Thin is Not In If You are Steve Jobs

At first glance, this seems straight out of the Ripley’s Believe it or Not book. Today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a piece on Apple in which a Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster attributed the 4% drop in Apple stock price Tuesday in part to concerns that Mr.Jobs appeared thin. But if you think about […]

Apple Lost the PC Battle but Won the Entertainment War

Lost amid the hype of the successful iPod and the iPhone is Apple’s steady emergence as a giant in the entertainment arena. So what if Apple lost the PC battle of the 20th century to Microsoft. You see, Apple has already ground Microsoft, RealNetworks, Napster and other sundry players into the dust in the bigger entertainment war […]

2 Indians on Booker Shortlist; Rushdie Not on List

Two desis have made it to the shortlist for the Man Booker prize for fiction books. They are Chennai-born Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) and Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies). The other authors on this year’s Booker shortlist include Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture), Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole), Linda Grant (The Clothes on their Backs) […]

Mamma Mia! 100 Million Downloads from Apple Store

In the evening of our lives, few things strike us as revolutionary. But if anything deserves the characterization of revolutionary, it’s Apple’s App Store. Launched just three months back, Apple’s App Store has become wildly popular. So popular, according to Apple that users have downloaded over 100 million applications in three months. Yes, folks that’s […]

Paul Theroux – Only Toothbrushing Silences Tamils

Travel writer Paul Theroux is in the news again – for his new book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, which re-creates the epic 25,000 mile train odyssey the author first undertook in the mid-1970s and chronicled in the bestseller The Great Railway Bazaar (published in 1975). Around 1975, Theroux rode trains across India including a trip […]

Panchang Comes to iPhone

All ye superstitious idiots, rejoice – there’s a new Panchang application on the iPhone. For centuries, the Panchang or calendar, has been the combined equivalent of the Bible, Koran and Torah to guide the Hindu devout to the various festivals and auspicious/inauspicious days. To tap into the Hindu obsession with the Panchang, a new application […]