ankurb – Page 399 – Ankur Banerjee's personal blog

Agnel Talent Fest 2007

Father Agnel School (Gautam Nagar) will be holding their annual Agnel Talent Fest 2007 from 30th August 2007 to 1st September 2007. It is one of the most prestigious events in Delhi, albeit slightly irritating because they award themselves a position in almost each and every event and then gracefully decline to accept it. This year, the theme is Global Warming, which I think is bullshit (the notion of global warming, not the topic).

The ATF’s Exquizzit, their quizzing event is one of the best and the toughest quizzes in Delhi, and sure hope that on 1st September the DPS VK Quiz Club does something in it. Joy Bhattacharya, the brain behind ESPN School Quiz, and one of the lead researchers at ESPN. He has also worked with the team behind Kaun Banega Crorepati, University Challenge, and India’s Child Genius. Boy, is he an amazing quizmaster, and his quizzes are so fun.

Getting there
Now that’s a question many people from the DPS VK QC and the Code Warriors (there are two tech events) have asked me a lot. For exact directions from your place, the best place is www.mapmyindia.com. Here are two general maps of the area though, click on the images to get an enlarged view.

Downloads

Agnel Talent Fest 2007 Invite (PDF)
ATF Exquizzit 2006 Prelims (PDF): Don’t get conned into thinking that the quiz is easy on the basis of this admittedly very easy paper – the competition is fierce and qualifying cut-offs are high. The stage rounds then teach you what trivia quizzing actually is.

Yahoo! Mail Beta Coming Out Of Beta…Soon

It’s official folks. In an announcement made by John Kremer, Vice President of Yahoo! Mail, we were told that Yahoo! Mail Beta will be coming out of its beta phase within the next six weeks. The release will be done in Yahoo! Mail server farms around the world in phases, so in about two months time the final version will be out. It’s good you know, beta is only supposed to be for testing for a short period of time. Unlike Gmail, which even years down the line is still in beta! :p That way, Google sneakily can save getting a final rating from the likes of PC World and CNET, because most tech reviews don’t give a final rating to beta stuff. And guess what, because it’s beta if anything goes wrong they can simply claim ‘you knew the risks dude, it’s your fault’. Tech columnist Stephen Manes once blasted this whole beta shit very convincingly – of the new trend of companies having perpetual beta phases, making the the customer use unstable releases and then washing their hands off if anything goes wrong.

Coming back to my main point, Yahoo! Mail’s final release version will also have another feature – SMS text messaging. According to their press release, users will be able to ‘send and receive free text messages in their email to and from any mobile phone number in participating markets including the US, Canada, India and the Philippines’. Good news eh? Personally, I think this is much better than Google India’s ‘gift’ of Indic transliteration. You can even see a screenshot of the final interface at the top.

So how will you get to know when you have the final version? Simple, it will no longer show the ‘Beta’ logo. For me, with such a crappy version of T9 on my LG KG300 Dynamite (boy, I need to write a review for that too, don’t I?), this service via Yahoo! Mail will definitely be a boon. And best of all, since it’s free, I think it will be huge hit. Similar services in India exist, like Indiatimes’ Chikka, but that requires a download, and it’s Windows-specific. Yahoo! Mail’s features, since they’re browser based will be cross platform and WON’T require a download.

Unlimited storage. Integrated messaging with Yahoo! and Windows Live accounts. Free SMS text messaging. What other goodies can possibly be in store for us!