December 19, 2009
December 31, 2009
December 28, 2009
December 28, 2009
December 29, 2009
December 28, 2009
Posted at TechCrunch
We’ve always had a lot of fun with Indianapolis-based startup ChaCha. They launched in 2007 as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. Pranksters, obviously, loved it. And we noted the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people.
The human powered web search never really worked out. But ChaCha evolved. In 2008 they launched a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. Putting a human into the mix makes sense with mobile, with poor (or no) data connectivity and hard to use keyboards. But all phones have SMS, and ChaCha had a hit on their hands (they also had the infamous Eiffel Tower incident).
And ChaCha also made another smart move. They started archiving questions and answers on their website in January 2009. 300 million of them are now published on their website – you can view and search them from the ChaCha home page. Those pages have lots of ads generating revenue, and the search engines tend to rank pages like these highly. The company serves just under a million page views to answer pages per day, they say.
CEO Scott Jones says the company has had “explosive growth” in usage of their mobile product. In fact, the company has had to take steps in the past to control that growth, by limiting the number of questions people can ask each month. Even so, people now ask ChaCha a million questions a day via SMS. They recently passed Google and ChaCha is the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile.
Those mobile questions bring in revenue, too. I asked ChaCha tonight “When and where is Avatar IMAX playing in San Francisco?” The first response, less than a minute later, was an advertisement. The second message came a minute later with the correct information: “AMC Loews Metreon 16 101 4th St. San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 369-6201. Showtimes for 12/31/09. Avatar IMAX 9:45 am, 1:15, 4:45, 8:15, 11:45. ChaCha!” Even on a smartphone, and even dealing with the ad, it was far easier to use ChaCha than doing a mobile search via Google.
And while there are a number of easy-to-use movie apps for the iPhone and Android, ChaCha is a multi-purpose app. I can just as easily ask it for flight schedules. Or the first king of England (answer: “No one is universally recognized as the first King of England. Some historians start with Egbert, the king of Wessex”).
We’ve said all along, though, that the ChaCha mobile service was useful. But we questioned its scalability since it involves humans.
Jones says they’re scaling just fine, thanks to tens of thousands of part time guides who work from their homes for an average wage of $2.50/hour. It’s not much, but they do it voluntarily, so they must think it’s a reasonable deal. The cost of answering a question has dropped from $0.50 two years ago to just a few cents today, and Jones says they’ll get it to under a cent soon. They’re able to recycle a lot of answers, he says, and they’ve built tools to make it easier for guides to quickly answer most queries.
The company is now profitable per query, says Jones, meaning they are making more money from those SMS ads than they pay the guides. And when you add revenue from the archived website questions, the company is on path to profitability. Their current revenue run rate is $9 million or so. My guess is they need to roughly double that to become profitable as a business and support their 60 or so full time employees.
Jones says has raised $52 million, including a recent $7 million round from insiders. We’re tracking more than that on CrunchBase and have asked the company for clarification.
So ChaCha may just have a real business on its hands, despite the near constant criticism from us and others over the years. This is one time that I won’t mind at all being wrong.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
December 30, 2009
December 30, 2009
Posted at The Times of India
The US and UK have issued travel alerts asking their citizens to defer non-essential travel to Andhra Pradesh in wake of the violent incidents taking place in the state over Telangana statehood issue.
Posted at Whole Health Source
by Stephan
One pound of human fat contains about 3,500 calories. That represents roughly 40 slices of toast. So if you were to eat one extra slice of toast every day, you would gain just under a pound of fat per month. Conversely, if you were to eat one fewer slice per day, you’d lose a pound a month. Right? Not quite.
How is it that most peoples’ body fat mass stays relatively stable over long periods of time, when an imbalance of as little as 5% of calories should lead to rapid changes in weight? Is it because we do complicated calculations in our heads every day, factoring in basal metabolic rate and exercise, to make sure our energy intake precisely matches expenditure? Of course not. We’re gifted with a sophisticated system of hormones and brain regions that do the calculations for us unconsciously*.
When it’s working properly, this system precisely matches energy intake to expenditure, ensuring a stable and healthy fat mass. It does this by controlling food seeking behaviors, feelings of fullness and even energy expenditure by heat production and physical movements. If you eat a little bit more than usual at a meal, a properly functioning system will say “let’s eat a little bit less next time, and also burn some of it off.” This is why animals in their natural habitat are nearly always at an appropriate weight, barring starvation. The only time wild animals are overweight enough to compromise maximum physical performance is when it serves an important purpose, such as preparing for hibernation.
