World Wild Web

What is an Intuitive Design?

2011-12-05T22:55:00.001+05:30

We have heard a lot about designs being 'intuitive', but is here is a good way to explain what exactly it is, and how can we build it.

Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge - Luke Wroblewski

"When you are at the bottom, you have no knowledge of how something works and when you are at the top, you know everything about how it works .

There are two points on this continuum to care about.

- Current knowledge (what the users already know)

- Target knowledge (what they need to know)

The knowledge gap is the space in between (what we need to design for).

A design is intuitive when current knowledge is equal to target knowledge. A design is unintuitive when there is a gap between current & target knowledge.

We can reduce target knowledge until it meets current knowledge by simplifying the design. We can move current knowledge to target knowledge through training. These are our two options for design.

The “gap” between current knowledge and target knowledge is where design happens.

A design is intuitive when the knowledge gap is really small. In other words, it’s easy for people to bridge from current knowledge to target knowledge. In these cases, people don’t realize they are being trained."

Don't miss the SILK, amongst all the FIRE

2011-09-29T09:52:00.001+05:30

Amazon's new 'iPad Killer' Kindle Fire is all over the Blogosphere. The $199 tablet, powered by Gingerbread (no, not Honeycomb) is expected to be available on Nov 15.

While it is grabbing all the limelight from the launch since Wednesday, there was another interesting product that was introduced.

SILK, is 'the potentially radical' browser that will be exclusively available on Fire. It supports HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, Flash and associated next-generation Web standards.

Amazon built the software from scratch, using the WebKit open-source browser engine, but what makes it different from the other browsers is that it can be configured to let Amazon's cloud service do much of the work assembling complex Web pages. Which results in faster load times for Web pages, compared to other mobile devices.

It is based on the "spit browsing" approach hence it processes requests partially on Kindle and partially on EC2. All the user's requests are directed to the EC2 service, which fetches the pages from the source and optimizes the content for the platform. Complex parts of JavaScript may be pre-processed and images may be downsized to a more manageable size.

As per Bezos, this provides "unlimited computational power and unlimited bandwidth, for all practical purposes".

But here is the part that I liked the most..

"Silk leverages the collaborative filtering techniques and machine learning algorithms Amazon has built over the last 15 years to power features such as “customers who bought this also bought…” As Silk serves up millions of page views every day, it learns more about the individual sites it renders and where users go next. By observing the aggregate traffic patterns on various web sites, it refines its heuristics, allowing for accurate predictions of the next page request. For example, Silk might observe that 85 percent of visitors to a leading news site next click on that site’s top headline. With that knowledge, EC2 and Silk together make intelligent decisions about pre-pushing content to the Kindle Fire. As a result, the next page a Kindle Fire customer is likely to visit will already be available locally in the device cache, enabling instant rendering to the screen."

However, it is interesting to note that, it is possible for users to turn off the EC2 service altogether and use the browser in a standard way.

Opera has been playing with Split Browsing approach for a couple of years now hence, though this might not be a 'new' but it'll surely add some twist to the market flooded with mee-too tablets.

Seventh deadly sin of Firefox..

2011-09-28T11:18:00.000+05:30

2011 seems to be like an year for sevens and eights.

WP7, Windows8 and F8, have kept the bloggers busy so far, now its time for Firefox to add some buzz.

The latest version of Firefox is here. V7.0 is said to reduce the memory utilisation upto 50% thus making web browsing experience faster.

One of the major complain, the "startup speed" has also been addressed and Mozilla claims that tabs, menus and buttons on websites will also respond much faster.

It also claims that "Heavy Internet users will enjoy enhanced performance when lots of tabs are open and during long Web browsing sessions that last hours or even days."

If you notice, the browser's address bar in Firefox7.0 will not show "http://" in the webpage URLs, however in case of secured pages "https://" is displaced.

To help improve future versions of Firefox, users can opt in to Telemetry. Telemetry is a tool built on Mozilla Privacy Principles that allows users to provide anonymous browser performance data in a private and secure way that they control.

Here are some links that you might find handy

- Know more about feature of Firefox 7 and Download

- What's new (techie stuff)

- List of bugs fixed

Chrome the No.1 browser in India

2011-09-27T08:07:00.001+05:30

Apart from Android, there is another Googly that is gaining market share rapidly.

As per StatCounter, Google Chrome is all set to become the number one browser in India. It has already pushed IE down to number 3 last month and now just a percent behind Firefox.

Its just a matter of a week or two that we'll see a new King of Browsers here.

PS: I'll still be using Firefox :)

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share

What if Humans were versioned?

2011-09-18T13:03:00.000+05:30

This thought stuck me when I was wishing a friend of mine on his birthday. But before we get into what I am trying to say let’s do a quick recap of software release and its versioning.

Almost all the software undergo certain stages of development, mainly Pre-Alpha, Alpha, Beta, and Release Candidate (RC) or the final release. Once the final version is out, every subsequent release is versioned to track and communicate the updates.

Most of the software maintain a numeric versioning upto 3 places, e.g. x.y.z where change in the rightmost digit usually indicates bug fixes or minor updates, middle one is for new features and major updates, and change in the leftmost denotes substantial improvement in the software, like completely new UI, significant change in functionality etc.

Also, one of the integral part of every release is a release note, which contains the details of the changes or the enhancements made in the software. It has to justify the need of a new release and sometimes be compelling enough to make the user download the new version (especially if it involves money).

Okay enough about the software, now lets get back to the humans.

Similar to software, once our final version is released, i.e. we are born, we keep track of ourselves via our age, which we write in Years, Months and Days.

Now, instead of writing age like 29 years and 10 months, what if we start using the regular software versioning convention, so my age/version today will be something like 2.9.9.16 in a decade.year.month.day format.

And if we stick to the popular nomenclature, and drop the fourth digit, calling myself version 2.9.9 will make sense, as every decade there is a huge change in what we are and the way we look, every year makes us slightly different from the last one and every month, there are minor changes or fixes.

But there are two things in which we differ from software.

First, unlike them, we neither have a choice of deciding whether to release a new version or not, nor the timing of it, it comes out automatically with every passing second. Infact we are the best example of continuous integration.

Second, and the important one, we don’t write our release notes.

Now this is a tricky part, what if now we are also required to publish a release note for each release of ours, a note that describes all the things that we have learned or done in that duration.

I feel, its not that we have stopped learning, although the source might have changed from teachers to tweets. But amid this demanding life that we are living today, we don’t make a conscious effort to figure out what we have learned and how does it makes us a better person than what we were before.

Thus writing a release note might be of some help.

Now I am less than three months away from a major release, i.e. Satya 3.0 and so much has changed in last 10 years. From young & restless, to not so young and much more restless. From a BCOM FY student, to a professional with over 6.5 yrs of work ex. So many new people, so many new places and I have learned from everyone, everything and every little mistake I made.

And all this made me who I am today, a person starkly different from Satya 2.0 (including the size and amount of hair on my head ;)

I know it’ll not be easy when I’ll sit down and try to write my release note for this major release, since I didn’t write any for the previous ones.

Nevertheless, I’ll write one, though I might choose to keep it unpublished.

Good luck for yours :)

Challenges of delivering content and applications on the Internet

2011-08-25T22:21:00.000+05:30

Tom Leighton's (Founder Akamai) interesting talk on content delivery.

Funny Footers...

2011-08-25T00:18:00.000+05:30

Dear Websites,

If you can still be "best viewed with Internet Explorer 6.0 / Firefox 2.0 or higher" let me tell you that stone age is over. Oh and there is something called Chrome that you must know even if you choose to ignore Apple of the eyes.

And here is something you might find earth shattering:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share

Good luck,

Cheers,

Androids Made in India

2011-08-22T09:58:00.000+05:30

Was wondering, if Androids were made India, what would they be called?

Here are a few options

1.5 - Cham Cham

1.6 - Dhoda

2.0 - Elaichi Peda

2.2 - Falooda

2.3 - Gulaab Jamun

3.0 - Halwa

4.0 - Imarti

5.0 - Kulfi (yet to be announced)

Sounds Yummier ? ;)

Some thoughts on Product Differentiation !

2010-11-29T06:57:00.000+05:30

God made everyone alike, then why 'Differentiate'

View more presentations from Satyajeet Singh

Who's got the longest ??

2010-10-07T19:09:00.000+05:30

And the winner is : Jet Airways !!!

Guys guys, I was taking about the roll-down menu ;)

See it to believe it (Firefox, 1024x768, no toolbar)

It's a nice clean site but the menu options for Product and Services (I wonder how will they differentiate between them) crosses the screen length and you have to adjust the screen to look at the entire menu.

and if you scroll down, it goes beyond the footer :)

If you have it, you should flaunt it....Cool no ?

Awesome definations

2010-08-10T12:49:00.001+05:30

Definition of frequency of use of applications by Microsoft:

- Rarely means "rarely"

- Occasionally means "sometimes"

- Frequently means "often"

I feel enlightened :)

Interesting Feature for Agents

2010-08-02T15:07:00.000+05:30

This seems like an interesting feature for ticketing agents, not sure if end consumers will like it :)

Who is the next big search engine?

