Notable Thoughts : Weekend Edition

“A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all” - Anonymous. Few notable thoughts that are worth sharing and spreading.

Does the World Need Another Way to Search?
Google’s dominance in online search hasn’t stopped hundreds of startups from trying to build a better mousetrap. Each is trying a new twist on search: geography, crowdsourcing, tags, user annotations, learned hierarchies and timelines. With $20 billion spent on online advertising every year, a killer search application can make a lot of money.

'Second Life' Players Face Real Financial Losses
If you find recent economic news depressing, imagine what your avatar might be going through. The online fantasy game Second Life has shut down its virtual banks. The closure has had some genuine economic consequences for players, who invest real money into the fantasy lives of their alternative selves, or avatars.

OpenID Has Big New Friends
Digital minimalists got a big lift this morning when Microsoft, Google, VeriSign and IBM all said they’d begin supporting OpenID, the open-source standard that seeks to enable consumers to use a single identity and password to log in to any web site on the Internet.

And now BarCamp Junior in Trivandrum …catching em’ young
the first BarCamp Junior was held recently at the College of Engineering, Trivandrum. This was a evening gathering, with the aim of getting students kicked up about starting a company while in college

Where are the IMS applications?
Graham Finnie, Chief Analyst at Heavy Reading chaired the panel asked : Where are the IMS applications? ( a now familiar question to many) - He then followed up by asking 'Does anyone have a good word to say about IMS'?

Years of irrelevance
Like chefs, like programmers. Peopleware quotes a study that six months seemed to be the cut-off point for programmers. Once they had six months under their belt, the platform knowledge was no longer the bottleneck in their abilities.

Ask 37signals: How do you document code?
The short answer is that we don’t document our projects. At least not in the traditional sense of writing a tome that exists outside of the code base that somebody new to a project would go read. I haven’t ever seen that work consistently and successfully at any software company I’ve been involved with

To VC or Not to VC – That is the question??? 
Ramneek Gupta of Battery Ventures, a Silicon Valley based top tier VC firm that is now active in the Indian space as well shares his perspective about VCs & startups and about a question that bothers every startup entrepreneur - "To VC or Not to VC...".