facebook profile and friend data into the core functionality of your site.

This is a REALLY powerful API and has the potential to be very popular on the web. The only real drawback that I see is that, Facebook is being territorial by not giving out a user's address book/friends' email-addresses, even when users want to export that information to the 3rd party site. The single sign-on feature that Connect offers is interesting but I doubt it will be used widely. Sites will end up using their own registration processes along with Connect.

On the other hand, Google Friend Connect is more like a gadget that you include on your website. I don't see serious web sites such as Yelp or YouTube ever using Google Friend Connect. It simply won't fit into their look and feel/functionality etc. If you look at examples, the Friend Connect site showcases it is clear small sites are using this. FriendConnect is more like another version of MyBlogLog.

While this is pretty interesting, I don't think Friend Connect is going to be a big game changer.

Calculated Risk - Watching the TED spread and LIBOR

2008-10-27T23:53:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in following the financial crisis and are constantly monitoring the TED spread and such. I recommend reading Calculated Risk - http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/

Why Barack is going to win

2008-10-02T15:33:00.000-07:00

I am going to put the odds of Obama winning this election at 90%... Funny intrade odds are only around 65%

Regardless of how close some of the polls maybe (btw Obama has opened up a significant lead in them right now) the fact of the matter is -

1. Obama's campaign has a MUCH better ground game than McCain's. On election day they are going to be much better at getting out the vote. This in itself is going to be a HUGE advantage

2. Even if assume that there is a racial bias against Obama amongst the whites. Black turnout is going to break all records. Every one who is black is going to prob. turn out and vote for Obama

3. Old people who like McCain are scared about their social security and believe Obama's populist policies are going to aid them in these 'dire times'. So there is going to be swing against McCain and his plan for privatisation of social security.

4. Obama's policies are clearly more 'populist' and geared much more towards social engineering and government intervention than McCain's. Like it or not, the free market system is not viewed favorably at the moment and this will be another BIG reason why Obama is going to win and McCain is going to lose.

Why I am not so excited about Obama anymore..

2008-09-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has spoken to me in the first half of this year, can tell you that I was a Obama-maniac. I was extremely impressed by his speech in Iowa after he won the caucus. I read all his speeches, saw all his videos on YouTube and even read his book.

I was convinced that with Obama as the president, we would usher in a new era not only in government, but also in other critical areas such as big business, finance and technology. To have someone who seemed like an idealist, who did not accept the status quo but questioned it, who believed in transparency and in the notion that everyone can make a difference, as the president would inspire a nation.

Unfortunately, after the primary and in the last 2-3 months, I have become more and more disillusioned. He seems to be all words and no action. The thing is words can only go that far, if you want to inspire a nation, you need to lead with your actions.

In fact, of what I have seen of Obama's actions lately, he seems to just another extremely ambitious, slightly arrogant, extraordinarily brilliant man.

For example -

- His VP pick of Joe Biden, his first presidential decision is underwhelming. Biden seems like your garden-variety old Washington dude. I watched him on Meet the Press, where he spent all the time defending HIS proposal for Iraq, which no one seemed to have taken seriously. His career in the senate seems pretty unremarkable and he would be pretty much the last person I would pick to challenge the status quo. HE IS THE STATUS QUO! Obama, made this pick because he could counter McCain's arguments on experience, not to bring about change in Washington.

- Obama came out and said he would say no to wiretaps and would accept public financing. In fact, he writes about this in his book. This was earlier in the year. But when it came down to it, he flip-flopped on both these issues. It wasn't in his benefit to accept public financing, so he did not. This is not change we can believe in, this is more of the same. The status quo in Washington is to change positions when it benefits you and that is exactly what Senator Obama did.

- Late last year, when the chances of him getting the democratic presidential nomination were low, he said he would love to debate republicans. Now, he refuses to do townhall meetings with McCain. His excuse for not doing them is so flimsy, it is unbelievable! He says he wants to spend more time campaigning in swing states. If that were true, how come he has time to show up on national and news shows every week? The townhall meetings would have received extensive viewership and television coverage and could have easily been held in swing states. This is not change you can believe in, this is more of the same. More of the same tendency to not be transparent and upfront with the American people. Why risk townhall meetings which might decrease your comfortable lead in the polls.

- His speech when he accepted the nomination was extremely unremarkable. It was not inspiring and did not have any new ideas. All his policy positions are recycled from the Clinton era. One other big issue was his emphasis on "I" vs. "We". Listen to the speech and you will see how many times he used "I". There is a sentence there that almost sounds like - I will cure world poverty, hunger and bring peace. You have got to be kidding me! This is not change WE can bring about.

