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Showing posts from March, 2011

Kerala Lotteries & Financial Derivatives

I recently came across an article which explains a new ( and I should say, ingenuous ) way of operating lotteries in Kerala.. For non-Keralites, lottery industry is something thats very sensitive politically in Kerala, especially considering the impending state elections in April.. The method goes like this 1) There is a reference lottery - Bhutan/Sikkim . Suppose they sell a lottery ticket in which ticket number has 10 digits 2) The Kerala lottery operator will float a shadow lottery to this, bearing a ticket with 3 digit ticket number & lets say, two/ alphabets ( the alphabet part is just to have a unique ticket number ) 3) The winners will be identified on the basis of last 3 digits of the winning reference lottery ( Bhutan/Sikkim ) 4) Of-course, the ticket cost & prizes are vastly different for the shadow lottery ( They have factored in the law of probabilities :) ) The interesting thing about this is that it is almost equivalent ( except the winning part ) to taki...

Google Profiles - Preview of Facebook Killer ?

 If you have upgraded to the new version of Google profiles, you wouldn't have missed the uncanny resemblance it has with facebook ..My profile is at  https://profiles.google.com/ajithprasadb / The Buzz feed is sort of a stream update that you have on your facebook home page, the picasa links to your photo album... If you have configured maps, you would see a location snapshot as well.. And if google puts some intelligent thoughts into the data volume in the underlying gmail account, it can easily bring in a friends / connections network to that profile page as well.. Though, this is still far from where facebook stands in today's social web, i think finally google is getting into the social space in a correct way.. There won't be any big launches or anything like that... They may slowly start adding more & more services / features to that profile page..And in one year or so, I won't be surprised if that profile page becomes central to our social page communications...

Facebook Comments on Blogger

( Test post - Will be edited as I experiment with this feature ) - Finally working well except for the width :)