August 10, 2000

There’s a whole series of articles on Umashankar Dikshit – a Silicon Valley pujari. Not a bad idea – epujari.com (which incidentally is on sale.) Following the articles on Rediff and USA Today, there’s this really funny piece. Now I’ve heard everything. The San Francisco Chronicle reported some weeks ago that a Hindu priest in Silicon Valley called Umashankar Dixit is in great demand to perform Lakshmi poojas when e-commerce startups are launched by Indians, as an increasing number are. Mr. Dixit says modestly that he is considered a ’lucky hand’ because his God is Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. He – Mr. Dixit that is, not Ganesha – has been compensated in cash and stock options by several startups and says he has already done very well from the IPOs of successful companies like Exodus Communications. Rediff’s US edition and USA Today have since come up with their own breathless takes on Mr. Dixit, reporting among other things that he spends an hour every morning, presumably just after sandhyavandanam, on the Internet monitoring the financial markets. ...

While we’re on metrics, here are some search engine metrics from useit.com, Media Metrix, Nielsen’s NetRatings and StatMarket. Yahoo’s right on top, followed by MSN.

With network-tools, you can find out where a particular computer is, who’s it registered with, and how information travels there.

The latest browser stats say that 69% of the world uses, Internet Explorer, while only 27% use Netscape. BrowserWatch says 57%-26%. Netscape 6 might do something about it, given that Microsoft’s split.