One of the great joys of living in San Francisco is having a cool and foggy summer. This year especially, I feel grateful for the chilly weather. The entire planet seems to have been enveloped by obscene heat, which is taking its toll not only on humans but also on flora and faun … | Continue reading
Photography, or rather landscape photography, strums my heartstrings like none other. A trip undertaken to indulge in one’s passion in life is often a reason for one’s soul to smile. And then why do I find myself cringing at the idea of such adventures? The answer is relatively … | Continue reading
Okay, I didn’t mean to be so dramatic. Or use a clickbait headline, but in reality, what used to be Instagram is now dead. It was a wonderful gathering place for photographers to showcase their work and build an audience. Not a day goes by when some photographer friend or the oth … | Continue reading
It was a perfect storm – high winds, blowing snow, and bone-chilling cold. Or as I like to call it — a perfect time for magic. It helps that I have a camera that helps me do it with minimum fuss. Both images were captured at an aperture of f8, ISO 100, and a shutter … | Continue reading
Sometimes the past and present come together, giving you a good reason to go “click.” I captured this wonderful sight quite early in the morning when walking across the Ponte Vecchio in Firenze. The photo is as-is from the camera, and I used the high-contrast monochrome setting f … | Continue reading
Writing is an intellectual contact sport, similar insome respects to football. The effort required can beexhausting, the goal unreached, and you are hurt onalmost every play; but that doesn’t deprive a man ora boy from getting peculiar pleasures form thegame.” The Silent Season o … | Continue reading
A few months ago, my friend Christian Lindholm, partner at Fjord, a convergence design agency, and father of the Series 60 interface (at Nokia) stopped by for one of our quarterly idea sessions. Our conversation eventually veered towards a topic that's near and dear to both of us … | Continue reading
In his documentary “Objectified,” director Gary Hustwit talks to well-known product design gurus such as Apple’s Jonathan Ive and Braun’s Dieter Rams about design and produc… | Continue reading
It is hard to imagine that it is already the middle of June. Like everyone else, I feel that time is moving faster and faster. It isn’t, but the perception is what defines our post-network world. I am reminded of the passage of time by the lack of posting on the old Om-stead! A b … | Continue reading
Porto, Portugal, is one of my favorite cities. Whenever I am there, I like to get lost in its streets, and often it is before Porto itself wakes up. And on rare occasions when I find myself walking the streets during the day, I leave my camera in the hotel room. Instead, I use th … | Continue reading
These were a series of tweets in response to the WWDC keynote presentation. These were off-the-cuff observations, but I still feel the same at the end of the week, and my opinion hasn’t changed. Clamping the iPhone to the top of an Apple computer is everything right (continuity c … | Continue reading
It was early during the pandemic lockdown I was chatting with Scott Belsky, a long-time friend who is now the chief product officer of Adobe. We talked about products that would emerge as heroes or villains from the pandemic, and he predicted that Twitter would be on the debit si … | Continue reading
I was walking around San Francisco when I came across this piece of street art. I don’t know the artist, but it was so beautiful that I had to capture it. It represents surveillance — the kind that is enabled by facial recognition. Whether it is smart cities or online services li … | Continue reading
It has been nearly a month since I posted something around here. I have been busy with work, life and reading. A lot of reading. Given the noisy state of media, I find books are a good source of intellectual nourishment. And there is another reason why I didn’t feel like posting … | Continue reading
There is a fundamental difference between form and meaning. Form is the physical structure of something, while meaning is the interpretation or concept that is attached to that form. For example, the form of a chair is its physical structure – four legs, a seat, and a back. The m … | Continue reading
This is the third in my ongoing series of posts about Elon Musk's quest to buy Twitter. In the first of the series, I pointed out that Twitter's CEO might be woefully out of his depth, and the board has failed to do its job. Twitter founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey agreed with … | Continue reading
Since everyone has decided that Elon Musk’s $54-a-share offer for Twitter is just a troll, the question remains who else can buy the company? Is there a suitor who can digest Twitter and deal with all its baggage? Or is the company destined to be a middling underachiever? Twitter … | Continue reading
Twitter is in middle of a tumultuous time as a company. It is in play, thanks to an offer Elon Musk. It is a company that has underperformed as a business. It has anemic new user growth. The revenue targets are optimistic. Does Twitter have the right captain to navigate the compa … | Continue reading
The future of social Internet is not in scale, but in intimacy. Whether it is the present web or future web, we are going to see more and more focus on smaller, social circles. Internet, will become an internet of multiple identities. | Continue reading
“If you hurry to get to the future, you always get a punishment for it. For example, instant coffee.” Alan Watts Fast paid too little attention to burn rate because it just assumed the VC gravy train would keep rolling. It’s not the only one, so don’t be surprised to see similar … | Continue reading
Sometimes, when sitting quietly, enjoying a cooling cup of perfectly crafted pour-over coffee, I find myself staring at the back of my hand. In front of my eyes lies a landscape akin to the red sand of the American Southwest that lay baking under the scorching sun after a week of … | Continue reading
“I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm,” an observation by Franklin D. Roosevelt came to mind when I was watching the first two episodes of Slow Horses. It is a new television series that debuted on Apple TV+ th … | Continue reading
I was full of ideas when I went to sleep and was going to take some time today and write. But last evening, after FDA approved the second booster shot for folks over 50, I got my second booster shot. It has been six months since I got my booster, and I got nervous. I … | Continue reading
