Amazing Ideas and Worst Mistakes

Flash mob robs wisteria 7-11!

2011-08-16T20:45:00.000-05:00

I heard today from a friend that a flash mob organized over the internet using tweets robbed a Maryland 7-11. This seems really a dumb thing to do considering all of these folks are caught on video. I am not sure what signal are they trying to send here... Check this out -

This happened on the Maryland/DC Metro Line

2010-08-19T22:29:00.000-05:00

This is the metro line I take everyday. Usually it ends up being a boring, unhappening ride but occasionally a drunk or psycho gets on the train and entertains everyone. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I missed this particular service. Check out the video.

Checkout my new blog

2010-08-15T00:53:00.001-05:00

Finally, having battled with SEO, I am putting my thoughts together in this new blog. Hopefully I will have the time and energy and the prodding of few smart people to keep it going here :).

If you are in the Atlanta area, call on my brother's new Handyman biz

2010-08-15T00:34:00.000-05:00

Especially if you are commercial - a hotel, office, building or industrial enterprise needing facility management maintenance work, he is offering some really good deals to sign you up as customer at this point. The company - Crisis Solutions of Georgia has a good deal of experience in this kind of maintenance work. Especially pools, large scale equipment etc. If you own a home and have regular handyman work, you may want to give Crisis Solutions of Georgia a shot as well. Tell them I sent you there and get a discount!

Fluent News: Best free News app on the iPhone

2010-07-07T21:26:00.000-05:00

I have tried several free news apps on the iPhone. The USA Today application was definitely the pioneer among the news apps which a lot of applications have copied or adapted from. The other onesI tried: Fox, ABC, NPR and a no brand version - Fluent News. The last one has turned out to be the best one for the following reasons: it collects the stories from multiple sources (so it has the most content of any other apps), the editor puts all the related stories together and sometimes when I want to find more, I click on those and the app downloads the news stories upfront which means after the application is loaded, it still operates after internet access is gone (which is why I love to read it on the train)...

OS4 and iPhone 3G

2010-07-07T21:19:00.000-05:00

My experience with OS4 upgrade on the iPhone 3G has been devastating so far. I think with this upgrade Apple may have released something which users can misconfigure in a way that makes the applications really slow. Most of the time I am reading news or mail, my phone has now become unresponsive. Several clicks or attempts to scroll the window down are met with tough resistance almost as though the screen has become insensitive to my touch. I am planning to spend some time tomorrow to find out what kind of tuning I can do on the phone to make it faster and more responsive...

Can't install new software on windows due to "Installation in progress"?

2010-07-07T16:14:00.000-05:00

Frustrated as I was, I happened to kill some installation process on my PC. Unfortunately this sent Windows into a death spiral as after that it refused to install or uninstall anything else. So much for concurrency. I guess I had a "feature lock up" scenario. Googling on this gave me 20 different answers for a variety of instances when this happens with Office and versions of MS operating systems. Finally what worked was this. Open up the services and then disable the Windows installer service and enable it again. That did the trick. It didnt make any sense to me since I had already cleaned up a registry entry for "In Progress" for the installer, but it did work...

Trojan.BHO - whew!

2010-07-06T16:09:00.001-05:00

Over the July 4th weekend, my computer got infected with this spyware/virus. The behavior was interesting. It indicated that my computer was infected and that Add/Remove programs was disabled. Then it prompted me to buy Anti Virus software called AV Security Suite. When it repeatedly did so and I couldn't get rid of the messages, something was clearly up and this time it was different. There were numerous issues in all:

I couldn't run the Remove Applications tool from the Control Panel.
On clicking on any google or yahoo results, my browser would be taken to an unsolicited (but respectable :) website. Typically these sites would list the AV Security Suite solution as something I should buy.

Now its been few hours and I think I have successfully eliminated all the files related to this attack. I have some notes here which could help anyone else having this issue.

The first phase of fixes made by Malwarebytes Anti-Malware software worked really well: it deleted most of the major Trojan files on the first run. However the second and third runs revealed more files to delete. This was quite odd since it seemed like the virus was self-generating or something. Eventually I was still left with a sporadic redirection problem: Both Yahoo and Google search results would get redirected to arbitrary sites. Now these would be random sites. And the problem would kick in every now and then. It seemed like there was something slithery still sneaking around on the computer.

Then I tried a whole bunch of other software:

CCleaner: This cleaned up my entire PC, my Startup Menu etc., Everything except my Desktop I think. It didnt help with the virus at all. However it did leave me feeling clean on the PC ;)
Spybot Search & Destroy: Again, this software found some low risk cookies and files. No big deal. I am sure by tomorrow these files would find their way into my PC by tomorrow.
Super AntiSpyware. Again same results as the Spybot.
HijackThis. This was the tool which did it and I found that a normal user may find it very hard to use. In just a few seconds, it exposed a few settings for the BHO registry entries that were causing my browser to behave as it was. And deleting them was a quick snap as well. None of the other tools found/exposed what HijackThis (made by TrendMicro) did. Good job!

Overall the experience was eye-opening. My PC came with Vipre Enterprise software suite and that also was not any help at all. It couldnt find the bad registry entries and it was not able to detect/delete a lot of the files found by the other tools.

I feel that since my last dealing with a computer virus, nothing has really changed. Its only the players which has changed. The state of the industry is still the same - there is no single fix-all as maybe the viruses keep evolving...

Update: Unfortunately my fixes didn't fix it all! The PC is still suffering from tabs or redirects at random to unsolicited websites. This affects only searches done on yahoo and google. On clicking on a search result, sometimes (like the third or fourth time) I would be redirected to a bunch of websites opening one after another. Luckily none of them are offensive. Pure junk and inconvenient.

Tried the following today:

Microsoft Security Essentials: Piece of junk. Just like other microsoft software, this one is buggy and has its own problems. Couldnt even connect and download its database from microsoft website.
Prevx. This has seemed to work and it did detect a virus (and it was the only one) when my browser was opening random websites. It immediately killed my firefox and said it cleaned my hosts file. I havent had the problem since. Lets see. My fingers and everything else I can cross is crossed ;)

Jawbone Icon -- kool or what?

2010-07-06T15:16:00.000-05:00

After doing a research on a lot of Bluetooth headsets for my phone, I finally picked the Icon and have been testing it out past week. At this point, it still is standing out as the best gadget I bought in the past few months. If you too are looking for a bluetooth headset with A2DP support, please need to read on...

The Jawbone Icon is one of the newer headsets in the Jawbone family and it comes with support for listening music as well - and it is very convenient and easy to wear. When you look at other options to hear music you come across a lot of headsets offering stereo option. If you need superior quality music you may be better off with a wired headset. Bluetooth may not be for you. Among the Bluetooth headsets there are a few stereo options as well with a detachable second headset.If you follow the keep it simple philosophy, the Jawbone offers a pretty good option. Couple of cool features attracted me to Jawbone -- its option to have voice announcements, easy redial, uploading new firmware (which is how I got the A2DP version on it). It fits great in my ear and has probably 6-8 different fitting options. The music quality is also pretty good so overall its a good package.

What's in a job...

2010-07-04T23:26:00.000-05:00

If you read Andy Grove's article in the recent issue of Business Week, he does leave you wondering about what is going to happen to America's superiority in the area of innovation. I think most of what he says is right. But maybe not all of it. For example, the U.S still reigns supreme in design innovation. The iPhone is one example. I can probably say the same for a lot of software products. However the U.S has lost significant speed in terms of implementation (and manufacturing industry as Andy claims in his article). I feel the science of implementation is being perfected in Asia beyond what it ever was in the U.S. Scaling and Quality share the same commentary. The U.S has become a land of ideas. However we must remember that ideas are dime a dozen and easy to copy. One out of thousand ideas ever succeed in the marketplace and ideas by themselves never are a competitive advantage. In fact most simple ideas are improvements thought upon current technology and are built on the foundation of knowing the implementation or manufacturing side of the equation. In the near future, most of this innovation is going to come from outside since nothing is made here in the U.S except needles and specialty screws...

