ZVM’s Indian Undercurrent

As Last Mile News@ Converge reports, Tara Maitra has decided to move to TiVo from Comcast corp.

TiVo once the darling of the technologists is in trouble recently due to companies such as Comcast bundling DVR as an additional service instead of asking consumers to go out and purchase something separate.

Is there any direct consumer market remaining at all for such devices, I wonder? TiVo should probably take a leaf out of Good Technology’s book and go completely indirect - and focus more on OEM deals with content providers such as cable and wireless companies where competition is much lesser, and enable them to focus on emerging areas such as TV-over-IP, bi-directional TV, sophisticated ad management and other solutions.

Tara headed up content development at Comcast, so I read that this may be a play for TV into getting into content development/management themselves.

Good luck Tara!

Google and eBay merged?

(this is funny for Kannadigas, since Goobay = Owl!)

Surj Patel was featured here in this recent article on news.com.

Courtesy: News.com

If we stick to the English-writing world, so far Americans have been the most active bloggers. And Americans dominate the “charts”. But what if, say, Indians really embrace blogging (OK, they don’t seem to be quite there yet). And assume they would write and discuss mostly Indian issues, and link to other Indian blogs. Wouldn’t they then start racing up the charts, become more visible, and …dominate?

That is about to change.. starting now!

Reports Om Malik in his blog here.

We just finished reading The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown’s un-put-down-able thriller. If you haven’t read this yet, please add this to your list of must reads.

I guess the most interesting part here is the extensive discussion of “paganism” and how it contrasts with christianity. I couldn’t help thinking - so is Hinduism pagan by this definition in this book - we seem to have the following criteria:
Worship of Devis (Godesses)
Nature worship
Idol worship

among others… Mr. Brown talks about how Christianity was carefully marketed with specific objectives to build its brand - making the initial devotees larger-than-life, competitively depositioning other religions (striking down anything that went against the original charter as heresy) ensuring that this religion continues, particularly due to a political connection.

“Religion is the opiate of the masses” - if there is a way to sway large masses of people in one direction, what better way than to climd the high horse of religion. It certainly lets avoid the more difficult process to build a position, convince, attract and recruit that independent candidates use.

Incidentally, there is a Hollywood movie in the making by the same name due in 2006.

Stay tuned!

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You are reading the most interesting single blog about India in the western world - That means all Telugus( a.k.a gultus!), Punjabis, Kannadigas, Gujratis, Madrasis and everyone!

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