Featured on the Product Management View
November 7, 2008
It gives me great pleasure to announce that I will now be guest blogging for the Product Management View – a blog focussed on product management and strategy , run by world class product managers from various backgrounds and vast experience in this field.I am pleased to be associated with them and look forward to some great discussions over there. Thanks to Stewart Rogers from PM view for making this happen.
My first post for the Product management view is about maximizing product value through effective feature prioritization. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic and having some great conversations.
The PM view also tracks major webinars on product management, you can sign up for a webinar remider service and here’s the handle to the RSS feed.
Top 10 Twitter tools for a power user
October 11, 2008
The Twitter obsession (and addiction) continues, we are all hooked on to it, aren’t we.
If you aren’t already, do follow me on Twitter.
So for all the Twitteratti / Tweeple / Tweeps out there, here’s my list of top 10 tools / plugins (in no particular order) for Twitter to enhance your Tweeting experience.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck takes all the information from Twitter and helps you manage the information overload by grouping them into managable pieces or based on your interests.
Twitturly
Tracks Top URLs which are talked about on Twitter. Extremely useful service and helps you find the most interestsing and latest information on the web.
Twitter Patterns
Helps you give your twitter page some style! They have some really cool designs, check it out.
Twitterfeed
Very useful app, which automatically tweets whenever you publish a post on your blog. Helps you get some link love!
Easy Tweets
A handy tool for online and digital marketers who wish to leverage the advantages of social media and microblogging. Easy Tweets enables you to switch between multiple Twitter accounts, track follower, replies etc all from one dashboard.
Hashtags
Hashtags enable you to track and follow conversations on Twitter. Follow @hashtags on Twitter and the service will index your tweets. Then add a #tagname to your tweet and this can be instantly looked up or searched.
Quotably
This service lets you follow a user’s conversations in a threaded manner, showing you all the various people the given user has had a conversation with. Interesting tool, especially when you trying to find out what others are saying about your brand/service.
Plodt
Power Twitter
Twitter Keys
Twitter keys is a fun tool for Twitter which enables you to use UTF8 symbols in your tweets. Once downloaded, this appears as a floating window, so all you need to do is to choose your symbol, copy n paste. So come on, get creative in your tweets using these symbols.
One special feature
Vakow
Vakow is an India focussed service which lets you post to Twitter as an SMS. Very useful and probably the cheapest way to pot to Twitter via mobile in India.
Let me know what you like and what tool you use.
To new beginnings!
July 22, 2008
As most of you know, I have finally taken the plunge and decided to join a startup. I will be starting from Monday, 21st July 08 as a Product manager with a stealth mode startup based out of Bangalore.
I am really looking forward to this new gig and am sure that the startup experience is going to be one roller coaster ride with many twists and turns. Above all, I think that it will be a great learning experience for me and can add a lot of value to my career.This somehow seemed to be the perfect time to juggle things up in life and I got a great opportunity.
We have a small team of around 10 people and I am really looking forward to interacting with each of them and for some great times ahead. I will of course miss all the folks from ADITI and the fun we’ve had together.
So here’s to new beginnings, Cheers!
The User Experience Umbrella
July 10, 2008
Found this very interesting picture which I think explains user experience and the various elements involved in it in a powerful way.
What do yout think ? Do all these apply to shaping web user experiences too ? Are there other factors ?
asklaila – India’s local information service
February 5, 2008
Trying to decide on a nice restaurant for a date in Koramangala and can’t decide where to go or what to do ? AskLaila, from Four Interactive comes to your rescue. Asklaila aims to answer common questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? within your city.
Currently they have local information services for Bangalore and Mumbai (which was launched a couple of weeks ago). I had a chat with their team and they were telling me that you can soon expect to see asklaila in all metros and other major cities in India in next few months.
I think this product has some great potiential (especially going by the vision of their passionate team !) in the Indian consumer market and the next couple of years will determine how consumers actually percieve the real value from local products.
Below is a SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats ) analysis I did on their product.
Note : The opinions expressed here are totally from my perception of the product 
For Christ’s sake!
December 18, 2007
It’s all about MyTinyJesus – Saviour 2.0.
No explanations. No FAQ. Just a figure of Jesus which keeps on emitting random Twitter posts in cartoon-like balloons. Pointless? Probably. Cool? Definitely.
What do you think ?
Yahoo’s new WPF messenger for Vista
December 13, 2007
Yahoo released their new version of the popular Y! messenger with an exclusive version built for Vista on WPF. This is 
currently only for preview. The UX is brilliant, and this app brings more of a human touch to conversations with smooth transitions and the likes.
The app however does not run on XP even if you have .NET 3.0 and the other jazz. But this looks and feels so much like a native Vista app, including the richness and the transparencies. This new version also provides a good deal of customization, with the usual laundry list of features. These two features were extremely useful
- The Vista gadget which comes along with this IM is very useful and enables you to drag and drop your favorite contacts on to your sidebar so that you can ping them from there itself.
- Being able to switch between different people that I’m chatting with in a single window.
But the bigger question is, ‘What do you think provides more value’ - a quick and dirty IM chat client like Gtalk (also built into your gmail) or an app like this which provides a great UX.
Physics with some crayon
November 17, 2007
Isn’t this game incredibly cool, check the video below. Looks like you really need to know your physics well to play this one This one is from Kloonigames and runs on the tablet PC. A PC version of crayon physics is coming soon.
The user experience on this is incredible, watch how the game reacts as the user draws different figures and tries to achieve their objective. With the Wii and PS3 giving PC games a run for their money, I think innovative concepts like this one are a really good answer.
This makes me wonder about the process of gathering requirements for this game. I’m thinking, there are so many scenarios that need to be captured and then taking a call on which ones the game needs to support and deciding others to be left out. Phew ! It’s actually my dream to do requirements, scenarios and functional specifications for a gaming product. Wouldn’t that be cool
Twitter poster mashup
November 9, 2007
Nice concept ! The new Twitter poster from Spanish company Come and Click Networks provides a mashup of Twitter users sized relatively to the influence of each Twitter user, based on the number of followers and the number of Tweets the populars make.
These posters are now available for the United States, Japan, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Australia, Italy, Mexico, Canada, France and Taiwan, in addition to a global poster on the front page. Now this is a nice concept and goes to shwo how mashups can surface up a lot of important information.
However I wonder what would be the real usefulness of something like. It’s eye candy! yes, no doubt about that, but could this lead to a digg style user rating mechanism in Twitter ?
How do you think this can be leveraged and can you build a business opportunity through this mashup ?
