Early this year I posted a list of tools that I rely on in day to day activities. It is more then 3 months now and I thought I will give a quick update on that.

So below is the updated list.

So what has mainly changed?

Desktop

I have my usage computers and laptops to Windows Vista except the one that I use as my work laptop.
Google Chrome is my browser of my choice and as a second position is Mozilla Firefox.

iPhone

Not much has changed on my iPhone as far as key applications go. Now I rely more on RTM for iPhone and love Shapewriter app. Really looking forward to iPhone 3.0 OS.

Web

If anything, I have reduced the number of systems as I using to manage my data online for now. I used to rely on Google Notebook, Zoho and few other services to manage my data, but now I just use Google Docs and Gmail as my key tools for information gathering and storing.

Still going strong on Twitter and the latest Twitter tool I love and recommend is TweetGrid.

What are the tools that you use on daily basis on desktop and web? Would love to check out your list too:).

Tagline for blog to me describes tells me two basic things:

1) What is the blog about
2) And reading the tagline gives a bit of an idea about the writer of the blog too.

Time is important and was always important. People want to get good value in return for their time. So when a person comes to your blog from a link or through a search and does not know much about you or your blog, having a elevator pitch [tagline] helps them to make a decision. It helps them decide if the blog/site is of value to them and if they want to invest more time in exploring further.

Since I have started blogging (I started blogging on other hosted platforms before hosting my own blog) from time to time I have changed focused on what I write about, my interests have changed and overall I have found that I write about quite a few different topics on my blog. And this has made it difficult at times to answer the question “What is your blog about?”. And not having a short and succinct answer does not help me or the other person understand the purpose of my blog.

So while following Darren Rowse’s 31 Day Better Blog Challenge, Day 1 exercise is to have a elevator pitch for your blog. This will get you clear as to what the focus on your blog is and also it will be valuable for your readers to know the focus of the blog. It keeps you more focused on the topics that you put up on your blog.

This being my personal blog is a mixed bag of lollies. As many topics interest me and I have vested interest in many different topics, makes it difficult to have a focused tagline [elevator pitch] for this blog. I gave it my best shot and came up with the tagline “My filings on entrepreneurship, business, technology while cherishing life at the same time.”

I am not saying I won’t change it in the future, but for now this will do.

What are your thoughts and what is the tagline for your blog?

While I spend so much time on Twitter lately, I thought I will ask myself a simple question to help me focus my time on Twitter and to make sure that I am on the right track. So I asked myself “What do I want from Twitter?”

And in the answer, I jotted following points:

> I want to network with smart/intelligent people
> I want to be kept most updated about happening around me and around the world
> I want to get and get ideas from other people of Twitter
> I want to increase my thinking horizon by interacting with a wide variety of audience
> Increase my tolerance level by interacting with people with different point of views

I do interact with smart and intelligent people on Twitter but I need to do that much more while providing them something of value too.

Have you asked yourself this question lately? What do you want from Twitter?

If you love Twitter and if you use desktop tools to keep on top of Tweets, then you should give Tweetgrid.com a try. It has a new interface since I last tried it and now you can perform most of all the functions that you can normally do from famous desktop based tools TweetDeck.

I loved how I can now just forward a tweet in my email from within the browser. You can also save your configured tweet grid as a bookmark or share it to friends. Awesome tool. It deserves to be the web tool of the week.

#webtool

Some pain are truly understood and felt when it touches you. With this market conditions and other factors, you hear people getting fired/laid off/sacked etc. every day and you hearing people talking about it everywhere.

I can truly say that I left the impact today when I heard, and then saw people’s reaction to the news that they were laid off in my office today. I am still working there for now but I was speechless.I will be seeing many people whom I have worked with last one year go tomorrow. It’s was hard for me to say anything as nothing was going to console them or for that matter sooth my pain. I have seen people let go before from my team, but it was never felt this way.

What have you done in such scenarios? Apart from helping them in any possible way that you can (like checking your sources if they have an opening etc., helping them packup etc.) what else can you help them with?

But I am optimistic, and believe that whatever happens, is for good. I am sure they will find a better position somewhere else and they will grow in this process.

Good Luck to all such people who have lost positions in this condition and please share how you coped with it or how you helped somebody else cope during this period.

Let me tell you that I love Google Notebook and I am a moderately heavy user. I use it from brainstorming to taking note and storing them there. I use it when I want it and often times export it to Word documents. With Google recent decision to stop development on Google Notebook, I was a bit disappointed but it’s time for me to move on and find/create another system that works for me.

