Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Passwords. The bane of the Internet. We need them; and also hate the need to remember so many of them across sites. One can’t use the same password everywhere because it’s dangerous and also because each site has its own demands on the length/nature of the password. Apple introduced fingerprint scanners on its phones a while back to do away with the nuisance. Of course, no new method has caught on yet, so passwords are not going away anytime soon. Besides, fingerprint scanners are not the solution for company passwords. Imagine what happens if a 9/11 type of attack wipes out everyone at headquarters. In fact, that’s exactly what happened to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large financial firm, says Ian Urbana. So how did the company unlock those accounts? They found that most people’s passwords have the following characteristic, says Urbana : “Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, ...

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” For the upcoming Jurassic Park movie, they invented a new dinosaur! Most of us would probably feel the way Nilay Patel felt about that : “The whole point of Jurassic Park is to bring real dinosaurs into the present day...Take away the real dinosaurs, and you're just left with a made-up monster movie.” So why then did they invent a new dino? Tim Carmody responded to Patel on Twitter on the possible reason: “We need clear IP on the dinosaur, the toy companies say they can’t have any copycats this time.” Wait a minute…You can get IP (intellectual property/patents/copyright etc) on a species that roamed the earth? Is that insane or what? Of course, IP is not always a bad thing. If it weren’t there, what would be the incentive for anyone to come up with new ideas, like lifesaving pharmaceuticals? Then again, IP does cover areas between pharma and, I don’t know, dinosaurs. Like industrial design. Apple’s head of desig...

Some people in entertainment just don’t get it. Take the Walt Disney marketing team for the movie, Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens . Rather than releasing the trailer on TV or online, they decided to create artificial scarcity by deciding to air it only in 30 theaters worldwide (read that as the US and Canada). What was Disney thinking? That nobody who saw the trailer would record it on their phone and post it on the Net? Did they not understand the consequence of that as one Reddit explained: “It’s like Disney WANTS the first thing people to see about ‘The Force Awakens’ to be a grainy, shaky footage someone at the back of the screen took with their iPhone.” Responding to the online fury of the Star Wars faithful, Disney backtracked and said the trailer would also be made available on the iTunes Trailer site. Wait. So they decided to leave Android users out? Are these people brain dead? Star Wars has a global audience; and globally there are far, far more Android de...

In my last blog, I talked about the smiling curve in the context of the publishing industry; of how the publishers are losing all value and how apps like Facebook are increasingly becoming the referral for most articles on the Net! But even as publishers increasingly move to Facebook to promote their content on our News Feeds, we, the users of Facebook, have protested. Facebook has taken notice of this : “People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content.” In response, Facebook has promised changes soon: “Beginning in January 2015, people will see less of this type of content in their News Feeds.” This puts the publishers in a conundrum: they have increasingly become reliant on Facebook to draw crowds to their sites (remember that Trending News sidebar on Facebook?), and now Facebook might have decided that it has overdone things and decided to step back a bit. Where would that leave the publishers? N...

Ben Thompson wrote a couple of very interesting articles on the future of the publishing industry. The theme of both articles was the following “smiling curve” that he drew :  The Internet has made content delivery free; which is why the publishing industry is getting wiped out. David Carr describes the clout of mobile apps like Facebook in particular on this topic: incident: “For traditional publishers, the home page may soon become akin to the print edition — nice to have, but not the primary attraction. In the last few months, more than half the visitors to The New York Times have come via mobile — the figure increases with each passing month — and that percentage is higher for many other publishers.” You might wonder why it matters how the publishers are getting traffic as long they are getting traffic. Thompson explains why the source matters : “When people follow a link on Facebook (or Google or Twitter or even in an email), the page view that resul...

The Internet has overturned the existing order of many industries: journalism, encyclopedias, bookstores…and also music. But why have the existing powers in each of those industries been unable to adapt to the brave, new world of the Internet? Ron Miller hits the nail on the head when he writes: “The Internet is the best distribution channel ever created and it’s up to musicians and record companies to figure out how to exploit it. And here’s a hint: It’s not the old way of selling records.” Miller may have written about the music industry but his theme applies for the others as well: distribution is easier than at any other time in history but the powers that be haven’t adjusted to find a new way to make money. The music industry got saved (in part) due to the iPod and more importantly, Steve Jobs. Not a man known for his people skills, Jobs berated the music bigwigs of the time: “You guys have your heads up your asses.” The music industry of the day was fighting (and l...

Rob Horning pointed out how Twitter has changed the way he reads and analyzes articles on the Net, or rather how he doesn’t do those things anymore: “Now, when I hit upon an article that starts me thinking, I excerpt a sentence of it on Twitter and start firing off aphoristic tweets….At worst, tweeting pre-empts my doing any further thinking, since I am satisfied with merely charting the response.” Next look at Jennifer Guevin’s complaint about how “snap judgments at warp speed are ruining the Internet” . She cites the following example: “A dude at a tech conference tweets a picture of a woman's feet in stilettos, and judges her to be brainless based on the fact that she is wearing said footwear. Predictably, outrage ensues.” Neither side of the “rage war” that followed on Twitter, Guevin says, stops to factor in that nobody can really convey their point, let alone subtleties, in 140 characters. Is it not possible, asks Guevin, that the guy who tweeted was an: “equal...