Ash Patel's Blog

it’s time

Ash Patel — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:48:16 +0000

This has probably been one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make.

But, the last 14 years have been one unbelievable experience. I’ve learnt so much, met some of smartest people in the industry, built products that affected 100′s of millions of users and created lifelong friendships.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/17/yahoo-evp-ash-patel-one-of-the-first-yahoos-announces-his-departure/

New Digital Albums Coming – Trying to get consumers to buy albums again

Ash Patel — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 06:48:42 +0000

Interesting piece on new formats to create new digital albums which will enable the music industry to package up music, art, photos and videos all in an effort to try and get consumers to buy albums again.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/apple-record-labels-diverge-over-next-generation-full-album-music-format/

Both wrap songs, videos, images, lyrics, ringtones and other digital doodads into a comprehensive package that the industry hopes will bring back the long lost, profitable days of full album sales, which gave way to listeners buying single songs.

Packaging has always seemed to me like a last resort to milk value from consumers by bundling all sorts of extras that they’ll never use. How many of us buy the special-edition DVD with all the special behind-the-scenes commentary and blah blah blah and actually watch them? I would bet that most consumers hardly ever engage in any of the extra content that they get “packaged”. I’m happily buying or renting online movies from iTunes, Hulu, Amazon or Vudu, and I’m finding that I’m not missing any of the extras that DVD’s come with.

With a new digital album format, being a connected interactive medium should enable the collection of great usage data on what consumers actually use in all these packages and bundles. Then we’ll know for sure the value of packaging.

Switched to a Mac Pro at home

Ash Patel — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 03:50:28 +0000

I’ve been using a MacBook for a while now (Ash Patel, Yahoo! CPO Loves his Mac ), but my desktop at home as always been a windows box. I’ve built the last 2 desktops, as I’ve always liked getting exactly all the components I’ve wanted.

However I was constantly fixing or tweaking Windows and felt that I was just wasting time on things that I shouldn’t have to. So when then new 2009 Mac Pro‘s came out I made the decision to switch. Now with Parallels and Bootcamp, I get the best of both worlds. I can fire up windows only when I need it, and have a Machine and OS that just works. It also helps that it’s blindingly fast also.

Great Coverage of Yahoo! Hackday and our Open Strategy

Ash Patel — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:26:00 +0000

DownloadSquad

Yahoo Hack Day: WYSIWYG editors, StumbleUpon clones, etc
Brad Linder
September 15, 2008
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/09/15/yahoo-hack-day-wysiwyg-editors-stumbleupon-clones-etc/

September 14, 2008

A Dreamy World
Open Hack Day: Yahoo’s New Open Source Strategy
Niyaz
September 14, 2008
http://initialm.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/open-hack-day-yahoo%E2%80%99s-new-open-source-strategy/

Richard Crowley’s Blog
Dopploadr at Yahoo! Open Hack Day
Richard Crowley
September 14, 2008
http://rcrowley.org/2008/09/14/dopploadr

September 13, 2008

Uberpulse
[Open Hack Day] More Open House Than Developer Conference. Boosts Yahoo Morale! (video)
Mark Boslet
September 13, 2008
http://www.uberpulse.com/us/2008/09/open_hack_day_more_open_house_than_developer_conference_boosts_morale_video.php

Webmonkey
Open Hack Day: Screenshot Preview of Yahoo Application Platform
Scott Loganbill
September 13, 2008
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Open_Hack_Day:_Screenshot_Preview_of_Yahoo_Application_Platform

September 12, 2008

CNET
Yahoo Open: Finally, a real answer to Google
Stephen Shankland
September 12, 2008
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10039742-93.html?part=rss&subj=News-DigitalMedia

Crunchgear
Yahoo kicks off Open Hack Day today
Brian Krepshaw
September 12, 2008
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/09/12/yahoo-kicks-off-open-hack-day-today/

Good Morning Silicon Valley
Extra credit if any of you hack together a better business plan
John Murrell
September 12, 2008
http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2008/09/extra-credit-if-any-of-you-hack-together-a-better-business-plan.html

IDG News Service
Yahoo YOS, Far From Complete, Inches Forward
Juan Carlos Perez,
September 12, 2008
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150993/yahoo_yos_far_from_complete_inches_forward.html
Reposts: Infoworld, PC World

InfoWorld
Yahoo hosts developers at Open Hack 2008
Paul Krill
September 12, 2008
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/12/Yahoo-hosts-developers-at-open-hack-2008_1.html

San Francisco Chronicle
Yahoo opens its headquarters to developers
Joseph Tartakoff
September 12, 2008
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=30226

Webmonkey
Open Hack Day: New Open Strategy Makes Yahoo Like Facebook
Scott Loganbill
September 12, 2008
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Open_Hack_Day%3A_New_Open_Strategy_Makes_Yahoo_Like_Facebook

