The easiest way to attract attention and dissipate information is by making it attractive. Its seen that people enjoy presentations that are full of numbers better when there is a background music, and with Fat Boy Slim's "Right here right now" as music this presentation tells you what you need to know about things today's technology. Enjoy!

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I don't want to come across as an Obama fan or anything, but what the hell, this dude rocks. And so does facebook. What do you get when you get Obama on facebook? Change - online history in the making.

Facebook and CNN will jointly bring you live Obama's inaugaration. This might be one of the biggest events online. So far 507,123 have confirmed attendance, 75,619 are tentative. 

I'm one of the 507K people. I am fascinated by the fact that we are now making history online. I remember historic events like this finding me glued to the idiot box filled with the intermittent commercials. So this might be another change we should start getting used to. 

More and more people are going online, more and more people in India are finding a quicker way to communicate through email and chatting. More and more of us are booking our movie tickets online, we go through the latest news. I read about the Mumbai blasts online before I went to the TV. Its difficult to move away from my virtual presence. With being online turning from an addiction to a state of being, many of us are going to possibly miss out on the real world, wouldn't you say?

All said, if you want to be a part of the change, join : http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=56799103571

Here is something to get you into the mood for change. 

President-Elect Barack Obama on Election Night

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Swype is a new way to input text into mobile phones based on touch screens which are all the rage now. Traditional T9 dictionaries in phones auto guess words from the keys you have pressed. But most new touch screen based phones have individual character keys and consequently you have to move fingers across more keys to input your text. Swype is a technique for making the process of typing into touchscreens easier.

Check out this video to get the idea.

To quote the swype website:


Swype provides a faster and easier way to input text on any screen. With one continuous finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard, the patented technology enables users to input words faster and easier than other data input methods—at over 50 words per minute. The application is designed to work across a variety of devices such as phones, tablets, game consoles, kiosks, televisions, virtual screens and more.




Simply Trace a Path

The word “quick” was generated from tracing the path shown above in a fraction of a second, by roughly aiming to pass through the letters of the word. A key advantage to Swype is that there is no need to be very accurate, enabling very rapid text entry.

Swype is not yet available in production phones and is expected to launch soon on all touch screen mobile phones.

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We've written about Google Phone Search before. And recently Google Phone Search is released in New Delhi. Again the number is the same 1-800-41-999-999

Here are 5 things I like about the phone search.

1. Anytime information - Getting the information when you want, where you want is amazing. I just need to dial the toll free number to get the number to the nearest Chinese restaurant.

2. Really low call wait time - I've never had to wait for more than 15 seconds (Yes I've counted) for someone to lift the phone on the other end

3. You get the information sms'd quickly - Sometimes I've received the information on a sms while on the call with Google.

4. I trust Google not to sell my number to cold callers - I've asked the agent and they've assured me that they don't keep a record of the number. In fact the agent asks you if you want the information sms'd or over the phone and you give your number just incase you want it sms'd

5. Free call forwarding - They offer to forward the call to the number that you require for FREE!

3 Things I don't like about Google Phone Search

1. Speech Recognition - It could work better, much better. But right now it doesn't work all that well. Sometimes you've got to repeat 3 to 4 times to get the computer to understand what you are saying. With thick Indian accents it might be difficult for users to get their desired number soon.

2. Agents google the queries- I've asked one of the agents how they get their information and he simply said "Ma'am I google it". So when I asked for a launderer in my area, they were unable to provide information as it wasn't available in their search result. 

3. Enough local content - I wonder if there are enough local results online. Are local businesses putting their information online? 

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We all get inspired by Science fiction and comics and try to make them real. For example the cell phone was first seen in Star Trek, the communicator as it was called. Or how about the Universal translator in star trek or the Babel fish which inspired the translation tools that we currently have online - yes they used the same name Babelfish.

Jules Vernes and his crazy ideas of underwater vehicles, the submarine is a reality today isn't it? I know you're wondering where I'm going with this. Not too far. Very close to home in fact.

