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Adhip Gupta

An all-around awesome guy! ;-)

Geek, coffee-lover, web-developer, music-lover, avid-reader ...

Posts

  • March 15, 12:11 AM
  • February 06, 04:13 PM

    Minimalist Design Magazine

    Showcase of beautiful minimalistic designs.

  • February 01, 02:57 PM
  • January 31, 04:01 PM
  • January 30, 03:49 PM
  • January 24, 09:49 AM

    Mud-hunting Technique of Bottlenose dolphins.

    Smart, smart hunting.

  • January 23, 12:31 AM
  • January 22, 05:22 AM
  • January 21, 02:25 PM

    the she i love is

    Sung by Md. Rafi

  • January 19, 02:00 PM
  • January 19, 04:58 AM

    Konami Code Sites

    I love Easter eggs!

  • January 17, 03:50 PM

    Hello Generatrix

    Generatrix is an MVC framework for PHP created by Vercingetorix Technologies.

  • October 01, 08:20 AM
  • September 23, 10:11 AM
  • April 01, 10:22 PM
  • March 27, 06:33 AM

    Little Red Riding Hood

  • March 10, 06:01 AM

    ‘Remember’

  • March 10, 06:00 AM

    ‘Reclaim Your Life!’

  • March 10, 05:47 AM

    Lines - Lines can keep you in, lines can keep you out. Some lines you don’t understand, some lines you can erase… some you can’t. Some lines you wait for, and some lines make you wait. Lines can keep you alive and lines are with you till the end. But the only lines that matter are the ones you make!

  • March 10, 05:36 AM

    Limca…

  • February 01, 01:10 PM

    75% of Facebook users are giggly and poke; 25% are serious and import bookmarks

    shalunov:

    Facebook users fall into two categories: giggly and serious. Facebook user experience could be better if Facebook took this dichotomy into account. Ignoring the difference pushes apps to be giggly and serious users to be unhappy.

    Giggly 75% like pokes, quizzes, pic forwarding, fun games, selling friends, glitter on profiles. They express themselves through style and interact with friends using the mouse.

    Serious 25% like bookmark import, utility apps, discussions. They express themselves with text and pictures containing them and interact with friends using the keyboard.

    Because you’re reading this, and made this far, you’re serious. (Giggly users tend to not read much at all, certainly not blobs of text, and quite certainly not my blog.) Let me tell you a few things about the giggly majority and propose how to make Facebook better for both giggly and serious users.

    Giggly users are

    • younger
    • less educated
    • lower-income
    • less likely to have credit cards
    • far less likely employed
    • more suburban and rural
    • more frequently female.

    Giggly users love to have fun with their friends, love to chit-chat and giggle, forward things easily and without a second thought. Giggly users generally don’t review applications because it requires typing. They don’t visit the about pages much. The prototypical giggly user is a female teenager who might later go to a party school to major in English.

    You’re far more familiar with the serious users. Serious users are Harvard students, Silicon Valley types who use Facebook for professional networking, young professionals, etc. Serious users vote in primaries, care about privacy, understand the importance of financial planning, and are somewhat hesitant about the exposure of personal information by social networks. Serious users dislike the apps, infrequently use them, but write many of the reviews. Their notion of fun on Facebook is Scrabulous. Serious users are a bit boring. They make up for it by extreme sports and odd personal styles. The prototypical serious users are you and I. (Facebook employees and shareholders are also serious Facebook users.)

    Problems:

    1. Giggly users send a bunch of giggly communication to the serious users, for whom it’s annoying noise that drowns the signal from serious friends
    2. Giggly users want more self-expression tools, which Facebook won’t create because of concern about serious users, who will hate them and cry “MySpace

    Solution: Have each user and each app self-elect into giggly or serious categories and treat them differently.

    API calls returning list of friends, friend selectors, etc., should, by default, only return giggly friends for giggly apps and serious friends for serious apps. There should be a way to override this with some difficulty and user involvement.

    Giggly users should be given tools to create different backgrounds for their profiles with different text colors and an option to play music on load. The default text color for giggly users should be pink, on a purple background with starbursts. Facebook should partner with RockYou to enable displaying the profile owner’s name in her favorite style of glitter, and a larger font. Latest photo album should start playing as a slide show on load. Applications should be given hooks into these extra self-expression tools, allowing iLike to set the song to play on load, etc. Self-expression should reign supreme.

    Serious users should continue to see profiles of any users, including giggly, as they do today, minus the app boxes. Utility and uniformity should be emphasized.

    The division of the app ecosystem will be particularly valuable. Giggly users will continue to have their silly apps, but the silly apps will stop bothering the serious users.

    This will create an opening for serious and useful apps, now squeezed out of the ecosystem by the higher virality of the silly apps. This will allow engaging and useful apps to flourish in the subset of Facebook users whom Facebook clearly values the most, who are far more valuable for monetization, without spoiling the fun the giggling girls are having over in the other corner of Facebook.

    It is in the apps’ interests to be classified correctly, therefore self-classification will be sufficient. The division will reduce Facebook’s need to police the apps, because serious apps will treat serious users more in line with their expectations and giggly users are more tolerant of highly viral tactics.

    The 75% and 25% numbers are my approximations, based on polls about the Beacon program and forced invites, on the demographics, review of statistics, and a great dose of guess. The dichotomy is not firm, and the numbers may not be exactly 75/25. There is, however, a giggly majority and a serious minority, there’s greater conversion to inviting among the giggly users, there’s Facebook’s desire to be a social utility and thus to appeal to the serious minority, and there’s the problem of higher virality of the silly apps on Facebook, combined with the desire to have serious apps.

    There are two ways in which Facebook would enable engaging useful apps:

    1. change the distribution model from viral to directory and
    2. segregate the users into groups.

