Thought Garage

Watch this Developer Preview of Google Waves, an amazing, totally mind blowing new collaboration (I hate to use this cliché word) toolset from the designers of Google Maps. What you know about Google today, will change forever.

Wow!!!

A totally immersive collaboration tool, that redefines collaboration, may be, forever.  If this is what can be called collaboration, then all collaboration tools I have ever seen were just nothing.

I can’t wait to start using Google Wave.

Whole world has been clamoring for a new ‘Killer App’ that would topple or at least give some competition to Google. But I guess, I can say now that it is practically impossible to beat Google. In its mind blowing Products and intuitive Interfaces delivered at an amazing pace of innovation.

You better buy Google stock now or you can afford never !

Many times I find ‘people’ (:-everybody except me) overrate the impact of IT on India. And of course, Entrepreneurs and developments in the rest of the Indian industry doesn’t get the attention and limelight they truly deserve.  Even though, latest figures suggest IT and ITeS (will) provide employment to a meager 4 Million Indians (by 2015), many ‘people’ still think the I in India is unequivocally meant IT (+ITeS).

No wonder, Entrepreneurship is often confused as creating a software startup.

 

One recent survey found the 43 percent of urban Indians who worked were self-employed. By contrast, there is no metropolitan area in the United States with a self-employment rate above 11 percent. Unfortunately, India’s high entrepreneurship rate is still something of a puzzle. I suspect that it reflects both good things about the country, like energy and intelligence, and bad things, like a maze of regulations that make it difficult to build large companies that follow the rules.

Source: NYTimes : Economix

 

The recent results of Nielsen’s Three Screen Report – a quarterly analysis from Nielsen’s Anywhere Anytime Media Measurement initiative (A2/M2) – show that the average American watches approximately 153 hours of TV every month at home, a 1.2% increase from last year. In addition, the 131 million Americans who watch video on the Internet watch on average about 3 hours of video online each month at home and work.

Source: Nielsen’s Anywhere Anytime Media Measurement initiative (A2/M2)

If we get little bit materialistic …

Even at the bare minimum of $5 per an hour, and extremely materialistic view that ignores the pleasure and joy of watching TV and replace with money you could have earned if you had spent that time in doing something,  that is $765 per month.

Consider other costs of watching TV : An article put the cost of TV, Cable, Movie rentals and money you would spend after so positively influenced by TV Advertisements at $700 per month.

If you add both, the money you would spend to watch TV plus the money you would have made if you hadn’t watched TV and do something in that time, it comes to : $1465 per month ( or $17580 per year)

If you just start saving that money or invested in say index funds that earn 5% per year, in 30 years, this money would amass to $1,167,999.26

If you are quite conservative and frugal, let us put the cost of watching TV portion to just $100 per month (Cable, movie rentals and Purchases you make as a result of watching TV) that would bring this cost to $800 per month and over a period of 30 years it will add up to: $637,817.

Tinker with how much you could make per hour, investment vehicles and number of years, you would come up with a number that you could have made. And I am pretty confident that would be north of a Million dollars.

At first look, it struck to me like an Engineering marvel and epitome of architectural expression of China’s creativity. But there is lot more to this magnificent building than just amazing aesthetics. 

For one, Going green is not an afterthought but an integral part of design and engineering. The beautiful arch is in fact array of solar cells. The building is built with 88% energy efficiency. Wow !!

The Sun-Moon Mansion, Himin Solar Energy’s headquarters in Dezhou (Source: BusinessWeek)

More about the mansion here.

 

Sun-Moon Mansion is the main conference hall of the 4^th International solar city conference in 2010. The building, covering an area of 750,000m², functions display, R&D, working, meeting, training, hotel, recreation, etc. It adopts solar technologies on hot water supplying, heating and cooling, PV power generation, etc, which breaks phenomenon of tremendous conventional energy consumption. Perfectly combining solar applications with construction, this building is undoubtedly prized as the model of comprehensive solar applications in construction.

Energy efficiency is high up to 88% with 70% in total and 60% in heating and cooling, which is much higher than 50%, the national standard in public construction. It can save standard coals of 2640ton, electricity of 6,600,000kwh and reduce pollution of 8672.4ton.

China has a National standard for Public Construction to achieve a 50% energy efficiency. Wondering how other developing and developed countries fare on this kind of commitment to go green.

Few amazing pictures of the building:

The outside view of the Sun-Moon Mansion

Night view of the Sun-Moon Mansion

More about the mansion here.