The Learned Man!

Veotag It

Check out Veotag, a new service that is able to text tag a podcast or video making it easy for the listener/viewer to directly jump to the section of relevance.

TATA Interactive Systems got Veotag to tag their Annual Review Of 2006 podcast and you can check that out here. I am sure you will agree that after seeing this, it is going to be very difficult to go back to your old way of listening to podcasts or viewing videos.

iPhone - First Review

So finally this is what it is:

Click here for more from Apple's iPhone pages.

Dont miss the early iPhone review and the iPhone FAQS by David Pogue of The New York Times who spent an hour playing with this.

From David's review:

• It feels amazing in your hand. Not like an iPod, not like a Treo — but something new.
• You operate the iPhone with your fingertips. Apart from buttons that appear on the touch screen, the only physical buttons are volume up/down, ringer on/off, sleep/wake and a Home button.
• During my one test call, the sound quality was loud and clear.
  Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there’s no tactile feedback. Software helps a lot. You can afford to make a lot of typos as you muddle through a word, because the software analyzes which keys you *might* have meant and figures out the word you wanted.
• The phone won’t be available until June, so some of its software isn’t finished yet.
  I tried out the camera. It was really cool to frame a shot using the HUGE 3.5-inch screen; it’s rare to find that big a screen on any camera.
• The Web browsing experience is incredible. You see the entire Web page on the iPhone’s screen.
  

What You Looking At?

Jakob Nielsen, "Web Page Usability Guru", provides details about a study where 232 people were asked to look at thousands of web pages and their reading behaviour was looked at and it was found that the dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F. Basically:

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.

The F pattern's implications for Web design are clear and show the importance of following the guidelines for writing for the Web instead of repurposing print content:

• Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't.
• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

For those of you working in sales, inside sales or brand management, communication etc this kind of information would be invaluable in helping you design your messages.

India Rising - One Billion Reasons To Care

Click here to see an interesting little video profiling the rise of India, despite all the hinderances and lack of infrastructure. Toward the end of the clip Thomas Friedman gives us his take on what the mood in India is right now. He says, "You want to know what India feels like, its really quite simple. Pull out a champagne bottle, shake it for an hour and uncork it. You wouldn't want to get in the way of that cork!". Well said Mr. Friedman!

Get Smarter

Read 'The Learned Man! Blog' everday, take a shower with your eyes closed, brush your teeth with your wrong hand, all these activities can actually make you upto 40% smarter within 7 days, according to research done by a BBC programme.

The programme found that a combination of techniques based on healthy eating, physical activity, sound sleep and stimulating your mind through solving puzzles and remembering lists makes people sharper, more confident and better at making decisions.

Click here to read the entire article.

Life Inside Googleplex

Ever wondered what the Google offices look like, and what it is to work in there.

"The Googleplex is the Google company headquarters, located in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, near San Francisco. The word Googleplex is a play on the word googolplex, and a portmanteau of Google and complex—googolplex being the name given to 10googol, or one followed by a googol zeros, and the headquarters comprising a complex of buildings. The building is unlike many modern company headquarters; contained within the sprawling complex are shade lamps, giant rubber balls, and other unusual niceties reminiscent of the dot-com boom. The complex is located along Charleston Road in north Mountain View close to the Shoreline Park wetlands." - Wikipedia

Inside Pics:

From Google: Googlers at work & play

From Time Magazine: Life in the Googleplex, Photo Essay

From Digg: Inside pics of Googleplex