Checkout GrantsInfoCenter.com

After SchoolGrants2009.com was so successful, the same team has launched another website to empower people to capitalize on Obama's economic stimulus package for 2009. Checkout GrantsInfoCenter.com

Check out SchoolGrants2009.com

Few friends launched SchoolGrants2009.com, a subscription site which covers the education and grants related area of Obama's 2009 Stimulus plan. The site was launched over the weekend and feedback is appreciated!

Sharepoint Wiki

I had the recent distasteful experiencing of using Sharepoint Wiki after having a good time with mediawiki installs for a long time. I must say Windows XP and the Wiki act together like "Thing 1" and "Thing 2" in Dr Suess's Cat in the Hat! After a few mistrials I found that the Sharepoint wiki only worked on IE, similar to Exchange's Online access. For example I couldn't get the WYSIWYG editor to work with Chrome - which is blazingly fast compared to IE. Even basic editing didnt work and introduced some confusing letter overwring issue when you went back into the textboxes. Meanwhile on every second day these days it seems XP downloads a "reboot required" update from Microsoft.

I must say when is this mess going to end and we put a lock on or tame the Microsoft craziness? 

A review of Xobni

After having fully converted from Outlook to a Gmail user (where I started receiving corporate email as well) I had the misfortune of using MS Outlook again. To my surprise after 3 years, MS Outlook had not changed much - same old and still hard to use. The parts which appeared to have even become worse were searching through emails and typing in the email addresses in the To/Cc fields. After having used Gmail exclusively for 3 years I had been thoroughly pampered. 

I figure when I use Outlook my time is probably split as follows: creating new mail (25%), reading mail (25%) and searching for something in the mails (50%). I was delighted to find that a new tool called Xobni was recently released and it made search blazingly fast and easy to use. It installs itself in the right hand side panel of Outlook and provides a whole bunch of features out of which I found searching through my emails to be the most useful.

A review of Flypaper

I recently tried out Flypaper, a service for doing interactive flash presentations. My goal was to get a web demo together and I was exploring all kinds of things: tools like Camtasia, Demobuilder to people providing the complete package including the creatives and graphics. The demo was supposed to be 4-5 minutes long and in this case it was not a software product or web based service. So I quickly discovered that while Camtasia and other flash building options could be part of the solution, they would not be enough. I needed something which could do the old and familiar powerpoint effects like blurring, animation, movement etc and have voice over it. Flypaper would have been ideal: it is designed to target exactly what I need. However, I found the service less than expected. This is probably due to the fact that it is still fairly new. I found that only a small number of powerpoint effects were captured. The software was based on .NET. The company needs to consider a technology like Adobe AIR now. The download was fairly lengthy: .NET 3.5 was around 35 MB or so and this was followed by the Flypaper software. Animation was also not up to par. Overall, I still need to figure out how to do my demo, but it seems that software to convert powerpoint to flash exists and there is a way to get my audio embedded in the slide transitions as well. In fact Camtasia does it I think. I would look at Flypaper again in next few months - there is some promise there, but it is all about what direction the product takes since its still fairly primitive.

Is India the next hot destination for Telecom?

If this was not already true, it is now inevitable. TRAI (equivalent of FCC in India) has now opened up how VoIP based products and services can be sold to the Indian consumers. We should see the emergence of an Indian version of Vonage, the need for VoIP related CALEA products, E911, SBCs and other security products already built and made popular in the U.S market. This is a boon for the telecom market which is out of breadth these days. Checkout the article here.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

fōneathon™ - Campaigns by communities

Getting campaigns off the ground could not be more easier. Checkout foneathon - an online subscription service which make campaign management and calling dirt cheap and simple. Community volunteers can log on from their homes (consider the hot weather and high gas prices as the incentive) and collaborate in a managed campaign to collect donations or get people out to vote. The foneathon service is powered by 3CLogic's TAG technology (note that I am involved with that company) and comes with full reporting and power/auto dialing features. TAGs are the new way to do telephony and other real time apps without heavy duty and expensive server resources in the network. The same technology is also used to power the Obelyx solution targeted towards more traditional contact center solutions available on a subscription model.

Update: Full Press Release is online now.

