Energy saving tips for all

tl;dr: Please unplug chargers when they are not actively charging your devices. About 75% of power consumed is by "orphaned" chargers.

Logging out of Yahoo! Mail takes me to the homepage. At first, I would just close the tab before the homepage loaded. Then one day, the page loaded, and I found the scrolling pictures (and related stories) to be a good distraction from my daily activities in tech-land.

Yahoo! has invested a lot of engineering into personalizing this page based on heuristics, region, your previous clicks, etc. Yes, I mentioned Yahoo! and Engineering in the same sentence. Got over it...

This morning, a story was presented to me that is close to my heart - Conserving Energy:

We live for gadgets. But even the smallest ones can consume an enormous amount of power. See some of the worst offenders.

Game Consoles
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Plasma TVs
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Laptops
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Battery chargers

Check the power saving tips at the end of the article, and please unplug your chargers when you are not using them.

Sleep your way to efficiency

Great life advice over at HBR:

The lesson: Two behaviors we've devalued and sometimes even demonized — rest and renewal — have a profound impact on people's productivity at work and their satisfaction across their lives.

Another nail in the Blackberry coffin

Reuters reports:

Qantas said it was replacing 1,300 company-issued Blackberrys with iPhones and the savings at the end of the program would be about A$1.4 million. IBM was also reported to be dropping RIM for iPhones for 500 employees in Australia.

...

"Savings will come from simplifying the infrastructure supporting the devices, from the devices themselves and from the data agreements reached with our providers."

Translation: We can't wait to get rid of the Blackberry.

It's about understanding "mobility", yaar!

Interesting analysis of the difference between mobile and mobility over on HBR:

And the same will happen in the rush to mobile if companies take a "channel" approach vs. a behavioral approach. In short, it's not about mobile as much as it is about understanding mobility.

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Mobility means information, convenience, and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices.

Mobility is radically different from the stationary desktop experience. In some cases, mobility is a "lean back" experience like sitting on a commuter train watching a video. In other cases it can be "lean forward" — like shopping for a gift while you take your lunch break at the park. And in many cases, it's "lean free" when your body is in motion, or you're standing in line scanning news headlines or photos from friends while you wait for your turn to be called.

Mobility trumps mobile. The difference between mobility and mobile is like the difference between hardware and software. Mobile is linked to devices — it is always one thing, wherever it is. But mobility changes with context: cultures incorporate mobile technologies differently.

I will extend that cultural metaphor further. Not only do cultures incorporate mobile technologies differently, people in the same culture use mobile technologies in unpredictably different ways.

The keys to success with mobile technologies are:
1. Weave mobility into your corporate culture. Mobility should not be an after-thought; it should be defined along with the other delivery strategies.
2. Recognize that maintaining a mobile experience will take effort.
3. Ensure that the mobile interface to your services add value for the customer.

User Interface Design and Firefox

There is an interesting article on rapid releases in Firefox over on hackernews. I posted my thoughts on the UI changes in Firefox since the 4.0 release as a comment on that story. Here is the text of the comment:

Very few user interfaces have withstood the test of time. There are notable exceptions, of course - the iOS UI, uTorrent, and the Chrome browser immediately come to mind. Other applications and operating systems have continued to evolve their user interface over 18-24 months. In some cases, the evolution is necessary for the sake of usability. Take Android for instance: The UI update in ICS dramatically enhanced usability.
In my experience, the designers of unchanged interfaces put a lot of thought into almost every interaction a user could have with their application/operating system. Armed with the use-cases, the designers invested time and effort in creating the core UI "right", and determined a seamless way to make incremental updates. Chrome and iOS are, again, perfect examples of this concept in action. Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much.

Firefox's UI changed radically in version 4. A good number of users revolted and there was uproar about the theme refresh, but most of the users that stuck around got used to the changes. That they are changing the UI again, only 24 months after the fact, does not reflect very well on the design philosophy behind the 4.0 refresh. Lots of questions come to mind - Did the designers not do adequate research during 4.0? Was the development time-frame too short? Was 4.0 just an interim solution to what they perceived a bigger problem? Are curved tabs really better than rectangular ones? Do I get back a lot of screen real estate? Is this a case of Not-Designed-By-Me syndrome?...

I continue to use Firefox today, partially because I know my way around the application so well but mostly because I trust that Mozilla values my privacy. I do think that they go half the distance sometimes with their privacy measures - "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default, and Firefox accepts and keeps "Third Party Cookies" until they expire. In these specific cases, I understand that these are measures taken to ensure they can keep the lights on at their headquarters. With the impending changes to the UI, I will be using the app only on the basis of my trust in Mozilla. And we all know that trust is a tenuous thing to hang by...

The Higg's Boson for dummies

An amazing introduction to the Higg's Boson, and why the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is important: The Higg's Boson explained

A tale of two acquisition strategies - Google vs Microsoft

Update: Vanity Fair published a piercing story on Microsoft's lost decade today.

I tweeted a realization about Microsoft and Google's acquisitions over the last few years:

For every successful Google acquisition, Microsoft has a failed one. Missed opportunities abound in Steve Ballmer's Microsoft legacy.
— Manoj Mehta (@manojhatax) July 3, 2012

Here is a comparative list in some of the key areas of competition between the two companies:

Genre: Advertising
Applied Semantics, DoubleClick, AdMeld, AdMob; Google; Status: Heavily monetized; Successful
aQuantive; Microsoft; Status: Written off; Epic Failure

Genre: Social Platforms
Pyra Labs; Google; Status: Monetized as blogger.com; Successful
Groove Software; Microsoft; Status: Unclear; Mild Failure

Genre: Mobile Platforms
Android; Google; Status: Number 1 Smartphone OS in the World; Successful
Danger; Microsoft; Status: Decommissioned; Epic Failure

Genre: VoIP
Marratech, Gizmo5Google;; Status: Used in Google Talk and Google Hangout; Successful
Skype Software; Microsoft; Status: Monetization unclear; TBD

Bottom-line is my Microsoft investment is never going to reap rewards! Now had I put that money in Google or Apple, I would have retired already.

Sources:
[1] List of acquisitions by Google
[2] List of acquisitions by Microsoft