2010-07-14T12:48:00.000+05:30

Nope it doesn’t look like BING,

As per the latest comScore release of Search Engine Rankings in US, a whopping 16.4 billion 'core' searches were conducted on various websites, of which 62.6% were on Google. But there is nothing new in this.

If you would have noticed is the number of searches being conducted on Facebook has reached to 621 million a month. Although it is a small number if you compare it with the search giant but look at BING and Facebook is almost one third of that. The number of searches in FB is equal to that of eBay and is ready to cross Craigslist.

The reason these number look exciting to me is unlike the other sites mentioned in the list here, ‘Search’ is not a primary function in Facebook.

It is obvious that the major portion of these searches will be ‘people search’ but it will be enthralling to know the split and the changes in trend.

Let’s see how the numbers grow and I look forward to see Twitter in the list soon.

Firefox 4 (beta) : Whats New??

2010-07-07T11:27:00.000+05:30

Firefox just got Awesomer.

Here are the new things you will notice in the latest version of the coolest browser.

New Tab Location
Tabs are given top visual priority and have been place above the ‘awesome bar’. This has been done for more efficient and intuitive browsing. Seems cool too.

Switch to Tab
The new option to switch open tabs from the “Awesome Bar’ itself.

Firefox Button
All your menu items are in a single button for easy access and reduced clutter. Just switch off your ‘Menu Bar’ and save few pixels of vertical space on your browser.

New Add-Ons Manager
An easier way to manage your add-ons and discover new options for personalizing your browsing.

WebM and HD Video
As pioneers of HTML5 video standards, Firefox also supports the WebM format so you can watch open HD quality video.

Protecting Your Privacy
Firefox has also fixed some flaws in some web standards that allow hackers to snoop around and expose your browser history.

Some under the Hood features

WebSockets
Developers will be able to build real-time online interactions like gaming and chatting.

Stylin’ Pages with CSS
With support for new CSS3 features, web designers can make their pages both look prettier and display faster.

HTML5 Support
A new HTML5 parser and full support for web video, audio, drag & drop, and file handling means Firefox 4 is ready to run the best web apps of both today and tomorrow.

Web Console
With this experimental analysis tool for modern sites, Firefox allows you to peek under the hood of dynamic web pages.

JetPack SDK (Making Add-On Development Easier)
Add-Ons can be installed without restarting the browser, and can be developed more easily using the new JetPack SDK and js-ctypes.

Indexed DB
Developers will be able to store application data locally, making cloud applications like Gmail or GDocs work more quickly and reliably, even when not connected to a network.

Crash Protection
Firefox provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows, Linux, and now Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins. If one of these commonly-used plugins crashes or freezes, it won’t affect the rest of Firefox. Instead, you can simply reload the page to restart the plugin and try again.

Source: Mozilla.com

How Google Search Works

2010-07-06T19:34:00.000+05:30

Infographic by PPC Blog

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

2010-07-02T15:14:00.001+05:30

Professor Leonard Mlodinow visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book, "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives". This event took place on May 22, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series. For more information about Prof. Mlodinow, please visit http://www.its.caltech.edu/~len/

In The Drunkard's Walk, acclaimed writer and scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, change, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious cases, when in actuality they are more profoundly influenced by chance.

Leonard Mlodinow received his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and now teaches about randomness to future scientists at Caltech. Along the way he also wrote for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His previous books include Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace, Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, and, with Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time. He lives in South Pasadena, California.

Roundtable on Online Travel: Details

2010-06-23T08:15:00.002+05:30

So finally here are some important learning from the discussion.

It’s been a while and I was not able to understand half of my notes written in shorthand, so I would request to use your discretion before reaching to any conclusion after reading this.

Date: 11th June, 2010
Venue: The Leela Kempinski, Gurgaon.

Here are some of the points that were highlighted during the discussion:

- Credibility is one of the major issues this is being faced by the online players. Thus some of them are evaluating a brick and mortar support as well.

- The complex and high engagement non air products are difficult to sell online whereas most of the ticketing as moved online (thanks to IRCTC)

- Cost of acquisition is still too high being Google being the major source. Thus companies to find other routes for acquiring leads in order to avoid ‘Google Tax’.

- Payment infrastructure is also a major concern. With 50-65% success rates of payment gateways, there is a huge scope for improving here

- More focus on consumer is required for providing him a greater value online

Details of the discussion

Subhash Goel (Chairman, STIC Group)

Airlines saved multi-million when they started posting their inventory online
STIC also tied up with successful portals and achieved enormous targets.
Portals enhanced the business of distributors and they started “riding the wave”
STIC still has 40 offices because they want a ‘seamless’ execution. Only around 10 office were shutdown since they started posting inventory online
His suggestions
Portals should have their own clearing house
They should focus more of Holidays and less on Tickets
Man is a social animal, they someone to talk to for clarifying his doubts and promise done on the internet. e.g. most of the common treatments are available on internet, but people still prefer going to the doctor.
There is a lack of experience related to travel in the call center executives’ e.g. An international connecting flight was sold with a gap of 90 mins however there was minimum 3hrs required to change the flight as the terminals were different.

Harish Bahl (Founder & CEO, Smile Interactive Technologies Group)

His biggest concern was that most of the online travel companies are making money for Google. They pay so much money for lead generation, but the user doesn’t end up buying. Thus companies have to think of alternative sources of generating cheaper leads
They should focus less on Bought Media (SEM, Ads) and more of Earned Media (Tie ups, FB communities)
Travel is a big boy’s game and needs serious investment and expertise
Credibility of the portals is one of the biggest challenge. People end up paying more to offline agencies but are not comfortable buying high engagement products online
Users do their entire research online and use the online prices to negotiate with travel agencies
It’s a shame that user spends 30 min on site and portals are still not able to sell him. If we compare it with the offline market, a good sales guy would hardy need 5-10 min to convince the client and close the sale.
Instead of cleaning up the internal differences (coordination between different stakeholders in the value chain) focus should move to the consumer.

Dhruv Shrinigi (Founder & CEO, Yatra.com)

Online travel industry in India is new and does not have a legacy to learn from
Everything in India works on Jugaad, so we need to be aware of it. e.g. credit card fraud detection logic failed (Name of the card should be same as that of user) since some of the customers were genuinely borrowing from friends and family to book tickets online
If the value proposition is great users will find a way to transact with you
55% of the air tickets are booked online in US and 30% in India

Some of the challenges:

Hotel’s online inventory need to increase and they should update of availability status
“Online transactions are unsafe” is a myth and users need to be made aware of this
Online payment infrastructure needs to be improved, current success ratio is merely 50-60%

Opportunities:

Mobile access, since for many users the first interaction with internet will be on mobile.
Customers are booking tickets online but holidays offline.
Social Media can play a “joker” here

Kamal Hingorani (VP Sales & Distribution, Spicejet)

Spicejet has only online presence and that has helped them immensely in keeping the cost low
25% of the entire ticket booking is direct
60% of the total tickets are booked online

Devdutta Banerjee (Regional Director of Revenue & Distribution, Starwood Hotels)

They too have seen a surge in business after posting the inventory online
More information is required while booking a hotel online
Complexity of taxation for international holidays need to be reduced
Aggregation is important since there are now so many small and big players in the online travel booking space

Internet Entrepreneurship Workshop (19th June, 2010)

2010-06-20T11:11:00.000+05:30

Another weekend, and another interesting gathering to discuss a new topic on the Internet. I am not sure if “workshop” was the right word for it but organizers made sure that the sessions were very interactive.

It was called "Internet Entrepreneurship Workshop” and was organized by “Peer Power” in association with “Wirefoot”.

Again, I knew that am not planning to turn into an entrepreneur in a near future but I always wanted to know what it takes to be one. And imagine I paid to attend to this one. But thanks to Akhil who offered me some discount :)

As per the organizers “The workshop was aimed at giving a crash course on how to build a successful internet system for your organizational/business needs.”

And the Panel of speakers included:

R. Sundar, CEO, Times Business Solutions Ltd.
Topic: Key Note

Ankur Dinesh Garg, CMD, Wirefoot India Technology Ltd.
Topic: Billion Dollar Idea

Alok Mittal, Managing Director, Canaan India
Topic: Fundas of Funding

Manish Vij, Co-founder, Quasar, Tyroo and Zoomtra
Topic: Startup Marketing

Pawan Gadia, Vice President, Ferns 'N' Petals
Topic: Building Brick by Brick

Manish Pathak, Co-Founder, Papam
Topic: Brand Building

Sumit Goyal, Promoter, PlanForMe
Topic: Real Life Startup Story

Jatin Mahindra, Founder, InternetMafia
Topic: You are the Man! How the power of you can make it all happen

I must acknowledge that the organizers made sure that the participants get an exposure to almost all the elements required for being an internet entrepreneur. Here are a few things they can probably add in the next workshops:
-    Legal Considerations for starting a new business
-    What financial documents need to be prepared
-    How can open source technology help

Overall an enriched experience, just one thing I would like to add/suggest. One of the most important qualities of an entrepreneur is not only to learn from mistakes but to accept them as well.

