Photo Pickle Chennai Moment forever on 03 Nov 3:11pm

The Chennai Social Mediarattis Ganesh APP(sagaro), Bhargav Ramakrishnan, Mahendran and others are attempting photo sampling of Chennai. They want to play ‘Freeze’ with whole of Chennai on Third November at of course 3:11 PM. They are want to use the wisdom of crowd to capture the moment as photos and pickle it forever at flickr.
All you have to do is sync your device that alerts your sense of time( your watch, clock, mobile, PC clock, sundial , wall clock in the shop nearby, anything) with global time, then be ready with a image capture device( digital cameras, analog cameras, webcams, mobile camera, obscure image devices). At the specified time(3:11PM on 03 Nov 07) you just use the image capture device where ever you are, to capture a snapshot of life as it happens in Chennai.
Then you you upload your images to the 3:11PM Flickr pool. You are done. Then you and rest of Chennai can carry on with life as usual. Participating in the mela as suggested by the initiators will not make a damm diff to the world:

This is not for any great worthy cause, this is not a competition, it may or may not help charity, it will not prevent global warming, you will gain no medals, no certificates but it is most definitely not a waste.

I’m contemplating adding a Amazon Mturk twist to it by creating Chennai 311pm HIT in the Mturk Human Intelligence Task market.

Update: Not in Chennai during the event? SecondLife and Avatar Voodo to the rescue! Now you can participate virtually via SecondLife, and With Avoodo Make It Real!

Mashing MyFridj.com with TipIt.to?

Recently I was checking out the Web2.0 Expo Berlin and BarCampBerlin ahead of it. I came across the Four Starters and its one of the most interesting offshoot – tipit.to

And sometime back, I commented in Brave and Inspiring Dawn Douglass’s Dankey Notes blog. She was sharing her micro-payment strategy for MyFridj – a digital goods based cartoon like content syndication platform.

Purpose of this post is to do my bit of serendipity enhancement for both TipIt.to and MyFridj to explore each other. And I also want to ask Four Starters, especially Alper, how they are handling the identity verification cost involved in micro-payment service.

I’m watching and experimenting with micro-payments. The recent release of Avatar Voodo/Treepu is my hands on experimentation on SecondLife Linden dollar and Mturk as micro-payment platform.

Indeed, I was checking out WebExpo2.0 and BarCampBerlin just to check if it is feasible to pull off a mini-stunt with Avatar Voodo
Ready to Give, Get Tips?.

AWS EC2 as Restaurant, Avatar Voodo with Mturk, Tree Teleportation

Amazon is indeed an extreme retailer, and retailers want their inventories to move. Amazon Web Services is just this concept applied to one of their ‘Inventory’ viz., their Infrastructure! Well, for some, this is bit over the head to appreciate. So I throw in some metaphors at these innocent folks and further complicate it for them. One such metaphor popped up in an Interview with Charu Bahri while she was working on an ITmag article. Surprise Surprise! It got published as box item.

Balaji Sowmyanarayanan, a social entrepreuner in the area of combining handicraft with technology(ICT) for sustainable development, puts forward an interesting analogy – he likens Amazon EC2 to an open restaurant, welcoming you to its kitchen to cook your own meal! He describes what you will find within: “The ‘restaurant’ would provide you a well appointed regular-size ‘kitchen table’, and charge you by the hour – one virtual Linux box at ten cents an hour. Supplies used would be charged by consumption – storage(S3), orchestration(SQS) and bandwidth charges as per usage. You would be free to use one table for an hour to make a few cheese sandwiches. Or you could choose to simultaneously use many tables for many hours, to cook a gourmet spread to feed a sit-down dinner party.

“Why would you opt to visit a restaurant and cook your won meal, if not to avoid tipping or intimidating waitresses! Choosing the right data centre outsourcing contract and negotiating service levels are daunting tasks. They are typically prepaid and expensive. In contrast, EC2 is hardware as a service, based on no minimum, no maximum, post-paid billing.

“However, you need to beware that the small tip you save are not eroded by the charges of hiring expert master chefs.

EC2 is raw, ( and sometimes intimidating) offering. Handling it often needs extra engineering skills that not everyone possesses. A cook-at-our-kitchen restaurant is only an interesting and useful concept for gourmet experimentalists and recipe inventors, who desire to focus on recipe rather than assembling a kitchen. Likewise, EC2 attracts innovators and start-up entrepreneurs who need to focus on their idea instead of worrying about servers or scaling up, or IT managers of one-off short-term scientific or academic projects with heavy computing requirements.

“The fact is that regular hosting strategies are more attractive for regular situations. EC2 is only attractive in special circumstances, where hardware needs to be scaled to cope with spikes in demand.”
Blog http://labsji.wordpress.com

Hat tip to Charu for the edits. Interestingly Indus Khaithan who gave an interesting EC2 talk at BCB4 is featured in the article. I came to know him and point him to Charu coz of his talk. So blogs and unconference talks work!

Speaking of metaphors, Avoodo – Avatar Voodo, a mashup of SecondLife with Amazon Mturk is ready for demo.
Check it out at Treepu SecondLife Sim.

Just like a voodo doll, an Avatar’s activity/interaction in SL can trigger a Mturk HIT, which in-turn can effect activities in the real world. Avodoo can blur the boundary between the virtual SecondLife and the real life. Geography is indeed History once again with Avoodo – Make it Real.

Avoodo is indeed illustrated with Treepu an use case that magically teleports virtual tree saplings from SecondLife to real life. It is a mashup of SecondLife, Amazon Mturk and Project Green Hands.

Hat tip to Jeff Barr seeding the voodo metaphor!

UPDATE: Today’s Amazon Web Services SecondLife Chat, the last 10 min was Avoodo and Treepu demo time! It was awesome!

SearchCamp.in: Is there a rescue camp around?

SearchCamp.in: Is there a rescue camp around?

Originally uploaded by labsji

SearchCamp.in is the most serious of the events yet by Knowledge Foundation. It was Search Engine Marketing/Search Engine Optimization experts talking to each other in their own jargons at very high speed. Here is an example of sage advice on how to make loads of money by SEO SEM: Build a startup that disrupts, dis-intermediates traditional media purchase! Go for an IPO, liquidity event at 35x profits – you are home! Oh that was useful take away that I’m going to put to use right now right away. Ha!

There were other interesting and useful sessions too!
Bonus Links:
On Mahesh Murthy – Pinstorm by Rajesh Kumar

Sagaro’s Left and Right take on SEO/SEM
Dino with Attitude’s take on SearchCamp –

Update1: Badri of Nrich who has recently signed up for Google JumpStart package is Disappointed with SearchCamp.
Bonus Bonus Link:
It was wonderful to meet Joythirmayee part of iRead facebook success story – ( If you approach her nicely perhaps you can sway her into working for your startup!)

Quote of the Day: Tidel Park’s PR manager: What is Google? via Kriba.

Question of the Day: By Geroge Tai, Obamboo Inc: If SEO/SEM service providers are profitable, why are they not listed in NASDAQ or any other stock exchange?