Today, Microsoft announced a new avatar of its search engine – Bing. I’ve been playing around with Bing www.bing.com since morning, and what I liked is that it’s not just a search engine, but designed to help make decisions. In fact we are making a paradigm shift and calling it a ‘Decision Engine’ because of the way It empowers people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to making the important decisions.

Its pretty cool! The new snazzy design will have a beautiful daily image on the homepage which will have hotspots embedded in it to let you explore the picture in detail

Try the Best Match feature that makes finding relevant information, by putting up front information like customer service numbers for retail sites, the ability to track a package right from the search page, deep links to common pages within the site and much more.

It also has this cool explorer pane on the left that lets me easily get to related searches, past searches, news on the topic etc. It even has a quick tabs feature that anticipates my intent when searching. For example, when I’m searching for a favorite musician, it filters results by albums, biography, videos and images….amazing!

Check out the Video and image search – it has these handy filtering tools that let me sort by size, color, style and much much more. In fact, when I search for videos, it even gives me a preview, when I simply hover over one!

Bing launches globally on 3^rd June and some of the features will roll out in India in the coming months. You must check it out at www.bing.com.

Long time since I posted, I must blame my laziness to stretch a bit extra. But the last two months some great incidents happened in my life which I must share to all. These incidents or accidents are great for me, ‘coz they had been my great desires while I was doing engineering at GCT.

After winning the Google Got the ‘App’titude challenge our team at XL did not had time to think about it also due to the prolonged placements for seniors, I was also completely engrossed in the finance assignments and other end term projects during that time. One fine day on March, we got a mail from Google Gurgaon office inviting us to their office. It was a surprise for me that my dream of visiting is happening. So we fixed the dates, but only Thunga and Chintan could join with me for thee visit. Our Professor Mr.Ashish Pani and Amrit Pal Singh the other team mate could not join for the visit due to prior commitments.

The whole visit was taken for us by a Googler – Shashank. We got flight tickets booked by him from Jamshedpur to Delhi on 25 March ‘09. Our day at Google would be on 26th March. We reached Delhi on 25th night at Delhi Airport. The great honor for me was when I saw a person standing at arrivals with a Google Signboard engrossed with our names. I immediately got the signboard from him and preserved it. ( Come on – for the first time I am treated like a VIP by one of my most loved companies – Google and Microsoft. It does not happen every other day.)

All three of us felt Google is pampering us with flight trip and huge individual rooms at Ibis. But that was not the end. The next day ,

Date : 26th March 2009

Morning 7.45 AM : Beep Beep… My Phone rang… I woke up and attended it… It was the driver sent by Google to pick us for the Office.  I got ready and so were Thunga and Chintan and we got into car at about 8.45 AM

Morning 9.15 AM: We all three were in car and stuck in the usual Gurgaon traffic. We were moving to Google office. I got a call from Shashank saying what happened to us since we were supposed to be in the office by 9.00 AM and the director is waiting for us. I almost fainted, I made the director of Google wait :). It was a great day for me I thought.

Morning 9.45 AM: We all three were in the office of Google India Director.We discussed about the Contest on how we went about implementing the Apps at XL. He also told his experiences in life and it turned out to a general chat with him.

Morning 10.15 AM: After the meeting, Thunga had instinct to drink coffee, so there was Costa inside the office and Shasank took us there. Thunga took the coffee and was about to pay for it. Suddenly it struck, come on you dont pay for food in Google. We saw around it was a huge cafeteria with Pizzas to south Indian food stuffs. I can grab anything for free here today, I picked the Red bull from the case kept there (I never purchased a Red bull, and had argued it as useless for the amount we pay. But today I am treated by Google).Then I notices food was every where in the office you just need to stretch 20 Meters to grab anything :).

Morning 10.45 AM: We were in the Green Room. What were we doing ?. There was a video shoot on us, yes it was a video case study on our Apps Experience. We did some rehearsals and finally with in an Hour our case study presentation was over. I would update the link here once I get it from Google.

Morning 11.45 AM: We had a presentation on Google Ad-words Non Dedicated services.

After Noon 12.30 PM: Presentation on Google Analytics by Analytics team

After Noon 1.00 PM: I was damn hungry and we had a royal lunch in Google cafeteria.

After Noon 1.30 PM: We had a presentation by the Sales and Marketing team of Google.

At 2.30 PM,  It was coming to an end and we were presented the Winners Certificate for being the National Level Winners of the Google Challenge. We were showered with lots of Google Goodies (What no Bags to T-Shirts and some Gadgets too After that we were dropped at Airport and all three of us boarded on Jet Airways with fond memories to cherish.

When I finished my Computer Science Engineering -  There were only two companies that I considered the as my dream companies. One was Microsoft and Other was Google. Google for the revolution they had made in the way we work. We cant work without search in any job. Microsoft for my passion on Windows and DOS which I  had been working with from the day I started to use computers in the year 1996. Windows is so entrenched in my life and I dreamt being a part of Microsoft one day during that time.

So I finally had a chance to see Google and I also had a similar chance to be with Microsoft which I would write in my next post.

A computer in everything and everywhere. I used to wonder after seeing Hollywood movies like Minority report & Paycheck whether the technology they showed will ever be invented. It was a system screen projected on any surface and you operate the system using the surface. And it came to world in the name of Sixth Sense.

Please see the TED show, where sixth sense was presented to know more about it.

Today I received a mail from Google Inc. It was really exhilarating to read each and every line.  The mail goes as mentioned below.

Hello everyone,

As you all are aware, Got The ‘App’titude Challenge concluded on February 28, 2009. In the days that followed, we reviewed the accrued usage data and are now ready to announce the much anticipated winner.

Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, have won the challenge by demonstrating the highest usage of Google Apps products. The XLRI team working on Google Apps implementation was led by Prof. Ashish Pani. The other members are “Hariharan R, Chintan Agarwal, Pal Singh and Srikanth Thunga”. The team showed great enthusiasm and managed to stay on top of the challenge from the beginning. They named this initiative XL CONNECT, ran a pilot and implemented Google Apps within a month from the day they secured approval from the college decision makers. They also conducted marketing campaigns to inspire students to find innovative ways to use Google Apps services. 

Alliance Business Academy - Bangalore, Birla Institute of Management Technology - Delhi, Jaypee Business School - Noida, Mudra Institute of Communications – Ahmedabad, Zakir Husain College of Engineering & Technology- Aligarh Muslim University, and National Institute of Technology - Calicut are some of the other colleges which had very high Google Apps usage. These colleges now join the elite group of colleges including Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad and National Institute of Design - Ahmedabad that are using Google Apps extensively.

In addition, over 100 colleges in India participated & implemented Google Apps as part of this challenge. Our thanks to those teams also for taking the lead in improving communication & collaboration capabilities in their college.

Thanks

–
Got The "App"titude Challenge
Main Site: http://www.google.co.in/apps/gottheapptitude

For me the best part in Winning this is the prize :). Below mentioned is the prize we will be getting.

• A case study to be featured on our Google Apps website as well as a video testimonial featured on our Google Apps YouTube channel
• A letter of recommendation from FMS and Google
• An all expense paid trip for your team to visit one of our Google India offices

I would write more about improvements on this.

Related Posts

1. A Small Sense of Satisfaction
2. Students testimonial – Update from Google
3. Google Truly Brilliant – Amazing Move

If you ever get a Instant message from any one with a message “lol check this out http://tinyurl.com/xxx“, Don’t enter your GMAIL id and password to login which it will be requesting to watch a video. It was very suspicious the moment I saw. If you enter your Gmail Id and password to login, it will send a Instant message to all the people in your Gtalk list. A nice prank, but a dirty idea.

So don’t fall into this phishing prank. This is very recent, I got the instant messages from about 5 people already at this time. Convey to all of your friends to stop this. More details of this prank will come out soon.

Nowadays when I am surfing, the usual Google banner ads which will have some un-known face is showing a familiar face. In the last two months, it was only one face and tri-color ( Its only one – Saffron:) is what that captures attention. It is Mr. L K Adavni’s prime minister campaign - for the Indian 15th Lok Sabha Elections.

I did some googling to find out the amount of money spent for the Advertising campaign – Its huge – Rs.250 Crore campaign. In this economic scenario this is really a huge amount for advertisement campaign.

He has followed Barack Obama’s style campaign by completely utilizing the web for the campaign. He has created a Website , Forum ,Blog, Orkut Community , You Tube Channel & Facebook page. A huge money has been poured into the Google Adwords and Banners adds campaign.This is probably the first time by an Indian politician. I am not giving any personal opinion on the party or the candidate here. But I am impressed on the party’s effort ( or any consultant who gave the idea) in using the power of internet for the elections.

That is a great move for me because of one reason, this should create an awareness to many Indian people about the power of Technology. This I see as just a precursor. Now every politician will be forced to follow and flood the world wide web. This will bring out money from deep-black-pockets of India which is in a way useful for online ads community beneficiaries like me who display online ads in our websites, 

This term at XL is going to be really  hectic. This 3 months will be worse than Term II. In Term I,most of the time I spent in learning Micro-economics and I spared a little extra time in learning Indian Constitution & Preliminary Labor Laws. The way economics was taught and the approach in the testing pattern was totally alien for me till my graduation. The exams were completely a problem solving approach, whereas in lectures were about discussing concepts.

I expected to relax in Term II , but what I got was totally the opposite. I had to go through a new type of pedagogy, The Case Approach. Performance Management was the course which was completely a course which went by case approach. I struggled in the beginning but it helped during my Summer Placement. I never thought I could crack a E&Y‘s consult interview  especially a Case based GD. Amidst the tedious Term II, Summer Placement consumed enormous time and what followed after that was completely strenuous. Projects Submissions and Quizzes, End Term and at last a good learning in this  term. The subjects I enjoyed in this term were Compensation, Performance management and Appraisal, Macro- Economics ( Any day it is an interesting subject for me) and Financial Accounting.

When I came back from home last week, Term III started with a jolt with 4 classes of Corporate Finance I have done 5 assignments. Every other day I am now doing Financial analysis of my company – Hatsun Agro Products Limited – which was allocated for me. For those in South India know this company very well for its household brand names – Arun Ice cream, Arokya milk and Komatha milk. The subject is really very interesting and I am enjoying to the maximum in lectures. The way the subject is taught matters a lot. I came here due to my inclination for training and development, now teaching as a profession has become one of my aspiration.

A general perception with people - all subjects can be taught to students in one best way – i.e. Lecturing , as Fredrick Taylor’s Taylorism says about industrial labor. Every subject that is to be taught to students must be adapted to the target audience with the different pedagogical methods, testing methods and especially the course content. I don’t think this is being thought of in the huge number of newly opened engineering college in Tamil Nadu. I am saying especially about this place, because I belong to Coimabatore , a cosmopolitan city in Tamil Nadu, were I have seen in during my graduation days the number of engineering colleges increased ten folds. The new colleges co not have quality faculties and a good course plans. I strongly now feel, I must bring in a change to academia with whatever I could contribute. For now, I will wait for this term to get over and complete my internship in a well known software MNC at Hyderabad.