What do you hate the iPhone for?

2010-07-04T23:10:00.000-05:00

I have begun to hate my iPhone. At least one in a while. It seems to mimic my Windows PC at least a few times a day - fails to deliver when I most need it or depend on it once held the promise to. Have your iPhone made it harder for you to make that phone call or receive one? Mine has. Perhaps when it is downloading email at the time an incoming call is coming. I try to pick up the call and cannot. The new OS4 on my second generation iPhone has made is very slow I think.Its possible that just like a windows PC, it allows users to trip and make mistakes which they come to regret big time.

I think even some apps on the iPhone are sooo slow - not sure how they got to be approved. Try using the redbox application on the iPhone. It takes so long to start that I can almost whiz past 2-3 redbox locations and be home.

I can probably learn and tweak my iPhone config or unload some apps or decrease the frequency at which my apps fetch data but given we are dealing with Apple here - I question why do we need to do it? Why is it that the user interface cannot prioritize where and what I am clicking on v/s what is running in the background on the iPhone?

It all seems so Windows to me. All over again. So stupid ... ;)

Is Chrome OS going to be supported by IT folks?

2009-11-29T02:15:00.000-05:00

Just a random thought I had - you must have heard that the open source Chrome OS (based on linux kernel) is going to make the web live waay too much easy. Its targeted towards the Windows users. I believe most users if given a choice would dump Windows OS. However most IT folks would not. I am sure that Chrome would be very good at handling web security but it may still create a havoc on enterprise security policies. If Google really wants to help users, then it first needs to enroll the IT teams at enterprises...

Finally cleaned up my twitter account

2009-11-13T23:12:00.001-05:00

For the whole last year my twitter account got accidentally linked to one of the websites we were working on. Using the twitter API, each headline post on the site was popping up on my twitter account. I didnt notice until I had like 800 posts. To clean it up I discovered lots of APIs and quick frameworks which required download, compile etc.

This one was a complete program which did the job in 5 minutes. Oh, I am so grateful there is software to kill other software :).

One of the weird things I noticed was that while cleaning up you could see that the program would clean up all the posts and then some remining ones would appear in few seconds on the twitter page as I was refreshing it. Very clever indeed twitter...!

Sharepoint Wiki

2008-10-24T22:57:00.002-05:00

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

2008-10-14T21:10:00.002-05:00

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

2008-10-06T21:01:00.002-05:00

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?

2008-08-19T14:29:00.001-05:00

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

2008-08-06T22:27:00.002-05:00

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.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

3CLogic Powers KCG Call Centers with Predictive Dialing

2008-07-24T22:31:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-07T00:30:00.006-05:00

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

2008-07-07T00:21:00.001-05:00

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.

A Microsoft without Gates

2008-06-30T22:51:00.001-05:00

I think Bill Gate's departure from Microsoft into the world of Philanthropy has become a much talked about topic today. Some very smart decisions made by Gates at the forming stages of the company gave shape to how Microsoft has evolved in the last ten years or so. Unfortunately (or fortunately) Gates proved to be too slow for the "internet bulldozer" which continues to make more inroads and forays into Microsoft's plush green lawns.

My prediction is that Gate's is just taking a break. Microsoft is going to continue to stumble and give it five or at most ten years, Gates will be back at its helm and this time he will open source windows ;)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

SeeqPod - one of the best media search engines

2008-06-30T22:40:00.001-05:00

If you haven't understood the power of media search engines, try out SeeqPod and you will understand. I think with the explosion of content on the internet, it is no longer the case that a search engine like Google which mixes textual search results with media works. If I am searching for an audio or video, I want something specialized like SeeqPod. With the widespread penetration of Broadband, multimedia phones and Flash technology, video is now the new king of the internet.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

OpenTable

2008-06-30T10:44:00.001-05:00

If you are a frequent visitor to restaurants taking reservations, OpenTable might be of interest to you. Techcrunch recently reported on this briefly - the site seems to have taken 70M reservations on 8000 restaurants which is pretty impressive. I visited the site and briefly browsed through it. It seemed to me that what it needs is a widget instead of being a sole destination site. The widget would allow OpenTable to offer reservation services on popular review sites like Washingtonion or Restaurants.com. The problem of course is that not all restaurants support the OpenTable integration, but that should be easy to check in software and collect data on rather than skip as a service. Overall, I think this can grow very fast in metro areas and depending on ease of use this can even rake in new users who traditionally are not used to making reservations before they go and restaurants who traditionally have shunned the idea of allowing reservations. To prevent users from misusing or abusing the service, the restaurants should be able to give some kind of rating back to the user which can help in raising the comfort level of restaurants who are not part of the OpenTable system.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Search Revolution

2008-06-24T14:46:00.001-05:00

The search engine revolution continues with visual search being the killing application. I previously blogged about the Pogo Browser from AT&T which was a "Visual Browser". TechCrunch reported today about SearchMe - a starup which gives the search results in a visual fashion.

The question becomes whether visualization will become part of the operating system (like Mac) and the browser (which is like an internet operating system) or if every application on the internet is going to have to implement the visual appearance? For example, SearchMe is having to re-index the entire web and improve the ordering of their results etc. Now how much time does that take to get better than Google? Isn't visualization simply a tool which should be part of the OS/Browser?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Some ideas keep getting born with different twists

2008-06-24T00:32:00.001-05:00

A while ago I blogged about P2P lending (Kiva). Kiva deals with microfinance. Recently I noticed two new websites (which probably have existed for a while) dealing with college financing for students. Both Greennote and Fynanz are websites which allow students to contact family and friends network to finance their education. The business model of the sites is simple - fees and cuts. There are lots of differences though Greennote's loans are unsecured. In other words, the lender must somehow believe in the borrower. If the borrower defaults, Greennote claims they will let loose their collections services on him/her and report to the credit bureau. Fynanz on the other hand provides some guarantees on the loans and also uses the student GPA in determining this guarantee as well. I think this method by default allows the borrower and loaner to be distant relatives compared to closer ones on Greennote.

If all this was not enough, Lending Club offers yet another venue for P2P lending. The rates are higher compared to student loans on the other two sites and normal people can get a loan there. Lending Club also offers a loan portfolio against lending to specific lenders which tends to reduce the risk taken on by the borrower and does not offer any guarantees otherwise.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The Pogo Browser

2008-06-23T11:09:00.002-05:00

Recently I tried out the new Pogo Browser from AT&T. Frankly, the browser seems great. It seems inspired a lot from user interfaces on mobile phones. However, at this point, it just doesn't seem to have enough of a delta over standard browsers like Firefox or IE. Though the Help button doesn't indicate Pogo is based on Mozilla, I think the software is based on Mozilla and the standard Firefox plug ins will work with Pogo as well.

It is quite possible Pogo's feature set will get absorbed by one of these big players. As a side note, I noticed it is as slow to work with as IE and seems to freeze my PC a few times.

At this point, my vote for a new browser goes to Flock. I will be re-evaluate Pogo again at a later date...

Pogo can be downloaded from here.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Do not waste time with this "Smart Remote"!

2008-06-23T10:03:00.004-05:00

We recently got this smart remote made by Logitech. Its called "Harmony One" and apparently its the best of a series of similar remotes made by the same company. First, before starting the bashing, I must say that I have liked previous products from Logitech (esp webcams) and when I read about this remote and how it could simplify my life and get rid of all the nasty keyboards I have (around 4 right now) in my family room - I though it was a great idea. So I went ahead and got it. I configured it using my PC and everything was very impressive. The most notable feature was "Activities". The remote organized everything into groups of actions. For example, if I wanted to watch Cable, my TV had to be on a certain Output setting (e.g Video 5) and the Stereo needed to be on and the Cable box needed to be on. If instead I wanted to watch a DVD, then my TV had to be on a separate output setting and the volume was controlled in a different way etc. It all looked very promising. When I gave it the model numbers as I hooked it up to the PC, it recognized all of them and downloaded some device configurations for them. It looked very smart. However in a week's of use, I have found it very frustrating. In fact I have realized that it does not replace my four remotes, but instead complements them. So I now have five! So what was the problem?

