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.

How to announce an acquisition to customers?

Learn from Wufoo.

It's very rare that an email notifying you about a merger/acquisition makes you smile. Makes you care. Does a good job of explaining what's going on. And does all of this in plain English, not corporate-speak.

That's quite a lot for an email to achieve. But that's exactly what this email from Wufoo did.

Meru Cabs Online Booking Website - A Review

I'm a big fan of Meru Cabs. Always on time [1], well maintained fleets of cars, and appropriately priced.

My only grouse had been with waiting (for eternity) to speak with someone in their call center to make a booking. Well, with the recent launch of online bookings on the Meru Cabs website, even that seems to have been solved.

A big shoutout to my friends at DotAhead, Goa for solving this beautifully.

What's good

The home page is where all the action happens - as it ideally should, for a website focusing on transactions. No mugshots of founders & investors welcoming you to the "Meru family". No corporate-speak about our "fleet of cars", "since 2002", yada yada. Get your booking. And get out. Simple. Here's what the home page looks like:

8 types of bad creative critics

I hope I'm none of them. Or better yet - have evolved through each of them already :-)

[Via Indigo Consulting, which is originally via SkydeCartoons.com as indicated on the image]

How can Google beat Twitter at the social game?

Quick answer - Embrace blogs & RSS feeds.
Long answer follows...

Twitter is a micro-blog

The numero uno use-case on Twitter is that users publish content (opinions, links, etc.) and broadcast it to whoever wants to listen. (The content, for some unknown reason, is limited to 140 chars.)

There is a well established & easy way to publish content online – hosted blogging platforms. There is a well documented & well supported open standard for broadcasting one's content – RSS feeds. No wonder Twitter was called a micro-blogging platform when it started out.