I was going on the road and just put my eye balls on the vodafone showroom. I found most of the things red there. I turned my head to the opposite direction and found banners of Airtel and Vodafone. Too much red color on both the banners. Again I noticed many things in red. Red colored bikes, cars, anything red was catching my eyes. Then I started assuming that most of the brands use red color for their brand. Vodafone, Airtel, Virgin (all products), Kingfisher (all products), Royal Challengers - Bangalore (IPL cricket team owned by Vijay Mallya, whose favorite color is red and he owns Kingfisher), The Mobile Store, Good Knight (mosquitoes are biting right now), Mortein, India Post, Metro Shoes and many more. Railway signals, traffic signals, Police van/car/jeep light, Minister and VIP car light all these are also red too. South Indian actor and model Tamanna, she looks gorgeous in red.
So why so much red there? Well it's science. Color red has a very high wavelength and low frequency as compared to other colors. That makes it easy to view and it attracts easily. Red is an erotic color too. That's one reason, in Indian marriage rituals, the bride wears red color dress, and both the bride and groom wear red color liquids (don't know how to explain that) on their feet.
But when I browse through the web, I don't see the red color more. The most attractive and most used colors on the web are (except black and gray) blue, green and orange. But red color has an important participation while showing delete button/link, error message or any thing danger. And as red color attracts our eye balls, we can use red color for any banner or important section of the web page to get the attention of the user.
We learned something from IPL, now it's time to learn form T20 World Cup, actually from Star Cricket's production for the matches. Normally the score card and score bar remains blue with a tint of green, but when there is a free hit after a no ball, the score bar turns to red and keep flashing with red and blue colors alternatively. That's one way they choose to attract our eye to that area over the TV screen.
Then why blue is used more on media and web? Even the windows default desktop background color is blue, default windows XP wallpaper is too blue. Orkut, Facebook all these are blue. Then why blue? My answer is blue is cool for eyes. It puts less strain to our eyes. Don't you like blue sky, blue ocean etc.? Even swimming pools are too blue.
Anyways, whether it's blue or red, both have some importance in product/web/brand designing. It depends where and when to use which color. Everything is as per our requirement, but red picks the attention easily, so use it intelligently. So what is your favorite color? (My favorite colors are pink and purple, not red or blue.) And which color will you pick for a design project? (You don't need to be a designer to answer this, please share your thoughts on it.)
At one night, Deb told me that a company got awesome money from a simple (but beautiful) iPhone application. He said in Oriya: "khali gote night stand", which I interpreted as "only one night stand". I got surprised that moment (however that moment last for a moment :P ). How one company can earn so much money form one night stand? Later I saw the image of the application on it's website and understood that what I interpreted was wrong! The application name is Night Stand and he was telling that it's a Night Stand which earned so much money from them. Look at the photo of iPhone below on which Night Stand was running. What will be the experience of One Night Stand while Night Stand runs on your iPhone? :P
What's Bing? For me it's something like a bird tweets "bing bing" or a child makes noise for for "bing bing" or something similar to Crazy Frog singing "bing bing bing bing prrrrrrrrrrrrrr..........".
As usual, looked at my Google Reader in the morning. Found Digital Inspiration blogged about Bing, a advance search engine (they prefer to call it as a decision engine), which which Microsoft will start a big battle with Google, the default choice for a search engine. Earlier Microsoft tried to be on the battle field with MSN Search, Live Search (Nothing was live there, better to call it as dead search!), and did not left any mark. But after seeing the video of Bing, I hope it may leave some mark on the search engine market. At first I did not take this seriously, I saw the related videos later at night.
I subscribe to MyToday News. MyToday is a free SMS subscription service which sends you free SMS on News, Cricket (news, scores), Bollywood news, etc. For News service, they send 2 SMS per day, one in the morning (delivers around 10 AM) and other in the evening (delivers around 5 PM). Generally one SMS includes 2 (rarely 3) News headlines and one advertisement at the bottom. But at headline number 2, it was "MS's 'Bing' to take on Google search"! Is it a headline or Ad? No, it's not as an Ad, it was like a headline. Then I started to think that, Bing is going to live today (29th May). I think Microsoft has paid a good money to MyToday to advertise like that!
Then I searched "Bing" (of course) on Google. And found first 2 results pointing to bing.im, the Mobile IM software. And 3rd result links to bing.com. Clicked on that result and found "Bing and decide, Coming Soon....". Then I <a href to decisionengine.com and but could not able to see the video (Silverlight is not installed on that system and Flash videos are disabled by proxy). So tried to satisfy myself by reading their letter on that web site. I noticed, Digital Inspiration comes on the top result of the search as compared to other popular blog, also above another link of Microsoft. Good! I think as a MVP, he got the news first and blogged.
After the evening people retweeted that Bing stands for “But It’s Not Google.” - TechCruch, I tweeted, If #bing stands for "But it's not Google", what does #kumo stand for?
Anyway, let's wait for Bing to start it's decision engine and now sing with me "Bing, Bing, Bing..... Bingo!"
When I used to want to buy a laptop or help any friend to buy a laptop, what I was doing is going to dell.co.in (as my first preference is Dell), then search for some hp or Compaq laptops, and some other good brands like Acer etc. Then write all the specifications, price, etc. on a paper or fill in a spread sheet. Then time to compare on the paper or spread sheet. Again, search for any user review or comments. Too much difficult and takes a lot of time. Time is money, why should not we save this time and spend this money on the laptop?
After these difficult days, I found ConsumerMate.com. It's quite cool. I setup my budget, the other requirements and it listed out all the laptops available on market and all the information are provided at a managed manner, more better than what I used to on paper or spread sheet. This also includes the products rated by Digit Test Center (Digit is the most popular technology magazine of India). And when there are some hot deals, why will anyone want to miss them? For example, BenQ has announced that the new Joybook Lite U101 will be sold in India at an introductory price of Rs. 24500. The best thing is that you can know about the street price of every model, so no more bargain, to get at right price.
However ConsumerMate.com is limited to Laptop now, soon it's coming with other products. Waiting for that day.
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