The problem was that all these devices it was controlling have no reverse communication back with the remote. This broke a lot of things. For example, I would put a DVD into my DVD player and tell the remote "Watching DVD" is the activity. It would then switch on everything, put my TV, Stereo in the right setting, but it turned my DVD player off (since the remote only knows how to toggle the power and does not know if the DVD player is actually on). This meant that if the remote didnt know the set of activities I was doing before I start using it, then it would be perpetually confused. Unless I totally switch to doing everything with this remote - so to put a DVD in, I first have to ask the remote to watch DVD and then eject it and put a new one in - nothing would work properly. Also if the remote was not pointing at all devices directly and it missed out a single device (maybe something came in the middle - like my son's toy would be sitting in front of the DVD player), then also the remote would get confused. It was also impossible to control individual devices conveniently from the remote the same way the earlier remotes worked.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Flock to Flock! - A Smart Browser

2008-06-23T09:49:00.001-05:00

I have diteched IE since IE6 came out and have managed to use Firefox 100% of the time w/o facing any issues on the internet. To add to Firefox's praise (before I trash it a bit :) the browser has continued to improve leaps and bounds with faster start up and operation and it simply feels a lot more smoother to use than IE in daily operation. However, recently it started misbehaving on my personal laptop: I think it was something related to Gmail and Google Gears which causes the browser to malfunction: links would stop working. For exampe, if I click on a link in an open page, it simply won't take me to the new page 5 out of 10 times. It was just odd. Restarting wouldn't help as well. Killing a tab or an open firefox window here and there would be my short term solutions, but eventually I would narrow down to just one window or tab. Even IE would stop working at that point. I noticed a few times that if I didn't open Gmail at all in the browser or did not use Google desktop, it did appear to stop the problems or delay them for a long time.

So I have been on the lookout for some alternative to Firefox (though only on this PC) and when I heard about Flock, I was enthused with new energy! I have downloaded it now and the one thing I must say about my initial experience is that Flock is a "Smart Browser". Its a smart window to the smart world out there. It leaves IE and Firefox way behind (though that may be temporary). My advice: Try it. Its based on Mozilla so it is only better than Firefox I would assume and it makes accessing websites with APIs (almost all of the popular sites today have APIs now) a lot easy and convenient with its single button operations of doing things within the browser itself (For example, I am making this post from Flock itself w/o going on to the blogger site).

To try flock, go here

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Cisco - the arms dealer?

2008-05-21T10:24:00.002-05:00

In my earlier post which had a brief mention of how Cisco helped the Chinese erect the Great Firewall or China, I got to know first hand myself how a simple business deal can have far fetched human rights issues - frankly a lot of inconvenience caused to the Chinese people since I am sure they have found their way around this firewall aready ;) However, it seems there is more to that. Cisco, Google and Yahoo! were recently at a Senate hearing for answering questions regarding how U.S companies are helping the Chinese government continue to improve and build this firewall even further. Even if Cisco is involved, what if it stops - I think the need will be fulfilled by Huawei.

What we need to do is instead of focusing on the companies selling equipment and services to the Chinese givernment, focus on the companies, products and services which help the Chinese people get better access to information outside this firewall and make these easily accessible in a way that the government cannot stop them. Some form of secure P2P technology would help.

Google Health is here

2008-05-20T22:12:00.002-05:00

It seems Google health was launched today and if you haven't checked it out yet, be sure to check out the FAQ and About areas. The service is completely free to users as well as providers which is great. Question is whether users will trust it and use it as they use other Google services. My take it that Google is going to find it a hard ride unless they change a few things around:

1) The service is completely free. Google claims there will be no ads on the service as well. Now that sounds scary. The information they deal with is precious and no one pays? I think this raises a lot of concerns. Google should explain how the infrastructure is funded and the business model clearly (however indirect it is). I think this gives confidence to users that the information they give to Google is precious to Google as well. After all I don't want to hand off my records to someone who claims they will send it free to my doctor and store it. I want to make sure this someone is incentivized to properly handle my records.

2) Ideally my medical records should not be linked to any personal information I have , even my emails. I think having all this online with a single provider is itself a very scary idea. Consider Google offers some DNA record storing service as well as part of this data. Identity thieves will have a party!

I think overall Google Health is very worthwhile for Google to invest time and money in. I think it is going to be challenging to entice users to simply open up their medical records to Google. I feel something more is required here to make us all feel safe and secure - surely Google is coming out with that in the next few months!

Powerful Utilities on the Web

2008-05-19T18:03:00.003-05:00

I was quite impressed with this demo on utility computing and Grids applied to web services now. Take a look at this demo for AppLogic from 3Tera. Similar services are offered by ServePath as well. These applications show how websites can be built and scaled over a cluster of computers. This is very powerful if you know how this is done today: Sites get started as single servers with standalone storage and a database. In all these cases, the architecture of the system is typically mapped to a physical setup. Here is how the story develops: after a large number of users or transactions, the scalability of the site and its architecture could become issues. Operation of the site, location of data centers, distribution of data all become expensive day to day issues.

Grids help you focus on application scalability and architecture as long as you can stick to a standard web server architecture template. Grids also use general purpose machines and hardware and really get you the best of worlds when it comes to virtualizaton and large deployments. Virtual web space has traditionally been the tool of small organizations or companies which don't want to have IT expertise in house for managing the website. Larger organizations have traditionally preferred to get dedicated machines. Grids change that - they allow large organizations to get the benefits of virtualization and outsourcing of physical hardware to the Grid provider.

Yet another social network, this time with Video

2008-05-19T16:41:00.002-05:00

Today I logged into a beta of Seesmic. A site which claims to do voice conversations. I think this kind of an application makes more sense either on Facebook/MySpace as an add-on app or work based on OpenIDs. I think the days are over of building friends networks over and over again unless something unique is carved from the network itself (cultural, language, tastes etc). The site uses Flash to record the video itself which really limits the size of the market. Consider the following: Till about 18 months back Dell Inspirons didn't have a mic and here we need all that and an embedded camera (I doubt people are going to hook up an external camera for recording videos for Seesmic or even if they do how long that kind of a user is sustainable for the site). Another problem is going to be scaling. Unlike YouTube, the videos in a social network setting are going to be one on one or targeted to smaller groups. Is there enough bang for buck for building a CDN for these videos? How long are people going to be on this site (since number of public videos is a relatively small percentage of what goes on at YouTube).

The best thing was the menu and the user interface on Seesmic. It was simply awesome. However I found the colors were too dark. Also it crashed Firefox which was not that great since almost all my work happens on Firefox these days in about 20-30 tabs!

I recommend everyone to try out Seesmic. I think it has a great and interesting future!

Stretching the utilities of DNA Matching

2008-05-19T16:23:00.002-05:00

Don't get me wrong. I for one am all for utilizing whatever little benefits science and technology provide. However, this one is fishy: using DNA Matching to figure out a date... I think if people dated with the sole purpose of making babies then this makes perfect sense... Take a look at ScientificMatch.com. The site lists six benefits of using their service and only the last two seem relevant: fertility and healthier children.

Here is why I think the idea is fishy: I think DNA matching is too deep. It eliminates uncertainty from the matching process. If your partner has similar interests as you have what is the probability of both of you discovering new ones? How much of your partner's traits should be common and how much complimentary according to DNA Matching? To what extent can you take this philosophy - would you extend this to your friends as well? Maybe business partners? After all don't you want to stay away from people who mock you or are jealous of you or intend harm? What if your business partner lies to you? I don't think DNA Match is the answer to all these...