If they wouldn’t have mentioned that the spelling mistake on the backdrop was deliberate, some of us wouldn’t have even noticed. Because if it was done intentionally then it should have been done on all the branding material. I think it was only after Satrajit tweeted it, that they noticed :)

Anyways, such things always happen, and we were not there to gaze at the backdrop.

Great work done guys.

The event was also live tweeted by Readit India, and can be followed by #peerpower.

I will add my details on what speakers said soon :)

Note for MakeMyTrip.com

2010-06-17T00:10:00.001+05:30

Dear MMT,

As we know that the term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University.

It is a program that protects websites against bots by asking a user to complete a simple test which humans can pass but most of the current computer programs cannot. Most common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type letters or digits from a distorted image that appears on the screen. Like the one seen below.

So, as we can understand that CAPTHCHA is used for preventing bots and not for testing eyesight of the user. Hence a 4 digit number written in extremely small fonts with (style="font-style:oblique; font-family:Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) does not help. The keyword here is IMAGE.

Also, disabling right click is not a very smart move and will be of no use if the CAPTCHA is in plain text format.

The current system may not you help in ensuring that your registration service is not being misused. Image will not appears, unless it is coded hence allowing images in browser will also not be of much help here :)

For more information and free CAPTCHA please click here.

Roundtable on Online Travel (11th June, 2010)

2010-06-13T00:44:00.005+05:30

This weekend, I finally managed to attend a good discussion on Online Travel. Special thanks to Kalyan.

Now you will think that what’s my interest in attending a discussion on Online Travel but can anything related to Internet be uninteresting. If I can attend Firefox’s developer camp, I was sure I’ll find some good points to take away from this one.

It was the first Round Table discussion on Online Travel organized my IAMAI and my friend Kalyan was kind enough to accommodate me for the same.

Panel comprised of
- Devdutta Banerjee (Regional Director of Revenue & Distribution Starwood Hotels)
- Dhruv Shringi (Founder & CEO of Yatra.com)
- Harish Bahl (Founder & CEO Smile Interactive Technologies Group)
- Kamal Hingorani (VP Sales & Distribution of Spicejet)
- Subhash Goel (Chairman STIC Group)

Moderator:
- Himanshu Singh (Managing Director Travelocity India)

It was really a stirring and enlightening discussion as most of the points discussed were not only applicable to Online Travel but to the entire eCommerce.

Here are some of the points that were highlighted during the discussion:

- Credibility is one of the major issues this is being faced by the online players. Thus some of them are evaluating a brick and mortar support as well.

- The complex and high engagement non air products are difficult to sell online whereas most of the ticketing as moved online (thanks to IRCTC)

- Cost of acquisition is still too high being Google being the major source. Thus companies to find other routes for acquiring leads in order to avoid ‘Google Tax’.

- Payment infrastructure is also a major concern. With 50-65% success rates of payment gateways, there is a huge scope for improving here.

Will add individual speaker’s comments soon

To the Product Manager @ Blogspot

2010-06-13T00:37:00.004+05:30

Here is what I wrote on 2nd June.

"it was disheartening to see that nothing much has changed here. I tried changing the template to rejuvenate the dead posts but there was noting much to choose from. I know its dieing a slow death but it seems that Product Managers @ Blogspot are in a hurry :P "

And here is what I saw today.

Great work guys, long live blogger :)

Microsoft Exchange On...line

2010-06-06T10:49:00.003+05:30

“Get the Best in CLASS Technologies at SMALL Business Price” is the tagline for the Microsoft Exchange Online Services.

Have you noticed that there is so much emphasis on CLASS and not on technologies ;) Maybe because of this

Anyways, there are mainly four services that are promoted here, Email, Chat, Conference (Live Meeting) and Collaborate (SharePoint) along with a shady Cost Calculator.

Not sure about the class of the Technologies but the Micro-site is third class (no offense) :P

Just a suggestion, maybe they should have tied up with an ISP and promoted it here, so that small business can get a comprehensive solution :)

Good luck MS.

Check out the site:

KYC: A must for every Product Manager

2010-06-03T21:45:00.006+05:30

"Engineers from IIT for a robust website, few lacs; Designer from NID for intuitive UI, few more lacs; Sales team from IIM for efficient practices, some more lacs; Realising your Customers does not have an access to Internet, PRICELESS. There are very few things that B'school teaches you, for everything else Meet Your Customer"

Wrote this a while back as my FB status message. Some of my client meetings have left an everlasting impact on me and this was one of it. Imagine meeting your client, or I should say 'paid client' who doesn't even have access to the internet. Thanks to our offline solutions and excellent sales team, we are able to cater to so many such clients.

Sometimes when we design products (though I like calling it solution) we misjudge the 'average user'. We assume them at par or sometimes slightly below us or the people we meet daily. But it is only when you actually meet the end user, you will be able to bridge the gap between your understanding of their net behavior and their actual net behavior.

Another one that is on top of my mind is one of our user complaining of not being able to access our recruitment solutions.

Our support team was telling him to:
-> Go to our website -> click on the employer login link -> enter your account details

What actually he was doing:
-> Go to Google -> Search for our website name -> click on the SEM link -> Land on the registration page - > Click on the Candidate's login link available on the page -> enter account details

Imagine :)

I am back !

2010-06-02T22:36:00.003+05:30

It's been almost an year since I have updated by blog. Will try to be regular now.

But it was disheartening to see that nothing much has changed here. I tried changing the template to rejuvenate the dead posts but there was noting much to choose from. I know its dieing a slow death but it seems that Product Managers @ Blogspot are in a hurry :P

Innovating on a Shoestring Budget

2009-06-22T09:48:00.002+05:30

No fuzz in "Vine"

2009-06-18T11:03:00.004+05:30

Though it started off with little trouble with signing in running smooth now.

The most funny part is that "BING" doesn't recognizes whats 'VINE' (check here) but Google does (here) . May be "Because Its Not Google" . LOL.

Will explore more and update later:

Acrobat.com Unleashed

2009-06-15T10:08:00.003+05:30

Adobe has released their new set tools for building documents collaboratively online. It will try to eat a pie from Microsoft and Google, who already have big plans in this segment.

I wasn't able to try them as of now, because it doesn't have a support for Firefox 3.5 or Crome.

Bing-o

2009-06-09T09:44:00.002+05:30

Something Wrong !

2009-05-14T12:45:00.002+05:30

Something really wrong with Facebook today, getting this message every now and then.

Wolfram Alpha: The Next Big Thing !

2009-05-12T10:41:00.007+05:30

Wolfram Alpha is almost ready to rock the world. Being the next big thing in the search arena, comparison to Google was inevitable, but as of now it is not being considered as "Google Killer". This all new "Answers Engine" is one of the most awaited launches scheduled in May.

Here is a snippet of an interesting article published on Twine by Nova Spivack which answers the 5W and H of Wolfram Alpha.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Stephen Wolfram is building something new — and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

A Computational Knowledge Engine for the Web
In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.

It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?”

How Does it Work?
Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge. For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science — massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.

Building Blocks for Knowledge Computing
Wolfram Alpha is almost more of an engineering accomplishment than a scientific one — Wolfram has broken down the set of factual questions we might ask, and the computational models and data necessary for answering them, into basic building blocks — a kind of basic language for knowledge computing if you will. Then, with these building blocks in hand his system is able to compute with them — to break down questions into the basic building blocks and computations necessary to answer them, and then to actually build up computations and compute the answers on the fly.

Wolfram’s team manually entered, and in some cases automatically pulled in, masses of raw factual data about various fields of knowledge, plus models and algorithms for doing computations with the data. By building all of this in a modular fashion on top of the Mathematica engine, they have built a system that is able to actually do computations over vast data sets representing real-world knowledge. More importantly, it enables anyone to easily construct their own computations — simply by asking questions.

How Smart is it and Will it Take Over the World?
Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.

In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn’t understand the question or the answer, and doesn’t compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.

But as intelligent as it seems, Wolfram Alpha is not HAL 9000, and it wasn’t intended to be. It doesn’t have a sense of self or opinions or feelings. It’s not artificial intelligence in the sense of being a simulation of a human mind. Instead, it is a system that has been engineered to provide really rich knowledge about human knowledge — it’s a very powerful calculator that doesn’t just work for math problems — it works for many other kinds of questions that have unambiguous (computable) answers.

There is no risk of Wolfram Alpha becoming too smart, or taking over the world. It’s good at answering factual questions; it’s a computing machine, a tool — not a mind.

Relationship to the Semantic Web
There is no reason that one MUST use the Semantic Web stack to build something like Wolfram Alpha. In fact, in my opinion it would be far too difficult to try to explicitly represent everything Wolfram Alpha knows and can compute using OWL ontologies. It is too wide a range of human knowledge and giant OWL ontologies are just too difficult to build and curate.

It would of course at some point be beneficial to integrate with the Semantic Web so that the knowledge in Wolfram Alpha could be accessed, linked with, and reasoned with, by other semantic applications on the Web, and perhaps to make it easier to pull knowledge in from outside as well. In this area, the standards of the Semantic Web could be quite useful to the project.

