The Y-AXIS LIVE!

A man once visited a temple under construction where he saw a sculptor making an idol of a deity. Suddenly he noticed a similar idol lying nearby.

Surprised, he asked the sculptor “Do you need two statues of the same deity?”

“No,” said the sculptor without looking up, “We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage.”

The gentleman examined the idol and found no apparent damage.

“Where is the damage?”, he asked.

“There is a scratch on the nose of the idol”, said the sculptor, still busy with his work.

“Where are you going to install the idol?”, asked the passer by.

The sculptor replied that it would be installed on a pillar twenty feet high.

“If the idol is that far, who is going to know that there is a scratch on the nose?”, the gentleman asked.

The sculptor stopped his work, looked up at the gentleman, smiled and said, “I will know!”

I am no great fan of pre-stitched clothes. I prefer the old Indian way of buying the dress material from one shop and then going to my favourite tailor, who would usually give my trousers or shirt after a week or two, depending on his load. Everytime he insists on talking out an old notebook that has the age old measurements,which he compares with real measurements and writes again on another sheet of paper before stapling it onto the dress material and lobbing across to someone in the mezzanine.  I keep wondering why the old ‘master’ refers to the age old measurements at all, especially when it takes in more than few minutes locating the wrinkled & dirty notebook with my records! I have given this suggestion to the ‘master’ quite a few times, but that gives considerable discomfort to him. Is the old ‘master’ Prisoner of information insecurity??

I noticed an excellent slideshow on YouTube via Edelman Digital blog. It is quite an eye opener on the kind of information overload we are suffering. Perhaps not just suffering, but the mindless bytes of data we are creating all around.

I was busy flipping channels looking for something different when I suddenly noticed CNNs Wolf Blitzer and Jessica Yellin talking about the win, standing few feet apart inside the studio. Something appeared a little unusual about Jessica that made me wait, and then Wolf said she was a ‘hologram beamed into the studio’ a la Startrek, while she was hundreds of miles away in Chicago.

(If you don’t see a video above, pls click here )

I have read about CISCO’s Hologram technology before and seen regular 2D video conferences hundreds of times but when I saw this in action, I was awestruck. Wondering when this technology would start appearing in workplaces. Like getting a buzz on the desk at say, 4 PM and hearing an announcement, “Mr. So and so from Australia joining via the hologram “. Wow!

As a person who buys loves to buy books every now and then, I have faced a constant nag. The stores in the town sell books that in their judgment, will move. They are not necessarily the books that match my taste or are the best. There are many occasions I just spend considerable time in a store and decide there’s nothing worthwhile to buy.Quite simply, there is not a single place where I can know about books, discuss them, and buy them right there.Not upto now at least.

My quest to know about books on marketing, business in general, great companies, business legends and so on got me connected to Shelfari some months back. Social networking to me till that point only meant leaving a few Orkuts scraps in iNcOmPrEhEnSiBlE blob of words and so on. Gradually I started following Shelfari and though I do notice that the level of action is not very high, I love the site for the books specific focus and the ability to have user provided reviews, discussions etc. If you are half sure on a title, ask ‘do you suggest I buy this book’ to folks who own that title.

It was announced today that Shelfari is has followed Skype into being another web property to be acquired by Amazon. Shelfari has seemingly good synergy and complimentary offerings with Amazon book section. It will be safe to assume that Amazon would use the social elements of Shelfari platform to generate book sales. Amazon would be able to tap discussions on books, see get to see early on demand being created by user generated reviews and ratings, opinions and discussions.Book lovers would almost certainly be able to buy those books there. Is social networking taking a new meaning here? Would Amazon use this platform to make people chat on other merchandise it sells?

Logical query: Are we going to see domain specific social networking sites getting consolidated by large ‘downstream’ or ‘upstream’ or ‘proximate’ players’?