App Review: Zomato

Zomato is a one-stop destination for all the foodies and gourmands like me. It serves and spreads gastronomy across 13 odd countries including India. I came across this app about six months back and have been thoroughly dependent on it for trusted reviews about restaurants, food joints, cafés and interestingly, street eateries too. For a quick glance about what it has to offer, I have jotted down three things that delight and disappoint me about this app.

Delights:

Simplicity: The app puts forth a very elegant and exquisite user interface with three basic selections viz. Search; Nearby and Feed. In addition to this, the app gives an option to maintain a Zomato Profile.

Collections: The makers deserve a big round of applause for putting forth their own collections of restaurants and food joints in a befitting manner.

Menu on the go: From the smallest roadside eatery  to the posh five star hotel, all their menus are efficiently displayed on the app. Also, they are being updated from time to time.

Disappointments:

Unavailable for offline viewing: This lag is pretty much depressing when you have 2G internet. The app might take forever to load (Do away with this lag by getting 3G internet enabled).

Behaves irrational at times: You may find a few tiny glitches regarding placement of restaurants in their collections like this one. No Zomato, 5 Spice is not Pocket friendly.

Facebook sync errors: It has some issues regarding syncing with Facebook. What adds to the disgrace is that it says the app is being used by all my Facebook friends when it fails to find any of them on Zomato. This certainly syncs your brand image, Zomato. *Pun intended*

Book Review: God Is A Gamer by Ravi Subramanian

"CEO in the morning, writer by night", "John Grisham of Banking"; that is how Ravi Subramanian has been introduced to the world by top magazines and newspapers. Winner of the Golden Quill Readers' Choice Award and Economist-Crossword Book Award, the author has surely made a kingdom for himself in the Indian Fiction genre.

With thorough and extensive research about Bitcoins, gaming, banking frauds and ofcourse love, he is back with a thrilling and raunchy tale to narrate in God is a Gamer. The story takes place and revolves around various locations in Washington DC, Mumbai, Goad and New York.

The plot begins with a major phishing scam on NYIB involving a heist of several million dollars from the ATMs. The fact that to rob the account holder off his money requires much more than just his account ID and password has been conveniently ignored by the writer. The book then explores the turmoil in relationships between top companies because of the scam and rise of a gaming giant.

After a year, WikiLeaks shakes the ground of the US government and the virtual currency Bitcoin, which knows no bounds illuminates from the dark. There is a mysterious death of a top bureaucrat which leads to a mad chase by the FBI, CBI and the CIA. The chaos-filled murders, interrogations and arrests with a thought provoking backdrop of the dark side of Bitcoins proves to be an exciting combination for a Saturday night book hangover.

Amidst all the goose chase there is an emotional chord that the author very sharply touches with a tale of the father-son bond who have been reunited after 20 years and a mild mesmerizing love story between two people in their 20s and their teenage types romance.

The author provides little information about Bitcoins mining and how they can be converted into actual real currencies for ease of trade. The author describes the founder of the Bitcoins, Satoshi Nakamoto, as a man who has a fetish for japanese products (Sa- Samsung, Toshi- Toshiba, Naka- Nakamichi, Moto- Motorola). However, there is an error in the fact given that Samsung is a Korean company. Sansui or Sanyo could have been used instead as this was an impressive highlight coming straight from author's mind and was likely to be noticed more than usual.

Overall, the book keeps you glued to it throughout and all your forecasts about the suspense turn out to be false until you read the post epilogue chapter. The book description rightly says "The truth seems far from reality. Where money means nothing, where predators are prey, nothing is as it seems and God is a Gamer". You will linger on to these lines for several days after completing the book.

You can connect with the author on his facebook page here and tweet to him here.