Well thats what Katie Fehrenbacher is speculating on gigaOM. Google might be hiring 800 employees at 345 Spear St. (1 block from where I stay in SOMA). Should be fun to have some Googlers around. Although this office location might be great, I think Offermatica (the company I work for now!) has a much better location (on Pier 1) See for yourself below (red is us, green would be google!)

So I had a great vacation recently to India and celebrated Diwali after a long time with friends and family. Diwali as many may know is the Hindu “festival of lights”. So why do I think Diwali has gone global:

• A call to American Express ended with a “… and wish you a very Happy Diwali”. Alright the call center might have been in India (not sure), but still they must have been instructed to wish everyone, right?
• Matt Cutts (the famous Google blogger) wishes everyone on his blog! (OK, this one is lame)
• Today an episode of The Office aired commemorating Diwali. More discussion on that here.

Its been talked about for a long time, but its happening now more than ever before. More American and European nationals are taking up full-time positions in India, even if its for a few months. This article in the Voice of America gives a few examples.

Is having worked in India / China becoming a pre-requisitive to grow in your jobs in western countries?

A quote from the article:

“If you work in India for a couple of years, it helps your career, whether you are in Wall Street or technology companies,”

I saw more employees of US and Japanese based companies at this golf course (designed by Greg Norman) in Greater NOIDA (a suburb of New Delhi) than Indians!!

Giving money away to charity is one thing. Giving LOTS of money is another. But taking so much personal interest in where the money goes and how well it gets utilized speaks highly of Bill Gates. Over the past 5 years or so the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has done some outstanding work in the area of healthcare and education. The work recently gained attention during Bill Gates hectic visit to South Asia. Read: Keeping Up With the Gateses

Many of us in the tech community don’t have much love for Microsoft (specially the ones like me who love their Mac!). But the man behind the company is not only a genius, but a very goodhearted person, who according to me happens to deserve the Nobel! Keep up the good work Bill and Melinda!

UPDATE: A day after I wrote this piece, I read this. I am so happy that Time magazine chose Bill, Melinda and Bono to be their “Persons of the year”.

I was in Tucson (home to the UofA wildcats) this weekend and am happy to have gotten over with the formality of getting my thesis changes submitted and signed etc. I had successfully defended my thesis on November 3. It was kind of a scary experience since a couple of professors (who weren’t on my 3 professor committee) turned up to hear my presentation. Hopefully it wasn’t all that bad/boring. So I am all set to graduate in december! Yaaaahoooooo……

My posts have been irregular ever since I moved to CA last month to work for Yahoo! in their Burbank office. I hope to be more regular with my posts in the future!

Is the average online shopper loyal? Would he still pay 5% more on Amazon than buying the same product from a not so well known online seller? I say it depends on what a person is buying.

If its a $3k plasma television then sure go ahead and buy from Amazon (given that they give a 30 day price guarantee (more on that later) and their electronics prices are very competitive… after rebates mostly). But what if its a $30-50 book or some similar product whose price doesn’t fluctuate as much as electronics? I don’t see why I should be loyal to any online seller when buying such a product. This is in contrast to an old essay by Joel Spolsky on Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon, where he talks about network effects and customer lock-in.

All this came to my mind when I was on a book buying spree this week. I bought 4 books and none of them from Amazon! Froogle searches led me to these two great sites: superbookdeals and bookpool. Below is the money I saved on each book (including shipping costs etc.):

1. The Art of Product Management — Scott Berkum ** Money Saved = $7
2. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X — Aaron Hillegass ** Money Saved = $7.05
3. Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases – Joshua Bloch ** Money Saved = $12.04
4. PHP and MySQL Web Development — Luke Welling & Laura Thomson ** Money Saved = $4.34

The best part of these purchases was not the price after all. It was the fact that ALL books shipped the next business day. This has not happened on my Amazon orders in the last 6 months at least. They have this clause that if you use “Free Shipping” then shipping of the order will be delayed by 3-4 days even if the product page said “Usually ships in 24 hours”. My advice: dump big online sellers and go for small sellers who are ready to give better service at a much better price!

I won a dinner with Om Malik! All I had to do was guess when he would write his 5000th blog entry….. that was easy! Thanks Om and I hope to meet up with you next time I am in or around San Francisco.

From his blog:

Number 5000, finally
Thank You. The readers and the community got me here, now I hope I have the energy to continue. But one more time – thank you all! Meanwhile, Sumit Chachra has won the “March to 5000 post” contest. His guess was closest to the actual posting time. He guessed September 12. Sumit, send me your details – dinner is ready!

I decided to make full use of my domain name (chachra.us) and buy some hosting space to run this blog. I’m still in school so the postings will be a little slow. But hopefully that will change in the coming months!

I’ve also imported a half-dozen or so posts from the blog I used to miantain at Yahoo! 360.

Enjoy!

So how many times have we subscribed to a newsletter or something else online and then wanted to unsubscribe one day. When we subscribed we were on in like 10 seconds. But when we want to unsubscribe we get: Please allow upto 7 days for getting removed from our mailing list.

A more blatant example for the WSJ (Wall Street Journal). I took an online subscription that automatically renews every month. Now I was able to subscribe and start using WSJ in no time at all. But when I wanted to unsubscribe I had to make like 10 clicks and then finally I found a page that said you gotta send an EMAIL with your id and address etc. to some id@wsj.com and then they will put you off the hook…. that was SO convenient! *sarcastic*

Ooh they’re having a partyyyy!!.. But wait are they so busy partying that they’ve stopped working?!

So I ordered this bluetooth headset for $42 on July 4. Within a day price got reduced to $40. I called and they reduced the price on my order and upgraded shipping to 2 day. I should be happy right? No!!

The item is supposed to ship on 6th and reach me on 8th. But today’s 8th and it hasn’t even started getting packed. Not only that the price is now $38. So I call again. The customer representative reduces the price and upgrades shipping to one day (saying that I won’t be charged for it!). So I should now be happy right ? No!!

I check my amazon account and hey she’s charged me $16 for shipping. I call again and FINALLY the product is "supposed" to ship today and reach me on monday. Lets wait and see what happens.

But the main question for Mr. Bezoz is: If you are such a big successful nice retailer, and have a 30 day price reduction policy, then why don’t you simply refund my money ‘automatically’ whenever the price of the product that I bought goes down ??? I simply fail to understand………. (