However for the internal knowledge representation and reasoning that takes places in the system, it appears Wolfram has found a pragmatic and efficient representation of his own, and I don’t think he needs the Semantic Web at that level. It seems to be doing just fine without it.

Competition
Wolfram Alpha, at its heart is quite different from a brute force statistical search engine like Google. And it is not going to replace Google — it is not a general search engine: You would probably not use Wolfram Alpha to shop for a new car, find blog posts about a topic, or to choose a resort for your honeymoon. It is not a system that will understand the nuances of what you consider to be the perfect romantic getaway, for example — there is still no substitute for manual human-guided search for that. Where it appears to excel is when you want facts about something, or when you need to compute a factual answer to some set of questions about factual data.

Future Steps
Maybe Wolfram Alpha could even do a better job of retrieving documents than Google, for certain kinds of questions — by first understanding what you really want, then computing the answer, and then giving you links to documents that related to the answer. But even if it is never applied to document retrieval, I think it has the potential to play a leading role in all our daily lives — it could function like a kind of expert assistant, with all the facts and computational power in the world at our fingertips.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Exploring Shiretoko

2009-05-08T11:00:00.005+05:30

After three initial beta releases under the Firefox 3.1, Mozilla developers decided to change the numbering of this release to version 3.5, to reflect a significantly greater scope of changes than was originally planned.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, codenamed Shiretoko, is the sixth development milestone and fourth beta release of Firefox 3.5. Based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 10 months, Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use, and adding new features for users.

New Features:

- This beta is now available in 70 languages
- Improved tools for controlling private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
- Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
- Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5

Known bugs:

All Systems
- Occasionally Google Mail will fail to respond when creating a new filter, showing advanced search options, or clearing the spam folder. Reloading Google Mail fixes the issue
- Some users with older computers or slower Internet connections may experience choppy OGG video/audio playback
- Users who run this beta, then downgrade to a previous Firefox 3.5 Alpha or Beta, will be unable to use stored passwords
- If you have set your preferences to clear your browsing history every time Firefox shuts down, it will also clear history when you restart after installing an add-on or theme. This is unintentional and will be fixed
- The default settings for clearing your recent history every time Firefox shuts down now include removing your cookies
- The "switch text direction" menu item has been removed from the context menu in locales that use left-to-right reading order languages.

Microsoft Windows
- Pressing enter in the Location Bar will not do anything if you are running AVG SafeSearch v8.0 or lower. Upgrading AVG SafeSearch fixes the problem

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 can be downloaded from here.

Web Innovation Conference 2009

2009-04-30T13:03:00.004+05:30

Yesterday I attended the Web Innovation Conference 2009 (Gurgaon) organized by TFCI. One of the major attraction of the event was the diverse and monolithic agenda, covering almost all the buzz words of the World Wide Web. With terabytes of information to be shared, speakers tried their best to convey the message within a short stipulated time period.

Projects as “The maiden Web Innovation event to connect the architects and builders of the web with the brightest minds, hottest concepts, and nextgen killer tools and applications”, I guess it did fairly well to achieve its objective.

Still have doubts, check out the agenda below

Theme Address:
Mohit Hira , President eLearning (Retail) – NIIT

Digital Advertising Concepts & Best Practices
Parminder Singh, Business Head - Google India

True Cloud: Build your IT Infrastructure on the Cloud
Jayabalan S, CTO - Netmagic Solutions

WEB 2.0 - Fundamentals for creating online products, services & business models
Jayabalan S, CTO - Netmagic Solutions
Sanjay Aggarwal, GM Operations - Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation

Investment Themes On The Internet
Alok Mittal, Managing Director - Canaan Partners
Ritesh Banglani, Vice President - IDG Ventures India

Emerging landscape of Web 2.0. and Sneak Peek into Web 3.0
Sanjay Trehan, COO - NDTV Convergence

Top 10 Best Practices of Successful Digital Advertising
Anil Tirunagiri - Google india

Save Capex - Reduce Opex - the Cloud Computing way
Nitin Mishra - Head, Product Management - Netmagic Solutions

SEO: Marketing or Technology?
Pradeep Chopra, Co-Founder & CMO - Omlogic

Enterprise RIA
Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, Sr. Computer Scientist & Evangelist - Adobe India

E-Commerce in Web 2.0 Era
Sanjay Aggarwal, GM Operations - Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation

Consumer 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Changing Moods, Metrics, & Monetization
Harish Bahl, CEO - Studio Smile

Web 2.0 means Business
Nikhil Sarup, Sr. Vice President - Digital Marketing - Solutions Digitas

How brands can influence consumer behavior in a 2.0 World
Sandeep Bansal, Director - BD - eBusiness Interactive

Successful Social Media Strategies for Corporates
Kiruba Shankar, CEO - Business Blogging

Establishing Trust Online
Rakesh Antala, Co-Founder & CEO, Crederity Inc.

User Driven Product Strategy
Satyajeet Singh, Product Manager, Naukri.com

Since I reached a little late (thanks to peak hour traffic) I was not able to attend the Mohit's presentation. But some of the important takeaways that I could note down from the discussions were:

Sometimes "the media becomes the message”
To reduce online fraud, track some fraudsters and take stringent action against them to set an example
Cloud computing can be very useful for startups
Promising areas in the Internet are : Ecommerce, Education, Financial Services, Entertainment
Strength of an Internet company is determined by its "Product Strategy” and “Cost of acquiring & retaining traffic”
Pure advertising based model may not work in India for some more time
Local language market will grow slow
Semantic web will be mainstream by 2012
Social Media can be a boon and bane for Companies, so it’s important to have a presence in Social Media.
To improve traffic, first identify the major source of traffic
Online marking should be handled by Marketing team not technology
60% of people research online but buy offline
1% of the user contribute in building content, 9% get involved in community service and remaining 90% just download it.
Interaction of a B2B site should be like we do in person. Since we do not start forced selling in the first meeting, same should be done on site.
Most of the major internet companies (including social networking giants) are evaluating ways for authenticating credentials of users.
My presentation can be accessed from slide share

Overall, good experience :)

User Driven Product Strategy

2009-04-29T21:08:00.002+05:30

User Driven Product Strategy

View more presentations from satyajeet_02.

Survey

2009-04-09T15:28:00.000+05:30

Hey,

I am working on a small research project. It would be great if you can take this survey and share your opinion.

http://bit.ly/Lhpe

Thanks for your help.

IndiBlogger Meet

2009-04-06T18:42:00.006+05:30

Another weekend, another unconference. This time it was a Blogger Meet organized by IndiBlogger. The event was hosted and sponsored by Microsoft (Gurgaon).

I have noticed that all the conferences these days begin with a hash code, and this one had: # indincr. Also a funny thing about this blogger meet was that there were more Tweeters than Bloggers here.

We started the conference with a little intro from IndiBlogger team and attendees, and I realized that most of the entrepreneurs were byproduct of a bad boss. No wonder why I am still working for someone else (boss I hope you are reading this :)

But the main reason, for me being there was a presentation by Microsoft “Internet Explorer 8: First Look”. Though it wasn’t a first look for me because I have been using IE 8 for more than a year now . But I wanted to see how a person from Microsoft tackles so many Firefox fans sitting there (some were even wearing Firefox T-Shirts).

The presentation was given by Abishek Kant and I must admit he did an excellent work in handling questions like “What is the USP of IE 8”, “What is original in IE8” etc. And he was candid enough to express that the main objective of his presentation was to spread awareness about IE8 and not to compare it with any other browser.

Some of the points that he covered during his presentation:

Accelerators:
These are a form of selection-based search which allow a user to invoke an online service from any other page using only the mouse.

Web Slices:
These are snippets of the entire page that a user can subscribe to. Web Slices will be kept updated by the browser automatically, and can be viewed directly from the Favorites bar, complete with graphics and visuals.

Smart Screen Filter:
It is mainly an extension of Internet Explorer 7's phishing filter. If a user visits a site which has been labeled as an impostor or harmful, then Internet Explorer 8 will show a screen prompting that the site is reported harmful and shouldn't be visited.

Automatic crash recovery
A crash recovery mechanism has been incorporated; if the browser crashes, web pages being viewed may be recovered, at the user's discretion, when the browser is restarted.

Performance and stability
IE8 improves rendering of content authored to various web standards. It has complete support for the W3C CSS 2.1.

Version Targeting
Since it has stricter adherence to W3C described web standards than Internet Explorer 7. As a result, as in every IE version before it, some percentage of web pages coded to the behavior of the older versions would break in IE8. To avoid this situation, Microsoft proposed Version Targeting whereby a page could be authored to a specific version of a browser using the X-UA-Compatible declaration either as a meta element or in the HTTP headers. A browser with a newer version than what the page has been coded for would emulate the behavior of the older version so that the assumptions the page made about the browser's behavior holds true.

Nothing from the points mentioned above will make me switch to IE from Firefox but if you are using IE7 then IE8 makes more sense for you.

We also had Priyanka (better known as Twilight Fairy) giving a very interactive presentation on social media and copyrights. The theme was that every blogger has to be protective of their content and they are responsible for the comments posted on their blog. Some important points mentioned were “If it is on web, it doesn’t mean it’s free to use”, “Linking to illegal content is also illegal” etc.

