news views and analysis

The terror attacks in Mumbai on 26 November was inarguably the worst terrorist strike on the country. The images and videos were in our face whether you were in Mumbai or half way across the world in New York.

The internet played a big part in spreading information to people on the ground and all around the world.

Twitter was being labeled as the runaway success story to emerge from the whole episode.

The Guardian UK writes

Twitter meanwhile provided a constant stream of information through its search function, allied to the use of tags – #mumbai being the favourite as the situation developed. The first notes of the attacks came from Indian users of Twitter (though the site’s search facility doesn’t go far back enough to show them).

In fact the Indian government became so concerned about the amount of information being spread through Twitter that it asked for the site to be temporarily blocked.

Sitting here in New York I was following the entire multi day saga through live video on CNN IBN, news websites, blogs and twitter.

And for all the promise of twitter, I found it to be a lot of hype and not much substance.

Citizen Journalism became the buzzword on all the news websites and some of them even went so far as to run live tweets to #mumbai on their TV channels.

Trying to follow #mumbai for information was frankly insane. There was too much noise and very little substance. At its height I felt that only 1 out of 100 tweets had something of value. It was like being in a room of screaming children trying to out shout each other.

A lot of the news coming was unsubstantiated and heresy. And there in lies the problem of all those who gloat about how Social Media and Citizen Journalism is the greatest thing to the internet at this time in history.

The BBC which used twitter reports on their site as sources of information has been caught off guard

BBC News website editor Steve Herrmann has added his thoughts to the debate, including an admission that the corporation will need to take more care in how it uses lightening fast, unsubstantiated citizen posts from Twitter in the future.

He raises a specific failing – regarding the widely-reported tweet that the Indian government called for an end to Twitter updates from Mumbai – which the BBC covered in a "live updates" aggregation page.

"Should we have checked this before reporting it? Made it clearer that we hadn’t? we certainly would have done if we’d wanted to include it in our news stories (we didn’t) or to carry it without attribution," Herrmann says. "But should we have tried to check it and then reported back later, if only to say that we hadn’t found any confirmation? I think in this case we should have, and we’ve learned a lesson." [link]

A lot of the news was of the nature "someone told me…." or "my friend heard…".

I started following twitter #mumbai when I saw Dina Mehta’s status update on Facebook. As someone who I regularly follow in the blogworld, I look forward to her tweets and I wish that somehow there was a way that tweets had the ability to be filtered through an editor. Dina would have my vote on being that editor.

I finally just followed Dina’s tweets on Twitter and I knew I wasnt missing much.

And something very disturbing was how twitter was being used as a self-marketing tool by some people. 

An example is a tweet by Gaurav Mishra

From My Blog: My Interview with Indian Daily LiveMint on the Role of Citizen Journalis.. http://is.gd/9iQb 4:34 PM Nov 27th from twitterfeed

And this was not the only one. Every few hours there would be similar self-advertising tweets from him and a few others about how they were quoted in some media or website or appeared on some interview. As someone trying to follow the conditions on the ground, how would I be interested in what a blogger, sitting in the US writes on his blog about how he was interviewed by some newspaper.

As the BBC example and many others have proved, Twitter is a great social media tool, but how it matures and is used will determine its success.

I don’t think all the hype about Twitter and Citizen Journalism is justified in what was actually coming off on #mumbai. Except Dina Mehta and a few others, everyone tweeting was a lot of noise and no sound.

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The much awaited T-Mobile G1 on the Android platform is out.

Check out the presentation on their website.

I just watched the press conference a short while ago and ever since the site has gone live I have been trying to login and order one.

And their website keeps crapping out

I called them up and was told the only way to order this was over the website.

Now one wouldve thought that T-mobile could have taken care to make sure that their website does not get overwhelmed during this phase.

T-mobile my suggestion is to please give the sales component of this over to Google. Their servers are more powerful than yours.

An article in the Mumbai Mirror is deceptively titled " Terrorists have 15,000 options"

You would think that they are talking about entry points into the city, or the number of trash cans available where bombs could be left behind or some such thing. However to my dismay the article states

There are an estimated 15,000 wi-fi networks in the city that are vulnerable to terrorists like the ones who used the wi-fi networks of an American businessman and an entrepreneur couple from Chembur to send e-mails to various media companies minutes before the serial blasts in Ahmedabad on July 26 and a little after the first of five bombs exploded in Delhi on Saturday evening.

Agreed that open access wi-fi points is a safety breach, but shouldnt the government be busy in making sure the terrorists never get here in the first place. This sending of emails before blasts has been a recent phenomenon. If we clamp down on the access points, the terrorists will still set up bombs, but not email us about it, hence making them so much more difficult to trace.

As much as open access wifi is an issue in the "war against terror" it should be way down on the priority list.

Personal friend and powerhouse blogger Kamla Bhatt has another fantastic post on the parallels between the Internet of today replicates the Silk Road of centuries ago.

Yogen was talking about how the Internet has shrunk and how in the digital world there is a great amount of  interconnectedness that provides us an ability to trade, to do mashups, to experience new songs and movies and to collaborate. It was this  description of the Internet that suddenly reminded me of a different period a few hundred years ago where the Silk Road played a central role and shrank the world. That is when I stumbled upon the term Digital Silk Road and suddenly I was able to access a whole different historical canvas and make sense of what is happening today.

Read the entire post here.

INFOSYSism: You have a 1000 poor cows. You put them on a nice campus, & send them one at a time to the US for milking.

PATNIism: You have 10 cows. You make them work so that they give milk of 100 cows

WIPROism: GE has a cow. You take 49% of the milk.