ZDNet
Yahoo: Open is not just â€˜Flavor of the Month.’
Sam Diaz
September 12, 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10016

September 11, 2008

Webmonkey
Yahoo Open Hack Day 2008 Kicks Off Friday
Mike Calore
September 11, 2008
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Yahoo_Open_Hack_Day_2008_Kicks_Off_Friday

2 Minute Big Lebowski – with only the important dialog

Ash Patel — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:15:00 +0000

another iphone/ipod change that is irritating

Ash Patel — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 20:44:00 +0000

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/09/apple_neuters_iphone/

“We’re talking about the inability to manually manage music on an iPhone by connecting it to a computer, highlighting a band, album or song within iTunes and moving it to the iPhone icon. Apple, the company that practically invented the drag-and-drop, has consciously eliminated the feature from the iPhone. This decision effectively neuters the device because it removes capabilities that played a huge role in making the iPod the gee-whiz device that set the standard for portable music players.

If you want to load the new albums by Wilco or the White Stripes (both highly recommended, by the way), you’ll have to create a playlist in iTunes first and then sync it with your iPhone. If you later decide you want to remove one of those albums from the device, you’ll have to remove it from the iTunes playlist and sync again.”

Quick iphone review

Ash Patel — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:52:00 +0000

It rocks and it sucks!

Rocks

New touch screen nav is awesome and should probably become the defacto standard for all upcoming ipod. True genius.
Photo app very nice, good screen resolution
Video IPOD nice screen, widescreen, the right way to have a video ipod.
Good battery life. (I watch 1.5 hrs video and listen to 1hr audio, a few phone calls and the battery was about 60% full).
Music app nice. Nice touch to navigate albums with covers when you flip the iphone on it’s side
Nice cool navigation and eye candy
Maps apps nice (no GPS)
Nice weather and stocks widgets
Safari browser very nice (full internet, anything pc can render you can see). Nice nav to make it work on a smaller screen
Camera, nice 2mp. Quality is nice better than curve. No flash
Nice size and feel
Mail App and navigation is very nice. Setup for Yahoo! mail was very easy.
Mail reader is nice, full html
Wi-fi integration nice, makes surfing web fast. Edge works ok, not great but acceptable.
Cachet!

Sucks

recessed head phone jack, shure headphones wont fit (had to cut the sleeve yikes) (see photo, note be careful as you can cut your fingers doing this)

My monster icarplay that works with video ipod wont work with iphone (how can you break this stuff)
Typing is hard, 1 finger good, 2 thumbs bad
Can’t navigate in text to fix things
No CUT and PASTE (how can they do this)
You can’t use MP3 are ringtones (it’s a friggin ipod, but you can’t play music as ringtones, go figure). Only can use built in ringtones for now. I hear they will charge you extra to convert a itunes bought track to a ringtone
Phone so-so. To dial a contact you have to scroll thru your contacts, can’t just type in the first few letters
No MMS

Very mixed. If you love your ipod and carry it around everywhere, and you use a standard phone. Then the iphone is for you. If you are glued to your crackberry or treo then the iphone is not for you (yet)

What are the odds?

Ash Patel — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 05:59:00 +0000

I have a couple of watches that I normally wear, and most are automatic watches (the kind that winds up as you move), and I have one watch that is a manual wind up.

I had been wearing a watch for weeks and I decide one morning that I should change, so I go pickup the manual windup watch, that I have not worn for months. I’m about to wind it up and set the the time and realize that I don’t need to, as the current time ws 7:28am and that is exactly the time that was on the watch (checked my treo also, same time). All I had to do was wind it up.

So now that I’m thinking about it and blogging this, the odds of me picking up a stopped watch at the exact time that it was stopped is 1:1440. So it’s high, but not sure how that compares to other odds, so I searched around and found some sites that listed various odds, the first is light-hearted

http://funny2.com/odds.htm

The second being very macarbe, listing all the various odds of dying at the national safety council site.

http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm

Xtreme Sport Shooting

Ash Patel — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:25:00 +0000

This guy is incredible. Who knew that there was an Xtreme shooting sport. Almost makes you belive in the outlandish action heroes in some of the latest crop of Hollywood action shoot-em-up movies.

SessionSaver Extension for Firefox

Ash Patel — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 00:22:00 +0000

One of the main reasons I use Firefox is for the tabbed-browsing interface. Once you start heavily using tabs, you end up with lots of tabs open all the time, all with different context and histories.
If the browser crashes or you close it, then you lose all this context and history.

A great extension that I’ve been using for about 3 months now is SessionSaver , the extension remembers that state of all your tabs and restores them all when you startup Firefox again.
It remembers all the browser history in all of the tabs also, so the back button works. It even remembers text that you’ve typed. It has a simple mode where it just restores the last state of your browser. The expert mode lets you create and name sessions and switch between them.

Now what I really need is a session saver that would let me transfer sessions between computers (work and home).

Download the extension at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=436