I would love to see some empirical data or research which proves that all the couples which have had long term relationships do have a good DNA match according to the sites criteria. For the benefit of their own children, we all can force the site owner to do that - can't we?

Robert H. Smith and others close their China Operations

2008-05-16T09:25:00.002-05:00

It is becoming a long list of B-Schools now which have figured out that the China B-education market is not that big. On top of that government red-tape is high which prevents students from easily coming on board and its hard to take money out of China. Ah... The realities kick in. While the Chinese can be shrewd, it is hard to replicate education industry the same way hardware and software industries have been replicated in China. Long term, this can be a huge setback for China. It takes longer for the Chinese to come out, get educated in a Western school and go back to China. Maybe, it is easier if the government has a concerted and coordinated effort to do this in some planned fashion. To read more, click here.

If you have seen this error, you must have been to China!

2008-05-14T09:04:00.002-05:00

Chinese internet security policy is very interesting and this article gets into all what the authorities employ to keep access blocked or inconvenient and keep the fear level up inside the country when it comes to internet access. There are some key points to note in this article. Its possible to get around the Chinese internet firewalls by using encryption and VPNs which happen to be common. But the side affect of this whole firewalling and tracking down miscreants is that people are wary of reaching out of their own country. This has led to rapid internal market development, something which did not happen in countries like India. Its almost like giving a child steroids to grow and become smarter. There are always side affects as most critics will complain, but I am not sure if they cannot be rectified by simply lifting these barriers in 10 years!

Another point to note was that the U.S company Cisco actually helped the Chinese erect this modern firewall of mirrors (lawful inspection of packets) - an example of technology affecting lots of human lives and going unnoticed...

If you haven't taken a look at WiMax, you will now...

2008-05-14T08:21:00.002-05:00

TV has been always an area of innovation. People want more and better all the time! While this used to include viewing experience and content in most cases, now its getting diversified. Its also about getting TV into places where it has not gone before! Take a look at this post on wired and the company USTelematics, which I think is the most innovative out of all mentioned in the article. Apart from the technology, their marketing and introduction model appears to be more disruptive than the others which are quite impressive as well. Frankly, to me IPTV has appeared to be just a technology change and its quite boring compared to what mobile TV has to offer - something truly unique and worthwhile to the consumers.

The thin line between Social and Unsocial

2008-05-13T15:10:00.002-05:00

A recent article in NY Times piqued my interest and it talks about a thing or two I have wondered about as well: There are many different social networking sites and at each site something unique is offered to the users. The question is what makes a social networking site succeed? What do people really need when it comes to filling this aspect of their 24 hour day?

To read more, visit this NY Times site.

Is $1M enough to block P2P

2008-05-12T22:54:00.002-05:00

One of the hot topics today on the blogger world is the announcement from Procera about an 40 Gbps monster machine which can perform DPI of all traffic (in and out of the ISP network), in particular P2P traffic. The detection of P2P traffic is done by examining packet headers so this method has a good deal of probability to work for encrypted P2P traffic as well.

The machine costs $1M. Assume each P2P Video flow generates a 1Mbps stream. This means you can have 40,000 users on each machine. That is $25 of CAPEX for each user or about $1 per month on a two year basis. So is there going to be a P2P surcharge for all of us on high speed connections ? :)

Do we really need an alternative to Craigslist?

2008-05-08T18:07:00.003-05:00

Ebay launched Kijiji to compete with craigslist. This was launched a while back and as I heard failed to secure any market share away from craigslist which continues to grow and become more popular. I guess Ebay stepped up their marketing recently about Kijiji. So the real question is if Kijiji is going to work. What's the problem with craigslist which is a huge network already? What is new or good about Kijiji that craigslist doesn't already have?

My view is that craigslist has done a great job till now and its network is huge. Kijiji has to have some remarkable differences which offer value to end users for them to start participating in both networks and eventually pick one.

An interesting article on Craigslist and Ebay reveals some facts: Ebay owns 28% of craigslist and has a board seat. I figure they decided they could make more money at it and thus created an alternative site. I think now they should give up that board seat. First of all, they should have tried to buy craigslist outright. The article also claims they are a market leader in Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan. Frankly after browsing Kijiji.com, I didnt think it was that great yet. I think it needs a lot of time to succeed in the U.S market.

Another interesting piece of data: craigslist is a team of 25 people generating a yearly 80-100M in revenue. That is simply brilliant. My suggestion would be the founder Craig Newmark should sell craigslist to Ebay's competitors for $500M and get out while he can. Things may only go downhill from here.

Here is a link to the NY Times article

Review of Grid Connector

2008-05-08T17:49:00.002-05:00

I went ahead and downloaded the Grid Connector from Grid Networks. See my earlier post on this company and the wonderful idea. Here is how I see it works. After downloading the program installed a piece of software on my PC which now runs as GridAlerts.exe and GridcastSvc.exe. Apparently these communicate to the site cdn.gridnetworks.com to download the actual video files. After the video is downloaded (or started to download) it is shown using the standard Windows Media Player or the default player for wmv files. There is some jitter and buffering sometimes but you can get some good videos from the company's website to check them out.

BTW, they do need to fix their installer which restarted my Firefox w/o giving me any warnings (thereby destroying all open windows momentarily pissing me off). The software requires a download which is really not a good thing once Adobe targets the same application using Flash. Hopefully Grid can solve that by then!

Grids rule over P2P

2008-05-08T17:18:00.002-05:00

I published an article on Grids a few weeks back on TMC and few days back I was pointed to Grid Networks by a friend. I was quite intrigued by the idea - CDNs based on Grids. The idea seems a bit like Bit-Torrent P2P, but downloads are backed by a grid infrastructure in the network. For someone reading this for the first time, the question is - what is the difference between P2P, managed P2P and Grids? Grids represent an evolution of managed P2P where information processing is distributed and a lot of distributed algorithms are in place. Telephony Grids represent the same kind of evolution over P2P where nodes in the network and PCs in the enterprise together combine resources to offer coordinated access to the system and use general purpose hardware to pull off some massive call processing.

The main difference between Telephony Grids and Grid Networks CDN is that the former is about real-time conversations whether it is Voice or Video and a CDN is a better fit to distribute recorded media.

Twitter and Ruby on Rails

2008-05-02T22:50:00.002-05:00

Well is Ruby on Rails an amazing idea? A lot of websites (and this includes twitter) employ Ruby on Rails as a method to quickly get a Web 2.0 site up and functional. As it turns out, there can be scalability issues with it and there are a lot of ifs and buts which go along with it. Take a look here....

A comparison of Referral Ad Networks

2008-04-18T22:53:00.002-05:00

I started a comparison between several referral ad networks around six months back and one of the things I was interested in concluding was - how good the Google adsense machine is when compared to non pay per click ad networks. At least for bloggers I noticed that Google adsense provided a much better return on real estate compared to: Amazon Associates, WidgetBucks.COM, ShoppingAds.COM and DoubleClick Performics (now part of Google). This is especially true if you just want to minimally manage your blogs and wish to only write posts about topics you really like or care about. I still haven't determined the following: which ads offer the best returns - text, image or video. What positions are the best: top center, top left or top right. It seems that top center and a text/image ad works the best when it comes to CTR.

Pubmatic

2008-02-23T21:04:00.003-05:00

I recently came across Pubmatic, which is really a cool concept: Manage all your ad accounts in a single place. As a publisher, a lot of people realize the following: there are a lot of accounts to manage, the ads don't look the same but its good to diversify anyway. Pubmatic solves this problem by allowing a publisher to source ads from wherever they want, make all the ads look consistent and managed from a single account. However, I don't like the smell of what may be their business model - charge pubishers for this service and here is why there may be something wrong...

