Best iPhone Humour That iFound!

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Ok, so the launch has happened and while we at Tech 2.0 wait for some friends in the US to ship one across so that we can use it on international roaming and give you guys a REAL review, here are the funniest three iPhone pieces floating on the interweb. Text: Churumuri for their hilarious post "11 similarities between the iPhone and Rajni" The only one I didn't quite agree with was: ""6) College dropout Rajni is in the safe hands of Shankar who has not known failure at all as a director. The iPhone is in the safe hands of college dropout Steve Jobs who has not known failure at all as a tech visionary." As Steve Jobs himself said in his famous Stanford speech, he's failed badly once and picked himself up to even greater heights. Not to....

First iPhone Reviews Are In!

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The first reviews from some of the lucky journalists (insert professional jealousy expletive here!) to get an early-review Apple iPhone model are out in the US media! The overall impression is that the "Jesus Phone" may actually live up to the hype after all. Minus the blood to wine conversion of course, though, I'm told there's a nifty app for the phone that actually lets you .... anyway, lol, here are some quick links: Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal: "Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer." More David Pogue, New York Times: "... so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese." More Stephen Levy, Newsweek: "The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge." More ....

Owed Two A Spelling Chequer

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Computers have come a long way and while they can crunch data easier than humans, they still don't "get" the subjective stuff. Thats the reason why CAPTCHAS as we reported on the Tech 2.0 show last week, are mankind's best defence against spam. I got a regular Press Release today, from an Indian car-maker today, which had me scratching my head when I read this line: "17 youth are being trained at the company's Jamshedpur facility, while another 340 individuals have been placed in two select it is and the Ramakrishna Mission Shilpa Mandir." After some thinking I figured that someone had run the release through a Spell Check and auto-corrected ITIs (Indian Technical Institutes) to 'it is' towards the end of the sentence. Just goes to show that however good software gets, you still need a human to run a final check! This....

Techie Dropouts & Graduation Speeches

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Ah! The sweet irony of a college dropout delivering a graduation speech! Even sweeter if it's the richest man in the world coming back to take his degree and address students of arguably the most famous college in the world. When William H Gates delivered the commencement address to Harvard's Class of 2007 a few days ago, life had come full circle for the founder of Microsoft. He joked that he was leaving his job next year and a college degree would help on the CV. For those who don't follow Microsoft, Bill Gates is relinquishing all responsibilities at MS and will focus on his foundation full-time. If you read the speech without being told whose it is, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's probably some stereotypical leftist-activist 'jholawala' crusader. And yet it was the very man who epitomizes American capitalism exhorting....

Fool.Google.Com?

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Haha! Google was back with its April Fool antics and this time the guys at Gmail joined in as well. Google promised a Toilet Internet Service while its mail service announced free print-outs! I will wager that the latter would ACTUALLY have takers in India - especially bureaucrats who have files in their IN and OUT trays with print-outs of official emails checked by junior staff! Google has been doing these fun April 01 jokes since inception - you can find a list of them here. The amazing part though is that fairly respectable news establishments continue to fall for these gags lock, stock and barrell. Business Standard, for instance reported it as fact although the article was quickly taken down. ....

Game Off!

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The economic fallout has begun! The poor guys at Microsoft have had to cancel the big launch party of "Yuvraj Singh International Cricket 2007" for the Xbox 360. Microsoft had organised a big "Good Luck India" signature campaign in the run-up to this release. We covered the launch of Microsoft's newest gaming console, back in September. After all, this was the first time that a big daddy like MS was putting its marketing muscle into gaming. The Yuvraj-Akshay "Game On" ad was a hit and getting ICICI to offer it on EMIs was a smart move. But the real driver of the mania needed to be an India-specific killer title that would drive sales like crazy. After all, the economic model of the console gaming industry is to make losses on the hardware and compensate with....

''Reporting'' To The Mob!

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Ok, so we all know about 'The Wisdom Of Crowds' and other productive forms of mob mentality. It allegedly works in business, but can it work in journalism? Well two seperate experiments are banking on the fact that it does... 1. Our friends at The Economist are working on Project Red Stripe which hopes to come up with a viable Internet media business at the end of a mega-brainstorming session, to which anyone is free to contribute. (Including business media rivals with too much free time on their hands, who may spam them with ridiculous ideas - heh heh!). Excerpt: "We're a small team set up by The Economist Group, the parent company of the eponymous newspaper. Our mission is to develop truly innovative services online. We already have some ideas, of course. But as champions of free markets, we abhor the concept of a closed....