People ask questions because they want to act upon the answer. Some answers lead to commerce and some lead to un-monetizable yet enhanced understanding/knowledge. This is the understanding that Q&A sites need and not a column that displays contextual ads.

When social disruptions, of which there are plenty now like Airbnb, Getaround, Foursquare etc, go awry the implications are on the society and the web lends amplification channels to exacerbate it. It’s not a terrain for technology geeks, alpha males and investors. They perfectly rationalize the choice of ignoring such risks by pointing to probability of occurrences and need we say, statistics are a bitch, when you are disrupting something related to people’s lives?

A self note or ten commandments based on what I have been hearing, seeing and doing over the past few months.

That a person is in a shop or a bar is a valuable piece of information for the brands and for that reason location based apps will stay on. But what makes me feel that the two ideas of location & game theory are getting over-stretched is when there are a host of apps which apply a game phenomenon on location apps to merely entice users with generic rewards with weak links to underlying brand related activity instead of rewarding them in a more tangible & faster manner, that brings accountability to the medium & benefit to a brand.

In business, when you startup you are too small to be noticed you could get away with almost anything. We hear a story a week where customers get taken out for a ride. When you become big, I think its fashionable to screw the loyal customer base. Also it seems, in technology and social media, the bigger you are the easier you get away with doing things that screw your customer base.

I’m sure if there is a research on recession and growth of Farmville there would be a good correlation. When such pleasures of growth, progress, attainment and sharing just evoporated in the midst of frozen economy, Farmville provided an alternative bliss where there was direct correlation between effort and result, with no externalities.

Pureplay dotcoms that are out there to solve a business problem or change the game, are too small. But its these small startups (likes of Antya, FlipKart, Burrp) that hold the promise for making india’s internet scene innovative and truely worldclass!

I hope the success of Twitter doesn’t inspire another set of 20 something entrepreneurs to engage the world with unwanted and cool services, that matters less to anyone.

If Techcrunch’s report is true, Bing has gone into a licensing deal with Wolfram Alpha, the new scientifc search engine for structured data.

Bing’s usage adoption has been steadily rising for over 3 months now, though its a distant third place holder behind Google and Yahoo!