-Finally, his stance on drilling: His position on drilling has evolved in exactly the same way the democratic position on it has evolved. His answers to the question have been the same as Nancy Pelosi's - almost word for word. First she would not even consider it and now she is ready to talk about it as part of a comprehensive energy plan. If the democrats were more tolerant and receptive, they could have put forward a comprehensive energy plan proposal from day one without having to go through this huge drama. Again this is more of the same. He blindly took the party position without taking the time to consider and study the issue.

Considering he voted with the party 97% of the time and voted present on hard topics (BTW, he talks about this in the book), this is not a guy with a bipartisan record. This is the guy who knows to work his party and the American people for his own rise to fame.

Trust me, I want to be wrong but want to believe he is the right guy for our nation but at the moment it is just too hard.

Should Google thank Cuil?

2008-08-26T12:26:00.000-07:00

A day ago, Google blogged that they were going to graduate Google Suggest from labs and make it a default feature on the Google home page.

Now suggest, has been on Google Labs for many years, so one wonders why now? It does add bytes to the home page, which means, it will slow down the page load and Google is known to be paranoid about this sort of thing.

I for one think, this has to do with all the buzz around Cuil and the praise they got from some quarters on their better UX and features. The auto-complete feature on Cuil works pretty well on it and if you think about it, while suggest might slow down page load, it does increase time to result, which is the more important measure to track.

So should Google not thank Cuil? At least someone got them to make that change :)

Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational....

2008-07-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

I watched Dan Ariely's talk last night. He goes through a bunch of experiments and studies that try to understand human behavior and how humans make decisions.

At first glance I agreed with most of the insights and conclusions from his studies, as they felt intuitively right to me.

However, on further thought I wonder if his studies really lead to the conclusions he makes. For example at the end of this talk he conducts a study where he gives away his book for free to a bunch of people in the audience. He than asks the rest of the audience how many of them are willing to pay less than $2 for the book. A bunch of hands go up. He than turns around and asks the book holders, how many of them are willing to part with the book for $2 and not a single hand goes up. Using this study as an example, he concludes that people value things that they own more than they would have valued them otherwise or that they fact that they own a particular thing makes it more valuable to them. While the conclusion seems obvious and is a statement that I might agree with, I dispute whether the study proves his point.

No one is willing to part with the book for $2 because they know the open market value is much more that (Amazon's price is around $18). I would bet a lot of hands would go up if the question was are you willing to part with this book for $16. People in the room are not willing to pay more than $2 for the book, simply because after listening to the talk and hearing what he has to say, they don't necessarily want to pay to read the same thing in a book that they have to pay money for or for these people the value of the book is less than $2. It was not that the people who owned the book valued it more, it was simply that there was no efficient market with buyers created in the room.

That said many of his other studies are pretty interesting and correctly capture human behavior.

If you have some time listen to his talk, it is pretty interesting....

Rent-a-designer-gown.com anyone?

2008-07-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

I am a sucker for expensive clothes... except I can't really afford them and most of the time can't fit in them... as they mostly make them for thin to extremely thin people. Anyways this seems completely unfair to me :((

Netflix has been successful.. Why not do with clothes? I want a designer dress/clothes rental service that allows me to rent clothes, wear them a couple of times and return them. You could charge a fraction of the actual price for the rental and the policy could be that you need to pay for the dress if you damage it.

I for one would love it. I suspect it will help the luxury brands as well. While they may not be as exclusive any more, awareness will rise and they will be able to make more money by making more copies of those fab. dresses.

As an aside, seeing as so many Americans are big, it won't hurt these brands to make a few more dress sizes rather than sticking to "only available in size 0 - 6 etc.).

Anyways, hoping something like this will pop up very soon.

My $0.02 on health-care

2008-06-25T21:55:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I have not researched this topic well-enough to have a highly-informed opinion about health-care but I have an opinion, nevertheless.

I got interested in this subject only in the last 3-4 years when I have had a couple of health/dental emergencies and had a first-hand experience with system. Being used to doing almost everything electronically, it was SHOCKING to see how primitive everything was in this world.

To begin with there is no easy way to compare doctors/dentists and evaluate what they charge for their services (as an aside this is true for most local service providers such as plumbers and lawyers). I was trying to find a good dentist and it was ridiculous how little information there is on the web about this (even on yelp and other review sites..)

Most people, I suspect, stick to one dentist/doctor without really comparing rates or quality-of-service. This practice, by it's very nature, stifles competition and does not bring prices down. Part of the reason for sticking to one person is that it is really difficult to change doctors, because none of your health/dental information is online/electronic. You would have to more or less start from square one or do a bunch of tests all over again if you change doctors. I changed hospitals sometime ago and got completely different diagnoses on my condition.