1) For publishers who are extremely successful, I would find it hard to believe that they are sourcing ads from a large number of ad networks. A few maybe. But they know what ads work and some of them will have their own ads posted. I don't think these will be pubmatic customers.

2) For publishers who are small, revenue is hard to come by or those who are publishing content as a hobby and not really looking at it from a cash flow perspective, its again not very interesting. Why? Most wouldn't want to pay a share of their measly income to pubmatic. Others who are hobbyists won't have too many accounts anyway so don't need pubmatic.

3) For publishers who are trying to figure the revenue part out and are playing around with different ads, this makes sense. But I dont see any stickiness in the pubmatic concept which is going to carry on. So I don't know why a publisher will stick with pubmatic.

Bottom line - the idea is good and cool. Needs more work from a product standpoint - what makes it stick? The company also needs to work on the business model to see how they can get network effects working for them.

Pubmatic's home page has more information.

Telephony Grids

2008-02-22T17:56:00.003-05:00

Here is a recent article I published on the web on Telephony Grids and their applications in contact centers, specifically specialized tasks like Predictive Dialing which is a server and hardware heavy operation. Most people not deeply familiar with the contact or call center industry do not know what a predictive dialer is, so this article is quite useful. It is also notable that it is not easy to design a telephony network which can systematically support predictive dialing. For more details, checkout my article here.

Operate your own White Labeled ôBelyx Service in a matter of minutes!

2008-02-13T23:50:00.004-05:00

I recently posted a presentation on how a telecom carrier can start selling and marketing a value added contact center solution to his customers simply by creating a retail website and a support staff to service calls. We have made it so easy for someone to offer such a service with almost no complex setup of servers or hardware. Checkout the PPT:

| View | Upload your own

Reducing the dependency on SIP Servers

2008-02-13T14:17:00.005-05:00

A lot of times I notice that a perfectly good voip service is going down the drain - why? Because they are either spending too much on stuff which doesn't matter anymore or too less on building value. My mission is to help people understand how they can bridge into the Web 2.0 world with their voice technology or services. The first set of slides I came up with are posted here:

| View | Upload your own

Compare the contenders against their Technology positions

2008-02-10T23:31:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama takes the most mature and savvy position on Technology. Compare Hillary, McCain and Obama here.

The rise of the machines

2008-02-09T00:20:00.001-05:00

I previously commented on Ebay's change of strategy and how that could be bad for the company. By doing this Ebay is allowing its brain to overrule its heart. The finance dudes and the accountants are running the company... And we all know what happens after a while of that going on. I think Ebay is going to make a lot of money in the short term by doing this, but it is going to loose to a new entrant who will figure out how to do things right - especially ones which Ebay is abandoning.

For more about what is cooking at Ebay, read here.

Some candidness from Skype

2008-02-09T00:15:00.000-05:00

Lee Dryburgh posted this excellent interview of Jonathan Christensen of Skype where Jonathan details some of Skype's roadmap in the coming years. We are all excited. However, I have the following note for Jonathan which I was unable to post as a comment on this website:

Skype is a living and impressive proof of what is achievable with VoIP on the open internet. They perfected VQ and ease of use. For SIP, like John says - the hardest problem to solve is NAT Traversal. However, once that is done you can do things using SIP which you cannot even think of using Skype. Another important difference is time to market. The industry’s SIP maturity helps cut that down in a major way. I guess in a nutshell, Skype has been very successful in the mass market, but that does not help the rest of the industry which wants to use VoIP on the internet to build whatever it is that they want to. NAT Traversal is hard, but not intractable. So my guess is that these other islands of VoIP providers who are doing the impossible using SIP will multiply in numbers and connect to each other. Maybe Skype will look like an island at some point and maybe it will be a big one…

BTW, I really appreciate John’s candidness on some of the VQ roadmap of Skype. My sincere thanks to him.

You can get the interview post here.

Interesting sites. Check 'em out

2008-02-07T09:42:00.000-05:00

Ah. There is no end to this. These sites just keep coming up. Who says re-inventing the wheel doesn't work if you think you can have a different hub cap embedded in it or make it a different color! There is no standard out there...!

These two sites speak for themselves:

Dealipedia - a place where M&A/VC deal details are presented in a Wiki format. EVeryone loves a Wiki and looks like the VCs didn't have one. That's a great hubcap..!

The Daily Political.com - as if politico didn't exist. This is another wiki style twist.

Don't get cosy Mr Schmidt!

2008-02-07T09:30:00.000-05:00

This is a funny post about Eric Schmidt's dislike and paranoia of Microsoft, partly because he is a technologist and partly because he has been through it before. We totally understand the paranoia and perhaps its true: Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo! may be bad for all of us, but that is if we assume Eric is incompetent. My challenge to him is to take on Microsoft in the real way and not play games. My heart goes out with Google and the fact that the open internet will triumph at the end, but I would love to see the real battle played out. For all you know, in ten years, this may spell the end of Microsoft.

Checkout the post here.

Googly Games

2008-02-04T12:03:00.000-05:00

How interesting would it be for Google that instead of Microsoft buying Yahoo!, some private VC firm with neither brains nor strategy nor muscle would instead back Yahoo! That would solidify Google's dominance for years to come.

This is clearly corporate Google speaking. And they are concerned. Scared I would say. The combination of Yahoo! and Microsoft would mean more options to people. This would keep consumers in control and Google on the heels to keep innovating.

Google - what have you done lately? Get back to work! Let the free markets figure it out... After all the people of United States are smart and democracy works.

Such a move could blow up bad PR for Google...

Read more here.

Here is a quick update: Microsoft is opening up a Bell Labs like research facility in the Boston area, just to compete w/ Google ;)

Another great article from NY Times on why the markets love how this will boost competition.

Downloading online video?

2008-02-03T23:17:00.000-05:00

There are a dozen sites I have heard people talking about for downloading videos from Break.COM, YouTube or Google Videos. I recently came across this one which seems pretty decent and popular in India. You are welcome to try it out... VideoDL.

The year of the YouTube Clones

2008-02-03T21:58:00.000-05:00

Ah, the year of the YouTube clones continues. I like this one I saw on Desi (Indian) videos. Clearly the Indian market is highly capable of being uniquely served by sites such as VideoDubba and Orkut.

Here are a few other video sites I liked:

Sixer.tv and CricTv: for Cricket communities

Punjabitube for Punjabi music videos

Poverty Inspired Innovation: Babajob.com

2008-02-03T20:44:00.000-05:00

Social networks typically depend on people coming on their website, enjoing the experience and coming back again or referring the site to their friends. Here is a presentation by Master Marketeer Dave McLure on this topic:

| View | Upload your own

However, Babajob is set to change the rules of the game. Founded in Banagalore by Sean Blagsvedt, this company aims to become the Linked-In for rural India to start with and then move on to other parts of the world. Most members of the social network are the poor who Sean says have till now found it hard to find good jobs precisely because they are not connected to people looking for them. A number of factors are playing in Sean's favor: India has a huge supply of poor people: drivers, maids, painters, gardeners etc and there is a high demand for them. Jobs also work based on word of mouth - India's hidden social network. There is also a study from Duke (which Sean says inspired him) that most poor people in the developing world are poor because they cannot connect with the opportunities available easily. It makes perfect sense for Babajob in growth economies in the developing world. The hard part is getting the poor who don't have access to PCs and laptops signed on to the social network's website. Clearly this didn't stop Sean from his goals. So how did he do it? Babajob pays people who photograph and put the poor looking for jobs on its website. It diverts part of the income it gets from people who end up hiring from Babajob to those who refer and put jobs on Babajob website. It also makes extended use of SMS which is widely used by rural India.

Read more about Babajob and see folks who are registered on the site here. Excellent article on Babajob at NY Times here.

Wii breaking into a new market?

