Thursday, September 13, 2007

For cricket enthusiasts

Recently Google enhanced their search to show cricket scores.

The best thing about this is that you don't have to go to different sites. It crawls to different sites, fetch the data and show the latest score. It does great to people like me , who work in organizations where major score providing sites (cricbuzz and cricinfo) are banned. :)

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

अब हिंदी लिखना इतना आसान है।

Thanks to Google for getting Indic Transliteration, writing in hindi is piece of cake.

मूझे याद है जब मैंने microsoft given fonts से हिंदी मैं लिखना सुरु किया था। It took almost a day after perfection when i wrote this.

पर अब हिंदी लिखना इतना आसान है। One should just see to believe that is it this easy.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

The VHS vs Betamax Format War

Recently i had a chance to read on a format war and it just gave me something to write on. The instance goes something like this.

In year 1974 JVC launched its VHS format followed by Sony's Betamax format a year after. For around a 20 years both the giants had a great tussle with VHS being victorious.

The victory was not on technical grounds (as Sony was unarguably the winner in that context) but more on marketing and customer needs.

One of the biggest this which went against the Betamax format was that a single tape of betamax recorded for just 1 hour as against the 3 hour movies during that time. Where as a VHS format was for 3-hour recording. Sony did provide with other solutions for longer recording time but it was too late.

The tussle between two giant formats lead to two manufacturing groups with Sony, Toshiba, Sanyo, NEC, Aiwa, and Pioneer on one side. On the VHS side were JVC, Matsushita (Panasonic), Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sharp, and Akai. But with recording time and the turn around time to create the VHS format players just squeezed the Betamax market.

Finally the last Betamax format machine was produced in 2002 with the war already over by late 1980's.