There is little or no transparency in the whole process. The black-box nature coupled with the fact health-care is a deeply emotional/personal issue, raises costs and increases inefficiencies

Add to this the fact, that consumers/patients don't pay for their healthcare, insurance companies paid for by their employers do. How often, have you heard from your dentist/doctor that "your insurance is going to pay for this procedure, so don't worry about it"? So doctors charge insurance companies a ton of money, who in turn pass the cost on, driving up the cost of health-care overall.

So all in all this whole system is a mess. IMO the government can help fix this in the following ways

- Mandate that hospitals and labs should make all the patient records/tests available electronically to each patient. As an example, any patient who has his/her x-rays taken should be able to access them electronically and grant access to these records to other doctors. Overall this should increase transparency and ensures that the patient has easy access to his/her information. Today you have to complete a bunch of forms to get to your own medical records.

-Allow consumers to shop around for insurance. Similar to car insurance, consumers should be mandated to get at-least basic insurance as long as they can afford it. This would have a similar effect to car insurance. Today we shop around for car insurance and for the right mechanic. We should be able to do the same with health-care. This would increase competition and reduce prices. Also the mandate would encourage more preventive care.

- For those who cannot afford basic health-care, they should be able to get health insurance from 'approved' health-insurance providers who encourage/mandate preventive care.

Thoughts/feedback?

My facebook newsfeed kinda of started working for me...

2008-06-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

Today I logged into Facebook and was surprised to see that I actually liked my news feed and was reading every single entry. I wondered for a moment, if they had tweaked the algorithm and if that was the reason for the high signal to noise ratio.

Than I realized that I had tweaked my preferences last week and the results were showing. I simply turned up Photos, Notes, Posted Items and Status Messages and turned down profile, relationships, friends and groups updates. This eliminated the stuff such as "so and so updated his/her profile picture" which tends to pretty boring and now I am seeing a bunch of shared links and photos uploaded by friends.

However, very very people are going to bother to change their settings... Unfortunately the news feed will remain noisy and un-interesting for most people :(

Garden Variety "I am leaving Google" blogpost.

2008-06-18T18:29:00.000-07:00

One of my co-workers was joking about the standard "I am leaving Google' blogpost that Googlers who are leaving Google often write on their blogs.

Trust me, you will know what the blogpost is going to say even before you read it. It will be along the following lines

- I was XYZ in Google and have launched A and B
- I am really sad I am leaving Google and I think Google is a great company
- I am also excited about what the future has in store for me
- I am going to be [Pick one of: start a company/travel the world/join this hot social network/join a ex-googler start-up. ]
- Did I forget to tell you - I LOVE Google

There is never anything against the big G.

What could be the reason for this? Are these people simply scared of speaking out against what works and what does not work in the company.

Please Facebook - Do something about those spammy apps

2008-06-12T21:53:00.001-07:00

Most of the people I know are on Facebook. My college friends, my high-school friends, my co-workers and even folks from my family (believe me, if you know my family, you will understand why this is somewhat surprising!).... So that is a good thing.

However there is little to marginal utility I get from Facebook today. I like looking at Facebook photos but most of my friends don't seem to be using this nifty feature - prob. cause they are using some other service - I am guessing PicasaWeb or FlickR.

Facebook added the support to import your feeds from these photo sharing services, but I bet no one even knows that this feature is there. First of all this particular is pretty un-discoverable, but more importantly, Facebook is a bit of a mess.You are so distracted by all the spammy apps on Facebook, that you are totally turned off and don't want to turn on any feature whatsoever :(

The other day, I was playing around with Slide's Funwall and I ended up sending a message to all of my friends! You won't believe how bad I felt for spamming 500 people.

Anyways, Facebook is growing nicely, but I am not sure people LOVE facebook. They will, if Facebook makes some hard decisions, throws out spammy apps and innovates at a faster pace. I bet people have been asking for features like the ability to comment on your status messages forever....

Yay! Blog List is out!

2008-06-05T22:26:00.001-07:00

I am glad we now have the Blog List feature out. Don't you like the fact that you can pull your favorite blogs from Reader.

Why am I so excited today?

2008-06-03T12:58:00.000-07:00

I am feeling really good today. Our nation ushers in a new era by picking Barack Obama as the presumptive nominee of the democratic party. Obama is pretty impressive but this goes beyond Obama.

After today, millions of Americans will look at Obama and get inspiration from him. They will know that the improbable can be possible. They will know that even though the odds are against you, if you don't get dis-heartened and are willing to work towards your goal, you can succeed and they will know that even if you start out being under-privileged because you happen to be black, a latino or a woman, you can rise above these labels and and make your dreams come true.

It is also a remarkable day for our country. A country that just proved to the world, it is capable of rising above it's prejudices and has the courage to challenge the status quo and the willingness to change itself for the better.