I love reading Viswas's forwards and the one's I like the most are from xkcd.com. Amazing cartoon strip. Love the disclaimer at the bottom "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)." (chuckles)
I came across their comic which had a very unique concept. Thought it was funny and forgot about it.
Just recently I see Youtube have that very unique concept on their site. All you need to do is type your comment in the comment box and Youtube robot reads it right back at you when you click on audio preview. Try it out!

I did, here.

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30% or our population is below the age of 20. Many of those people in colleges. One of the things that happen when you join college in India is you get ragged. Its illegal but seniors still think its important and you get ragged.

I was ragged on my first day to college. It wasn't a hostile ragging session, quite weird, I felt a little sad that people were picking on me, but nothing that bothered me for too long. I was happy that the first day was over and I was initiated into the college by my seniors. But its not the same for many people. Ragging can be hostile and down right dirty.

The Legal Definition of Ragging is and I quote "Ragging means the doing of any act which causes, or is likely to cause any physical, psychological or physiological harm of apprehension or shame or embarrassment to a student, and includes– (a) teasing or abusing of playing Practical joke on, or causing hurt to any student. or (b) asking any student to do any act, or perform any thing, which he/she would not, in the ordinary course, be willing to do or perform."

*

A few examples of the extent of Ragging are given below (extract from www.noragging.com)

 

We were asked to strip, lift pens with our buttocks, sit on empty bottle with their mouth upward

 

My friend may not talk about it because he has to study 5 more years in college. But later on i took my revenge by ragging my juniors

 

“They are made naked and ordered to do bad things... I can't tell it even to my parents. It is not justified but I can't bear it any more."

Amit committed suicide on 11 October 2005 by jumping in front of a moving train

This is serious and now many organizations are getting together to solve the issue of ragging. Its about time too! Here are a list of sites that you can go to if you want to read more about ragging and how you can report it you should try out the following sites.

http://muthoot.com/antiragging/

http://www.no2ragging.org/

http://www.noragging.com/

Here is a small video that talks about the extent of ragging in our country.

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You've started the sentence and are waiting to finish but you just can't get the word, you know the word, its on the tip of your tongue but you can't get it. Yes that word, you know the one that starts with ummm, P and means drinkable. Where do I go? Do I search on Google? I get about 292,000 results but none of the top 10 posts are even close to the word that I'm looking for. I'm the kind of person who can't sleep if a question doesn't get answered. For people like me and millions others like me (who can't let go), here is the Tip of my Tongue tool.

I played around with it for a while, its not perfect yet but chir.ag is working on it. Its very very easy to use and you can get the answers immediately. A friend of mine had the time to use the unscramble tool here during his scrabble game, he found it very useful and though he didn't win against his AI opponent.

You should try out this tool. Its fun and easy to use and we should give chir.ag some motivation to finish the tool quickly so my friend can win his next scrabble game.

In case you were wondering what word I was thinking of and was on the tip of my tongue but not out yet, it was Potable :)

Chir.ag > DI > Lifehacker

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Google vs MSN vs Yahoo, if you ask this question, its not an easy question to answer. But now we don't have to. Here is a rap battle which will decide who will win. If you want to influence the result - click here. Winner to be announced on 27th of October 2008, vote now. I did.

Here is a sample. Enjoy. 

 

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If you're thinking -
I am excellent at logo design where should I go to display my artwork?
I am great with flash and have made tons of illustration, where can I display my work and get potential clients?

Pixish is your answer!

Pixish says

There are several assignments from people from different walks of life. One person wanted a tattoo design and the designer will get a monetary award and the person will get the tattoo done and send a picture. LeeLefever the Principal of commoncraft.com has opened an assignment for a T-shirt design which will be sold on his site. I love their site and I might have a few ideas up my sleeve for a good design for them.