Over all meet was good (any meet is good if it ends with Pizza ). But unlike Mozcamp Delhi, there were no free IE t-shirts here, another reason to like Firefox :)

Yahoo monitoring Twitter by "SideLine"

2009-04-03T10:19:00.010+05:30

“Watch, search and monitor the twitter public timeline in real time” is the baseline of Yahoo’s new app for searching and monitoring Twitter. Based on Adobe AIR this desktop application is built using the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) and allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.

Sideline is an open source application released under the BSD license and the first beta is available for download here.

Some of the prominent features (as per Yahoo) include:

Advanced search query builder
Custom search groups
Automatic refreshing of defined search queries
Monitor trending topics
20% more awesomeness

Being a Kung Fu Panda fan, I like the last one the most. Also because the other top four are very basic functionalities any search app should have.

Fennec: The Smaller Fox

2009-03-31T10:00:00.010+05:30

Was trying out desktop version of Fennec, the upcoming mobile browser from the makers of Firefox. The name 'Fennec' is based on a small nocturnal Fennec Fox found in the Sahara desert.

The first look seems promising and with options of adding popular Firefox addons, this can be a huge hit (especially for Firefox fans like me).

The desktop version for windows PC can be downloaded from here.

Tips and tricks

To use the full screen for browsing, click the button on the left hand side on top of the device (to the left of the -/+ buttons)
Swipe left to expose back/forward/bookmark buttons and the URL bar; swipe right to dismiss them
Swipe right to expose tabs; swipe left to dismiss them

Known issues

Allow panning/scrolling in iframes - Websites that display large amounts of content in IFrames, including Google Mail and Reader, will be very hard, if not impossible, to use.
Plugins may not work in some of the desktop builds.

Source : Mozilla.org

Crome joins the party !!

2009-03-24T22:25:00.001+05:30

Bebo in India

2009-03-23T10:04:00.005+05:30

You must me thinking that whats the news in this, Bebo has always been in India. But this is not about our size '0' Karina, its about Europe's leading social networking site which has been officially launched in India.

As per Alootechie, Mr. Nicole Vanderbilt, VP, International, Bebo, is very confident about the success of Bebo in India and consider their "Open Media Platform" as a great differentiator .

Though I have not explored it in detail but something that caught my eye was its registration form. It seems they are targeting a very wide age group. Their dropdown for specifying age starts from 1903 and end at 2009. So it doesn't matter if you are 106 yrs old or yet to arrive in this world, Bebo is for everyone.

Will try to explore more this weekend :)

Noticed another strange thing. They are running ads of Bebo.com on Bebo.com. See the "Advertisement" heading on the right most image. Clicking on it will take you to the registration form. So are they paying for getting registration from their own site. LOLz

Interesting Product Review

2009-02-14T09:49:00.001+05:30

Warning: Contains profanity

The Real "Man" of the Match

2009-01-13T07:55:00.004+05:30

On 15 Dec, 2008 India clinched a remarkable test match against England and the "Man of the Match", oh I am sorry, "Player of the Match" award was given to our very own “Maa da Laadla” Virender Sehwag. There were a few who were happy with the decision and some others who thought Sachin was the man behind the historic win.

But in all these controversies we did not notice the real man behind this victory. Who is none other than "Mr. Jammy", Rahul Dravid. No, no, not because of his quick-fire 4 (of 44 balls) in the first innings or the "dependable" fielding efforts, but because of the fact that he got out early (yet again) in the second inning and gave Sachin a minuscule chance to score at an achievable run rate.

Imagine if he would have stayed on the crease for another 20 overs, scoring at a lighting strike-rate of 21 runs every 100 balls faced, even 2 Sachins (at both ends) couldn’t have won it from there.

We need more player like him who first & foremost play for their country, then for their team and then, if possible, for personal milestones (This quote is sponsored by Red Chillies Entertainment ). What a sacrifice, even at this stage of his career.

Long Live "The Wall".

Crash !

2008-07-08T15:13:00.007+05:30

Rare !

Thrice a day !

.

Ten principles that contribute to a Google user experience

2008-05-24T12:24:00.004+05:30

I got this article through an email from one of my colleague (Sameer) and I found it really interesting.

---------------------

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams

The Google User Experience team works to discover people's actual needs, including needs they can't always articulate. Armed with that information, Google can create products that solve real-world problems and spark the creativity of all kinds of people. Improving people's lives, not just easing step-by-step tasks, is our goal.

Above all, a well-designed Google product is useful in daily life. It doesn't try to impress users with its whizbang technology or visual style – though it might have both. It doesn't strong-arm people to use features they don't want – but it does provide a natural growth path for those who are interested. It doesn't intrude on people's lives – but it does open doors for users who want to explore the world's information, work more quickly and creatively, and share ideas with their friends or the world.

2. Every millisecond counts

Nothing is more valuable than people's time. Google pages load quickly, thanks to slim code and carefully selected image files. The most essential features and text are placed in the easiest-to-find locations. Unnecessary clicks, typing, steps, and other actions are eliminated. Google products ask for information only once and include smart defaults. Tasks are streamlined.

Speed is a boon to users. It is also a competitive advantage that Google doesn't sacrifice without good reason.

3. Simplicity is powerful

Simplicity fuels many elements of good design, including ease of use, speed, visual appeal, and accessibility. But simplicity starts with the design of a product's fundamental functions. Google doesn't set out to create feature-rich products; our best designs include only the features that people need to accomplish their goals. Ideally, even products that require large feature sets and complex visual designs appear to be simple as well as powerful.

Google teams think twice before sacrificing simplicity in pursuit of a less important feature. Our hope is to evolve products in new directions instead of just adding more features.

4. Engage beginners and attract experts

Designing for many people doesn't mean designing for the lowest common denominator. The best Google designs appear quite simple on the surface but include powerful features that are easily accessible to those users who want them. Our intent is to invite beginners with a great initial experience while also attracting power users whose excitement and expertise will draw others to the product.

A well-designed Google product lets new users jump in, offers help when necessary, and ensures that users can make simple and intuitive use of the product's most valuable features. Progressive disclosure of advanced features encourages people to expand their usage of the product. Whenever appropriate, Google offers smart features that entice people with complex online lives – for instance, people who share data across several devices and computers, work online and off, and crave storage space.

5. Dare to innovate

Design consistency builds a trusted foundation for Google products, makes users comfortable, and speeds their work. But it is the element of imagination that transforms designs from ho-hum to delightful.

Google encourages innovative, risk-taking designs whenever they serve the needs of users. Our teams encourage new ideas to come out and play. Instead of just matching the features of existing products, Google wants to change the game.

6. Design for the world

The World Wide Web has opened all the resources of the Internet to people everywhere. For example, many users are exploring Google products while strolling with a mobile device, not sitting at a desk with a personal computer. Our goal is to design products that are contextually relevant and available through the medium and methods that make sense to users. Google supports slower connections and older browsers when possible, and Google allows people to choose how they view information (screen size, font size) and how they enter information (smart query parsing). The User Experience team researches the fundamental differences in user experiences throughout the world and works to design the right products for each audience, device, and culture. Simple translation, or "graceful degradation" of a feature set, isn't sufficient to meet people's needs.

Google is also committed to improving the accessibility of its products. Our desire for simple and inclusive products, and Google's mission to make the world's information universally accessible, demand products that support assistive technologies and provide a useful and enjoyable experience for everyone, including those with physical and cognitive limitations.

7. Plan for today's and tomorrow's business

Those Google products that make money strive to do so in a way that is helpful to users. To reach that lofty goal, designers work with product teams to ensure that business considerations integrate seamlessly with the goals of users. Teams work to make sure ads are relevant, useful, and clearly identifiable as ads. Google also takes care to protect the interests of advertisers and others who depend on Google for their livelihood.

Google never tries to increase revenue from a product if it would mean reducing the number of Google users in the future. If a profitable design doesn't please users, it's time to go back to the drawing board. Not every product has to make money, and none should be bad for business.

8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind

If people looked at a Google product and said "Wow, that's beautiful!" the User Experience team would cheer. A positive first impression makes users comfortable, assures them that the product is reliable and professional, and encourages people to make the product their own.

A minimalist aesthetic makes sense for most Google products because a clean, clutter-free design loads quickly and doesn't distract users from their goals. Visually appealing images, color, and fonts are balanced against the needs for speed, scannable text, and easy navigation. Still, "simple elegance" is not the best fit for every product. Audience and cultural context matter. A Google product's visual design should please its users and improve usability for them.

9. Be worthy of people's trust

Good design can go a long way to earn the trust of the people who use Google products. Establishing Google's reliability starts with the basics – for example, making sure the interface is efficient and professional, actions are easily reversed, ads are clearly identified, terminology is consistent, and users are never unhappily surprised. In addition, Google products open themselves to the world by including links to competitors and encouraging user contributions such as community maps or iGoogle gadgets.

