Ramesh Bhaskar

I am now addicted to the Wii Commercial music, it has extremely catchy music and the ad has been done extremely well (in my opinion). I went in hunt of the music which is used in the ad and found out that it is a remix of Kodo by the Yoshida Brothers. So I went in hunt for the non-remixed version.

It sounds pretty good as it is, but its not something people would have caught on to. However after it goes through the commercialization process of adding beats and putting it into perspective of the ad it turns into this…

A little hunting around gave me information about the Yoshida Brothers on Wikipedia. Its quite amazing how they have turned around a traditional musical instrument to deliver this kind of fusion music. I am impressed with this and I can’t imagine what all different varieties of music exist in this world that we miss listening to.

To me, good music needs to be heard, there is no need to understand lyrics or lyrics themselves need not exist. The music itself conveys the message and the mood.

All in all I would give this ad a perfect rating in all aspects. Kudos to Nintendo

I recently had the opportunity to use two different GPS systems, one by Mio and the other by Magellan. Apart from the fact that the interfaces varied greatly I was wondering how the underlying technology worked. Reading lots of reviews and stumbling upon a site catered to GPS systems ( GPS Magazine ) I finally found that Mio, Magellan, Garmin, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and probably every other person who makes use of maps in their products uses data provided by either Navteq or TeleNav. After all the reviews (that have been extremely well done by the site) it boils down to the fact that it is the algorithm that makes the difference in providing the routes.

How intelligence is built into the system is a whole different issue, but just providing the shortest routes from the point of departure to the point of destination itself seems like a major task. I was just wondering how primitive the traveling salesman/shortest path algorithms might be in comparison to what these guys might have built to provide the routing.

However, none of the systems seem to have enough intelligence to know how to take shortcuts. Probably its there on the higher end systems, but then I haven’t tested/tried any of them. Sometime in the future I see myself sitting in a car, punching in my destination and not even having to lift another finger. I will be there. (Considering Lexus already has the autopark feature done)