I was proud to become an American last year and now I am extra-proud of my country today.

2 weeks in Europe

2008-04-28T17:39:00.000-07:00

We are going to be in Europe for 2 weeks starting May 10th. We have plans to visit Paris, Berlin and Barcelona. Still looking for the 4th city to visit.

Wondering if anyone has good ideas. Have already been to Amsterdam, London and Milan and don't want to go back there. Would ideally like to go a large city which has multiple sub-cultures... Kinda of like Toyko.

All suggestions are appreciated.

Top 10 things I want from Facebook

2008-04-28T17:38:00.000-07:00

- Make newsfeed rock. They seem to have given up development on it. Damn it, I badly want sorts, filters, comments, pagination, content from the web...

- Show me who is online without me having to actually open the chat window to check

-Show me all the people who have recently joined and can potentially be my new friends (They have all the information for god sakes!)

- Allow me to make a list of my best friends and than sorts all content - photos, videos, news feed etc with my best friends first

- Reduce latency

- Throw out spammy apps like Fun Wall and get rid of all the spammy notifications that show up.

- Makes email and messaging work! Give me a decent address-book and a better interface

- Merges posted items with notes. We have too many of these anyways: Notes, posted items, blogs, status messages, twitters... Please STOP!

- Makes it really really easy to upload bulk load of pictures and videos, so I can see tons of these from my friends and store a bunch of them on facebook

- Gives me the ability to email to a facebook group.

Oh, yes and I forgot this one .... Give me the answer to the life, the universe and everything and it better not be 42.

Middle management in corporations

2008-04-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

It has been 2 months since I posted last and I had promised myself to keep blogging regularly. Considering I used to work on Blogger, you would think I would remember to do this :))

Of late, I have been thinking more and more about corporate culture. As you start climbing the corporate ladder and become a middle manager, it seems your job gets more nebulous and seemingly more useless.Middle management is rife with politics and territory grabbing. Other aspects of middle management include credit taking and upward management.

In order for middle management to be effective, corporations need to create the right incentives for middle managers to focus on their jobs and not on politics and empire building.

A manager's performance should be judged on the following dimensions:

- A key component of a manager's performance should be the sum of the performance scores of the individuals who work for him. This is good in many ways, starting with the fact that this incentivizes the manager to ensure that his team gets the credit vs. taking credit himself. It also ensures that the manager is more upfront about delivering hard feedback and helping improve employees who are lagging behind. Finally, when recruiting new employees, the manager will try and find good people vs. just adding more bodies to build his empire

- Get feedback from the manager's employees and her peers about how effective she is in empowering her employees. Often times employees get bogged down by all the processes that large companies are bound to have. A manager's job should be defined by how well she can empower her employees, cut through the processes, and get stuff done.

Finally and most importantly corporations ought to be EXTREMELY transparent about the evaluation/performance scores of not just managers but all employees. Employees, should be able to easily look up other employees' evaluations.

These evaluations influence people's bonuses, promotions and salaries. Having a transparent process forces the evaluations to be fair and prevents people who are just good at upward management from succeeding.

If the process, by which people climb the corporate ladder is well structured and transparent, we would see happier employees and managers.

Email - the most common way people share stuff

2008-02-04T13:34:00.001-08:00

With all the rage around passive sharing and inserting items into your "NewsFeed" on Facebook we forget that, still the most common way to share stuff is simple ole email. When people think of sharing photos with friends or family, they resort to sending an email.

More often than not, people want to send a particular article or link to a friend or co-worker. Normally, this is related to a topic they are having a conversation about and/or doing research on. Most if not all of these links are shared by email

Email is used for 2 big reasons

- Email is platform agnostic. Regardless of whether a person uses delicious, digg or facebook using Email to share ensures that the person gets the shared link directly on email and does not have to look/log in else where

- Email may be personalized. Unlike broadcasting a link to all the people who have subscribed to you, you can actually personalize the email to the person/group you are sending it to

Given this, I think it would be interesting for our top email providers to offer a view that reviews your email and shows a user all the stuff that was shared with them and a simple way to navigate through that stuff and allow for re-sharing.

"Most blogged" about Videos

2008-01-23T18:18:00.000-08:00

Working on Video, means that I get to see a ton of interesting videos as part of my job. Lately, I have been fascinated with this list and have been coming back to it on a almost daily basis.

The "most blogged" about videos list is generated by looking at all the blogs we have in our Blogsearch index and identifying videos that had the most links from these blogs on a particular day.

It is fascinating to see how these videos reflect what is is going on in the world. For example check out these videos on Steve Jobs and MacBook Air that showed up between Jan 14-18th when MacWorld was happening or these videos about the presidential candidates talking in various forums right after the Iowa caucuses earlier this month