Idle/Random/whatever Thoughts of a Demented/Idle/Whatever Mind

Ten startups, forty top-tier investors, and more than one hundred strategic connections forged in a single room. As Ruhbir , one of our volanteers and startup founder who pitched, aptly noted, the event successfully compressed twelve months of traditional ecosystem networking into a single evening. This was the high-impact reality of the inaugural Xoogler Demo Day in India. The initiative began almost entirely by chance. After attending several casual Xoogler meetups in Bengaluru, the appetite for a structured startup showcase was clear, yet the structural execution remained unmapped. The definitive turning point occurred during a weekend community gathering at Cubbon Park organized by Samvidha . Over lunch, I proposed the concept of a Demo Day to Sachin , a fellow founder sitting next to me. Sachin immediately recognized the potential, loops in Samvidha, and the momentum instantly shifted into high gear. What followed was an agile WhatsApp group that quickly evolved into a rigorous op...

1. How Major Indian Apps Are Bypassing Google’s Policy to Spy on Your App Drawer? - Report reveals that many major Android apps on the Google Play Store are allegedly bypassing Google's privacy policies to access a list of other apps installed on users' devices. Apps like Swiggy, Zepto, and HDFC are among those seemingly "peeping" into users' app drawers. While some argue this access might be needed for core functionality (like fraud detection in banking apps), the report suggests it's being used for fingerprinting and user profiling. Analysis of AndroidManifest.xml files shows apps use methods like querying by package name or intent signature to extract this data. Concerns are raised about apps like KreditBee, which appear to be profiling users based on the presence of specific apps, including those related to religion and astrology. The report questions Google's enforcement of its policies and the lack of user consent or awareness regarding this data co...

I just quit Google after almost 7½ years. When I had joined Google in 2016 I was exploring to start up with a travel planning, sharing and booking platform. But then when I got the chance to join Google I told myself that I will stay for 3-4 years and learn how Google's culture makes it build products that people love, at scale. Also, their engineering culture was something I had heard a lot about and thought this is my best chance to learn about and implement it in my startup. But then I managed to overstay at Google for various reasons.  There are various posts talking about what is wrong about Google here , here and here . But I wanted to look at its positives and I hope companies adopt it rather than a toxic culture which is brewing everywhere. Here are a few things which stood out for me (in no particular order): 1. Blameless postmortems : Blameless postmortems are a powerful tool for learning from incidents and improving system reliability. The key aspects of it are   a...

Well I read this story sometime back I thought it was some sort of rumor. But it seems that the software is now available to the general public via the rapidshare.com . Heres the page which has the complete application which can create gmail accounts for you in a jiffy. Though I am not sure of reliability of this app because I dare not install apps from such location for the fear of malwares and rootkits. After this report I dont trust my anti-virus to be of any help in identifying these. I would not recommend you to use it either. Here is what the application claims to do. Create Unlimited Gmail Accounts in Seconds Flat. Setup Auto-Responder automatically! Setup Forwarding automatically! Use random or custom names! Enable POP3 automatically! Proxy support: HTTP/SOCKS4/SOCKS5 Multiple exporting options! Automatic self-updating software! From the image its clear that you can either create a single gmail account or a number of them with letters or n...

I have been a big fan of Google Reader even since it was launched. Its a cool application for news reading if you really love the gmail interface. Anyways some time back Google guys updated it. And from then I can see this awesome bug(Click on the image to see full sized one). Well actually what happened was that I had left google reader open for some time. Later when I came and finished what all was there and marking the uninteresting ones as read, I saw this popup. I had some 39 items only open(Look at the text bound by green lines at the bottom right of the image) but when I said Mark All as Read, I wanted to mark all 557 item(Not in the pane but updated ones) as read.Boy I got frustrated at this point. But I said Cancel, Refreshed the whole page and went through all those news which I did not find interesting enough to read. Finally I did Mark All as Read. Later I realised that even if I had done OK instead of Cancel, it would have worked and only those 39 items would have had b...

