Misc

The way sound affects us in our day to day lives, consciously or unconsciously, is quite fascinating. Just concentrate for a second on the environment around you and notice everything that you hear at this moment. Surprisingly you would come up with more variety of sounds than you would have imagined. That may be colleagues talking two cubes over, a cell-phone going off in the distance, shoes stumping on the floor, door closing with a shudder, neighbor typing frantically on the laptop keyboard as if he were in a race to prove his dexterity or it could be some white noise continuously humming in the background--say from AC source or a heater or a fan.

Notice that I have not even used the word music in the above examples and it is silly that whenever we use word sound, the first thing that comes to our mind is Music. Julian Treasure gave a talk at TED, where he talks about how sound affects us in our daily lives. Open Space offices reduces our productivity by 66%, says Mr. Treasure. Well, that explains quite a bit of bay area culture and its love for open cube spaces.

Most often than not, the sounds that we hear are unpleasant and disturbing. On the other hand, do you know why ocean waves are so soothing to us ? Sounds produced by ocean waves are 12 cycles per minute apart, exactly same frequency as breathing when we are sleeping.

Change is Refreshing. It brings excitement and motivation and that's the theme for this blog post. I have been quite busy lately and hence long time gap between the posts. Hopefully in coming days that would change. In order to motivate myself, I updated the look of the blog, which I believe is much more sleek, much more clean than the one it replaces.

I love Orange/Black combination. Orange brings excitement, enthusiasm and also encourages socialization. Black brings boldness and authority. You can find more on the effect of colors on human psychology here.

There are few modules that I have added to the back-end software; One of them was to link my twitter account with the blog. That would synchronize my blog posts with the twitter account and vice versa, bringing more dynamism to this blog, as you can imagine twitter updates are quite frequent.

It is the Sound, that reigns over the silence :-)

BMW 130i tii from Daniel Michaelis on Vimeo.

I am sure readers might have come across this earlier, but since I like the idea so much, I might as well repost it for sake of remembrance.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

The Brand Gap. Absolutely Amazing. Must read if you are in business :-). It answers some basic questions on branding and breaks some welknown myths. Nice differentiation of strategy vs. branding. I loved the following quote from this presentation:

Execution -- Not Strategy is where the rubber meets the road.

Everybody knows my Wedding Reception was more of a standup comedy show and for no other reason than some witty friends and family that I have got. Ahmed has posted here his contribution to the fun evening which can be found on LivingHalal.com. The Rest as they say, is history.

Seth Godin, Author of the book All Marketers Are Liars, gave a talk couple of days back at Googleplex. The talk, in a way, is directly related to this Blog entry, and that is Passive Marketing (read, telling a story). He starts with an interesting question, Does Technology sell on its own, and follows up in a strong Negation. Instead, he argues, technology just gives a shot to the Marketing.

On March 31st, Islamic Relief along with ICSD is organising Fundraiser for the Victims of South Asian Earthquake. You can find more information about the event at ICSD Blog . Guest Speakers for the event are former captiains, Moin Khan and Rashid Latif from Pakistan Cricket team.