A greater challenge is to make sure that Google demonstrates respect for users' right to own and control their own data. Google is transparent about how it uses information and never shares data outside Google without a user's explicit consent. Our products warn users about such dangers as insecure connections, different privacy policies on other websites, actions that may make users vulnerable to spam, or the possibility that data shared outside Google may be stored elsewhere. Google is reassuring but truthful about data sharing so that users can make informed choices. The larger Google becomes, the more essential it is to live up to our "Don't be evil" motto.

10. Add a human touch

Google includes a wide range of personalities, and our designs have personality, too. Text and design elements are friendly, quirky, and smart – and not boring, close-minded, or arrogant. Google text talks directly to people and offers the same practical, informal assistance that anyone would offer to a neighbor who asked a question. And Google doesn't let fun or personality interfere with other elements of a design, especially when people's livelihood, or their ability to find vital information, is at stake.

Google doesn't know everything, and no design is perfect. Our products ask for feedback, and Google acts on that feedback. When practicing these design principles, the Google User Experience team seeks the best possible balance in the time available for each product. Then the cycle of iteration, innovation, and improvement continues.

Third-party ads now available on the Google content network

2008-05-23T09:58:00.002+05:30

Got this email from Google Today

-----------------------------------------------------

Greetings from Google!

We're happy to announce that the Google content network now
accepts display ads served from qualified third-party vendors.
During this initial release, only ads in English are eligible,
although we look forward to offering more options in the future.

By accepting third-party ads, we can attract a greater variety of
advertising on the Google content network, which we believe will
result over time in increased revenue for publishers and more
relevant advertising for end users.

If you're currently opted in to image ads, you're already able to
receive third-party ads. If not, you can enable image ads to start
receiving third-party ads immediately.

If you choose to allow third-party ads on your site, please update
your privacy policy to inform your visitors that third-party
vendors may serve ads on your site. Please also provide links to
these vendor websites and inform your users that they may opt out
of cookies (if the vendor offers this capability). For more
information about updating your policies, visit
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=94150.

You'll continue to have full control over which ads appear on your
site with tools like competitive ad filtering and the Ad Review
Center. Also, only advertisers with whom we have proven
relationships and who've clearly demonstrated commitments to our
quality standards may participate in this program. Our policies
governing ad content and formatting remain unchanged.

To learn more about third-party ads, please visit our blog post at
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/05/introducing-third-party-ads-on-google.html
and our FAQ at
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14535.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact us at
adsense-support@google.com.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

IE 8: Better or Worse

2008-03-18T10:40:00.004+05:30

Hey, I was trying to download Windows updates but got this message.

It seems they were not able to identify that I am using IE-8 , thus prompting me to upgrade to IE-7.

So what next, I clicked on the "Emulate IE7" button in the command bar and surprisingly it worked.

IE 8: Beta 1 Available for Download!

2008-03-07T10:46:00.003+05:30

The downloads of the IE8 Beta 1 which was released by Microsoft at the Mix 08 conference, are available for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, x64 versions, Windows XP (SP2) and Server 2003 (SP2) as well as XP x64 and Server 2003 x64 .

Some of the details of the latest version are given below.

Microsoft wants to give the user easier access to typical activities involved when visiting a web site, for example sending data by E-mail or looking up an address in a street-map service. IE8 will make such operations possible via a context menu. The user can install it by JavaScript from any web site. For this purpose, a developer must describe the action in the form of an XML document.

A second innovation appears in the middle between news feeds, widgets and Firefox's live bookmarks. If the user adds "WebSlices" to his favourites bar, he can click it to have a quick look at the weather forecast and stock exchange prices. This favourites bar was previously known as the links bar: it offers space for news feeds and references to local documents, as well as bookmarks and WebSlices. Web designers can identify an area on their sites as a WebSlice by giving it certain class attributes - very much in the spirit of microformats.

Perhaps IE8 will give a strong push to the development of Ajax applications. New functions tackle the problem of navigation and connectivity; IE8 implements DOM storage, a storage mechanism specified in HTML5 that Firefox already knows about. That could offer a range of functions for storing offline data, similar to those of Google Gears. IE8 will also allow Ajax links to other domains; how the browser will solve the possible problem of security is not revealed in the documents so far published.

IE8 has borrowed from its competitors the feature of restoration following a crash, to enable work to be seamlessly continued, with a previously open tab for example. Microsoft claims as its major innovation the improvements made to the phishing filter introduced by the previous version. Bugs with HTML compatibility and with the DOM functions are said to have been eliminated, a known memory leak is said to have been closed, and speed is claimed to have been increased overall.

Source: HEISE Online

Michael Muchmore has also written a very comprehensive technical review. You can read it on PCMAG.com .

Tech quiz: How well do you know the latest advances?

2008-02-20T17:38:00.003+05:30

1. Microsoft introduced a new version of its Zune music player in 2006. Name a key Zune feature that Microsoft has promoted in its battle against Apple Inc.'s rival iPod.

A. WiMax connectivity
B. Wi-Fi connectivity
C. Wiki connectivity
D. Why should I care about connectivity?

2. Five years ago, almost 90 percent of all digital photo prints were produced on home printers. In 2007, what percentage of digital prints were made at home?

A. 72 percent
B. 50 percent
C. 38 percent
D. 24 percent

3. Amazon.com unveiled a new electronic book reader in November: a $399 digital screen with a keyboard and the ability to buy best-selling books for $10. What is the name of Amazon's new device?

Story continues below
A. Reader
B. Kindle
C. eInk
D. iRead

4. In 2006, only 20 percent of all digital cameras had a resolution of seven megapixels or above. Last year, about what percentage of all digital cameras sold in the United States boasted resolutions over seven megapixels?

A. 30 percent
B. 40 percent
C. 50 percent
D. 70 percent

5. In 2006, there were about 161 billion gigabytes of digital information stored online, on personal computers and on corporate servers. How much do experts expect to be stored in 2010?

A. 250 billion
B. 362 billion
C. 988 billion
D. 1.212 trillion

6. Which of the following electronics retailers won't be around to battle Wal-Mart and Costco with razor-thin margins this year?

A. Best Buy
B. CompUSA
C. Circuit City
D. Tweeter

7. Where do local merchants think they're most likely to find the consumers they're targeting with their online ads?

A. local newspaper sites
B. local television sites
C. Yellow Pages sites
D. Internet-company sites

8. IRobot added a new line to its robot vacuum cleaners and swimming-pool cleaners last year. What does it clean?

A. toilets
B. cat pans
C. home gutters
D. bath tubs

9. Flash drives that hold up to 32 gigabytes of data in a tiny space and plug into a computer USB port to upload or download files are showing up in all sorts of unlikely devices. Which of these is now being sold as a flash-memory device?

A. Swarovski heart pendant
B. Swiss Army knife
C. plastic sushi
D. ballpoint pen
E. all of the above

10. Which of the following companies agreed with the Justice Department to pay $21 million in fines for promoting illegal gambling in the United States?

A. Microsoft
B. Harrah's
C. PokerStars.com
D. InterCasino.com

Answers:

1. B. Wi-Fi is the wireless networking technology that is used in homes and at hot spots like coffee shops, and it allows Zune users to download a tune directly from a computer without plugging in a cable. Most iPods can't do that.

The iPod brand still dominates the world of music players. It had about a 60 percent share of the market for most of last year, based on unit sales, compared with around 10 percent for Zune, according to estimates by market-research firm NPD Group Inc.

2. C. Consumers increasingly are relying on retailers to print their photos. Most of the time, that means bringing the camera's memory card to a kiosk or mini-lab at a store, but a growing number of photographers upload their pictures to retailers' Web sites and then pick up the prints when they go to the store. People are increasingly reluctant to print their pictures themselves because of the cost of ink and specialty paper and the sometimes disappointing results of home printing.

3. B. Although the Kindle isn't the first electronic book device, the Amazon sponsorship brings vastly more content than earlier readers — 88,000 books and numerous periodicals available for purchase. And the Kindle offers wireless downloading, unlike Sony Corp.'s $299 electronic Reader, which requires users to download content through a PC.

It's too soon to say, though, whether the Kindle's advantages will help spark a market that has been close to invisible, especially in the glare of the popularity of portable digital music players.

EInk is the technology used by the Kindle and the Reader to display text while avoiding the flicker of LCD screens. IRead is a Facebook application that lets users list and review the books they have read.

4. D, according to NPD Group. And better picture quality isn't costing consumers more, as the price of the most popular cameras remains in a range of about $200 to $300. The steady improvement in resolution allows images to be tightly cropped and still blown up into clear pictures for calendars or photo collections. But this may be a trend that has run its course: Photography experts say further advances in resolution won't make much difference in photo quality.

5. C. Thanks to the proliferation of user-generated content such as YouTube videos and online photos, stored digital information is growing 60 percent a year, according to market-research company IDC.

6. B. CompUSA Inc., currently operating in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is being liquidated after its acquisition by Gordon Brothers Group PLC. But 16 of its stores have since been acquired by Systemax Inc. and will continue to use the CompUSA name in Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico.

CompUSA had struggled to find a profitable niche competing with larger firms with greater economies of scale. Best Buy Co. remains the No. 1 specialty electronics retailer, with rising sales of flat-screen TVs and other popular electronics. Circuit City Stores Inc. is No. 2, but it has been losing money as it revamps stores and tries to improve customer service.

