prodosh's blog

Amazon is flexing its muscles trying to get social collaboration startup Amazee to give up its name. There is already an active discussion on the web and the print media in the USA, Germany, Switzerland and the UK, e.g:

• Amazon Wants To Bully Amazee Into Changing Its Name
• Would You Confuse Amazee With Amazon?
• Tree huggers will confuse shoppers
• Der Online-Gigant gegen das kleine Startup
• Amazon verklagt junge Schweizer Firma
• Amazon klagt gegen Amazee

This is a David vs. Goliath battle, even if the cynics say Amazee is getting publicity out of this. The fact of the matter is that a large company is using its strength to bully a small company who is not even a competitor. One can't help but wonder what exactly is Amazon hoping to get out of this other than bad publicity?

Legal experts say that trademark laws require companies to "actively" defend their trade marks. If this is the real explanation behind what Amazon is doing, then there is something seriously wrong with these laws. It is time the legislators in most countries start looking into how a company can trademark the name of a river that has existed for hundreds of years before the company chose it as its name and how it can use the grabbed name of this river to bully a  company that is not competing with it.

In the meantime I will start visting my local bookstore more often as suggested by Gregory Gerhardt the CEO of Amazee in his blog.

Support Amazee by blogging about this, join the Amazee vs. Amazon project and vote on whether you would confuse Amazee with Amazon.

The financial crisis is affecting all of us in one way or another. With a lot of discussion about what needs to be done to prevent it from happening again, a look at how it has developed provides some interesting insights into the different aspects of the problem.

The following interactive diagram plots the different events as they happened. You can scroll the upper part by weeks by holding down the mouse and moving left or right. The lower part allows quicker scrolling by year.

Recently, i have been trying to find out what I can about my great uncle Sailoz Mukherjea, one of India's best known painters of the 20th century. He was one of the influential artists of the evolving modern / contemporary Indian art scene and continues to be a source of inspiration long after he passed away in 1960.

The following picture shows the artist's fantastic use of colours to bring his theme alive and touch the emotions.

Maalo and the Funk Fellows, an international band from Vienna, dished out some fabulous soul / funk on 15 February 2008 in Nüziders, Austria to promote their brand new "Soul Stories" album. Their mix of contemporary funk, soul and R&B with a good mix of up tempo numbers and ballads, was well appreciated by the audience.

The cool vocal and horn arrangements enriched the music harmonically and rhythmically. The wah-wah guitar, Fender Rhodes piano and Moog synthesizer give Maalo's sound an authentic 70s touch.

Click on the pictures below to see a gallery of pictures of Maalo playing live in Nüziders.

As some of you may be aware, it is possible to run Apple's Mac OS X operating system on regular PCs. Apple's licensing agreement currently does not permit this but its viability has been amply demonstrated (search for "OS X on x86"). The conventional wisdom is that Apple doesn't want to start licensing it's OS X / Mac operating system for PCs because they make a lot of money selling high margin Macintosh hardware and an OS X for PCs would cannibalize this. This analysis will show that there is potential to generate in excess of USD 3 billion in additional income for Apple, nearly doubling its latest income figures.

Let us start by assuming a USD 100 price tag for each home license. Based on OS X's simplicity, ease of use, superior features and "Mac halo" this is a realistic price when compared to Microsoft's Vista offering.

Let's assume that Apple is able to convert 3% or 30 million of the installed base of 1 billion PCs every year, that would add 3 billion dollars in revenue annually.