I recently came across a classic study that illustrates these principles nicely in humans, titled “Metabolic Response to Experimental Overfeeding in Lean and Overweight Healthy Volunteers”, by Dr. Erik O. Diaz and colleagues (1). They overfed lean and modestly overweight volunteers 50% more calories than they naturally consume, under controlled conditions where the investigators could be confident of food intake. Macronutrient composition was 12-42-46 % protein-fat-carbohydrate.
After 6 weeks of massive overfeeding, both lean and overweight subjects gained an average of 10 lb (4.6 kg) of fat mass and 6.6 lb (3 kg) of lean mass. Consistent with what one would expect if the body were trying to burn off excess calories and return to baseline fat mass, the metabolic rate and body heat production of the subjects increased.
Following overfeeding, subjects were allowed to eat however much they wanted for 6 weeks. Both lean and overweight volunteers promptly lost 6.2 of the 10 lb they had gained in fat mass (61% of fat gained), and 1.5 of the 6.6 lb they had gained in lean mass (23%). Here is a graph showing changes in fat mass for each individual that completed the study:
We don’t know if they would have lost the remaining fat mass in the following weeks because they were only followed for 6 weeks after overfeeding, although it did appear that they were reaching a plateau slightly above their original body weight. Thus, nearly all subjects “defended” their original body fat mass irrespective of their starting point. Underfeeding studies have shown the same phenomenon: whether lean or overweight, people tend to return to their original fat mass after underfeeding is over. Again, this supports the idea that the body has a body fat mass “set point” that it attempts to defend against changes in either direction. It’s one of many systems in the body that attempt to maintain homeostasis.
OK, so why do we care?
We care because this has some very important implications for human obesity. With such a powerful system in place to keep body fat mass in a narrow range, a major departure from that range implies that the system isn’t functioning correctly. In other words, obesity has to result from a defect in the system that regulates body fat, because a properly functioning system would not have allowed that degree of fat gain in the first place.
So yes, we are gaining weight because we eat too many calories relative to energy expended. But why are we eating too many calories? Because the system that should be defending a low fat mass is now defending a high fat mass. Therefore, the solution is not simply to restrict calories, or burn more calories through exercise, but to try to “reset” the system that decides what fat mass to defend. Restricting calories isn’t necessarily a good solution because the body will attempt to defend its setpoint, whether high or low, by increasing hunger and decreasing its metabolic rate. That’s why low-calorie diets, and most diets in general, typically fail in the long term. It’s miserable to fight hunger every day.
This raises two questions:
Given the fact that body fat mass is much higher in many affluent nations than it has ever been in human history, the increase must be due to factors that have changed in modern times. I can only speculate what these factors may be, because research has not identified them to my knowledge, at least not in humans. But I have my guesses. I’ll expand on this in the next post.
* The hormone leptin and the hypothalamus are the ringleaders, although there are many other elements involved, such as numerous gut-derived peptides, insulin, and a number of other brain regions.
Posted at economictimes.indiatimes.com
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ByAnil K Gupta and Haiyan Wang
India’s 7.9% economic growthin the third quarter of 2009 vividly illustrates a dramatic transformation inthe country’s image, from a land of elephants and snake charmers to that of anIT powerhouse and an emerging economic giant. While both sets of perceptions arevalid, they hide far more than they reveal. Indeed, when it comes to the Indianeconomy, what most people believe to be true contains more fiction than fact. Wehighlight below five common myths about India and discuss why the reality on theground is quite different.