DELLism: Intel has a Goat. Samsung has a Camel. Buy milk from both & sell it as Cow’s milk.

IBMism: You have old stubborn cows. You sell them as pet dogs to innocent small businessmen.

MICROSOFTism: You have a cow. Force the world to buy milk from you. Spend a million dollars to feed poorer cows.

SUNism: You have a bull. It doesn’t give milk. You hate Microsoft.

ORACLEism: You have a cow. You don’t know which side to milk, so you sell tools to help milk cows.

SAPism: You don’t have a cow You sell milking solutions for cows implemented by milking consultants.

APPLEism: You have a cow. You sell iMilk.

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From today’s NYTimes

Dr. P. K. Sethi, who invented the affordable prosthesis called the Jaipur foot, which has helped millions of amputees in developing countries to lead normal lives, died Sunday in Jaipur, He was 80.

The cause was cardiac arrest, his family said.

The Jaipur foot, which has never been patented, is available in more than 25 countries, most of them poor, many of them with great numbers of land-mine victims. Unlike many high-priced prostheses in developed countries, it can be made by traditional craftsmen, lasts more than five years and costs about $30, making it affordable for mass distribution.

What caught my attention was the above highlighted fact.  It is indeed noble that medical advances that enhance the quality of life are available to all for generations.

Ever wondered how elevators….or lifts as we call them; are tested? Especially the ones that grace some of the tallest buildings in the world. Believe it or not, there is an elevator race track. And obviously it is vertical.

Japan’s Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has opened what it says is the world’s tallest elevator testing tower. The 173m-high (567ft) structure is called Solae and dominates the skyline of Inazawa City. The company says it will use the tower to conduct research into high-speed elevators to serve the next generation of super-tall buildings. [link]

These facilities are in high demand for testing and fine-tuning newer elevator technology befitting today’s highrises.

Elevators travel fast. The worlds fastest elevators zips and zooms upwards at about 17m per second…that’s nearly 50 km/h. Going up. That’s damn fast. Trust me on that

Two high-speed lifts at the world’s tallest building have been officially recognised as the planet’s fastest. The lifts take only 30 seconds to whisk passengers to the top of the 508m tall TFC 101 Tower in Taipei, Taiwan.The Guinness Book of Records has declared the 17m per second speed of the two lifts the swiftest on Earth. The lifts also have a pressure control system to stop passengers’ ears popping as they ascend and descend at high speed. [link]

Now that’s one ride to surely make you foggy in the brain! Wot say

In Fortune Magazine?.

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Leaders of the world are meeting in Bali, Indonesia at the UN Climate Conference this week. From some of the findings released at the conference…

Sweden is First and the US almost Last… Says Study A new report rates the climate-protection performance of 56 countries that account for 90 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. While Germany came in at second best, the US ranked second worst.

India comes at a favorable 5th position.

Yes, that does not mean that everything is gung-ho with the climate and environment in India, but its still an interesting indicator of what is going on (or not) in the world around us.

However these simple statistics gleaned from this very informative interactive paint a much larger picture.

The above table brings a stark contrast to the amount of energy the US consumes vis-a-vis its percentage of the total world population.

And even more scary is that countries like China and India are moving in the direction of the US in terms of energy consumption.

So if 5% of the world consumes 20% of the worlds energy, what happens when 20% of the world starts living the same kind of lifestyle that the 5% live. Insanely scary.

No wonder the energy conservation movement is something that is on top of the news pile here in the US.

India should strategize so that it does not ape the US in terms of energy consumption. Already China is going that way and the early warning signs are there to see. Pollution in Chinese urban areas is all-permeating. And when the world converges on Beijing next July for the Olympics, it will be difficult to ignore the itchy eyes and the smog filled skies.

The latest Apple Store opened in the Meatpacking District yesterday at 6:00 pm. This is Apple’s third and largest store in NYC. The store occupies three floors in what was the old Western Beef building. The building went through a major renovation and addition by my office Cook+Fox Architects. The building is a Landmark designated building. The facade was painstakingly restored and the original sign on the top of the building remains. A penthouse was added to the top of the building and is skillfully designed to be camouflaged by the sign but at the same time offer fantastic views of the Meatpacking district and the Hudson river to the west.

This is a picture of the overall building with the penthouse visible under the sign.

This is a picture of the store inside with the now trademark full glass staircase.

Some facts about the store from Gizmodo

It may not be the biggest like we suggested—Chicago’s Michigan Ave still beats it by a few square feet—but the first three-story Apple Store has a lot going on that others do not:

• Apple’s first three-story glass staircase (we were wrong about the elevator)
• 46-foot Genius Bar capable of serving 100 tech-support seekers per hour with 12 stations. It isn’t the longest GB in the world though; somewhere there’s a 50 footer.
• Pro Labs: Free multi-session classes in Logic, Final Cut and Aperture. Six students sign up for 2hrs, once a week for four weeks. The classes are intense and totally free, starting Jan. 7.
• It won’t be open 24 hours like the Fifth Avenue store, but it will be open til midnight.
• A Concierge team wearing light blue shirts will be on hand to show off all the shop’s wares.
• A total of 175 employees will work the store, mostly veterans from other NYC stores.
• This store will have an entire floor dedicated to service, that’s 50% more total space for tech support and education than any other Apple Store. [14th St NYC Apple Store]

The lines to enter the store were really long last evening. Circling the block once it became a zig-zag serpentine line as you got closer.

I plan to head out there today evening and check it out for myself.