Unless you are a complete idiot or a troglodyte, you know who Craig Newmark is.

Assuming for a moment that you are one of those out to prove that the dodo is not extinct, let’s introduce Craig Newmark to you.

Craig Newmark is the Craig of Craigslist and the man single-handedly responsible for destroying the lucrative classifieds business of major newspapers around the world, particularly in America.

Craig is the man who (along with the Internet) has brought the newspaper industry to its knees in America.

Oh, No. Craig is not just a destroyer.

Craig has wrought a revolution by bringing affordable Continue Reading…

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made it clear where he stands on the contentious issue of outsourcing that has snatched several thousand well paying jobs from Americans and handed them over to the cheaper Indian and Chinese coolies.

In his acceptance speech, this is what Obama had to say:

Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

U.S. companies ranging from IBM to HP to Sun to GE to EMC to Intel have Continue Reading…

The monkeys at Sun Microsystems have done it again. 

According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Sun’s server revenues fell 7.2% in the second quarter of 2008.

This makes it the third consecutive quarter that server revenues have declined at this struggling IT vendor.

Even as the worldwide server market grew 6.4% to $13.9 billion in the second quarter, even as IBM grew server revenues 13.8%, even as Dell grew server revenues 14.1%, even as HP grew server revenues 3.1%, Sun’s server revenues fell by a whopping 7.2%. Go figure.

Take a look at how badly Sun has fared compared to the server leaders:

As we’ve said repeatedly, there is just no hope for the sickman of Silicon Valley - Sun Microsystems.

Shut this ailing company down, fire the bozos and return the money to the shareholders.

Sun’s share price on Friday morning (August 29, 2008) fell as low as 8.91, close to its 52-week low of $8.63.

Hey, don’t count us among the surprised if Sun’s shares hit a new 52-week low.

We could be wrong but we think the crappy Sun stock will soon be a penny-stock trading on the OTCBB or the Pink Sheets. Continue Reading…

Desperate to burnish its credentials as a credible player in the search and e-commerce arena, Microsoft is buying Greefield Online, owner of Cia GmbH, an European price comparison, shopping and consumer reviews sites for $486 million.

Ciao’s technology platform, online community and extensive merchant relationships are to be integrated within Microsoft’s total-disaster of a Live Search platform.

Microsoft expects the deal will increase its European commercial search Continue Reading…

We were first introduced to Robin Cook many summers ago through his chilling book Coma (also made into a movie).

Over the years, we read several books by Cook including Fever, Brain and Sphinx although none lately.

When we heard that Cook’s new book The Foreign Body had a strong Indian connection, we decided to renew our acquaintance with the old man.

Set in India, The Foreign Body is a so-so medical thriller that has as its Continue Reading…

Tamil Nadu has a burning problem.

This is a disturbing trend that no other Indian state has shown over 40 years.

Take a look:

* When Tamil movie superstar Rajinikanth’s marriage was on the rocks in the 1980s, an anguished fan doused himself with kerosene outside the star’s house in Chennai and burnt himself to death (Source: The Name is Rajinikanth by Gayathri Sreekanth P.289-290).

* At the height of the anti-Hindi agitation in 1965, eight people burnt themselves to death in Tamil Nadu (then known as Madras).

The New York Times (January 27, 1965) wrote about the death of 22-year-old Sivalingam in Madras in a fiery blaze on January 26, 1965. Two days later, another person did the same.

Was Sivalingam the first person in Tamil Nadu to ignite this fiery form of protest?

* When Karunanidhi was arrested by his arch rival M.G.Ramachandran in September 1981, 11 people immolated themselves. Five died soon afterwards and the rest must be suffering a living death if they are not already dead.

* In mid-1983, 15 people in Tamil Nadu are said to have immolated themselves over alleged atrocities against their Tamil cousins in neighboring Sri Lanka.

* In October 1984 when the then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and one-time film star M.G.Ramachandran fell ill because of a kidney ailment, 100 people attempted self-immolation and 10 died.

According to the New York Times (October 29, 1984 P.A17), the Continue Reading…

Nazia who, might well be the question posed by youngsters in India today.

Well, Nazia was a young London-based Pakistani pop singer who became an overnight sensation with Feroze Khan’s Qurbani (Zeenat Aman, Feroze Khan, Vinod Khanna) in 1980 and followed it up with her phenomenally successful first LP Disco Deewane (Nazia’s brother Zoheb and Indian composer Biddu collaborated on the project).

You can listen to the title song Disco Deewane via YouTube here.

The Disco Deewane disc went gold on the very first day of its release April 3, 1981, selling 100,000 LPs and Dolby cassettes.

And in less than three weeks Disco Deewane went platinum.

As one Indian magazine wrote then:

In India, such a sales record is without precedent. No album has ever gone gold in less than two months, and platinum in under six.  (Source: India Today, May 1-15, 1981, P.142)

You know, how long it took Bobby to go platinum - eight months.