This helps in getting the creative people online to submit, judge, and source amazing images which will be useful to your business. Some of the assignments online include - home page image for a site called Tatango.com, clip manager icons from Luk Dhondt, Barrack Obama illustrations etc.

The rewards are pretty interesting too. Some reward in cash while others provide gift vouchers.

I'm very excited about this platform and will be visiting it regularly to see if I can get my creative juices put to some practical use.

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Social networking is seeping in to every aspect of our life. Orkut, Facebook, Jaiku so on so forth, people are not getting tired of these things. So what is the next big thing? Some time back I wrote about microblogging and mobileblogging, which I feel is amazing and we've got so much to explore in that realm, but what about video.

We all watch video, we all leave our comments at the bottom of the youtube videos. What if we could put those comments on top of the videos for every audience to see. That's exactly what Omnisio does. Allows you to put your thoughts on other people's video. And guess who's acquired Omnisio? Yes online giant recently acquired Omnisio. Here is an example of the comments that can be added to a video on Omnisio.




I don't personally like the tags, but I do see an option to watch the video without annotations, which is quite cool. Youtube already has this feature integrated. It makes the video more interactive and allows your video to lead to various other videos. I've taken a video here and modified it a little using the annotations tool. I've linked it to other videos that talk about the topic. It was very easy to use and didn't take any time to finish.



I like the new annotation feature. I may not allow everyone to comment on my videos but loved the fact I could add those comments online and link them.

Moo Score - MOOOO/MOOOOO

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Ever wished you could do away with all the chargers and their cables for all the gadgets you own? Fret not, for help is here. Witricity - a portmanteau for wireless electricity is the technology that will make your life easier. While it might sound like a new cool thing, it actually is not. The technology has been around for quite some time now but hasn't been very popular.

WiTricity works on the principle of mutual induction, the same technology that drives transformers used for power distrubtion. In layman's terms, mutual induction help transfer power from one electrical circuit to another without physical contact (by means of wires). For this to work, like how it does in transformers, the parts of the 2 circuits involved are closely coupled. Hence distance between the 2 circuits is the limiting factor. If you consider your wall charger as one circuit and your mobile phone as another, there will be limits to how far the devices can be for the phone to be charged. This distance is what researchers are trying to increase to make the technology more practical and wide spread.

Intel recently demonstrated advances in this field at the Intel developer conference that happened last week. They were able to power a 60-watt light bulb from a power source that was 2 meters (7 feet) away at around 40% efficiency. The technology is expected to gain wide spread adoption in another 3-5 years. Till then we are stuck with cables.



Find more details here and here.

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Hacker News is THE website for all your web startup resources. If you are planning on starting a new web based business, this is the place to be. You get advices of all sorts to get started with a startup. There are frequent top 10 lists about startups, discussions on new startups, information on funding, idea sharing etc. Most startup discussions are web based. Also lot of technical resources with regard to hosting websites, programming etc are discussed.

Articles are submitted by readers and are ranked on the basis of popularity using a voting system.
Submitted articles have comments which are are good place to discuss the article. If you are looking for a place to hang around and gather good information about going around and implementing that great web idea of your's, you now know where to go.

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As the ATF fuel (ATF - Aviation Turbine Fuel commonly called Jet fuel) skyrockets (pun intended) the prices for all the fares have increased tremendously. There has been 20% drop in the weekly flight schedule since March 2008 (source - economictimes.indiatimes.com)

To add to this, the newer airports like Hyderabad and Bangalore are levying hefty airport duty (yet to come but in the pipeline or so I've heard). And above all, the travel to the airport which is now outside the city and takes about an hour to get to, has put off passengers from flying anywhere. So what are our alternatives?

The railways is monopolized by the Indian Government and booking is primarily done directly by waiting at the booking places and if online from irctc.co.in. Many people I know (including me) are giving the good ol' bus another look. Here are the top 7 sites for booking your road trip.


