ZooZoo

If you are from India and you watch even a wee bit TV, you wouldn’t have missed the Vodafone’s ZooZoos. Vodafone with the help of O&M has created a masterpiece with the ZooZoo Ad Campaign. It showcases viral marketing at it’s best. Contrary to the popular perception, ZooZoo’s are not animated characters, they are human beings in costumes in a greyish set. If you want to watch the TV Commercials, click here. To get the full story behind the creation of these masterpieces, click here.

Below are some of the behind the scenes shots of the ZooZoo in action.

 

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Wolfram|Alpha

Most of us have got accustomed to the google search engine for our daily requirements. What if there was a search engine which went a step ahead and gives you a handful of computational answers depending on your search query?

Enter Wolfram|Alpha (http://www94.wolframalpha.com). The next generation search engine which might not kill google but it is definitely an alternative to many of the questions that google does not answer at one shot.

It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links. Eventually you should be able to ask it about essentially any kind of systematic factual knowledge. You can get an idea of what it covers today by looking at the examples. It gives you real time answers on weather, stock quotes, time zones, all of mathematical computations, chemistry, physics, socio economic, people, culture etc..

You will get hooked onto it once you have started using it. Spent about 10 minutes on the site and found out some interesting details

• My surname is ranked 831st in the world and one in every 7133 people have this surname. So guess it’s not very uncommon.
• I’m 10,377 days old and there was only 11 hours of daylight on the day I was born.
• 1 million rupees is currently valued at $20,980.
• My country is ranked 7, 2 and 12 among the biggest countries in terms of area, population and GDP respectively.
• I’ve learnt the full native name for my country just now. Shame on me!

Stephen Wolfram and his team certainly weren’t short of humor when they built this search engine. People have been finding some interesting easter eggs within Wolfram Alpha, triggered by specific questions or events. Ben Parr has posted a collection of these which at

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/wolfram-easter-eggs/

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/better-wolfram-easter-eggs/

Would definitely recommend everybody to spend some time time on Wolfram|Alpha, go through the examples, screencast, community forum.. You will certainly learn something new every time you pay a visit.

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Vintage Bombay

Recently one of my friends had sent a photo collage of Bombay, India as it was in the yester years. Was personally fascinated by the pictures and thought of sharing it with all of you.

 

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Change is constant

What happens if suddenly you are asked to or forced to change what you have been doing or how you are doing ? What happens if you are told that you cannot continue what you used to do the way you used to do? Change happens in all our lives at some point of time or the other. It could be related to anything like

• your work area within your existing job like change in workplace or manager
• change in job
• your lifestyle like not being able to sleep after having a newborn in the house :)
• marriage, this change does not need any corroboration :)

A change is a "shift from comfort zone". By working in a particular manner we get so accustomed to it that any deviation from it will drastically disturb the mindset. We do not know whether the new thing will be good or bad but generally we take it as bad if the current way is going good. We might not realize or willing to realize that this change might open up new opportunities. In the recent past there have been several instances when I have been asked the question of "why the change?". Change should be looked upon as a part of life. As the saying goes, the only thing that is constant is change. So do we cope up to this? Whenever there's a change, we have two options

1. We see this as a positive thing, embrace it and look forward to it
2. We resist the change and stick to the existing method and then sooner or later adopt the change with rancor.

What is going to happen is going to happen. That's destiny. That is not in our control, but what is in our control is how do we take it.

If we take it as in the first option, the doors are open for us. There is a whole new world out there waiting to be explored and there are so many things to be learnt. There's a feeling of vibrancy, of excitement, of positive energy around us. But this does not come that easy. It takes a lot of conviction, self-belief and positive outlook and then the fruits of this are much sweeter.

But it's the second option that most of us opt for as it is the most easiest to adopt to. It's also the most difficult to get out of and causes a lot of stress and anxiety within us.  The immediate reaction of the change is to dwell on how good the existing things are and why was the change required. After receiving the shock of the change, we try to resist the change for some time. Realizing that resisting is not helping, we try some work-arounds, some experiments to circumvent the change. When we realize that it’s not working, we grudgingly decide to integrate with the change and make it as an integral part of out life.

What we also constantly do post the change, is to make the “before & after” comparisons. While accepting the change we also need to firmly accept the fact that things will not be the same as before, otherwise why would the change dawn? Same is with comparisons between people. No two persons are same, neither the fingerprints, nor their skills and talents, not the way they speak, nor the way they work, nor the way they manage people, nor the way they get around with people. So expecting the same thing from two different persons is impractical.

Changes are either self triggered, as in the 1st two examples above or it can be something which is “shoved” onto us, as in the last two examples. Either ways, unless we are ready and we maintain an open mindset, change can be very unsettling initially.

Whichever option that we opt for, change will still happen but it is in OUR control to CHOOSE which option. We can make a choice to be happy with the change or make a choice to get get stressed out with the change. It is our choice and we have to REALIZE that we have the POWER TO CHOOSE and be happy!

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