2008-02-01T00:19:00.000-05:00

Ease of use. Ease of use. Ease of use.

I can vouch for what Seth Schiesel claims in this article. I have never played a PSP/XBox or PC game and last month I ended up playing Wii five times. It was addictive and I loved it. I can't say that I am begging to develop a love for video games though. Just Wii.

Its ease of use. This is causing a paradigm shift in the Video Game market which could potentially become a mass market as Seth claims. The main change Wii introduces is that Wii can be easily played by people of any age group and not just kids or game freaks (veterans).

Garmin Phone is here!

2008-02-01T00:12:00.000-05:00

Will it be the iPhone, Google phone or the Garmin Phone? They all have something cool about them. Nuviphone, from Garmin is a quad band GSM phone - in case you are wondering which carrier is it going to be. It won't be T-Mobile - I can take a quick guess. The phone will also compete with iPhone, which makes me wonder if it will be AT&T. Trouble is lurking... Stay tuned for third quarter of this year when the phone comes out.

Be safe with children

2008-02-01T00:03:00.000-05:00

I earlier blogged on Imbee - a children's social network website, more for kids 8-14. The company recently got into trouble for violation of child privacy. This is not unexpected - anything to do with Children on the Web is mired with trouble and this may just be the starting. The interesting thing to wonder is Imbee's business model. Kids don't buy anything online which means the website services have to have a paid model. Parents don't want their kids much to be online - as much as they can prevent it. I think parents would rather have their kids spend the same time playing Wii. This is a hard nut to crack for imbee...

Lawyer firm supporting Shell companies criticised

2008-01-28T23:00:00.000-05:00

Here is an interesting post about something I don't regularly follow. After all the last I was diving into this legal maze was when Blackberry and Vonage got sued and things got fairly interesting. This blog done by an anonymous lawyer criticizes the Chicago firm Niro Scavone Haller & Niro for supporting Shell companies which spend public cycles suing other companies for IP infringement. This sounds so much like the fox which waits and watches the hen grow. I think this is not fair and does great disservice to us all. A better option is for these "shell" companies to inform the infringing company as soon as they know about the infringement. They should simply be disallowed from waiting for long periods of time!

Developing a following: Gaming Industry

2008-01-27T15:04:00.000-05:00

This article by Clive Thompson on how gaming companies are branding and creating a followership. Games can be treated just like pieces of art. Once you get five minutes into a game, you can get a sense of who made the game. I guess this becomes part of the game playing experience. Kind of like what bigger entertainment companies like Disney like to offer. Anyway, I am getting a bit more into the world of gaming these days...

Digg this! Revolt

2008-01-25T12:02:00.000-05:00

There is a new revolt ongoing in the Digg community where the major power users are basically planning on banning the site. It seems that there is an algorithm change on Digg which gives a more uniform control to the community overall and lets the best links pop up. Someone once said - communities need love, not structure. I think that is right and must be remembered here. I think this could be bad for Digg. Love security from a few is certainly than hope for love from the many. This is going to be a major gamble for Digg at a time many different sites like Digg are coming online. There is in fact a free tool for people just to replicate Digg like sites. Check out Pligg

Rent A Coder

2008-01-24T23:38:00.000-05:00

I recently came across a website called s4support. The company essentially provides an efficient and online way of hiring talent in India. Compare this with the interface provided by companies like Globallogic. If you look at S4's pricing, it's probably slashing those offered by other well known outfits by around 50%. I haven't tried S4, but if you have do post a review or some comments here. I have tried an alternate service though called Rent A Coder. Now Rent A Coder works quite differently. Its like the Ebay of software services. The model is you buy software services in small snips and you manage it on your own. I must confess - I have spent close to $2,500 on different pieces of software written by Rent A Coder experts, but I haven't been able to put even one single piece to use. Some projects done there are gems of their own. Its just that they were good experiments. I found love somewhere else :) Frankly I have worked with companies like Globallogic as well and would recommend them over any of these two services. However both Rent A Coder and S4 are well established and make sense for certain kinds of projects. Rent A Coder excels in getting small pieces of work done. For example, you want some Javascript for your site or you want first cuts of a website or PC software. If you want to maintain and improve a piece of code, Rent A Coder is not the right place. If you want to improve some existing code and the coder needs to understand and improve it, Rent A coder is not the right place for it. This kind of work is better done by S4 or Globallogic.

Now you must be wondering where I found love :) I found a bright and talented set of people in India who absolutely rock and I hope they are reading this!

Google is Healthier (or Wealthier?)

2008-01-24T09:55:00.000-05:00

Google Health is here! However the login is not working. Try it out and let me know if it worked for you!

Ebay to Compete more with Amazon

2008-01-24T07:59:00.000-05:00

I think the new CEO may be making a mistake here. Fixed price listings may be a new core of Ebay's business. Question is what is EBay good at and known for. Ebay is the only place where auctions work. I have tried to go to numerous places but they don't offer as close a reliable system where transactions bigger than $2000 can be done with ease of mind. I am disappointed that Ebay has not been able to expand that model from physical goods to information and services industry. Ebay's fixed price listings sound similar to Amazon and Yahoo! and clearly this is more well established and allows people quick satisfaction on the internet. I can vouch for this myself. On Ebay, the last 20 transactions I did are all fixed price listings or BuyItNow items. I have bought stuff from Amazon as well. However it is clear to me that I would never go to Ebay for the kinds of listings Amazon has or vice versa. Let me take an example. If I need to buy something which I need a lot of reviews on, like a book or coffeemaker, I go to Amazon. If I am buying something I already know is good. Lets say a ThinkPad laptop - and this may be a new model I have checked out elsewhere before, then I would go to EBay. Ebay clearly wins when the transactions are a higher price or object is well known in advance and reviews are not required. The existing Ebay community is not good at doing reviews and even if it did, I wouldn't trust the Ebay system better than Amazon. However Ebay is unique as I described. Now that's what they need to latch on to.

The Most Amazing Jack...

2008-01-23T11:41:00.000-05:00

First it was Vonage, then Skype (maybe the other way around .. uhh). Anyway, it doesn't matter - for now there is MagicJack. This is perhaps the most amazing thing I have heard recently and I am amazed because I am a VoIP guy and should know all about these things before anyone else does! Alrite jokes aside, I know that for $20 a year its a pretty decent deal. $20 a year for U.S and Canada calling is around 2000 minutes which is about 55 three minute calls every month or around two a day. So the economics makes sense. I am sure the company is not making a whole lot of money on the telecoms side. The money making part is the USB gadget which takes in a regular $10 phone jack and makes it work on the PC. This is a job well done. I will now go and get it!

A refersher on leadsership

2008-01-23T10:34:00.000-05:00

I found this article on FastCompany today about a Leaders checklist first day on the job. Its pretty amazing, but people do forget most of this stuff and that's what makes or breaks great companies at the end.

Streaming Ads: Not good!

2008-01-23T09:09:00.000-05:00

Nothing new here, but its getting more convincing and now there is proof: Streaming Ads DO NOT WORK! So what are streaming ads - for those like me who had to read the entire article and say - Oh, thats what its talking about... I hate that as well! Streaming Ads are ads which are played back to users in the middle of what they are viewing or kind of in the beginning. I hate the videos on CNN.com precisely because of this reason. BTW, the best strategy to get users to view ads is to mix those up with news feeds in a limited real estate (reason - if users know a place is going to have ads, chances are they will ignore it). A good example of this is ads I see in Gmail, right above the email list grid. This is the place the news feed come in and Google sometimes shows a sponsored link there. I aways look there and sometimes I see the sponsored link (clearly marked by Google and I appreciate that :) and I do click on those about hundred times more because I read them against ones appearing in places I don't even look...

Nano: Not up to standards!