7. D. Last year, for the first time, local advertisers spent more on sites like Google.com or Monster.com than on local newspapers' sites. Internet companies got 44 percent of the $8.5 billion local advertisers spent online, newspaper companies got 33 percent, Yellow Pages sites got 10 percent and local-television sites got 9.3 percent, according to media research firm Borrell Associates. This year, local online advertising is expected to rise 48 percent to $12.6 billion, led by growth in car, job and real-estate ads.

8. C. The Looj reduces the number of times a homeowner must climb a ladder to scoop leaves out of gutters. The robot was designed by iRobot Corp. to be small and light enough to be carried up a ladder and propel itself along the gutter.

9. E. Flash drives also have been decorated with Star Wars figures or scented like fruit. Sales of flash drives rose 66 percent last year to 232 million units, according to Web-Feet Research Inc.

10. A. Microsoft recently agreed to pay a total of $21 million without admitting or denying guilt for allegedly receiving money from online gambling companies for advertising on its Web sites. Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. agreed to smaller fines at the same time.

U.S. regulators maintain Internet gambling is illegal, but they can't go after offshore operators. Instead, they have cracked down on mainstream U.S. financial firms to stop them from handling payments and have gone after popular advertising-driven Web sites, such as Microsoft's MSN.com and Google.com, to stop them from promoting gaming sites.

By: William M. Bulkeley
(The Wall Street Journal)

OVI - The door to Nokia's internet services

2008-02-05T12:25:00.000+05:30

“Today, capturing great photos, videos and audio is easy. But until now, organizing it all has been tedious. And sharing it with the people who matter to you can be a major hassle. Now, Share on Ovi makes organizing and sharing your media as easy as capturing it with an easy-to-use site where you can be comfortable inviting your friends and family”.

That was the so called "USP" of Nokia’s “Ovi” (twango), a new website in the already overcrowded social networking domain. “Ovi” allows people to share photos and videos and is built on technology acquired with the U.S. firm Twango. So let look at what “Ovi” has in store for us. Here are the reasons mentioned on the website for becoming a member:

Organize and manage all of your media in one place—we support more than 100 types of files.
Share your media your way: privately with one person or with a group, or publicly with the whole world—you are always in control.
Bring every participant's media together to enrich the experience of your team, clubs or other groups.
Republish your media anywhere on the Web—with access to fun display features such as slideshows and tickers.
Find cool new people and media with easy browsing and searching on Share on Ovi.
Capture the moment wherever you are with one-step sharing from your PC or camera phone.
Invite people to view your media without forcing them to sign up.
Get unlimited media storage, 250 mb of upload bandwidth per month, and a 100 mb maximum file size with your free account.

Nokia, the world's largest cellphone maker, has also started to roll-out its online gaming service N-Gage as it expands into mobile Internet services. It has delayed the gaming service twice last year due to delays in software testing and starts to roll out to owners of its N81 multimedia phones around the world.

Nokia is the first handset maker to move strongly into the content space with services like music or filing sharing site Mosh, where millions have downloaded audio or video files, programmes or documents.

Microsoft's reply to Google

2008-02-05T09:48:00.000+05:30

In a statement released on Feb 3, Microsoft has responded to the questions raised by Mr. Drummond.

Here is what Brad Smith (General Counsel, Microsoft) has to say in reply to Google’s Comments on the bid, “The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising.”

Further in his reply to Question 1, he added, “Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the Internet. We believe that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will advance these goals”

But it seemed that either he wanted to ignore the other two questions asked by David or he had no answers for them. He tried targeting Google for its monopoly in web search and was sounding desperate while quoting the combined market share of Microsoft & Yahoo vis-à-vis Google in web search. And if we go with his logic, how the hell will we get the “compelling number two competitor” player for emails and instant messaging services.

And here is the synopsis of the deal so far from Reuters:

Google's view on Yahoo-Microsoft deal

2008-02-04T15:37:00.000+05:30

Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo will be one the hot topics in this internet industry in weeks to come. And Yahoo’s statement indicating that its board would indeed evaluate the deal seriously is enough to stimulate millions of thought processes.

But if you were wondering, how Google does feels about this, here is the answer. Mr. David Drummond (Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer) has posted Google's first official response to the proposed deal “Yahoo! and the future of the Internet”, and it has some bite. He has raised several questions that bring forth the darker side of this deal. He thinks the its much more than just “simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”

And here are the questions if anyone wants to answer:

Question 1) Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Question 2) Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft -- despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses -- to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet.

Question 3) Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services?

And he summed it up saying that “the interests of Internet users come first -- and should come first -- as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored”

Dotcom Pioneers: Where are they now?

2008-02-04T11:16:00.000+05:30

Hey, this is a nice compilation of the pioneering tech companies that made the Web what it is today (by Josh Lowensoh, Scott Ard, Elinor Mills, Greg Sandoval, and Jon Skillings of News.com). Some of them continue to innovate and turn a profit, while others have either died off or been consumed by larger companies.

About.com. After being launched in 1997, Web guide service About.com was picked up by The New York Times company in 2005 for nearly $700 million. About's still kicking, and serving up a large variety of content, both written and video.

AltaVista was one of the first big search engines for the Web. After launching in late 1995, the service gained popularity before parent company Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq in 1998. It then changed hands three more times to fall under Yahoo's control, who still uses its technology in its Web search.

Amazon.com. Founder Jeff Bezos' 1995 e-marketplace baby survived the dot-com bust and quickly began to turn a profit selling a huge array of products. It's snatched up over a dozen otherhigh-profile sites including the Internet Movie Database, Alexa Internet, and on Thursday Audible.com.

AOL started out as a video games-by-telephone modem service before nearly going under in the early 1980s. It turned into an ISP beginning in the 1990s, and continued to grow massively until competition made the company change its focus to content. It later merged with Time Warner in 2001. The company continues to be known for its instant-messaging service, portal news site, and as an Internet service provider.

Ask Jeeves has been around since 1996 and was formerly known for its cartoon mascot of a smarmy concierge-type who would answer search queries. Jeeves was nixed 10 years later when the company re-branded as Ask.com. Ask continues to compete in the search world, but trails behind the popularity of larger search behemoths like Google and Yahoo.

Buy.com was founded in 1997, and like Amazon.com it began with relatively few types of items for sale before expanding to cover nearly every product in every category. The company went public in 2000, but stock values tanked. Company founder Scott Blum bought back control of Buy.com and took it private, and it continues to sell goods online.

CBS MarketWatch, now known simply as MarketWatch, was partially owned by Viacom until News Corp.-owned Dow Jones snatched it up in early 2005. The media company continues to provide written and video content, both on the Web and on TV.

CMGI (College Marketing Group Information) was founded in the mid-1980s, and had an IPO in 1994 as CMG Information Services. The venture capital company continued to grow, and stock prices soared up until the dot-com bubble burst, taking the company with it.

CNET Networks, parent of News.com, started out producing TV shows about technology and later expanded into creating online content, ranging from video games to a technology news service and blog network. The company has expanded into several major global markets both in China and the U.K. Recently, a group of investors led by Jana Partners announced an intention to try to take over a majority of seats on its board of directors.

CompuServe is one of the better known dot-com pioneers, and also one of the oldest. It's best known for its role as an ISP, which brought it popularity in the early 1990s before tanking due to customer dissatisfaction with bad modem hardware and poorly written software. It was quickly snatched up by Worldcom in 1998 before getting flipped to AOL only 24 hours later. CompuServe remains an ISP with a news portal serving up stories from Netscape.com.

E*Trade. This financial services company started from a company called TradePlus before moving its operations onto the Net in 1991 under the E*Trade brand. The company went public five years later and managed to survive the dot-com bubble burst. But it has struggled as of late, along with many companies in the financial industry.

EarthLink is another ISP that managed to survive the dot-com burst. The company started out in 1994 providing dial-up service, and continues to offer it and VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) phone services using DSL, satellite and cable. The company's also managed to branch out into telephone services with its popular MVNO Helio.

eBay. A pioneer in online auctions, eBay is now a more diverse company--and it also faces growing competition from Amazon.com, along with what one analyst calls "buyer fatigue" following years of revenue leaps. In January, longtime CEO Meg Whitman said she'd soon be handing the reins to John Donahoe, head of eBay Marketplaces.

Excite@Home was the result of one of the largest mergers of the dot-com era: the popular portal Excite.com and broadband infrastructure builder AtHome. The plan was to create a company that provided the pipes and the content (similar to AOL), but combining two successful companies turned out to create one dud and Excite@Home sold off the Excite portal in 2001.

Expedia was one of the first Web services to offer travel arrangements for airfare. It was created by Microsoft in 1996 before branching off as its own company three years later. In 2001 came a purchase by InterActiveCorp (then USA Networks), which holds a handful of travel and entertainment sites. The site continues to be one of the best-known online travel services.

