Hawkeye :: Murali's Blog

Linux CDs/DVDs for sale on eBay

muralikrishnan — Mon, 12 May 2008 01:54:50 +0000

To help out folks who would want to try the latest versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware and various other flavours of Linux, I am selling these on eBay India (payment through credit card / internet banking). The idea is to make these available to those who do not have access to it via their friends and don’t have the Internet Bandwidth to download it

You can find the items for sale here

Y! BSOD !

muralikrishnan — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 06:25:59 +0000

Looks like almost the entire world is puking at the thought of Microsoft taking over Yahoo!, for me funnily enough, I guess this is a good thing to happen to the ‘Intertoobes’ in general. About time Google had someone / thing to worry about

Via Amber Mac’s blog

Tags: yahoo, microsoft, business, humour

The evolution of Man - Mentos style

muralikrishnan — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 04:04:46 +0000

This is one of the coolest ads I have chanced upon in recent times, an ad by Mentos taking their ‘Dimaag ki batti jala de’ theme forward uses the evolution of man thanks to a Mentos

Brand Managing your Career

muralikrishnan — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:16:35 +0000

Chanced upon a very interesting article on Fastcompany.com about how to treat your own career as a Brand manager treats his Brand in the physical world:

The tenets of Brand management as applied to managing careers :

Identifying key markets to understand where your skills and passions are transferable.

Market research to be tooled with the required skills to be competitive today and tomorrow and to identify market trends (or create them).

Build product/service solutions that add value and separate you from your perceived competition.

Pricing strategy to understand the value of your skills and results as well positioning for negotiations for your service offering.

Building brand awareness on and offline to be a known commodity and provider of value - sought after as an expert in your field.

The important point to note here is every Brand in the market stands for something which is its Positioning statement
Individuals, as they manage their careers also need a Positioning statement, and this must be derived out of what that individual values in life
The question we all need to ask ourselves is ‘What do you stand for ?
Is it Innovation ?, is it efficiency ?, is it Leadership ? etc

Brand Manager for Your Career | Fast Company

6 tips for the Career Jungle

muralikrishnan — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 04:45:09 +0000

I had the opportunity to spend time with students of IT, Computer Science & Mass Media from Kirti College, Dadar, Mumbai yesterday morning and share with them my tips on how to manage their careers

These folks are extremely raw and lack perspective on what awaits them in their life. Am sure there are thousands of others like these in colleges across India and I do hope that I can get to spend more time with them coaching them and preparing them better for their future. Afterall, the future of India lies in their hands

Here’s the 6 tips slide from my presentation to them

Twittering the India Vs Australia Cricket match @ MCG

muralikrishnan — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 04:36:55 +0000

Lazy Sunday morning, nothing else to do, what better to do that waste my time twittering the India Vs Australia Cricket game @ MCG

Join in & lets have some fun commenting the game together on twitter

Where do you want to go today ?

muralikrishnan — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 05:15:32 +0000

Found this while shopping in Shanghai

Twitter a story, a ballad, a novel ?

muralikrishnan — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:34:35 +0000

A very interesting thought came up last night when I was getting back home form work and listening to Tom Merrit, Molly Wood & Leo Laporte on CNET’s Buzz out Loud podcast. The folks on the podcast discussed how novels in SMS lingo is rave in Japan and then tossed up a concept wherein Twitter can be used (by one or more users) to serially micro-blog a novel. The challenge of course is that every sentence of your can only contain 160 characters. I find this entire concept rather cool and am willing to give this a shot. For one, it helps me find a creative vent to my energies and also helps because while I have always wanted to write a book, I dont quite have the patience for that

Looks like BOL crew have started something off. Keep checking it and if you want to micro-blog a story with me leave a comment here

Product design - Commonsense

muralikrishnan — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:44:57 +0000

Neat bits of advice here :

Don’t make users login with an Account number - names are simple & easy to remember
Don’t enforce complex passwords requirements - unless you have confidential data stored
Don’t make them confirm their email address - just to get started … there is enough time for that
Don’t make them ‘Opt out’ form being spammed - that is pure evil !

All you Product Managers & Developers out there … take it easy folks and make it easy for your users to use your site !

The top 4 things you should never do to your users : Codeulate.

Will Scrabulous be saved ?

muralikrishnan — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:12:44 +0000

Perhaps this was meant to happen, Hasbro, the makers of the wildly popular board game Scrabble has sent out a notice to the 2 brothers in Calcutta, India who have created a hot online version of the game called ‘Scrabulous‘ which boats of thousands of devoted users in Facebook

I for one, am a big fan of Scrabulous and perhaps this is one of the few reasons why I continue to visit Facebook, coz after a point in time one gets truly sick of getting sheep thrown at them, vampires and Flixster movies

Hope there is a last minute deal that can make all of the Scrabulous fans and the folks who made the app happy

One a related note, if you dig Scrabble, you’ll enjoy this video

FORTUNE: Techland Will someone please start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous? «