Digging for Meaning

Saw this promotional video for Bosch's automated driving system. There are similar efforts being attempted by other corporates too, notably Google. But here again, I feel corporates are trying to answer the wrong question .  'In the future' - we shouldn't need to travel unless we desire to travel (that is to say, travel only for leisure and not because you must to earn your bread). Our scientific endeavors need to be geared to completely remove commutes from our lives. In which case, driving would become an activity largely undertaken for leisure. But the fact remains, the way our economy is geared, people must leave there homes and travel greater and greater distances to bigger and bigger cities to earn. In China alone, 120 million youngsters leave their homes to find jobs in a year. Why is globalization only aiding economy and not human will? (Jobs migrating to cheaper and cheaper venues, forcing people to migrate towards jobs. As against, people moving to ...

Why invent Google glasses? Here's Sergey Brin trying to answer that question. Doesn't his argument seem a little unconvincing - a weak reason to deploy the best of the brains on the planet and 3 years worth of efforts.   The primary pivot of his argument is the glass' ability to improve social posture (?). He talks about how when interacting with your cell phone, you look down, away from the rest of the world. How when nervous, one fiddles with cell phone to escape the real world. So how is Glass a solution? It is an even more 'evolved' tool to keep the outside world 'out'! Ok, so Glass frees your hands. for what? for better documentation of our narcissism? These series of innovations (social media, smart phones, glass) are answering the most base yearnings of our narcissistic behavior. When you look down, atleast there's that bit of honesty - 'yes, I am looking away from you. Sorry for my awkward inability to be social.' With Gla...

Digital Natives (DNs) like their information served in 'multimedia' and not just one medium (like the ever so abundant text) and Yahoo knows it. Yahoo has come up with a new spruced up search interface called 'glue'. Glue essentially changes the way one uses the search utility, eliminating the need for a few clicks in certain instances, all the while making the result page much more interesting with videos, images, Y! answers, maps, news and any other relevant sources and multimedia being made available on the result page. The service hasn't been rolled out across geographies and queries yet though. As of now, it is only a Y! India feature with only a few categories of searches (sports, travel, entertainment, health, stocks, and tech). for eg. I wanted to know about good beaches in Konkan (where I plan to spend this weekend :D) and searched for 'konkan' and the result page threw up wikipedia's entry about konkan, news, y! answers, images along with the...

Being a digital native , my first instinct before doing anything is to google up the query instead of thinking it through myself # . so here I am, having decided the structure of the white paper that is to be written and poised to write the entry in this blog that should elucidate the start of the discussion, but instead am writing an entry thats a chronicle of my trek through numerous blogs and other interesting outposts on web related to digital native discussion. lest you think that this post would hence be any less valuable, think again, there are some interesting links that I came across during my scavenging. not everything is directly related to the query at hand, but as is the non-linear nature of surfing (funny, I am presenting this post in text - a linear logic, to advocate digital nativity, whose hallmark feature is being non linear. well until we have a better alternative, lets stick to text for now.) I would share some other interesting stuff as well, in no particular ord...