2008-01-23T08:54:00.000-05:00

A lot of people have heard about this already - the $2,500 car, now on exhibit from the Tata's in India. This is pure amazing. Here are the stats we care about:

The car can do a max of 60mph at a 33hp and a two cylinders. The only space available is for one or two briefcases. I can't believe it still has four doors - there's got to be something Indian about that! The environmental compliance and mileage is kind of obvious with this small a car. It complies with the European emission standards and the car gives about 60miles per gallon. This is certainly not impressive Tata!

First, its surprising the company decided not to build a hybrid or some alternate fuel car. 60 miles per gallon is no feat. It seems kind of less. Most hybrid cars will give more than that and have less tradeoffs. At a low price tag of $2500, it seems it will allow more people to gas the environment. What worries me is that the car will sell like hot cakes in a lot of countries.

Frankly, I think its lame to build a gasoline powered car at this time of the day. Tata can do better and should!

A How to class to be famous

2008-01-22T23:16:00.001-05:00

Read about Jamie Wilkinson's new class where the final grade depends on how famous you are on the internet. Here is the class's website. That's a vital piece of training for the new generation, getting them accustomed to the new rules of the new game out there.

Technology gives birth to Microjournalism

2008-01-22T07:36:00.000-05:00

Well, I am not entirely sure this was the first time and if twitter intended to actually be a part of this, but it sounds like a great idea - microjornalism. Twitter updates sent from your Blackberry to your Facebook account. I need to quote Josh from the above article:

"If you tell people how to consume their content, they will ignore you," he said, a truism that experience had taught new-media executives.

"Let people do what they want to do and try to be in their circle of choice."

So if you do have a Blackberry and you also have a facebook account, why not get Twitter now? If journalism was something you always wanted to do, but didn't get into, now is your chance!

The online Battlefield

2008-01-22T07:15:00.001-05:00

News is that U.S games maker EA is all set to launch an online, free version of its popular game Battlefield Heroes to compete in the hot online gaming market. The free version will be monetized using advertising and other trinkets players can press and buy if they need during the game. This is going to be fun, since I am going to try it as well. I checked out the EA website for the game, and registered. Seems like you must subscribe to the EA newsletter to register which is pretty bad compared to internet standards. There was also no new emails coming at my ID and it didn't say how I was supposed to log in. Maybe I should checkout later... This tells me companies should avoid making news like this one until the website is done. In this case users will read the news and expect to easily log in!

A new update on Yahoo!

2008-01-21T00:33:00.001-05:00

Here is an interesting update on Yahoo! Major items are that there may be some firings and changes in ways decisions are made. That's great for Yahoo! I always felt Yahoo! was a great social networking company Google could never be.

Turn Joost into what?

2008-01-21T00:26:00.000-05:00

How do these guys come up with names like these: Joost. Hulu. Just kidding. Looks like Joost is in trouble with Hulu on the horizon and business has not been good lately after Skype for Niklaus. BTW - Checkout the recent TechCrunch winners. That's where the action is...

Slide: Amazing or what?

2008-01-21T00:18:00.001-05:00

Checkout Slide.COM. I was on the company's website a few months back w/o realizing what was cooking in the honey pot. The company recently was valued at $550M. I guess all the social networking companies may easily be counting each others money twice to arrive at those kinds of valuations. After all Facebook's money is Slide's as well - seems pretty social to me :)

Sun to purchase MySQL!

2008-01-16T22:37:00.000-05:00

Sun stock was up today on news that it was purchasing MySQL for $1Bn. So the first question which loomed over me was what was the impact of this: I think there is only one impact for folks like me who don't want to use Solaris: this means trouble on the horizon. LAMP (the fundamental block of Web 2.0 - see my Web 2.0 blog) is also in trouble I think. But this represents an opportunity for Postgres to catch up in the market. Sun's acquisition creates more FUD about MySQL than previous Oracle acquisition of InnoDB.

There is a relevant blog on this from MySQL. Check it out - it represents the opposite point of view, but clearly may be biased since its a MySQL blog...

One more thing ...

2008-01-16T20:36:00.000-05:00

Steve Jobs released Apple's thin laptop. Anyway, the most interesting thing was Phase 2 of iTunes which now includes 30 day movie rentals. Ah... this was timed well for Amazon's announcement with major record vendors on offering online downloads of songs with DRM. Great! I think Jobs does it again...

Just an addition - the company behind Macbook Air - Intel who designed the Core 2 Duo for Mac's new for factor.

Comcast strikes again!

2008-01-16T20:30:00.000-05:00

Comcast came up in the news today for blocking P2P traffic. Slashdot reports Comcast used Sandvine to block traffic for a Vuze who provides online videos and movies. Comcast is notorious for blocking traffic which competes with its own services: for example Vonage forums are full of posts where comcast subscribers keep compaining how the company routinely blocks packets or intoduces packet loss on Vonage VoIP calls.

Brilliant: Divide and Conquer

2008-01-16T12:12:00.000-05:00

I don't blog too much on political events, but this one caught my eye and seemed like an excellent candidate for an amazing idea. Blogger Markos came up with this idea to promote Mitt Romney in Michigan so as to create strong alternatives for people to vote for in the Republican party. This will help defocus the Republicans and indirectly may help the Democrats win the elections...

Facebook Gaming

2008-01-16T10:42:00.000-05:00

I heard Scrabble recently served notices to two Indian brothers who started an online version of the game called Scrabulous. I found some interesting statistics about this company: with one years worth of work and a launch in early 2006, they amassed a user base of 600,000 users. What is more stunning is that after launching a Facebook application in June, 2007 the userbase grew to 2.3 million active users!

I guess this is what companies like Scrabulous and another new one like Zynga are banking on. Zynga is also interesting. The company is already breaking even by selling cheap ads to other gaming companies who want to advertise on the Zynga network. To make sure they don't snatch users away, Zynga adds credits to a user's account - like Blackjack chips for clicking.

I think what one out to do next after Facebook's social graph has been visited is to figure out the money flow graph - how fast and frequently is cash exchanging hands on the facebook network and within the partners. I would love if someone can explain or post a link here on how that works - like what is the main source of money and how fat it is and is it enough to sustain the facebook jungle out there!

It can only happen on MySpace...

2008-01-15T16:10:00.000-05:00

Here is a funny posting on a recent hack attack on celebrity accounts on MySpace. It seems its a popular and respectable thing to do amongst hackers. Instead of demanding money, the hacker, in this case 22 year old Weinberg demanded lots of other things. MySpace and Facebook accounts are now just like personal property or assets now which have $$ associated with them!

Visual Search engine Quintura

2008-01-14T20:05:00.001-05:00

My friend Ramana recently took me to Quintura's website which boasted a visual search engine the company has developed. Initially intrigued, I was left gazing and truly impressed! This thing rocks and if the founders (a bunch of Russian dudes) go to market right, they may actually change how search works. The funny part is that the company claims to be the next Google killer like everyone else does (stop using Google search on the back end!). I suggest being more modest on the website and that would have impressed bloggers like me even more!

iTunes honeymoon may be over...

2008-01-14T20:01:00.000-05:00

I guess Apple may soon be back focusing on selling iPods, iPhones and MacBooks. That's not to say that iTunes was not a good return for them and we never know how Steve Job is going to react to this. Well, Amazon is all set to launch a major offering in the music retailing market, making it a lot easier for consumers to buy music online, by not requiring any DRM software. Moreover, quite possibly they will expand the market by getting users like me who would like to get free music by buying Pepsi!

Grand Prix for Apple?

2008-01-14T19:42:00.001-05:00

Well, that's an interesting proof: The iPhone accounts for less that 2% of market share but the highest internet traffic. In fact Google is launching a special product called Grand Prix just for the iPhone browser itself.

That said - I am just waiting for Google's phone which won't gave me a sticker shock. I believe the phone (an HTC phone) is actually free and Google plans to fund it through ads. That is marvelous and unlike Steve Jobs who sold his religion to Cingular, Google plans to stick to their model.

