(Screenshot of the TED Video)

Why do people succeed? Because they’re smart? Or lucky? How about: Neither. Richard St. John compacts seven years of research on successful people into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success (Hint: passion, persistence, and pushy mothers help). Richard St. John is author of Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and RICH: What really leads to success — and it’s not smarts, looks, or luck. He’s also founder of the communications agency, The St John Group. (Recorded February 2005 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 3:40)

Link to Richard St. John on TED Talks

There  was a mad rush to build Feature RICH applications. And then there was ‘Less is More’ conundrum that everybody has been touting about.  And if you just read it the way many people understand it and wondering what is better for your product, then for sure we are all missing the point. Joel reveals the mystery.

Devotees of simplicity will bring up 37signals and the Apple iPod as anecdotal proof that Simple Sells. I would argue that in both these cases, success is a result of a combination of things: building an audience, evangelism, clean and spare design, emotional appeal, aesthetics, fast response time, direct and instant user feedback, program models which correspond to the user model resulting in high usability, and putting the user in control, all of which are features of one sort, in the sense that they are benefits that customers like and pay for, but none of which can really be described as “simplicity.”

Source: Simplicity - Joel on Software

So ‘Less’ in ‘Less is More’ does not exactly mean Startups/Developers/Designers have ‘Less’ to do. Infact, you got to do a lot more design to do things that looks so ’Less’ and Usable. Its called ‘Elegance’. And designing a elegant interface is nothing but ‘less’ work.

An elegant solution is one in which the optimal outcome is achieved with the minimal expenditure of effort and expense. Elegant solutions embrace an overarching philosophy of doing far more with much less. (Source: ChangeThis Manifesto :: Elegant Solutions: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way).

Not in any sense, lack of some thing needed is ‘Elegant’. And, some times it doesn’t make any sense to have less when ‘More’ is actually elegant. Neither 37 Signals nor Joel’s blog have blog posts categorized. That is pretty inconvenient for readers and yet a clever decision by design for the 37 Signals  and Joel. If you are a regular reader, it might not matter. But for folks like me, who get to read blogs once in a while, categorised posts will save my time. Otherwise, Whether I like it or not, I end up reading every post on their blog. Some times end up reading posts that are totally irrelevant and useless.

Many must have watched movies on Google Videos or YouTube, which are infact illegally copied clips from TV or CD or DVD.  But now you can watch and download movie clips and full length movies from Google Videos while keeping your head high.

BODVOD Networks announced the availability of feature films and other content on Google Video. BODVOD’s content is presented under the name Saavn and available at http://www.video.google.com/saavn.

The launch includes full-length movies available for immediate download representing some of the biggest recent Bollywood hits plus exclusive promotional videos, music clips, trailers, and more.

Source: Bollywood set to scale new heights in US, Canada - India News

Videos of 9th Annual MIT Venture Capital Conference are now available. You can watch them here:  9th Annual MIT Venture Capital Conference .

List of Videos:

1. Mobile Innovations : The World Beyond Walled Gardens
2. Decision Making in Biotech Innovation: Who makes the Ideal CEO?
3. Investing in Energy Technology Innovation - How Long Does it Really Take?
4. Keynote Address: Rebecca Henderson
5. Monetizing Social Networking Businesses
6. Keynote Address: Alan Spoon
7. The Future of Digital Media: Are Companies Overprices and Overhyped?
8. Lunch Keynode Address: Jeff Taylor
9. Commercializing Web2.0 - Hype vs Reality
10. MIT Innovation Showcase
11. Global Ambition and Global Sales
12. Corporate Venturing - Present and Future
13. Venture Capital in India and China - Invest Globally, Innovate Locally

For those who want to create lively Ajax based websites, mostly inspired by looking at Google applications like Gmail, Google maps, this is a great news. Google has opened to public its Web Toolkit that is being used to build its own websites. Wow!

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Source: Google Web Toolkit - Build AJAX apps in the Java language