Need for Speed 2 SE was the best ever high speed racing game ever made. Period. Many would argue otherwise. The sheer speed (375 Kmph) of the Mclaren F1 on the Australian outback was as close as I would ever get to such speeds. And what a feeling that was. The Mclaren was my favorite and also the most expensive road car ever built. That was until the Bugatti made the Veyron which broke the land speed record for a road car. Top Gear pits the Bugatti Veyron head to head with the Mclaren F1 on a 1 mile drag race. Ofcourse, I am not happy with the result. But what a ride this is.

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Someone forwarded to me the original theme song for the spiderman cartoon that I used to watch 20 years back. It gave me the goosebumps! It would have been awesome if the new spiderman movie series had a modified version of this theme song.



Check out this link from Gourmet India with links to old Indian TV Ads.

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In the words of HTC "HTC Hero is the first phone to embody HTC Sense. HTC Sense is a distinct experience created to make HTC phones more simple for people to use, leaving them saying, it just makes sense."

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I love the movies. I remember the time when we had to stand in long queues to get tickets to watch them. Now, we have the net, yeah! Online booking changed my life, no queues no worries, just amazing movie watching experience.

Direct booking on cinema sites is pretty neat. I've never had issues with booking online for IMAX, INOX and Funcinemas. We now have a new player in the market for your ticketing solutions Kyazoonga.com. Their tag line "puts u before the q". I currently book my tickets on Bookmyshow.com

I'll be meeting my co-author over the weekend and we are definitely going for a movie together. So I put these two sites to the test.

Time to load

Kyazoonga : Took a lot of time to load, must be all the new traffic post their tv campaign.

Bookmyshow : Took no time to appear. About 8 seconds (Yes I timed it).

Design

Kyazoonga : New site, it took me some time to get used to it. I can't say its confusing but the layout could've been a lot better. The zig-zags and the arrows are a little passe. The bright yellow arrow in the background, the arrows pointing in all direction is quite jarring. Logo's of people running towards the arrow reminds me of a movie booking rat race, and online booking is no longer a rat race, so where are these guys running? The homepage is like a portal to go to the event of your choice. With the load time being an issue (atleast on my system) this step was uneccessary. They really should take you directly to the site versus having you go through an extra page.

Small things matter and the drop downs have a hotch potch of English, Hindi and other regional language movies. The good thing about this site is the social networking aspect which Bookmyshow doesn't have. I personally am not into social networking but I can see a large fan following where we are bringing together two very fun activities - social networking and movies.

Bookmyshow : Slightly more bias towards this design for the ease of use. You type the url in the browser and bam you are on the page where you can directly transact or view the result you've been looking for. The designer clearly knew what the majority of his traffic would do on his site. The design is non-intrusive yet fun. The drop down is well organized into movies by language.

Money

Kyazoonga : For watching Wolverine at the Cinemax here it will cost me Rs233.09, Rs.3.09 more than Bookmyshow. Seriously? OMG I can't believe that I will be paying more. Rs30.90 more for 10 tickets. So the conveyance charge here is greater. Why? Moreover you can't view the seats you'll be getting unless you want to change it. What was really funny was my default seats were the worst seats in the house. Front row seats - dude this isn't the play-offs.

Bookmyshow: For watching Wolverine at the movies for 2 cost me Rs.230.00, Rs30 being the conveyance charges and plus you get to book your seat.

Moo score.

Kyazoonga : Long way to go you guys MOO/MOOOOO

Bookmyshow: You've got a loyal follower MOOOO/MOOOOO

A video to end it all, Kyazoonga ad with ad moghul Prahlad Kakkar and the highest ranking woman in the Indian Police Service Kiran Bedi.

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There has been an onslaught of new technologies for people to interact with computers off late. I wrote about some of them earlier like the 6th sense technology from MIT, Project Natal from Microsoft, Mgestyk hand gesture controller etc. Most of these technologies seem to have started after Nintendo released the Wii controller that took the next level of human machine interface to consumers with a product they could actually buy.

Today we look at another level of interaction between humans and machines in the form of an augmented reality shooter using a mobile phone like device powered by Nvidia Tegra. The player looks through the camera of the device at a two dimensional picture which looks 3 dimensional model on the device screen. He then goes on to interact with the 3D Model in ways that will blow your socks off.

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This is a mind-boggling new level of interactivity between humans and computers.

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