Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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Greg Linden wrote in Show advertising people might want about showing Consumers the ads that they want.

Advertising can be useful information about products and services we actually want. The advertisements we see should be helpful and interesting, not annoying and irrelevant.

I use to believe in that and have skipped\avoided ads due to the noise there is. But working in Advertising field in someways (I am in a Software Engineer Yahoo Display Advertising department), I came to believe, another thing, that sometimes Consumers might not know what they want or might try out, this includes a new cereal, a new updated car model, a new serial coming up, until they learn about it and try it out. To re-quote,

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said they wanted faster horses. Henry T. Ford, inventor and entrepreneur.

So, there is a balance between desire and needs and another angle is creating awareness.

Greg is right on about Personalized advertising. If you are interested, take a look at the Targeting options, Yahoo provides, specifically Yahoo! Behavioral Targeting or BT as we call it, which has been in place for a while now.

Personalizing advertising — targeting to advertising to individual interests — can make advertisements relevant, useful, and helpful. By learning from what each person likes and does not like, personalized advertising can use that fleeting glimpse of our attention to show us something we actually might need.

Disclaimer: The blog entries and opinions mentioned in this blog are my own personal viewpoints and do not represent my employer’s view in any way.

Michael at Prana Journal wrote in Meditation and pranayama before yoga about his experience on doing Pranayama before Asana.

It really did help prepare me for a more mindful yoga practice: it usually takes me 20-30 minutes to shake off what I call the “debris of life” (all the to-do lists, internal dialog and white noise that go on in my head) and surrender to my practice; this time around, I eased into almost immediately.

My own experience when I do Pranayama is that it is better to do it after Yoga Asanas, particularly since I do the Asanas only one or two times a week. The Asanas open up the body, making the Pranayama more fulfilling.

Moreso, in Yoga Sutras by Patanjali (Wikipedia link, Book by Iyengar, Book by Cope), Pranayama comes after Asanas so it is kind of a next step.
Talking of Pranayama, the best book I found is Yoga for Transformation: Ancient Teachings and Practices for Healing the Body, Mind, and Heart by Gary Kraftsow of Vini Yoga.

Jeff Jones wrote in Feature/Function Innovation: Inventing Left-Hand Columns

Real innovation is what I refer to as “inventing left-hand columns.” What I mean by this is that once users hear what is now possible, they not only realize they must have it … they now consider it a requirement.

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Buyers use this matrix to evaluate market offerings … thus the more unique features, you offer the more the X’s appear in your in your column … and this is a good thing.

New left-hand columns cause users to start asking everyone else for such capabilities.

In my experience and observation, it almost always is not a good strategy to focus on features. This is specially accurate for startups. Features in search of a product is a case often encountered in the Technology field.

When a startup or team focus on features, the customer anyways buys from their original vendor or the number one vendor,  all they do is request your features from them. And a claim of the feature as upcoming, even a year or two from now is enough to halt evaluating the startup’s products.

It has happened many times including Microsoft Active Directory with Administration Delegation (I was with Entevo then)

The key then is to solve an actual customer pain or provide a functionality never available before.

SiliconValley.com has an article on a bootstrapped startup, which shows the otherside of creating a startup, hardwork and a tough climb: Tech startup life still tough years after dot-com bubble burst

She and her boyfriend, Wan Hsi Yuan, 27, run the business, 8coupons.com, from their 500-square-foot studio apartment, meaning headquarters is, effectively, their couch. The business, which text messages discounts to users’ mobile phones, keeps Yuan and Ung, who is 28, up until 3 a.m. most nights. Then, Ung said, she sometimes finds herself lying awake, worrying.

“I need to watch a little National Geographic special on the rain forest or something before I go to sleep,” she said.

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Welcome startup life in 2007.

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“The Aeron chair is out, the Starbucks latte is in,” Shipley said.

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“We don’t go out anymore,” Yuan said. “For the past two years, all we do is work.”

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At home, they sleep in a queen bed and their workspace/living area is roughly the size of a king bed. They have Internet-only cable; their flat-screen TV shows their Web site, and Yuan works from the couch on an arrangement of pillows they call “his shrine,” typing braces on both wrists, a serving tray with a wireless keyboard on a pillow on his lap.

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At the startup camp, a partner at a venture capital firm ran through a PowerPoint slideshow on what VCs are looking for: Companies doing things competitors can’t with technology that’s either patented or incredibly challenging to create.

As he went on, it was clear 8coupons lacked nearly every attribute he listed, but Ung and Yuan shrugged that off.

Ironically enough, it is people who work long hours specially need Ergonomic Furniture like Aeron or Soma Biocomfort chair to avoid long term pain.

Here are two methods to keep learning Maths and keep in focus.

• Maths Calendar

Thanks to someone at work, I found out about excellent Math Calendar, every month has a writeup and every day a short Maths problem. The link at Amazon:

The Mathematics Calendar 2008: Exploring the Ever Evolving Worlds of Mathematics by Theoni Pappas

• Understand the Math behind the TV Series Numb3rs (Numbers)

There is a wikipedia section and two dedicated websites which cover this and both are pretty good and sometimes cover different aspects of the same episode.

• Wikipedia: Numb3rs episodes and mathematics used
• Numb3rs at Wolfram(started with Season 4)
  
• We all use Math everyday by TI.