Ticketvala.com - Ticketvala claims to be India's largest Online Bus Ticket platform. They have a special feature called the mTicket which allows a passenger to receive a confirmation of your booking on your mobile and this confirmation acts as your boarding pass. They have quite a few payment channels, and last minute booking. You can contact their call centre for tickets and even have your tickets delivered at your doorstep. Home delivery is available in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune, for those outside this region, you'll have to wait a while till ticketvala comes to your home.

Apart from this they provide other services like car hire, bus hire and budget hotels listing. An ideal list for the budget traveler.

Ticketkaran.in - This Chennai based website says its the first to provide frequent traveler program for Bus travelers (step aside jet gold members). This site too offers mobile phone confirmation of your ticket and the ease of booking your ticket by phone by calling their booking room. The site offers delivery for nominal chargers to most locations in Chennai.

This site is brand new (as are most sites on this list). Only once testimonials and other features are added will we understand how useful this site really is.

Redbus.in - This was the first site I'd heard of that allows online bus booking. Its been there for 2 years now. This site has by far the largest number of bus travel operators and spans to more than 80 cities in India. It offers all the services provided by the other sites, like home delivery (at a nominal fee in major cities), mobile booking etc. There are 3 things I adore about this site:

- First the localization with the Indic language translations (5 of them).

- Second the Testimonials page, people have enjoyed the service and great service never goes unnoticed. There have been tonnes of suggestions appreciations and love letters that this site has recieved. I especially like - I think redBus is the right answer for all our travel related problems. The options available at your website are very comprehensive. - Nageshwara Rao K - Well said Nageshwara.

- Third and not the least, there is a little link under the booking section that says "Boss is watching? Look busy." It takes you to some random excel page with numbers and charts. I couldn't believe it. Good job redbus!

TakeOffTrip.com - One of the quickest sites I've seen in the group. Very quick results and crisp layout just draws you in to the site. Once you're in you're hooked. The site has amazing user engagement with trivia during on the loading screen if the loading is slow etc. There aren't too many special features for bus passengers like mobile booking and home delivery of tickets. The site is a complete travel site and bus is just another service they provide. They also have a train link but I guess its still under construction. I can't wait to find out what this feature does.

CheckOutTrip.com - Again a Hyderabad based site. Its more of a Online travel agent as opposed to specifically for bus passengers. The site is still not up and running completely. The site looks like it needs a lot more work before users will like navigating through it. Quite a disappointment at this point of time. Would love to see how this pans out. Fingers crossed for you checkouttrip.com

Bus-tickets.rediff.com - Rediff bus tickets gives you more than one solution to your problem. They have a tie up with the Indian railways. On the search result page, apart from getting the bus details from major Government and Local bus operators it shows the possible trains that leave during the same day between the locations selected. Allowing you to compare the prices of the bus and train ticket and the indianrail.gov website is just a click away. Fast easy effective - truly impressed.

Bustickets.makemytrip.co.in - Makemytrip is slow, I know I don't have the fastest connection under the sun, but makemytrip takes forever to show results. Once it did show up on the page, it had some very competitive results. Makemytrip as a brand has a lot of patrons already. Personally not my favorite site for Online bus reservations.

Apart from these sites, there is Raj National, KPN, VRL direct from the Bus operators themselves.

I hope this helps you find a good site to book your next bus ticket. I personally will either book it on redbus.in, ticketvala.com or Bus-tickets.rediff.com. Will post some review on my experience soon.

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I like listening to Bollywood music and with less scraping from the west these days we have some really cool Indian artists. (Bollywood music is very very rare- mostly listen to Pop and Rock from the West)

I've looked up a few sites that have Radio/music streaming online and I'm going to write one my favorite.

in.com is a network 18 venture. Currently in beta, this portal offers you music, videos, games, a cool search tool, and mail. They say "Give us your name and we'll give you a short @in.com email address." So I did and now we have topicbean@in.com. The mail service gives you 10GB mailbox, linked messages to track the thread easily, mail scheduler to post pone your mail etc etc.


