Blur – The high speed view

pluggd.in has been around for the last 2.5 years and we must have seen close to 300+ startups (and 500+ideas) and out of that, only a few names that remain in the memory. Many startups are fledgling and some of them have announced their death as well. This post is not about all that, but a few missing links that exists in the startup ecosystem (let’s not get […]

When we wrote about Facebook’s minor design changes earlier today, we didn’t take an extremely close look at the screenshots that were embedded in the accompanying blog post the company’s design team published about the tweaks. If we had, we may or may not have noticed that they featured two nuggets that most definitely deserve a second glance, but FBhive mo […]

It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare. We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries.  But now, xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping the world’s brightest m […]

With over 250 million users, Facebook is a social networking behemoth. The site is host to thousands of celebrity fan pages and has been taking steps to make these more appealing to self-promoters. On Saturday Bill Gates revealed that he’s not a Facebook user, and many other famous names are notably absent from the site. Which leads us to wonder…what might t […]

Small-scale entrepreneurs in a developing nation have come for the rescue of poor villagers. These entrepreneurs are studied in the context of delivery of IT services to rural and poor populations. Sriram Raghavan is one of them. He intends to prove that the world’s billion-plus rural poor can produce sizable profit for online services. Raghvan’s challenge - […]

Looks like the marginal benefit of advertising during programs shown on Hulu must be higher than that of the same program shown on TV.Marketers typically pay $20 to $40 per thousand viewers for a prime-time ad. On Hulu, which began offering shows to the public in March 2008, an ad on the animated series “The Simpsons” costs $60 per thousand viewers, Michael […]

Chris Yeh from PBWorks responds to Things A Venture Capitalist Will Never Say slide show with a few funny-because-they-are-true slides of his own: Things A Startup Founder Will Never Say My favorite: “We reached out to you because your portfolio shows you are about as selective as Paris Hilton.” Good one! Second favorite: “Our marketing plan is to pray for T […]

This past Friday, Facebook started issuing vanity URLs to its 200 million-plus community. It was a big change for the social-networking company that has so far used unique numerical identifications to identify its members. Not anymore — now you can go to Facebook.com/OmMalik and friend me. It was such a major event that, even on the weekend, it was the talk […]

The marginal cost of delivering web-based content is approaching zero, so while some publishers continue to charge for it, they are the exception and not the rule. This has led to the reliance on advertising as a revenue model by most consumer web publishers. But if the marginal cost of a page of content is zero, isn’t the marginal cost of a page of ads zero […]

A classic example of how feudal our politics is comes from a Rediff Q&A with Veena Singh, Arjun Singh’s daughter, who is contesting these elections as an independent candidate after the Congress denied her a party ticket. See this bit: Q You mentioned in your speech that you decided to contest because you were offended by the way the party has treated yo […]