Besides the title track Disco Deewane, our other favorites from the album are Ao Na, Lekhin Mera Dil and Dil Mera.

India had never seen anything even remotely like this.

The shock-waves of the Disco Deewane success were felt by everyone, including the most haloed of Indian light music personalities. Within a week of the album’s release, Lata Mangeshkar, the jealous mistress of popular music, felt threatened enough to fly to Calcutta for an evening’s concert for which she charged Rs three lakh.  (Source: India Today, May 1-15, 1981, P.143)

 
Nazia Hassan
(Photo: Nazia Hassan Foundation)

Asked about her sudden celebrity status in India, this is what the

Continue Reading…

Indian IT services provider in the telecom space Tech Mahindra has picked up a minority equity stake in European systems integrator Servista.

Financial details were not disclosed.

Tech Mahindra will be Servista’s exclusive delivery vehicle for three years and assist it in securing more large scale European IT Offshoring business.

Tech Mahindra expects the deal will drive its expansion into the European Continue Reading…

Befitting his cult status, Tamil film superstar Rajinikanth has developed his own law.

Rajini’s Law - You know, like Newton’s Law, Boyle’s Law or Charles Law.

This is what Rajini’s Law postulates to his fans - The longer I act in Tamil movies, infinitely worse my performance will get.

Thanks to Netflix and demands from some of the SearchIndia.com blog readers, we got a chance to watch Mullum Malarum again.

We believe 99.99% of movies must be watched in the time period when they are made, i.e within 3-4 years of their release (the remaining few like Casablanca, On the Water Front, Citizen Kane or Sholay are classics that transcend time and geography).

So we were initially reluctant to watch Mullum Malarum because 30 years had passed since its release and we wondered if we could relate to the movie. After some hesitation, we decided to take the plunge.

And what a delightful treat Mullum Malarum turned out to be.

Rajinikanth & Jayalakshmi
(Photo: Wikipedia)

For those of us sick and tired of seeing Rajinikanth leaping hither and thither on the big screen with lesser grace than Shakespeare’s Caliban, his performance in Mullum Malarum is a revelation.

Boy, this bloke could act those days. In Mullum Malarum, Rajinikanth has turned in a performance par excellence in sharp contrast to his buffoon-like antics in recent movies like Sivaji and the recent disaster Kuselan.

Rajinikanth was 28 then and perhaps the rough role he was playing in Mullum Malarum reflected well his violent personality of those days.

When Rajinikanth’s character Kali tells the engineer (Sarat Babu), Rendu kai, rendu kaal ponakuda, kali angarava polachikava, sir. Ketta payan sir, avan, we empathize with Kali as we never have with any of Rajini’s other characters with the exception perhaps of the writer in Aarilinthu aravathu varai.

The stars were all perfectly aligned in Mullum Malarum - stellar

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One day after Canon launched its new EOS 50D, Nikon introduced its new D90 digital single lens reflex camera (DSLR).

Besides taking still pictures, the 12.3 megapixel D90 can also take 24fps HD movie clips with sound, first for an SLR camera.

The various controls for the camera can be used for shooting HD video as well. But the catch is you can shoot video for a maximum of up to five minutes.

The D90 is the successor to the 10 megapixel Nikon D80 that we own to much pleasure.

Nikon D90 Digital SLR

Other highlights of the D90:

* 3-inch 920,000-dot high-resolution LCD screen
* 11-point auto focus (AF) system based on Nikon’s Scene Recognition System and Face Detection technology
* Burst rate of up to 4.5 frames per second
* Wide range of ISO 200 to 3200 (expandable to Lo 1 ISO 100 and Hi 1 ISO 6400)
* Image Sensor Cleaning to free dust particles from the sensor’s optical low-pass filter
* Maximum shutter speed of 1/4000 second
* New playback function lets users show images in either four, nine or 72 thumbnail images, or use a calendar format to find photos
* Built-in Flash
* Provides geotagging when used with the Nikon GP-1 GPS unit (available separately in November 2008) with latitude, longitude and altitude data imprinted on the images’ metadata

The D90 will ship in September 2008 and cost $1,000 for body only and

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As the Ambani bozo builds a $2 billion dollar mansion amidst the Mumbai hovels, as glitzy malls replace neighborhood kaka shops, as wealthy kids snap up Rs 36,000 cell phones, as latte replaces chai and kapi for the nouveau riche and as watching ugly reality shows become de rigeur, the number of poor people in India has quietly gone up by tens of millions in 25 years.

India now accounts for nearly 33% of the world’s poor (estimated at 1.4 billion).

A new World Bank report on poverty said that the number of poor Continue Reading…

Canon has rolled out EOS 50D, the successor to the popular EOS 40D digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera.

The new EOS 50D offers 15.1 megapixel resolution and features Canon’s new DIGIC 4 image processor.

Canon EOS 50D

Other highlights of the EOS 50D include:

Continue Reading…