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3CLogic Powers KCG Call Centers with Predictive Dialing

This press release went out today regarding the Obelyx service which is powered by 3CLogic's TAG technology. KCG was able to go live using the Obelyx on demand service for several of its campaigns without an infrastructural changes. Obelyx comes bundled with standard expected features like leads management, analytics etc, but delivered in a more Web 2.0 model. For example, all reports are built using Adobe Flex real time charts. All agent nodes are configurable in real time from a management account which can be operated from anywhere by signing on to an online account. Call dialing performs much better since it minimizes unnecessary call transfers, clicks and call holds which irritate customers.

Here is the press release

The fate of RIAs

RIA or Rich Internet Apps is another name for Web based applications delivered over the browser or stand alone applications which are cross platform much like today's browsers are. The technology wars are beginning to rage now in this area with big giants like Adobe, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft each coming out with their products and packages to solve this problem. First of all I think in this war users are the ones to benefit at all times. Chances are more than one technology will emerge as winner here as it frequently happens over the web. Interperability is less of a concern here since it involves mostly front end technologies which do not have too much of a back end integration and almost all use web services (XML/SOAP) on the back. Lets take a look at what the players are here and then look at the main differences in the approaches and current capabilities:

1) Adobe Flash/AIR
2) Google Gears
3) Yahoo! BrowserPlus
4) Microsoft Silverlight
5) SproutCore

There are a couple of comparison points to use: the technology they use, penetration potential, multimedia capabilities. Lets start with the big points first: SproutCore - a relatively unknown framework is now backed by Apple who want to use it on the iPhone . It is an open source framework which uses javascript. There are few other javascript frameworks used to deliver web 2.0 apps which are quite popular as well (like prototype, Scriptaculous etc) but SproutCore is the only one on par with RIAs it seems. From a support standpoint, any Javascript framework is already highly penetrated since it is supported by today's browsers and could possibly enjoy the same success as Flash if they deliver on features. Note that SproutCore competes more with Flash than Google Gears which is also open source and based on javascript. The main difference is that Gears installs SQLite (which allows it to work offline). This makes its application space similar to Adobe AIR instead of Adobe Flash. AIR is a separate runtime which uses SQLite as well. Microsoft Silverlight is a plugin on the other hand, competing more with Flash than with AIR or Gears. However it is proprietary, requires a download and possibly will have huge penetration issues. It also doesn't compete well with Flash when it comes to features. For example, Flash 9 supports H.264 and Flash 10 supports speex (open source voice codec) which I believe will enormously increase the number of applications built with Flash. A company called Ribbit builds a cool Flash based phone which integrates with their back end infrastructure as well. Real time voice is not possible with any of the other Flash alternatives to this day. Another great example is recording your video from the PCs embedded camera directly from the browser - that's possible only with Flash today I believe (requires MX server). All this is bound to change this year. I think Flash will face stiff competition from SproutCore, especially on the iPhone. Silverlight and Yahoo! Browser plus technologies may fade away or evolve into AIR competitors but they need to move fast.

Comparing Video Monetization startups

In the past 1-2 years, quite a few companies have started in the valley targeting monetization of Internet Videos. I am not talking about destination sites like YouTube here, but companies which are building technology or services for other destination sites having video content which they wish to monetize. Few examples I looked at (there are many more including Maven which was acquired by Yahoo in the beginning part of the year): Brightcove, Ooyala, Delve and Move. It is worthwhile to investigate how these companies are each solving the problem with a different solution twist.

First, lets see what is important to the customers (Content sites). A content site wants to see its users become repeat users and it wants to be able to monetize the visits. Everything else is simply an unnecessary detail in this equation. For users to become repeat visitors, it is all about experience and the quality of the content. Assuming the latter is not in question, there is still a lot to be figured out in giving the best possible experience to the end user. This experience depends on the media player and the network over which media delivered to the user (which determines buffering, bandwidth, resolution etc). Move Networks has taken an interesting approach here by building their own player and possibly choosing a player platform different from what the majority of web uses (Flash). Brightcove, the one which is the most advanced of these four appears to hasve reinvented itself a few times it seems but they have a feature rich platform. Both Brightcove and Move have taken huge investments as well (about 100M each). Ooyala and Delve on the other hand are more nimble and flexible (with less money gone in as well < 10M). Ooyala intends to revolutionize how and what kinds of ads are shown to the users while Delve's focus is to try look inside the video's audio part for rich information which can be matched to the ads. Both models try to get the user engaged before showing a relevant ad - something which Move and Brightcove don't do it seems.

More later.