    Directory-based distribution would be bad news as it would replace competition with arbitrary choice, reducing the overall quality of apps. I believe Facebook understands this, as they have resisted this route thus far.

    Segregation of users and apps into groups is the next natural choice, and I do not believe it has been explored. The minimum useful number of groups is two, and two groups might well be sufficient.

    Facebook already has good data that separates the giggly users from the serious ones. I expect that serious users have been far more likely to change their privacy settings from the defaults. Why not start from there?

    Update, July 24, 2008: Facebook has made a choice.  Apps will no longer compete on a level playing field.  Instead, Facebook will separate them into three tiers of preference.  The replacement of competition with arbitrary choice by Facebook employees will obviously lower the overall quality, except as perceived by the particular employees making the choice.  Yet it’s Facebook’s platform and their choice how to run it.

  • November 29, 02:17 PM

    If the rest of the world wants to help, it should run toward the explosion. It should fly to Mumbai, and spend money. Where else are you going to be safe? New York? London? Madrid?

    So I’m booking flights to Mumbai. I’m going to go get a beer at the Leopold, stroll over to the Taj for samosas at the Sea Lounge, and watch a Bollywood movie at the Metro. Stimulus doesn’t have to be just economic.

  • November 26, 12:30 PM
  • November 03, 03:15 AM

    AMV Cars (Rascal Flatts) Life Is a Highway (via bigmike30316)

  • November 01, 04:40 AM
  • October 23, 11:01 AM
  • October 20, 08:08 PM
    “Wikipedia is the lazy man’s link, and we’re all lazy men, except for those of us who are lazy women.”
  • October 15, 02:09 PM
    “Here’s a nice snapshot of the expansiveness of today’s web: Facebook has announced that it now stores 10 billion photographs uploaded by its members (as noted by Data Center Knowledge). Moreover, since it stores each photo in four different sizes, it actually has 40 billion image files in its system. More than 15 billion photos are viewed at the site everyday, and at times of peak demand 300,000 images are viewed every second. An additional two or three terabytes of photos are uploaded every day.
    I did a quick scan of the 10 billion photos and found that 3 billion of them included an image of beer, in keg, can, bottle, or pitcher form, 1.5 billion included an image of a bra, and 675 million included both beer and a bra.”
  • October 15, 06:04 AM

    - from xkcd

  • October 11, 04:12 PM

    Where Do We Draw the Line?

    - Poets of the Fall

  • September 30, 05:08 PM
    “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.”
    Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle
  • September 30, 03:56 PM
    “A completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it’s the sort of number that you could, without any fear, introduce to your parents.”
  • September 23, 04:45 PM
    “Blame is the cure, cure anything”
    Mike Doughty
  • September 21, 06:51 AM
  • September 20, 12:41 PM

    12 Days of Christmas

  • September 19, 10:27 AM
  • September 19, 06:50 AM

    Google Pirates! Awesome!

  • September 19, 06:24 AM
  • September 18, 09:13 PM
    “Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”
    Anthony Burgess
  • September 18, 05:04 PM

    Cartoon Slideshow

  • September 18, 06:18 AM

    Ben Walker - You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter

  • September 17, 06:30 PM

    - Scott Adams’ blog

  • September 17, 09:10 AM
    “The best way to predict the future is to invent it!”
    Alan Kay
  • September 17, 02:44 AM
  • September 16, 05:32 PM
    “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who can read ternary, those who can’t and those who mistake it for binary!”
  • September 16, 05:24 PM
    “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”
    Rick Osborne
  • September 16, 05:06 PM

    Large Hadron Rap

  • September 16, 03:48 PM
    “13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.”
    Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
  • September 16, 03:06 PM
    “Prison Break now seems more like a TV adaptation of Ocean’s Eleven than a original TV show!”
  • September 16, 07:29 AM

Profile

Adhip Gupta

Chief Technology Officer at Vercingetorix Technologies
Computer Software | Pune Area, India, IN

Summary

I have a few years on building web and mobile products on various technologies and I specialize in developing solutions for product based startups on the web and mobile platforms. I have been working with Vercingetorix Technologies since 2009 where we have been building some really cool applications on the web, iPhone, Blackberry and have recently started out on Android. Highlights of recent applications on various platforms: * Created the official iPhone application for the live concerts of one of the most popular rock bands ever - Metallica. * Instrumental in the conceptualization and implementation of TalentSherpa (a product of CareerVidyaLabs)
Specialties: Developing solutions and bring together teams to bring a product vision to light. Technologies: PHP, JavaScript, LAMP, HTML, iPhone, Android, Blackberry.

Experience

  • Apr 2009 - Present

    Chief Technology Officer / Vercingetorix Technologies

    Vercingetorix Technologies is a web and mobile development firms that prides itself in building products for startups and small businesses. We essentially work on PHP (LAMP), iPhone, Blackberry and Android.
  • Jul 2008 - Apr 2009

    Freelancer / adhip inc.

    Freelance web developer in various web techologies like ASP.NET WebForms/MVC, Apache-PHP-MySQL etc. I have good experience in working on various frameworks.
  • Jul 2006 - Jun 2008

    Software Design Engineer / Indigo Architects

    UI Developer on various projects on ASP.NET and Classic ASP. Also, worked on Silverlight and OBA.

Education

  • 2002 - 2006

    Army Institute of Technology

    BE in IT
  • 2002 - 2006

    University of Pune

    BE in Information Technology
  • 2001 - 2002

    St. Johns Sr Sec School

    HSC in Maths, Computers
  • 1999 - 2000

    Holy Cross Sr Sec School

    SSC
    Activities: Editor - School Magazine, Debate Team.
  • 1996 - 1998

    Army Public School, Lucknow

Additional information

Websites:
Interests:
Web Technology.
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