Staring at me the probably the most fundamental and yet most important lesson for all of us trying to sell something. These are 2 separate products, manufactured in 2 different places in China (probably) and yet somehow they both just work together, like there is some imaginary shower-curtain-hole-rings standard from ISCSO.

Next time when you are making something that others are going to use, spend sometime thinking whether your product (or website, service etc.) will work with rest of the things the customer may use without excessive customization. Deviating from standards is good, companies like Apple can pull it successfully. But, making your products / ideas / stuff work with other things is much more important and fruitful.

FlickR photo from massdistraction

The walking directions are sometimes illogical. See aside.

From the place where I get off the bus, I need to walk to point B and the maps tells me to walk all the way to some place and return to point B. One reason could be they are using one-way driving instructions on the roads to create walking directions. Click here to see the directions on maps (may not be same since all busses dont stop at same place)

More on using google maps:
search restaurants by cuisine using gmaps
Fetch public transport directions from google maps
View 3d outlines of buildings in maps

This is hilarious or there is a color technology out there that requires to scan my finger print in order to show the “bunch o surfers” or some other design on my laptop skin. Really Dell?

see it on the dell site, just select the color scheme as “bunch o surfers”

On closer look I have realized that it is indeed an image ad with scroll bars in the image. Either it too creative or totally misleading, I would vote for misleading.

Ok, time for sharing another set of juicy excel posts around the web:

Do Gapminder like Motion charts in excel, the kind you saw in the Olympic medals visualization in Excel. Jon @ PTS Blog has put together a generic approach for creating motion charts in excel. Very simple and useful. Of course, if you want even simpler method, you can always use motioncharts widget in google docs spreadsheet app.

Formatting dates in pivot chart, of course if you try the usual route of “format axis > number format” and set it to show the date nov-10 instead of 11/10/2008, it wouldnt work. You have to use the technique highlighted at the contextures blog.

Excel UDFs for advanced linear interpolation, conversion of co-ordinates from rectangular to polar If you use excel to do graph related analysis, to build 2d / 3d models then this set of downloadable UDFs by Newton Bach’s blog would be very useful to you.

How to create a perpetual yearly calendar in Excel Do you have a nagging question around “what’s date of the eighth Thursday of 1922″ teases the Microsoft Excel Blog, of course, they answer it too, with a downloadable perpetual yearly calendar in Excel for those of you who need to do lots of date analysis.

Finally, if you are not the kind who would read excel articles on a Tuesday, here is a short TED talk by Prof. Hans Rosling on Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen. It is extremely insightful and entertaining. So enjoy the next 20 minutes.

Also see:

• Daily Excel Links - [Aug 4]
• Excel Links around the web - [July 29]
• Excel Links Around the Web [July 22]

They are showing your password in the URL… OMG

Make sure you don’t use the site for getting new quotes as it could be a potential privacy breach as anyone watching the URLs like network admins, ISPs owning the logs or other users of the computer can see your password and access your account to see your details like SSN, Date of Birth, Accident history.

The registration process was smooth, and soon they gave me my app id which has 64 case-sensitive alpha-numeric characters.

64 Frigging Characters.

A quick calc tells me that is roughly “5,164,973,859,965,250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000″ combinations possible.

That is even more roughly 5.1 × 10¹¹⁴

Do you know what is less than that? No. of Atoms in observable universe, number of atoms in whole frigging observable universe my dear blog reader, which btw are roughly 10⁸⁰, are less than the number of applications that Yahoo is hoping to create. For the curious out there, the observable universe contains anywhere between 30 to 70 billion trillion stars.

May be they REALLY want to make sure that no one guesses away the app id. I am not sure why they bother to go even way beyond GUID limits to come up with these freakishly large appIDs, I mean who are we competing with here? Some aliens trying to steal away my apps by guessing the appIDs? Huh!

…

Ok, stop scratching, you might loose more hair than the common sense brand managers at vodafone lost.

Apparently these adds convey that Vodafone has solved the unsolvable conundrum of “talk-time” or “validity” by introducing a lifetime valid pre-paid card that also gives unlimited talk time. Wow, certainly a good move given the difficult choice pre-paid cell phone customer has to make by selecting one of “more talk time, less validity”, “less talk time more validity” and “mediocre talk time and mediocre validity”.

But Vodafone choose the most cryptic way to communicate this message across. They created visuals that have very little text and complicated meanings that I am sure not many pre-paid customers can comprehend. Anyone looking at zebra and thinking “is it white lines on dark skin” or “dark lines on white skin” and then immediately correlating that with “talk-time” or “validity” all while controlling the temptation to skip that page (containing the ad) in the magazine / news paper has my kudos.

what do you think? Should brands challenge people intellectually or just indulge in simple and easy to understand messages?

Also see earlier rants on Vodafone and Hutch: vodafone pug, Hutch Hindi ads

PS: Images are from AgencyFaqs

The first one is from Lenevo slim monitors, they are so slim that you can cut a head off with them, who comes up with this stuff anyway?

This is even more bizarre, kanika digital printers that can print almost life like - really tasteless

Now comes itch guard, subtle and yucky

This classic wtfness displayed by Sahara global, I think they mean that you can visit the place, but.. why create such visually revolting ad for that?

I had post another lenevo ad for it displays intense lack of common sense on the ad designers part

Images Source: AgencyFaqs.

Also see: Best of Indian Outdoor Advertising, Few good Indian Print Ads

All the Japanese I know can be summarized to 1 word - “omurice“, now that I think of it, the rice part of it does look like an English word, that makes me think, how many companies are out there who fail miserably in their area of core competency?