I am going off tangent here (as always). The mail service of in.com is good - lets move on to their music offering. They have the Artist of the week, Podcast, News and Record Labels.

The Artist of the week is Shankar Mahadevan, they have his songs in many languages and the streaming is really really quick. I don't have the fastest internet connection, but in spite of that the song started immediately and had amazing sound quality.

I listened to the Movies you should see podcast and listened to Trivia about The Green Mile. This isn't my favorite podcast of all times but was interesting (polite way of saying - NOT GOOD AT ALL). But all that they were saying was pretty clear.

Moving swiftly on to the News - This page took a long long time to load framed another site which was all garbled and i couldn't read a thing and couldn't see a think either. Was a terrible terrible experience.

Finally I looked at the record labels and there were tons of music which I really enjoyed. They had Tips, Venus, T-Series, Times Music. I listened to Independent artists - End Song from the album Blue Bugyal by Summit Attempt. It was relaxing to listen to such music after a long day and enjoyed every minute of it. I was so impressed by the music that I had to admire the musician and I posted a comment and read the following disclaimer -

"Don't post rude or nasty comments. Ethnic slurs, personal insults and abuses are rather uncool. Criticise, but know where to draw the line. No point putting in personal details or links, we won't publish them. Try and write in English and please stick to the point! "

This was great to see. Finally a site which will sieve through the garbled rubbish before posting it online. I stand impressed by In.com

Something you should definitely check out.

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I couldn't stop laughing when I read about this site on Lifehacker. The site Diaroogle.com is about to help those needy New Yorkers find the nearest possible loo to relieve themselves.

I think this is a brilliant idea. The owners of the site wanted to use poogle.com instead of Diaroogle.com but weren't able to get the name.

I am sure this will help out all the desperate people out there looking for a hygenic place to download. I will be happy if such loo's come to India. Something better then the Sulabh's we have. I wouldn't mind having such a website for us out here too!

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I came across the following website while trying to sign up for Twitter for my previous article. I was blown away about how Sachi and Lee make complex online tools easy to understand. I can show this to my mum and I know for sure she'll be able to understand what a wiki is or how it works (in fact I learnt quite a few things from this page myself and it was fun.)

Hence, Education meet Entertainment.

I love the way how paper and pen is still classy, and how we can make simple ideas to go a long way! Common Craft is also an Official Honoree of the 2008 Webby Awards! Congratulations you guys. I also want to try my hand at making a video like this, but meanwhile. Please have a look at a couple of videos I fell in love with on their site.

This one explains what I'm doing here and you're doing there - and of course in Plain English.

This one explains Social Media.



I urge all of you to go check out the Common Craft Show.

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I was surprised to see billboards today across Hyderabad urging us to try out Google Phone Search. Call 1800- 41-999-999 to contact Google Phone Search. I couldn't help myself so I took out my handy camera and took a few snaps.

I also picked up the phone and was connected to a Google representative and I asked him for Chevrolet dealer in Hyderabad. While the representative wasn't able to give me the required answer, he did take my feedback and said that the listing will be updated soon.

I also called them now (1.43am. June 26) and was connected to a voice recognition software. It asked me for Business Name or Type of Business. I selected Pizza Hut and Madhapur and within seconds not only did I have Google send me an sms to my cell phone but the voice recognition software also read out the listing.

When I tried the search yesterday I was also offered the option for call forwarding, which I didn't utilize. Kudos Google!

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Wondering what the Android OS is all about?

Well, Google decided to extend its expertise into the world of operating systems and thought they’d start with the most widely used device, the mobile phone. With 3 billion users and growing, world-wide, (that’s half the world population and 3 times the number of personal computers) what better platform to start with than the future replacement of the PC.

The android OS is said to be an open source Linux based OS and supports accelerated 3D graphics even on large VGA displays unlike other smart phones, plus rumor has it that it plays Quake.

