Author Archives: rangaprabhu

Building an iPad competitor- Part 2

With the stage set with the previous post, lets jump right in. 1. Cheaper cost of entry: The serious iPad competitor will not only match iPad2 in price but go one up and come in at a lower entry point. The cheapest SKU needs to be less than $499. Anything over $499 for a base

Building an iPad competitor- Part 1

As a bevy of tablets enter the marketplace and inevitably get unfavorably compared against the iPad 2, it makes one think- what will it take to build a good iPad2 competitor? This post (and the following one) attempts to piece together from the media, from blogs and from word-of-mouth the current players in the tablet world

Near Field Communications (NFC) and Mobile Payments

Near Field Communications (NFC) is being touted as the next big technology disrupter. It is expected to change how we use and interact with location based services, payment systems ranging from gas stations to vending machines and enable killer peer-to-peer communication applications. In that context it might be worthwhile to know more about the technology and try

A digital only future for periodical content

I love reading newspapers. And I love perusing through magazines. We get the print version of Wall Street Journal in addition to a multitude of magazines that arrive weekly, biweekly and monthly. In recent times, as I have made my trek to the recycled bin in my apartment complex to drop off the old newspapers

Location, location, location.

I finally took the plunge and moved to dedicated hosting for my blog and my website. Until recently, my blog was hosted on www.wordpress.com and my website was hosted by Google Sites. This was nice and free but I wanted to have greater control on the style of the blog and website and also utilize

The Android Situation

There has been quite a bit of press on Google tightening the screws on its Android OS and fundamentally altering the “openness” of it. Today’s Bloomberg Businessweek article adds lot more fuel to the fire. The article goes on to suggest that Android licensees are thinking or have already talked to DoJ on the matter.

How does AT-T’s purchase of T-Mobile affect us?

News just hit the wires that AT-T, the once largest, sometimes and recently  second largest telecommunications carrier in the US agreed to acquire T-Mobile, the 4th largest carrier with 33 million subscribers in a $39 billion dollar deal. This makes AT-T the definitive largest carrier by a big margin. It is early hours to speculate

Bill Gates and his second life

My first PC was an Intel 286 architecture based system that came preloaded with Windows 3.1. Since then, I have had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft. Their software is in a way, responsible for my career and who I am today. But I didn’t personally approve of the way Microsoft muscled their way into many segments of

Steve Jobs, Salesman Extraordinaire and the iPad 2

Last week, the world witnessed the launch of Apple’s second generation tablet device, the iPad2. What it also saw was one of the best presentations yet from their CEO and arguably the greatest salesman of this generation, Steven P. Jobs. If you want to save the trouble of reading the post, you are welcome to

Just Thinking- The $399 iPad

I have always wanted to launch a speculative post series that poses tantalizing questions that are not entirely out of the realm of possibility. The first of them is a recently speculated possibility [1][2][3] of Apple dropping the price of the iPad to $399 at its event on March 2. The reason why this makes