Hu Jintao Addresses Industralists in Mumbai

Chinese president Hu Jintao is in India these days. It is interesting to see that the two arch rivals are working on increasing economic ties in the new world. Hu wound up a trust-building visit to India on Thursday with a call for the two Asian giants to strengthen energy and infrastructure ties and invest more heavily in each other’s economy.

Boder disputes including Arunachal pradesh issue were again in the news but goverment spokesmen were quick in downplaying the media reports.

On another note, Hu was awarded Nishan-E-Pakistan, the highest Civilan award in Pakistan as he landed in Pakistan on his next destination in the sub-continent tour.

Alive in Bagdad

I met Jay Dedman today at the PodCampWest. He gave a session on using videoblogging across boundries and using open-source tools to effectively Video blog in a distributed manner. He talked about Alive in Bagdad a video blogging site that shows interviews from ordinary Iraqi people everyweek, talking about the ground realities and the complexities of the war and the insurgency in Iraq.

It is really interesting to note how this new social revolution is enabling ordinary people across the globe to have their voices heard.

PodCampWest is today, Nov 18-19th 2006

I will be at PodCampWest today and half day tommorow. If you are attending as well, come by say hello. My cell phone # is on the contacts page.

Also, don’t miss the after party at @Cafe du Nord.

iPod connectivity on Flights

Apple is teaming up with Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United to deliver the first seamless integration between iPod® and in-flight entertainment systems. These six airlines will begin offering their passengers iPod seat connections which power and charge their iPods during flight and allow the video content on their iPods to be viewed on the their seat back displays.

Interestingly, more than 70 percent of 2007-model US automobiles currently offer iPod connectivity.

Social Networking 2.0?

SixApart launched a new Social Networking site Vox and has received mixed response. In an interview to Marshall, Six Apart co-founder Andrew Anker talked about Vox and also made interesting comments about Social Networking and its future.

To make an analogy, we believe we’re in a similar stage as cable television was in the mid 1980’s. There have been a few breakout hits like MySpace and Facebook, but we’re a long way away from having a diverse set of properties covering all of the different market segments and customer use cases.

I don’t agree about his analagy about Cable TV, because I don’t think Cable TV has any social aspect to it compared to what we are seeing in Web 2.0.

But I agree that there is evidently a lot of room to be creative and innovative in Social networking. The current sites that we see are more like “Social Networking 1.0″