More fine tuning of Yahoo! coming...

2008-01-14T19:20:00.000-05:00

Wow - A map which finds the way and a restaurant which cooks up invitations! Jerry yang is sure doing a an amazing job in finishing up the Yahoo portfolio after cleaning up all the useless distractions like Yahoo! 360 and Photos apps. Keep it up!

Shouldn't Google buy Yahoo?

2008-01-12T13:54:00.000-05:00

Rumors are on that Microsoft is going to purchase Yahoo! considering its dwindling market cap which is lect at about 7% of Google's 200Bn cap. Here is my take:

1) Friends of mine tell me that most of the PhD students graduating from universities these days are more inclined to join Yahoo! Research than Google Labs. Main reason is that the former actually does any worthwhile research. However clearly Google is much faster to bring products to market.

2) Yahoo! Web Hosting and other businesses (which I am myself a customer of) are nowhere close to what is out there in the market. Even GoDaddy does a better job of hosting.

3) Yahoo! Email sucks as many already know.

Personally I think if Microsoft kicks the tire and buys Yahoo! the market is worse off. If Google buys Yahoo! and becomes a better R&D facility (and clearly Yahoo! has been much more successful than Google in launching social networks!) then we are all better off.

Microsoft v/s Apple

2008-01-11T18:55:00.001-05:00

This is a funny posting in Slashdot on the development of iPhone. The funny part is that if it was Microsoft, Bill Gates would have said - "Perfect! We have done it again! Lets get this out now people..."

Deplorable actions by Network Solutions!

2008-01-11T18:49:00.000-05:00

Can you believe this - If you search for a domain name on Network Solutions website and don't buy it immediately, then the company blocks it for a few days just to make you buy it from the company at $35.

We used to joke around the office - what if the domain name provider was doing this and I always said - "Nah. Not possible. Its a really bad practice. If customers found out, no one will ever come and buy form their website!". That is exactly what Network Solutions did and they didn't even care about their name. Makes me really edgy searching for a domain next time!

The Nuts and Bolts on Cha-Cha

2008-01-10T23:20:00.000-05:00

Last week I tried signing up as a ChaCha guide. ChaCha is a new service or search engine which claims to have guides helping people who even Google cannot help. The most interesting piece seemed to be the ChaCha mobile service which I thought was where such a thing could have major impact. After all almost everyone has trouble Googling when they are driving around. At a high level, I found it was extremely complex to sign up as a ChaCha guide and the amount of time it took to do that was enough for me to kick the whole project off several times. But I kept going slow and steady. Here is how it works for those who want the details stripped of the actual experience:

1. A basic sign in is followed by a lot of rather dumb tests. I had my younger one checking on me most of the time and I was able to skim through all of them.
2. The website is rather unintuitive. For a long time I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do after I logged in. It seemed I had to download some sort of software which would route the questions ChaCha users would be asking.
3. After locating the software I downloaded it but it would refuse to run on my machine. Turns out that on googling I find that almost everyone is asking the same question and there are no answers on the web. I finally found the trick posted on someone's blog after 2-3 hours of searching. I dont think a normal person planning to be a guide would be spending this much time trying to get the ChaCha software to work.
4. I had to enter my social security number, bank account, address, maiden name, birth date -- almost everything I would think 5 hours before giving to someone. So that's exactly what happened. After three days, I finally gave some information I made up and ChaCha accepted. Has someone heard of Paypal?
5. After loading up the software, I waited for 4 hours and there was no activity.
6. Next day my userid and password stopped working and then I gave up.

ChaCha sure has a long way to go...

Kizoodle

2007-12-22T22:50:00.001-05:00

Kizoodle is an online bartering system which has kizoodles as the monetary units. The model is that buyer agrees to buy certain seller listed items at some agreed kizoodle value and the seller uses these units to go buy other things on the site. The domain seems to have a advertisement based model. Trouble is that there is no protection between buyer/seller and most items in this environment are low valued items. Kizoodles only work on that site which is a bottleneck in the network growth. It will be interesting to see how the site evolves and grows.

Opensource Blackboard

2007-12-22T19:14:00.000-05:00

Moodle is a very popular open source alternative for Blackboard.

Digital SLRs put to rest...

2007-12-22T18:57:00.000-05:00

This is the most helpful review on SLRs I have come across. A month back I researched on a new camera and I know how hard it is to figure out the world of cameras. This review is full of surprises for anyone who has done this recently!

Peer-to-Peer Lending?

2007-12-17T23:13:00.000-05:00

Kiva is an interesting site which does P2P Lending. I think the idea of being able to fund people who can make a difference in the developing world is really powerful.

The knol on the Knol

2007-12-15T20:30:00.000-05:00

Here is the punchline: you can read more about Knol on Wikipedia than here. Its plain unbelievable why Google always tries to re-invent things sometimes. Is the search engine market in recession? I hope I am kidding. So Knol intends to compete with links from Wikipedia and Squidoo in Google's search results. I wonder if there is some conflict of interest here and how I will perceive Google's search engine when I start seeing Knol results on top. I wonder if people will flock to Knol just because they perceive what I perceive. Hopefully Knol evolves organically and my trust for Googling never goes down...

Folksonomy?

2007-11-02T23:26:00.000-05:00

Folkwhat?. This term, Folksonomy, invented by Thomas Vander Wal, refers to Collaborative Tagging. While I have been accustomed to Tags and how popular sites like Flickr, Digg use those, this interesting term was new to me...

In fact, I didn't realize how powerful Folksonomy is when compared to traditional categorization techniques. Making sense of Folksonomy is a science by itself. Personalized tagging, like that used by Gmail is not very interesting compared to its collaborative counterpart.

I also enjoyed reading about Semantic Web, though I must say that I don't fully understand its impacts and how successful it could be in today's high pressure search engine, facebook, flickr environments :)

What would I save a million for?

2007-11-02T22:59:00.000-05:00

Check these out: Inflatable Space Pods. Vegas like idea from a Vegas man.

Apple playing by the rules?

2007-09-28T20:51:00.000-05:00

Apple is well known for revolutionary ideas. However when it comes to telecom, we are not seeing any of that. Read this post and you will see the extent to which they are going to play by the U.S cell phone industry's device locking rules. My expectation for Apple was that the iPhone would be available as an unlocked device as well, available for purchase from Apple's website allowing users to free themselves from this stupid way of doing things!

Facebook going public with profiles!!

2007-09-26T21:32:00.000-05:00

Recent post shows Facebook has decided to make people profiles public. This could have vast implications: a lot of new companies could be indexing all this new data to make available for advertisers as well as hackers could be using this opportunity to steal away data before members realize that their profiles are public. A lot of web crawlers will also cache this data in numerous places on the web. What a mess! A great mess!

The Telecom Innovation Paradox

2007-09-21T22:38:00.000-05:00

Its Friday night and time to blog again!

Its been a whole week of intense brainstorming at 3CLogic as we continue to find new ways to free voice from the deep dungeons of middle earth. I have been wondering what makes the internet almost a factory of innovation and most unlike the telecom industry. First read this report and I am sure you will be enlightened by the statistics. Now for my own reasons:

1) Telecom providers today have almost no ways of selling direct to the end consumer. The internet is completely different in this aspect. My view is that the sheer thrill of communicating directly with the consumer changes the whole ballgame on the speed of innovation (on the business model side).

2) The architecture of the internet is very simple compared to architecture of telecom networks. To slap on an internet application together, what I need is LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+php) on a machine and then write the application itself. I dont need to worry about how everything else has been implemented on the internet. It is that simple! Telecom is radically different. There is a system architecture with which my application must comply with and then most of my lifetime of creativity is spent in doing interoperability. BTW SIP was designed to completely change that and make voice work on the internet model. However, that goal is still not completey achieved. P2P SIP will help us all get there.