MythNo.1: The information technology sector has been the primary driver of India’seconomic growth. India is indeed a global powerhouse ininformation technology and IT-enabled services. Yet the IT sector is little morethan a tiny, though highly visible, niche in the Indian economy. The totalrevenue of this sector added up to $72 billion in 2008. Translated intovalue-added terms, the IT sector contributed only about 4% to India’s grossdomestic product last year. Its contribution to employment is even smaller:About 2 million people are directly employed, and an additional 8 million jobsare created indirectly. Those are tiny numbers in a country with a labor pool of700 million people. The fact that India’s IT sector is just a nicheis actually a blessing rather than a curse. Notwithstanding IT’s annual growthrates of 25% or more, the bulk of the recent growth in India’s economy has comefrom manufacturing and other services. Only the manufacturing sector has thescale to create jobs for hundreds of millions of people, most with relativelylimited education. If India is to realize its potential as an economicsuperpower, it will have to keep following China’s path by becoming one of theworld’s factories. The IT sector gives India a good brand image, but most Indianjobs will have to come frommanufacturing. Myth No.2: India isdecades behind China. Most visitors to India and China formtheir impressions about these countries by comparing such cities as Mumbai, NewDelhi, and Bangalore with Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou. The differencebetween the two countries’ urban centers is truly stark. China’s top cities nowlook more modern and sleeker than New York or London. By contrast, India’spremier cities are still vivid examples of the third world. Yet most peopleoverlook the fact that, even though China is clearly ahead of India, the formerlooks stronger than it is while the latter is stronger than itlooks. In 2008, China’sGDP was just a bit more than three times that of India. If India’s GDP grows at8% to 9% a year over the next decade—a reasonable prediction based onanalyses by Goldman Sachs (GS), the U.S. National Intelligence Council, andother analysts—India’s GDP in 2020 will be almost the same as China’s in2008. Of course, China would have powered ahead by then, but the fact remainsthat India’s economy is about 12 to 14 years, not decades, behind China’s. Thisis exactly the difference from 1978, when Deng Xiaoping launched China’sreforms, to 1991, when India jumped onto a similartrain. Myth No.3: India’s democraticpolitics will prevent a rapid build-up of the country’sinfrastructure. Given its fiercely democratic politicalsystem, any Indian government will find it impossible to relocate quickly a fewmillion people from a city’s center to make way for gleaming office towers andelevated expressways. Note, however, that infrastructure consists of more thanbeautiful roads and buildings. It also includes ports, airports, powergeneration and transmission systems, telecommunications, airlines, andrailways. The only aspect of infrastructure that India’s democraticpolitics hinders in a major way is the beautification of cities. The number ofpeople who need to be relocated to build interstate highways, intrastateexpressways, and most other infrastructure components is minimal and thuslargely unconstrained by democratic politics. From1995 to 2007, China spent about 8.5% of GDP on infrastructure. During thisperiod, India spent only about 4.2%. Today, though, the situation is radicallydifferent. India is currently spending about 8% of GDP on infrastructure and hasplans to increase the figure to about 9%.
Ugly and crowded cities,while an eyesore, are unlikely to derail the ongoing manufacturing revolution,which needs interstate highways and intrastate expressways far more thaneasy-to-navigate city centers. In short, given its political system, India ismore likely to become a manufacturing power long before its cities begin to lookmodern. Myth No.4: Uncontrolledpopulation growth is a major burden for India. China’sone-child policy has clearly achieved a major reduction in birth rates andpopulation growth. In contrast, when one thinks of India, the enduring pictureis one of cities overflowing with poor and teeming masses. Hence the question onmany people’s minds: How can India sustain uncontrolled populationgrowth? Notwithstanding the utter inability of India’s democraticpolitical system to impose any type of birth control policy, it is critical toremember that, as people become richer and better educated, they choose to havefewer children. Fertility rates (i.e., average births per woman) in India aredeclining rapidly—from 4.65 in 1980 to 3.25 in 2000, to 2.68 in 2007. Asimilar steep decline has occurred in the population growth rate—from2.15% a year during the 1980s to 1.5% a year from 2000 to 2005 and 1.35% a yearsince then. If current trends continue, as is almost certain, fertility rates inIndia should drop to about 2.0 within the next 10 years, and the population’sannual growth rate should fall to about 0.6% a year, similar to China’stoday. In short, population growth in India is a self-correctingproblem that is getting addressed on its own at a rapid rate. In any case, in ademocratic country such as India, it is far easier and wiser for the governmentto focus on how to make the economy grow at, say, a 9% rather than an 8% rate.Over 10 years, that can be as effective a mechanism for population control asany other. Myth No.5: India’seducation system is world class. In launching the “Race to theTop” fund for educational reform in the U.S., President Barack Obama encouragedschools to develop internationally competitive standards so that Americanstudents can take on “folks in Beijing and Bangalore.” President Obama is righton the money in noting that, in today’s era, labor markets are global and thatkids in Los Angeles are competing against not just their peers in Chicago