nihaar's notepad on technology, food, sf and… well, life
Technology
Salaries: Heres How Much People Make In Silicon Valley
Infographic of the week - Salaries: Heres How Much People Make In Silicon Vally.
Colorful Bubbles
News of another photography app for the iPhone raising an insane $41M from the likes of Sequoia, Bain Capital and others quickly spread through the interwebs today and has lead to numerous people opine that we have officially entered another bubble. From a cursory glance, this seems to be just another entry into the already [...]
Infographic: The Downfall Of Yahoo
Infographics are so hot lately! Interesting to see how the demise started with their decision to use Google as the search engine. Full Article On Techcrunch.
Halloween Costume Idea – The Privacy Cookie
As we all scamper around for last minute costume ideas, here’s one that I think is pretty timely (and yes, dorky).
Welcome Emails Are A Great Way To Start A Conversation With Your Users
I have been experimenting with welcome emails on a web application I have been working on and the effect has been great. The idea is to have a very personal, friendly and welcoming email message that you send to all your users who sign up. I first experienced this when signing up for DivvyShot (now [...]
Top 5 bookmarklets for your browser
I use bookmarklets quite frequently in my browser for a few reasons – they are easy to install, easy to use and can definitely increase productivity and your overall browsing experience. Here are a couple that I always find myself adding time and again to any new browser I use: Readability – This gives a [...]
April Fool’s Jokes Around The Web
YPermutator: A new startup incubator- We have a simple formula for the amount invested: $4 million + $1 per line of code written.” You’re not in Kansas any more – Google’s new name and logo. xkcd – Not so much a joke as an awesome gimmick that caters well to its core readers Google Translate [...]
Thoughts on Google Buzz
Image by Máximo Gómez Santos via Flickr Google’s latest foray into social media has caused quite a bit of buzz. Having played with it for the past couple days I thought I’d put my thoughts in writing. Firstly, this is obviously Google’s attempt to get on the hyperlocal, micro-blogging bandwagon in the same vein as [...]
New York Times to Charge Frequent Readers of Web Site – NYTimes.com
NYTimes made an announcement recently saying they are going to be following the same path as the WSJ and Financial Times, using some perversion of the freemium model. What’s interesting is that they tried this in the past and seemed to have been pretty successful, reaching about $10,500,000 in revenue per year. Granted its just [...]
Weekly Links, Sept 25th
Selling out: I’ve been using Pandora for over 2 years now and they seem to be selling out more and more recently. Used to be that they had a small 300×250 ad on their website, then they started interspersing ads with the music and now this. I understand their need to make money but they [...]
Speaking of good burgers…
Brunch at the Spotted Pig
MyCal – improved location detection
Tweaking around with the location detection mechanism of MyCal (combining Yahoo’s Local search results with that of Yelp’s), I was able to improve its ability to locate the correct store/restaurant/bar you type in. Now you should see for areas that have multiple locations (such as starbucks, petland discounts, etc) MyCal will automatically select the location [...]
MyCal now accepts emails…
You can now send your events to mycal via email. Simply type in your event info into the subject line and send it to ‘mycal@nihaargupta.com’ and that’s it. For example: To: mycal@nihaargupta.com Subject: cooking session with raekwon tonight at 9 at the clan kitchen @ 123 Pine Street, Staten Island, NY and MyCal will create [...]
MyCal – an easy way text events to your google calendar
I’ve recently been working on a way to text events to my google calendar that would automatically add location information (cross streets and subway info) to them. Tired of having to constantly find and type it in each time (yes, I’m lazy), I wrote an app that would do it for me each time I [...]
Weekly links – April 28th
Inspired by O’Reilly Radar’s periodic short links post, I thought I would share the most interesting (read: poignant, amusing, thought provoking) links I come across on the web on a weekly basis. Here are this week’s: Hacking TIME’s Most Influential Person poll: Great inside look on a massive job that took place to hack’s TIME’s [...]
Why I moved over from Posterous
While I really liked using Posterous for its simplicity, I made the decision to move over to a self-hosted blog primarily for reason of using this site as a means to become a self serve publisher on ADSDAQ (and eat my own dog food). So you can expect to see some advertising on this site [...]
Observations from SES New York
I’m attending SES at the moment (going on till tomorrow March 26th) and being a bit of an outsider to this area it’s just fascinating to step back for a second and see the amazing ecosystem that search has produced. There are an incredible number of groups of people existing and making a living in [...]
I would like to acknowledge that some of the comments that have been posted on this blog in regards to 99vine (HomePeople Corp) and its CEO Tarik Sansal were extreme and false. I apologize if those comments misled any candidates and investors interested in the company.
Simple twitter auto-refresh script for GreaseMonkey
twitter_autorefresh.js Update: July 2nd, 2009. Added #home, #replies, #inbox, #search to included URLs Update: April 20th, 2009 Works with latest twitter UI A friend (@rtalreja) requested a GreaseMonkey script to automatically refresh your twitter page. Thought I’d post up here as well for anyone else interested.
My favorite iPhone apps
Mint: Love this application even though I am not a fan of apps that are simply conversions of their websites (just create a mobile friendly version of your site that I can access via Safari!!) VNC lite/OpenSSH: Lets me access my laptop at home no matter where I am Evernote: This is a good example [...]
iPhone app success
After reading a lot on the immense success of these seemingly trivial and useless iPhone apps like iFart, virtual lighter, etc I can’t help but a. want to create an app on the iPhone and b. understand why this is happening. This seems to have all the makings of another mini-bubble. Thinking about this a [...]
My Projects
MapThatPad For Brokers: Allowing brokers, landlords and property managers to gain incredible insights into all their real estate listings. Hit me up for a beta invitation!
MapThatPad: The easiest way to organize your apartment hunt on craigslist.
MyCal: A dead-simple way to add events to your google calendar.