Huawei IDEOS - Review by a first time Android user

One fine day I received this email from the good fellows at Avian Media asking me if I'd like to review the recently launched Huawei IDEOS. As you can guess, I agreed. They sent me an IDEOS handset, I played with it for a good 2-3 weeks, and here's the review. But, first, a couple of quick clarifications:

• I think it's very hard reviewing an Android phone. You don't really know whether you're reviewing the phone or the Android platform. As a first time user of an Android phone, I don't really know which parts of the Android OS/UI are it's inherent traits and which parts are controlled by the phone manufacturer. Given the fact that Android is open and assuming that the manufacturer would have control over all aspects of the OS/UI, I'll state my opinions as a whole towards the phone, and not split between the hardware & the OS/UI.
• I did NOT use this handset as my primary phone. I had taken it along with me on my Thailand trip where, although it had a Thai SIM, calls were infrequent. It was used frequently for surfing the net over WiFi, checking emails, Google Maps + GPS, & tons of Angry Birds :-)

Phuket / Krabi / Thailand Weather in May, 2011

My wife & I got back from an 11 day trip to Phuket & Krabi. We were there from 14th May to 25th May, 2011.

We were skeptical of having to stay indoors for most of the trip due to the rainy weather forecast. We were surprised to find mostly hot & sunny days all throughout our trip. If I remember correctly, it was partly cloudy on two days (no or very little rain) and there was only one day with heavy rains. A couple of days it rained in the night, but most of the days it was hot & sunny - perfect weather for beach bumming & island hopping.

Thailand is very beautiful in the rains.Unless you're hell bent on catching some sun and lazing around on the beach, hire a car and go for a long drive if it gets cloudy. The roads and the lush greenery are just brilliant when it's wet!

You can get more information on the current weather in Phuket at the Phuket Weather Blog.

Back to school from Thailand

Back from a long-ish (11 day) trip to Thailand. Didn't want to come back only :( Thinking of going to office tomorrow feels like going back to school after 10weeks of summer vacations!

Gotta write some SEO'd posts about my travel tales now...

Brand bidding as a PR tool: Learnings from CCAvenue hack

Following up on my previous post about the CCAvenue hacking incident & learnings from it, I'm really, really surprised that CCAvenue has not started bidding on it's own brand terms.

There's a lot that has already been said about bidding on one's own brand terms in the regular course of things and I'm not about to go into it here. You can read some opinions about it here & here. This post focuses on why you should be bidding on your brand terms during critical public situations.

As of 11 May, 2011, a Google search on "ccavenue hacked" results in a bunch of links from other blogs & news sites, which talk about their take on the incident.

If CCAvenue were bidding on terms like "ccavenue hacked", etc. they would easily have the opportunity to place the official response right on top of the search results page. With a few rupees per-click they could ensure that users hear of the official response first. The fact that their official response sucks, is a different matter altogether.


BP seems to have done this during the Deepwater Horizon Oilspill incident. They were bidding aggressively on keywords like "oil spill", "deepwater", "gulf of mexico", etc. The ads took users to a section on their website detailing the official response and updates on the damage control process. Read more about the BP Oil Spill Google ads here. However, they seem to have gotten a fair bit of backlash -  [1] [2] - for spending time in online reputation management instead of fixing the damn problem. But that's mostly because oil companies don't have a good reputation to begin with. I would presume that that's not the case with CCAvenue.

PS: I'm not sure what the search volume for the CCAvenue-hack related keywords would be. I'm itching to put out an ad and see how many clicks I can get on this. Screw it, let's do it!

Two must-have features in Google Blogger & Reader

Two features that I wish Google Blogger & Reader had:

1. Google Reader should show me ONE consolidated news item if it appears multiple times in my news feed. For example if a particular post has been shared by one or more of my friends and/or is also part of my news feed it should show up just once. Bonus feature would be to display each user's note/comment in a usable fashion.
2. Google Blogger should have the ability to reply to a comment via email. While you can be notified via email with every comment to a particular post, you can't simply hit the reply button and continue the discussion. Pull up your socks Google, it has been ages since Facebook released this feature for all comment threads on its platform.

What do you think?

Aside, if you haven't already read why I think Google Blogger + Reader can beat the shit out of Twitter, do it now. I mean now!

CCAvenue hack: What can developers & businesses learn?

If you haven't already read about the alleged hacking of CCAvenue, here's the gist:

1. Hacker, calling himself d3hydr8, posts complete schema of CCAvenue's DB on a mailing list. The post also contains the contents of 'admn_users' table, which include username & passwords in plain text.
2. Story is covered all over the interwebs - MediaNama coverage, Pluggd coverage
3. CEO, Vishwas Patel "patently" denies that this happened.

Developers should read this

Here's what developers can learn about how to safely store passwords:

Is the iMint loyalty card worth it?

A couple of years ago I got a free iMint card because of my ICICI Bank debit card. I never bothered with it apart from getting mildly irritated with iMint spam in my inbox every week. Last week I got yet another iMint spam - "Redeem your i-mint points & get 100 BONUS i-mint points" - and I wondered, how desparate could they get!

I decided to dig deeper.