I love pizza. And there is this Pizza Hut close to where I live in Bangalore which is where I usually order from. Now, I wake up this morning and get to my mail box (read snail mail, not email) and find a nice brochure that read:

Hello Pandurang! Do you know how fresh Pizza is made?

And all of it was printed, not on a paper that was stuck on to the brochure, but actually printed on the face of the brochure. Though I had actually read the content of the brochure in a newspaper advertisement before, this one brought a smile to my face - just to think that they'd gone through the trouble to personalize these brochures and actually deliver them to the right addresses too.

It was a simple 'wow' and will sure go some way in putting Pizza Hut into your list of subconscious favorites. Probably.

Personalization has been around for quite some time now. The most popular personalization gimmicks started when the Internet caught on, with "Welcome, John Smith" messages to personalizing colors, fonts, themes, layouts and content.  All of it simple user profiling - I've coded this functionality many times myself.

But today, that is no longer a 'wow' factor. That's expected. Today's personalization, to create a wow, has to go notches above that.

An example is when Reason magazine printed 40,000 different covers to one issue of their magazine, each carrying a satellite image (similar to what you see in Google maps today) of the subscriber's home. That is ground-breaking personalization.

I think today's users need that kind of personalization to be realized by websites (or portals) like MSN, Yahoo and the like. www.google.com/ig is once again trying to solve an old problem in a more AJAX-based, stylish manner. But the real value-add would be when the personalization was context-based (and I don't mean the user entering search keywords and seeing feeds based on search results - that's just lame because I still have to define the keywords).

The need of the day is personalization that is really personal. Who will provide the answers?

www.windows.com - Wonder what this is a placeholder for?

There are some pages that are unlinked and very old (dating back to 2001) and the site looks like it is going to be the Vista one-stop website. Or is there something more exciting our way?

time.windows.com is still used for synchronizing time. None of the other sub-domains seem to be used (sa.windows.com, shell.windows.com, etc.)

If you downloaded Google Earth, you no doubt tried "visiting" your country (outside the U.S. and Canada) and were disappointed to just see wide satellite imagery that showed no rich detail.

Google Earth is now global covering every region of the world. You can visit Bangalore, India or for that matter, most major cities of the world and can see vivid satellite imagery (courtesy DigitalGlobe) showing you buildings, roads, bridges and what not.

Apparently, most countries aren't very happy about the satellite imagery being available to the whole world. Yeah, no doubt the Americans and the Russians always saw everything with their spy satellites, but now every Tom, Dick, Harry and you can see it too. And the Governments of these countries aren't very happy.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1243460.cms

http://www.webpronews.com/insidesearch/insidesearch/wpn-56-20050811GoogleEarthContinuesToRaiseSecurityConcerns.html

If you thought these countries were crazy - instead of embracing technology and opening avenues for a navigational system based on Google, they're talking about security issues and causing red tape - wait till you see this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/13/google_earth_threatens_democracy/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/20/google_earth_democracy_two/

Obviously not a pretty picture. Will Google be forced to take off this wonderful "feature"?

PS: I like what MSN Virtual Earth does with countries outside the US and Canada - it shows very good maps, with even city names of relatively unknown cities (I tried viewing India, of course), with no detail. Google Maps does not do that yet - though their own Google Earth does it. I wonder why!?

Finally! Welcome Vyas.

(As per our deal, every click that goes from here gets me a beer!) :)  Talk about revenue generation.

Yahoo! has been right there competing with MSN and Google. Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Maps, everything.

And now, Yahoo! is getting its huge user base to do community and blogging activities. Check out http://360.yahoo.com

Also, Google has changed Orkut logins to link to Google accounts. So now Google has a unified view of YOU!

There is exciting stuff going on in MSN.

September 13th is the Professional Developers Conference and is also the unveiling of the MSN Developer Center.

It is worth seeing it right now at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn The nice big MSN logo and the announcement is really heart-warming, because it announces with a big bang - hey Google, here we come.

Check out interesting things that will be part of MSN Developer Center: http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=ec5ea191-4b3c-4d94-94a9-dc5e67902648

It is also rumoured that PDC opening session by Bill Gates will have people talking. Bill G is supposedly going to take on Google (indirectly of course) by the launch of Atlas and many other cool stuff for Web 2.0. Read about it here: http://news.com.com/Microsoft+Web+plan+takes+aim+at+Google/2100-1007_3-5855244.html?tag=nefd.top

And about Beating Google, Scole says it all at http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/09.html#a11079

You can watch Bill Gates' session live from http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx

This was a moment to cherish!

Being at the Golden Gate is just an experience. The bridge is so massively huge, it just brushes you aside and completely overwhelms you.

This is the one of the entry points to the USA from the wide, wide Pacific. That's also where it gets its name from.

http://www.jayanthan.com/blog/2005/08/28/so-there-is-a-god-after-all/

Hilarious!