Indians are heavily influencing orkut. Well it should have been with so many Indian just hooked onto Orkut and so many developers coming out of India every year. I am sure google too recruits them like many other software giants. Well a proof of that was uncovered to me a few days ago when I tried to get the location of the thumbnails in the friends update. It was something like http://img1.orkut.com/images/ chhota /15/556/677123.jpg?tid=123213 I just managed to notice the word 'chhota'. Now thats a nice desi way to say, thumbnails. No wonder orkut is getting feature laden each day. Not because the developers are Indians, but this small thing shows the passion they are carrying while developing this amazing social network. I truly believe that this kind of passion is what makes things go beyond the ordinary.

I just happened to chance upon this amazing job offer from Google. Its a really out of the world offer. Guys if you are really interested real hard core technology development related activities, please read through. It may be once in a life time chance. The best part is that its open to all and the location is onsite, on Moon. I just cant imagine the pay package of Google, plus onsite fees. Probably if you thought onsite chance from an Indian Services company can do you good for a couple of years, well with Google it might be what you need in this lifetime, unless of course there are some people who are working to prolong your life(Read here ) . But then, thats always a possibility. Anyways, the fact is, work is going to be a really challenging one. You will be doing some hardcore research and development work, including but not limited to, algorithm development, page rank optimizations and newer web related technologies. So what are you waiting for, jump on guys. Some additional i...

Delivered-To: xxxxxxxx@gmail.com Received: by 10.142.204.1 with SMTP id b1cs41185wfg; Mon, 12 Nov 2007 09:24:25 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.141.21.19 with SMTP id y19mr2509906rvi.1194888265222; Mon, 12 Nov 2007 09:24:25 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.141.154.20 with HTTP; Mon, 12 Nov 2007 09:24:25 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 09:24:25 -0800 From: "Customer Centre" To: philiprony@gmail.com Subject: Gmail Account Warning!!! ( Verify Your Account now To Avoid It Closed) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline GMAIL BETA VERIFY YOUR FREE GMAIL ACCOUNT NOW !!! Dear Gmail Account Owner, This message is from Gmail messaging center to all Gmail free account owners and premium account owners. We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account center. We are deleting all unused Gmail account to create more space for new accounts. To prevent you...

I think you guys must have had a real good experience searching on Google. No wonder they have a very good algorithm but then that too us susceptible to spam so you cant really have 100% reliability on that. That was the question that made me think that googlrithm is more complex than what it seems. And yesterday night I got that light from my thinking bulb. At first when Google introduced Google Sitemaps and Google Analytics. No one would have suspected it to have any consequences on search. But now I realize that the assumption is perhaps wrong. So heres my hypothesis on how Google makes it happen. Well every webmaster now by default goes to Google Sitemaps to get his site in the list. The webmaster would get information like his indexed pages, when his page was indexed and what searches picked up his pages and at what rank. It also records for which searches his site was visited. Great now you know who visited your site for what result. But then Google also knows. From here Google...

Dear Google, I have my blog at http://the100rabh.blogspot.com as you can see ;-). I was looking into Google Webmaster Sitemaps . Today I found that I was not able to see more than 100 inlinks to my page. The main page link was this https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/externallinks?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fthe100rabh.blogspot.com%2F&hl=en&bplink=http%3A%2F%2Fthe100rabh.blogspot.com%2F&sort=allsubdomain&num=100 The next link was this https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/externallinks?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fthe100rabh.blogspot.com%2F&hl=en&sort=allsubdomain&view=&bplink=&num=100&bpmark=100,0,100,0,0&fwd=true It was frustrating to see that clicking on the next link I went to the main inlinks page. For the time being I found solution as this https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/externallinks?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fthe100rabh.blogspot.com%2F&hl=en&bplink=http%3A%2F%2Fthe100rabh.blogspot.com%2F&sort=allsubdomain...