As I an existing user, I will still have access to Google Notebook, but I am not comfortable in using a system that will not be supported and no innovation will be further done on it. So I started to contemplate as to what else should I use now. I checked out Zoho Notebook among few other alternatives like (EverNote)but then decided to use an external program.

While I was thinking about it, my intentions were:

1. Easily Accessible
2. Searchable
3. Notes should be grouped (Categories/Labels)
4. Should be Exportable (RSS or Word Documents)
5. Should not cost me money ( I spend enough on other web apps.)
6. Simple/Less Cluttery and should make me more productive

I like to make my systems work for me rather than me working around it. I started asking people questions on Twitter desperately to see if they have a better solution. Then I thought about using Gmail (Steve Rubel uses it and so does Vinayak Kamat). One issue I have with this is I hate living out of my email Account but then using Gmail will meet most of my criteria.

Below is the current system I have deployed.

1. Create Labels (These are my Categories by how I save my notes even in Google Notebook)

2. Create filters for those labels that once an email is sent to that address, it is automatically labels accordingly. (E.g. when I email to myemail+Categorycode@gmail.com it is automatically labelled appropriately based on the filter)

3. Create draft notes and save it under the label manually or send email to the appropriate filter code attached to the email address

4. If I have already emailed myself and note and now need to edit it, I just reply to that email with the edited version so it forms a email thread and also acts as a version control system

This system should make it very easy to search (using Quicklinks feature in Gmail) and I will not have to store in multiple systems.

I would love to know how you plan to migrate your data and to what system. Some other good Google Notebook alternative systems are listed in this article. Word of caution is, make sure that company is not going to shut down or they are not going to stop the development on that system.

A friend forwarded me a cheap joke involving Satyam. My Hindi reading friends will understand it.

New Scene from Sholay

Jay : Mausi, ladka Satyam mein kaam karta hai..
Mausi : Hai ram..!!! Aur kahin try kar raha hai kya??

Jay : kahan mausi, 2 saal Satyam me rahne ke baad koi Company leti kahan
hai…
Mausi : Hi Raam to kya 2 saal se Satyam mein hi hai..

Jay : haan socha tha 2 saal me salary hike hogi hi. Aajkal to salary
bhi jyada NAHI mil rahi hai use..
Mausi : To kya salary BHI KAM milti HAI..?

Jay : Ab appraisal bhi to asaani se kahaan hota hai mausi..
Mausi : Hai hai …!! To kya appraisal bhi nahi hota uska..?

Jay : Senior se ladhai karne ke baad appraisal mein achhi rating to
nahin milti hai na… Mausi..
Mausi : To kya seniors se ladhta bhi hai..?

Jay : Ab 2 saal tak onsite Jane ko na mile to ho jaati hai kabhi kabhi
anban..
Mausi : To kya AB tak ek baar bhi onsite nahi gaya ..???

Jay : Ab Outdated technology ke developer ki kismat mein to yehi
likha hai mausi..
Mausi : kya kaha ladka Outdated technology mein kaam karata hai..!!!

Mausi : Kaunse college se padhai ki hai..?
Jay : Uska pataa lagte hi hum aapko khabar de denge!!

Jay : To main rishta pakka samjhuna mausi???
Mausi : Beta, kan khol kar sun Le…Sagi mausi hoon basanti ki, koi
sauteli maa nahi….Bhale hi hamaari Basanti Call Center wale Chandu
se shaadi kar Le par Satyam ke employee se katai nahin karegi .

Indian IT out sourcing company Satyam’s name is taking the web in circles. Company executive mastered a fraud http://tinyurl.com/7ygggo. It’s easy to understand the magnitude of this seeing the figures in the letter written by the executive but difficult to understand how he could have mastered this if you are not an expert accountant. Satya sheds his thoughts on this http://www.sathyamurthy.com/2009/01/07/satyam-fraud-unravelling-the-mystery/.

Based on what Michael Arrington did on Techcrunch, I have put together a list of tools that I like and rely on. The tools can be Desktop Applications, Web apps, services or even phone applications.

What tools do you use? Do we have a lot of similarity in the tools that we use?

I will make it a point to update this list quarterly. It will be interesting even to myself as to what stays on the list and what drops.

Photo By Perecca
All my readers and friends, Wish You a Very Happy Year 2009. I wish you all the best for the coming year and may you progress in your chosen work and get all the success.

I am really looking forward to this year and I have high hopes and expectations from it and I hope I can do all the possible from my side to live up to those expectations. I am also hoping to show more of myself on this blog and on Twitter.