butalso those in Beijing and Bangalore. It would, however, be incorrect to concludethat India’s education system is anywhere close to world class. Indiais not just a large country but also one of the world’s most diverse, withextremely high levels of income and educational disparities. The eliteengineering and business schools (the Indian Institutes of Technology and theIndian Institutes of Management) are tougher to get into than Harvard or MIT andhave produced a disproportionately large number of CEOs and senior executivesfor some of the world’s biggest corporations. Yet one cannot overlookthe fact that adult literacy in India runs at only about 61%, far below the 91%figure for China, the 90% figure for Indonesia, and the 89% figure for Brazil.During the past five decades, China has placed far greater emphasis on primaryand secondary education. In contrast, India has placed far greater emphasis ontertiary education. The manufacturing revolution, which is now in full swing andmust continue, will need high school graduates and vocationally trained peoplefar more than highly trained engineers and scientists. As in the U.S.,transformation of the educational system and rapid upgrading of theinfrastructure will be two of the most desperate needs for India’s economy overthe coming decade. Anil K. Gupta isthe Michael Dingman Chair in Global Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the SmithBusiness School, the University of Maryland. Haiyan Wang is managing partner ofthe China India Institute. They are the coauthors of Getting China and IndiaRight (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2009) and The Quest for Global Dominance(Jossey-Bass/Wiley,2008). |
Posted at Lifehacker
by The How-To Geek
One of the most persistent myths about Windows is that you need to reinstall the operating system regularly to keep it running at top performance. Let’s take a look at the real problem and how to fix it.
Today we’re talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesn’t slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you won’t have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that your Windows PC will never slow down—because for many people, they almost always do. What actually slows your PC down are too many poorly written applications that stay resident in memory and waste CPU cycles, having too many badly written low-level applications that hook into Windows, or running more than one antivirus application at a time. And of course, if you’ve run your PC’s hard drive out of space, you can hardly blame Windows for that.
If you aren’t getting the picture, the problem is usually the person behind the keyboard that installed too many junk applications in the first place. More gently put, it’s often that (very well-meaning) person’s gradual easing of their safeguards and cleaning regimens as time goes by.
Installing software should be thought of like feeding your PC. If you constantly feed your PC garbage apps, it’s going to get sick and won’t be able to run fast anymore. These poorly written applications clutter your drive with unnecessary DLL files, add always-resident Windows services when they don’t need to, bloat up your registry, and add useless icons to your system tray that waste even more memory and CPU cycles. Usually you can get away with using a few terrible applications, but as you continue to install more and more of them, your PC will slow down to a crawl.
We feature and recommend a lot of software applications around here, but you should keep in mind that we aren’t trying to tell you to install every single one of them at the same time-just install the applications that you actually need and you’ll generally prevent the dreaded format and reinstall.
Here’s a few tips to help you know what applications you should be careful with:
Once you’ve rid yourself of your junk application habit and resolved to only use healthy, useful applications, you’ll want to make sure to keep your PC clean of any remaining clutter that doesn’t need to be there. You can set up a shortcut to manually run CCleaner silently with the push of a button, but your best bet is to set up CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do it.
Since CCleaner is only going to clean up temporary files, you’ll still need a good solution for keeping the rest of your PC clean-and Lifehacker’s own Belvedere can help you automate your self-cleaning PC or automatically clean up your download folder.
With all of this automated file deletion going on, your hard drive is likely to get a bit fragmented. If you’re already running Windows 7 or Vista, automatic defrag comes out of the box and probably shouldn’t be messed with, but Windows XP users will need to use Windows Tasks to setup a schedule and automatically defrag their drives.
If you still want to test out all of the latest software, including apps that look a bit rough around the edges, your best bet is to use a virtual machine to test out anything before putting it onto your primary operating system. You can install all of your software in an XP or Windows 7 VM just like it was a real PC, and with the latest VMWare player releases, you can even enable Windows Aero in a guest VM. If you are new to the idea and need some more help, you should check out our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines in VirtualBox, or Windows 7 users can check out our guide to using XP Mode. If you don’t want to go the virtual machine route, Windows XP and Vista users can alternatively use Windows SteadyState to protect their PC and roll back all of the changes on a reboot.
The How-To Geek reinstalls Windows only every few years and has no speed problems at all. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.
Posted at Neatorama
by Miss Cellania
This may look like a snake attack, but it’s actually an ad on a bus inviting everyone to the Copenhagen Zoo. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Jeetu Mirchandani
