User Centric Design & Helping the Poor

Came across this interesting article on how user centric design is helping create better stoves for the poor.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that toxic emissions from cooking stoves are responsible for causing 1.6m premature deaths a year, half of them among children under five years old. In China 83m people will die from lung cancer and respiratory disease over the next 25 years, according to a recent report from Harvard University. Research from the University of California, Berkeley, on stoves in India, Guatemala and Mexico has found links between indoor air-pollution from stoves and increased incidence of pneumonia, cataracts and tuberculosis

The full article can be found here.

Are you going to finish strong ?

Came across this inspirational video from Nick Vujicic today when Prasoon put it up as his status on Facebook. I had seen this video in the past as well and was deeply moved by the courage Nick extrudes in carrying on with his daily life normally and with such conviction and belief in all the good things that life still brings on to him.

Here is the video.

Do visit The Life Without Limbs foundation website and try and be inspired by the way he has given hope and courage to not only the millions across the world who have been struck with the bad luck of being born without limbs, but even to those who lead the life of a physically fit person.

Bananas from Minekey

E-Summit 09 - IIT Kharagpur

Just came across an awesome coverage of the ongoing E-Summit at IIT KGP by Shrey here.

I am really happy to see the E-Cell ( that me and some of my friends help found while at KGP ) is doing an awesome job of what we set to do then. The E-Summit is a wonderful array of events connecting the budding entrepreneurs there at KGP with the seasoned ones and allowing for a platform for a healthy discussion on issues related to starting up. The cell has also done some great work in helping people find funding and the right mentors inside the campus ( not to mention the deferred placement program - that has really helped some of the students take the plunge in starting something of their own ). Kudos to all the E-Cell members for their efforts and hope that we get to see more action in the years to come.

I really wished to be there for the summit but it was really not possible for me to travel to KGP so soon(i had been to KGP in the first week of December itself). Arindam, a researcher with the Minekey Labs at KGP, would be sharing his experiences working with Minekey there at the E-summit today. Shall update the post on his talk there later on.

I shall write more about the E-Cell some other time. Maybe i can get someone from the cell write a guest post here or something.

Some info on the summit from the summit website

Entrepreneurship Summit, a two-day event organised by Entrepreneurship Cell IIT Kharagpur, is one of the biggest platforms in India for academicians, new-age entrepreneurs, eminent business personalities, venture capitalists, and students alike, to gather and share their entrepreneurial endeavours and experiences, and to pledge to take Entrepreneurship in India to greater scales.



After the immense success of Summit ‘07, which witnessed active participation from places strewn far and wide across the nation, Summit ‘09 promises to scale new heights and conquer unexplored horizons. Entrepreneurship Summit ’09, the third edition of the Summit, is scheduled for 10th and 11th January, 2009. It aims at promoting entrepreneurial awareness among the students, and will witness varieties of guest lectures by distinguished speakers, panel discussions, focused workshops and a host of events such as Case Study analysis, Business Ideas competition, etc. This year’s summit is part of the Entrepreneurship Week that is being celebrated in IIT Kharagpur, starting from the 2nd of January.

The week kick starts with a guest lecture by 3Com and Finisar Director, Dominique Trempont, accompanied by spouse Sramana Mitra, who is also a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur, has founded 3 companies, and is a strategy consultant for over 70 companies including SAP, Cadence etc.

The summit also includes a Venture Funding Conference, which will showcase the launch of Global Ventures Lab. It is a collaborative effort of IIT Kharagpur, University of California, Berkley(UCB), USA and University of Jyvaskyla, Finland to promote Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Best of Comete Blog

Compete also published their best of 2008 recently, here is the post .

January	Sink or Swim? The Top Moving Sites Of 2007
February	Start Your Engines: Which Nascar Driver and Sponsor Sits on the Pole Position?
March	Brilliant! TNS buys Compete
April	Multi-Cultural Marketing, Part I: Finding Korean Americans Online
May	Environmental Issues Turning Many Into Treehuggers
June	What You Have Been Asking For… Today We Are Launching Compete PRO and Ranked Lists!
July	Moviegoers Online: The Wisdom of Crowds and the Web
August	Could Soaring Traffic to RIM and Samsung Sites Spell Trouble for Motorola?
September	The “New” Facebook: Learning From Old Mistakes
October	Electoral Tea-Leaf Reading: Which States are Leading Online?
November	Behold the Power of google.com
December	Diesel - The German Hybrid

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The best of LaserLike 2008

I had started reading Laserlike, Mike Speisers' blog, early this year.I really love his insightful posts, infact some of his posts inspired me to write about those topics on my blog here as well.

Mike in in his most recent post has collected the top few posts of 2008. Out of the few he mentioned in the post, there are my personal favorites and i would recommend it to you all as well

Why Google or Yahoo should buy Twitter

Email is Dead.Long live Email

Startup Marketing Advice

I shall be doing a series of posts sharing with you all some of such posts that i have found most interesting in the year 2008.

WIshing you all a very Happy New Year !! Happy reading !

Minekey now lets you have fun with Eggs too !

We at Minekey just launched the Content Rating System with the aim to help surface the most high quality content available on the platform. The content rating system provides greater control to its users to decide what content gets promoted on the opinion boards, thereby contributing to a more fulfilling user experience not just for new users but for the old timers as well.

To quote the Minekey Blog

We have launched the Minekey Content rating system. As mentioned in our earlier posts, Content rating system provides greater control to Minekey users to have a say on what content they would like to promote on Minekey.

Here is how the content rating system works:

Minekey users will be allowed Eggs at opinions and comments on Minekey. If you like an opinion or comment, you can reward it by throwing a Golden Egg. If you dislike something you can throw a Rotten Egg - what can be meaner than that ?

To promote an opinion or comment, you can rate it up by clicking on the Golden Egg icon. To rate down an opinion or comment that you feel doesn’t belong there; you can rate it down by clicking on the Rotten Egg icon. Currently, we have kept the rating system anonymous, so users do not develop biases against the preferences of other users and feel comfortable and secure while rating the content.