Dying for sneak preview of the OS already,

The bad news is that most service providers and mobile phone manufactures worldwide aren’t ready for the “Android” as yet and the expected date has been pushed into the fourth quarter of this year because of this and the much awaited launch of the iPhone 3G. Currently, HTC and T-mobile, USA are the only members to stick to their part of the bargain and have support ready by the next quarter.

Guess the lucky ones are the developers, Google’s running the Android Developer Challenge and the price money of 10 million dollars is to be split among the best. For all you know they might just get one of these android powered devices thrown in to the gift hamper.

For the rest of us, we’ll just have to sit and wait …... and something tells me, we on this side of the globe won’t get to lay our hands on one of these beauties until later next year or the year after.

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Being social animals, we constantly want to keep in touch with our friends. Now our innate nature has an "online presence" through the means of micro blogging. Micro blogging is the future. I write this post to you at the end of my day, this post is my way of connecting to the online world. While I'd like to keep in touch with everyone at all times its difficult and time consuming.

Micro blogging allows you to update friends and family with things that you are doing at the moment, in a moment. You can update a 140 character post using your mobile phone or from the site itself and keep your friends and family updated on smaller things in life, which are important, but not important enough to write a post about. Like your visit to the dentist which was funny cause the dentist had his own dental appointment, or when you put salt in the tea instead of sugar just cause you're too engrossed watching Euro 08. These small things can be updated on your micro-blogging platform which will in-turn update your friends. There is also an option to receive updates on your mobile phone, this allows you to stay connected.

I recently signed up for twitter account. I can have my twitter conversations appear on my blog using the embed feature. It also allows you to tag the person who has updated it. I started receiving updates in about a few hours (talks a lot about my social side). Its easy to use and quite addictive.

Jaiku is another such micro blogging platform. It was acquired by Google in October 2007. I applied for Jaiku, since its an invitation base I got an error message saying " Your request has been received! We'll notify you by email when an account becomes available."

I hope to get an account soon because I want to see how it works. I see tremendous things coming into play with Jaiku and Google's merger. Mobile blogging? Mobile scrapping on Orkut? I can't wait to see what else we're going to see on the micro blogging front.

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Opera is one of the most under-rated browser out there. I have been using opera for the past 2 years and I have found it extremely elegant and easy to use. It looks good, works fast and has some really cool features that puts other browsers to shame. Some of these features might be available as plugins in other browsers, however, Opera runs really fast because some of these features are well integrated into the browser itself.

Here are some highlights and features:
1) It is free just like IE or Firefox.
2) It is really fast in loading pages.
3) Opera is one of the most feature laden but light setup browser coming in at 6.7 MB for the english version where as firefox is 7.8 MB.
4) It looks good.

My favorite features in Opera:
1) Speed Dial: Speed Dial is a set of visual bookmarks you see when you open opera. Just click on the image link and get right to your favorite website.
2) Recycle Bin: Accidentally closed a tab in the browser? No worries, Ctrl Z or Command Z will act like undo and restore the previous page you were viewing from the browser's recycle bin.
3) Opera Link: Syncs your bookmarks and Speed Dial settings between your various computers and mobile phone. No more carrying around your bookmarks or being worried about not having them when you need them the most.
4) Opera Voice: Don't have the patience to sit in front of the monitor and read a big article? Just highlight the content with the mouse, right click and choose speak. Opera will convert text to voice and read out information to you. You can also issue voice commands over a mic for Opera to obey.
5) Quick Search: This has to be the most coolest feature of Opera. Want to search something in Wikipedia? Just type w followed by search keywords in and address bar and see wikipedia search results. Want to search in google? Type g followed by search keywords. The best part: you can create custom search shortcuts for any website you visit and run searches from the address bar real fast.

Other cool features:
1) Bittorrent downloader.
2) Integrated Email and newsfeed client.
3) Mouse gestures (make the browser behave any you want without keeping your fingers on the keyboard)
4) Widgets: Add widgets to your system using your browser. These widgets run on the browser engine but are accessible outside the browser.

Download Opera 9.5 here.

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