Simple pointers from Bill Gates to High Schooler

Love him or hate him , he sure hits the nail on the head with this!

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world doesn't care about your
self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault , so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

MRM - Study on Mobile and Attituides

Mobile & Attitudes - a Mobile Web User Typology from MRM Worldwide Deutschland on Vimeo.

Mobile online usage is growing rapidly but attention has been focused on devices, networks and operating systems instead of the users. Find out who is spending time in the mobile internet and how different user groups are using the mobile online services.

MRM Worldwide Frankfurt conducted a new mobile Internet user types study in partnership
with the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. The study sheds a new and detailed light
on current mobile phone Internet usage patterns beyond brand ownership (of their mobile
phone) or plain socio-demographic. Interesting comparison and well crafted information on mobile for both UK and Germany.

A Billion SMSes went through the Beijing Operators' network in 1 day

China's major mobile phone operators confirmed that about one billion SMSes were sent in Beijing alone on the eve of the Spring Festival, China's biggest festival. If you were to translate that into monetary term, the Operators in Beijing would be making a cool RMB 100 million in just one day for doing almost nothing thanks to the frantic subscribers who are eager to send out spring festival well wishes to all their friends and contacts listed in their address book.

Motorola XOOM Tablet on demo

This is XOOM, Motorola's first ever tablet computer. The device surely looks sexy, as it has a large widescreen display and a bezel that is quite thin. Naturally, most of the buzz around the Motorola XOOM comes from the fact that it’s the first tablet to run Google’s tablet-optimized Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system. It features :

- 10.1-inch screen with a very high resolution of 1280x800;

- a 5MP HD camcorder (front-facing cam included);

- dual-core ARM-based Tegra 2 chipset which will allow for full 1080p HD video playback.

- In addition, the tablet will feature an accelerometer, gyroscope and of course, Adobe Flash 10.1 Player support.

Check out for the demo video below :

Nokia comeback strategy by partnering Microsoft

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has finally outlined the company's comeback plans, including retaining Symbian and shifting MeeGo to computers.

Nokia running Windows 7 will surely be happening. The rumours that have been bubbling throughout the week have just been confirmed by Nokia, as the company unveiled its strategic direction under new CEO Stephen Elop.

The key details: Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its principal smartphone strategy, innovating on top of the platform in areas such as imaging, where Nokia is a market leader.

Symbian isn't being killed off instead, it will become 'a franchise platform', as Nokia looks to 'retain and transition' the existing base of 200 million Symbian users, while selling 150 million more Symbian devices around the world.

And MeeGo will become 'an open-source, mobile operating system project' with 'increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences'.

Nokia will also work with Microsoft on joint marketing, a shared development roadmap, and will aim to 'help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies'.

Microsoft's Bing will be used for search across Nokia's devices, as will the Microsoft adCenter for search advertising. Nokia's maps service will be 'integrated' with Bing and adCenter to create a 'local search and advertising experience'.

While the news to partner someone is a fantastic one for Nokia having been living in denial for years without coming out with innovative device to compete with iPhone and Android, the problem here is that Microsoft is a wrong partner of choice.

I m not saying that Windows 7 is a lousy platform, the platform is certainly nice and interesing but lack developers. Despite all the advertising that Windows 7 has been doing, it simply hasnt done enough to convince mass adoption. In the eyes of the current buyers of smartphone, the defunct user experience has to be an iPhone or Android.

If Nokia is going to partner with a third party OS, why just work with Microsoft, they should had just worked with any viable OS. This would had been a much better strategy as it would have allowed them to have scale, have multiple market entry points and essentially leverage their core DNA ie, their ability to make good hardware and use their logistics to push it into the market.

What would Nokia do in 12 - 18 months when they discover that the partnership isnt working out? By then, its almost game over for Nokia. While i m not hoping and wishing for their demise, the current strategy seems heading that path.

China Internet Users - Feb 2011

According to CNNIC latest report this January, China’s total Internet users has reached 457 million, up 19.1% compared to 2009. Internet penetration rate (34.3%) is still low in China but higher than the world average.

China’s total broadband users are 450 million, up 30%! Broadband penetration rate is 98.3% but the average Internet connection speed in China is only 100.9KB/s, far below the world average which is 230.4KB/s.

66% of China’s Internet users access Internet through mobile phones. On average, China internet users spend 18.3 hours per week on internet access; or, 2.6 hours per day.

More Smartphones shipped out than PCs in Q4 2010

IDC's latest figures reveal that 100.9 million smartphones shipped in the final quarter of 2010, compared to 92.1 million PCs.

IDC says Android was one of the key drivers of the smartphone market in Q4. "It has become the cornerstone of multiple vendors' smartphone strategies, and has quickly become a challenger to market leader Symbian.

IDC claims that in Q4, Nokia shipped five million Symbian OS 3 smartphones, while Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 saw shipments of 1.5 million units during the quarter.

However, its public charts focus on manufacturers rather than operating systems, ranking Nokia as top dog for smartphone shipments with a 28% market share - down from 38.6% in Q4 2009. Behind come Apple (16.1%, flat YoY), Research In Motion (14.5%, down from 19.9%), Samsung (9.6%, up from 3.3%) and HTC (8.5%, up from 4.5%).

With Samsung nearly tripling its smartphone market share and HTC nearly doubling its, you can see the Android effect in action.

The end of traditional paperback books

Sales of Kindle ebook titles now outnumber traditional paperback releases, online retail giant Amazon.com reports. Amazon now sells 115 Kindle titles for every 100 paperbacks sold in addition, ebook sales now outnumber hardcover sales by a three-to-one margin. Amazon adds that the sales metrics include sales of books where there is no equivalent Kindle edition.

Free Kindle titles are excluded, with the retailer noting that if free ebooks were included in its sales breakdown, the discrepancy between Kindle downloads and traditional print sales would grow even wider.

More tablet computers will be launched this year and this will further accelerate the adoption and at some point book shops and libraries will no longer needed in the nearest future.

Android surpasses Symbian in smartphone OS market share

Android operating system overtook Nokia’s Symbian during the fourth quarter of 2010 to become the leading platform in the smartphone segment according to market analyst firm Canalys. Shipments of Android devices reached 32.9 million by Canalys’ estimation, with Symbian trailing on 31.0 million.

The increasing popularity of smartphones saw segment shipments grow by 89 per cent to 101.2 million units for the quarter, pushing the number for 2010 as a whole to just short of 300 million units.