Did you know that the 88th day of the year is International Piano Day? Why? Because there are 88 keys on a piano. Today, March 29, is the Piano Day. On the day’s occasion, there is a special playlist you can check out on Spotify. It is also available on other streaming platforms, … | Continue reading
Today is the day of the Oscars — Academy Awards that celebrate excellence in the art of movie-making. There was a time when this was a red-letter day on my calendar. I have not paid much attention to this made-for-TV spectacle since I cut the cord. I am not the only one who has … | Continue reading
It has been a few years since I was able to attend the Founder Camp, an annual celebration and gathering of founders backed by True Ventures. The global pandemic and travel restrictions made it impossible for us to host the event, but we found a way to gather outdoors and enjoy e … | Continue reading
U.S. President Joe Biden has informed Americans that a potential cyberwar with Russia is likely. And we should be prepared for the consequences and havoc it can cause on such a society. It is common knowledge many of our industries, corporations, and infrastructure services, such … | Continue reading
As the world around me has started to (pre-maturely regain normalcy), I have decided to deal with some of the to-do list items. The more I try to get things done, the more I realize that our “digital transition” is still in infancy, and any talk of a digital-first society is deci … | Continue reading
Snow hides nature’s imperfections and only reveals what it thinks we should experience. It is one of the photos from my Antarctica 2021 series. It is my interpretation of the landscape, and I use the high key is to emphasize the empty white expanses I experienced. I made the phot … | Continue reading
The book is a grim lesson in how cyberwar is waged and underlined by long-held belief that privacy and the concept of secrecy is a fiction, that anything can be hacked…… Up until this b… | Continue reading
Paul Millerd, author of The Pathless Path, in an interview with Sara Campbell, points out: This might surprise you but I think the framing of “The Great Resignation” is off. It seems like a successful media narrative that has helped generate clicks but doesn’t really get to the h … | Continue reading
I woke up this morning thinking about the new Apple Studio Display’s webcam hiccup. It has reaffirmed my belief that the camera, and by extension, the visual sensor, is becoming a key interface to the information and how we interpret it. What keyboard and mouse were to what was t … | Continue reading
The endless quiet of the Elk Refuge in Jackson, Wyoming. Winters in this part of the world are my favorite and I can’t wait to go back next year. Due to unavoidable circumstances, I missed the visit this year. This photo is also a testimonial for iPhone and its ability to capture … | Continue reading
…not much has changed in 33 years on the macro level. We’re still setting up differentiable neural net architectures made of layers of neurons and optimizing them end-to-end with backpropagation and stochastic gradient descent. Everything reads remarkably familiar, except it is s … | Continue reading
Our challenge is that our economic systems are revving society and the planet into out-of-control spirals. The scale required to change that spiraling is unlike anything we’ve faced. It was never going to be easy, but humans have a tendency to defer big problems to a point of cri … | Continue reading
Nicholas Carr, one of my favorite writers, penned an excellent rumination on the perils of information overload in his must-read book, The Shallows. The stress that Google and other Internet companies place on the efficiency of information exchange as the key to intellectual prog … | Continue reading
The reviews for Apple’s new Studio Display are in — and they aren’t kind. Some of them are brutal. I read, viewed, and heard what the reviewers had to say — and my conclusion: they are fine, with a handful of misses. You can get a near-exact display from LG for about $300 less. H … | Continue reading
The book is a grim lesson in how cyberwar is waged and underlined by long-held belief that privacy and the concept of secrecy is a fiction, that anything can be hacked… … Up until this book, the hidden market for zero day exploits has been covered in bits and pieces, but it’s Per … | Continue reading
Dubbed the “king of cashmere” by The New Yorker, Brunello Cucinelli is the founder of the eponymously named fashion house that is well-known for making luxury cashmere sweaters (and more than $450 … | Continue reading
Yet Another Apple Event, also known as an opportunity for The New York Times columnists to mock it, is in the rearview mirror. Unlike the Times, I was impressed that Apple created a machine (Mac Studio Ultra) that is about the size of three hard drives and is 25 percent as powerf … | Continue reading
In an article about a new research paper about changing media consumption habits, Neiman Lab columnist Joshua Benton observed: Before the internet, the consumption of news was profoundly driven by … | Continue reading
Photo by Ronda Darby on Unsplash My general physician quit UCSF and joined another group. After a few years of working with her, I hoped that at least, she is going to send me an email. Instead I g… | Continue reading
Spotify is buying Chartable and Podsights, two podcasting-focused analytics companies, for an undisclosed amount of money. Spotify said it would use the Podinsights technology in its broa… | Continue reading
Photo Unsplash Another week is in wind-down mode. I hope your week was more productive and bountiful than my continued struggle with finding a writing rhythm. Despite my best efforts, I didn’t writ… | Continue reading
Random Sunday musings — triggered by wide-ranging opinions about Neil Young, Joe Rogan, Spotify, freedom of speech, and censorship. What should be a nuanced and thoughtful debate has now been… | Continue reading
I fell asleep quite early last evening, and not surprisingly. I woke up at an ungodly hour. And that’s when I found out the sad news. Lata Mangeshkar, the Nightingale of India, has died. Whil… | Continue reading
I wrote a guest piece for my former colleague Stacey Higginbotham’s wonderful newsletter on the internet of things. It tackled the need and importance of trust, privacy, and security in this … | Continue reading
What is a Metaverse? There is a real answer — aka the science fiction answer. And there is an answer you will get from Zuck and his acolytes. They are busy rearchitecting the company away from soci… | Continue reading