Games.com is best known for its various handoffs, including one between Atari and Games Inc. for over a million dollars. The site now serves as a portal to AOL's gaming offerings, many of which are casual, and can be played in a Web browser free of charge.

iVillage was created as a media company providing content aimed mostly at women. Created in 1995 by some former America Online employees, the company continued to grow. Four years later, the company went public. Despite share prices soaring in the beginning, they quickly bottomed out. After merging with Women.com in 2001, iVillage's offerings began to thrive again, and in mid-2006 NBC Universal picked it up for $600 million.

Lycos is best known for its search engine roots. Now a Web portal too, Lycos underwent huge growth after its launch in 1994. It was enough to attract the attention of Spanish company Terra Networks, who snatched it up in 2000. Four years later, Daum Communications became the new (and current) owners. Lycos continues to roll out new services like Mix.

Monster.com shares a similar title with Craigslist in serving up classifieds for jobs. The service launched in 1999 as a merged solution from two former job classifieds competitors, the Online Career Center and the Monster Board, from which Monster.com gets its moniker. It has localized sites for nearly 40 countries.

Netscape offered one of the first Web browsers that completely dominated the browser market in the mid-1990s before getting dominated by Microsoft's in-house browser, Internet Explorer (which came as the default browser in every copy of Windows). It was purchased by AOL in 1998 and now resides as a content portal and social news service that was later spun off from the Netscape brand and into Propeller. The last traces of the famous Netscape Navigator browser now reside in a customized variation of Mozilla Firefox, whose support is slated to be discontinued next month.

Overstock.com has always played second cousin to competitor Amazon.com. The service was founded in 1997 as D2: Discounts Direct, but the brand didn't stick and was later changed to Overstock. It may be best known among investors for its IPO failure and subsequent loss in sales, but consumers are likely to associate it with the company's ads featuring spokesmodel Sabine Ehrenfeld. The company continues to sell a wide range of goods, though it has yet to turn a profit.

Pets.com was a vertical of the Amazon.com model, focusing purely on pet goods and known well for its sock puppet mascot. Despite the killer advertising campaign, the company had bad timing with the burst of the dot-com bubble, and couldn't stay afloat.

Priceline.com offers discount travel services including airfare, hotels, and cars. After launching in 1998, the site expanded into several other areas, including long-distance calling, home loans, and car sales before re-focusing on travel. The company is well known for its mascot, William Shatner, who played James T. Kirk in the Star Trek TV series and movies. Priceline continues to do well, with a recovering stock price and profits from licensing its purchase technology to eBay.

Shockwave.com is a games site that's been offering casual games since 1998. The site merged with the Atom Corporation in 2001, and was later picked up by MTV (by parent company Viacom) for $200 million. Despite the Shockwave moniker, most of the games utilize Adobe Flash.

Webvan. Flush with millions of dollars raised from venture capitalists, Internet-only supermarkets like Webvan spent huge sums to build high-tech warehouses and flashy Web sites, and to hire armies of deliverymen. In the end, the wild spending broke them. The concept lives on, though, with established supermarket chains and online companies like NetGrocer.com.

Word Sense Disambiguation !!!!

2008-01-11T12:41:00.000+05:30

I was reading about this cool topic which is very popular with dialogue writers of B-Grade Cinema but seems to be one of the major hurdles in the field of information retrieval.

Simply put Word Sense Disambiguation is process of identifying which sense of a word is used in a sentence.

Just to remind, you must have enjoyed WSD in the double meaning dialogues of Dada Konde, because for us it very easy to understand the context of a word, but to develop an algorithm to replicate this human ability is a nightmare for programmers. For eample, when we say “Sachin’s cricket bat”, it’s easier for us to understand that it is related to Sachin Tendular’s bat which he uses for playing cricket, but for a search engine, a bat can be a mammal, cricket is also an insect and who the hell is Sachin.

Few of the difficulties faced by IR can be, queries in some complex figure of speech rather than a literal language, different meaning a word in different languages (remember the “Monkey” controversy), addition of new words, new spellings/acronyms frequently used in sms, chat etc,.

Various techniques are used to overcome this hurdle like Ranking results based on the origin (country) of query, User clustering, Collaborative filtering (Collective intelligence) etc but none of them have proved to be completely infallible.

To me this seems to be one of the major reasons behind the popularity/growth of vertical search engines. Because more or less, vertical search engines knows the context of your query and the ambiguity is reduced to minimal.

I will try to give an example of the same by using my favorite keyword “Fish”. So let’s say you are search for the book called “Fish” by Harry Paul and John Christensen and type “fish” as a keyword for your search query, here are the results you’ll get from different search engines.

Google Web Search

Google Product Search

Google News Search

Google Book Search

Finally Google book search comes to your rescue. It is because Google book search knows that you are searching for a book which will be somehow related to “fish” and managed to throw the relevant result on page 1.

Many search engines are very wisely trying to integrate the intelligence of their vertical search engines to its generic search engine by combining the results. Google, Yahoo etc have also started including results from its vertical search engines (mainly news, images, video) but this strategy has been very effectively implemented by ASK. So if you search for “Sachin” on ask.com, you will get, web results, videos, encyclopaedia, blogs, related keywords, and even paid content in a much organised manner.

Okay, I guess enough for now, it seems now I am deviating from the main topic of WSD. But I am sure you must be feeling much superior to a stupid computer who can still interpret WSD as Washington School for the Deaf :-)

Phishing targets HDFC

2007-11-04T22:42:00.000+05:30

Hey, i just got an email from "Service@hdfcbank.com".

The subject-line was really persuasive - "Urgent Notification! Your Account is Suspended". Though "urgent" is considered as a spam word but this subject-line must have got them a good open rate.

It said that my account has been accessed from some foreign IP and as a precautionary measure they want me to login to my account. The content really enticed me to login to my account but then I remembered that I don't have an HDFC account ;-)

The landing URL of this email is

http://www.mycareerchange.com/chat/nick_image/page.html
( note that is not on https :-)

whereas the original HDFC URL is

https://netbanking.hdfcbank.com/netbanking/

So be careful and never share your account details on such emails.

I am attaching the email below.

-------------------------------

Dear Hdfc Customer,

We recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your
Hdfc Bank account from a foreign IP address.

If you recently accessed your account while traveling,
the unusual log in attempts may have been initiated by you.
However if you are the rightful holder of the account.
Click on the link below to re-activate your membership and
follow the instructions carefully.

*Re-Activate My Hdfc Account*

If you choose not to complete the request, you give us
no choice but to suspend your account temporary.

It takes at least 72 hours for the investigation in this
case and we strongly recommend you to verify your account at that time.

Hdfc Bank Email ID hdfc9eh9

HDFC BANK LIMITED �2007. All rights reserved Terms of Use | Privacy Policy.

Gartner’s top 10 technologies for 2008

2007-10-11T11:20:00.001+05:30

Gartner has outlined its top 10 Strategic Technology Areas for 2008:

Here is the snap short of the technologies and what David Cearley and Carl Claunch said Gartner's Symposium ITxpo 2007.

Green IT is the application of environmental consciousness to the computer and information technology industries. Green IT companies are changing the way technology is used to cut down on waste, eliminate unnecessary energy use and help the environment.

The technologies for green IT practices–multicore chips, power supplies, fans and power management software–are all mature, says Carl Claunch, an analyst at Gartner. So what’s new about green IT for 2008?

Claunch argues that there may be limits put on data center choices, regulations may become more prominent and then there’s the cost savings to your electric bill. “Green really matters and there’s a lot of work coming from the technology vendor sphere,” says Claunch.

Cearley notes that he has talked with many technology managers that haven’t been prodded for green IT practices. His advice: Plan ahead because “at some point someone will knock on your door about it and it’ll be easier if you plan ahead.”

Unified Communications is a commonly used term for the integration of disparate communications systems and media, desktop computers, applications and mobility. This potentially includes the integration of voice both fixed and mobility , e-mail, instant messaging, desktop and advanced business applications, Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, voice-mail, fax, audio video and web conferencing, unified messaging, unified voicemail, and whiteboarding into a single environment offering the user a more complete but simpler experience.

Claunch says converging things like Web services, contact centers, email and phone services will lead to combinations with storage networks, video from security cameras and sensors. “All sorts of potential applications emerge,” says Claunch. Timeline: 2010.

Business Process Modeling (also known as Business Process Discovery, BPD) is the activity of representing both the current and future ("to be") processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed and improved. BPM is typically performed by business analysts and managers who are seeking to improve process efficiency and quality. The process improvements identified by BPM may or may not require IT involvement, although that is a common driver for the need to model a business process, by creating a process master.

Meta-data Management involves storing information about other information. With different types of media being used references to the location of the data can allow management of diverse repositories. URLs, images, video etc. may be referenced from a triples table of object, attribute and value.

Mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; a typical example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally envisaged by either source.

Composite Application expresses a perspective of software engineering that defines an application built by combining multiple services. People often compare composite applications to mashups. However, composite applications leverage enterprise and enterprise-ready sources (e.g., commercial web services) of information, while mashups usually rely on web-based, and often free, sources.

The composite application consists of functionality drawn from several different sources within a service oriented architecture (SOA). The components may be individual web services, selected functions from within other applications, or entire systems whose outputs have been packaged as web services (often legacy systems).

Computing fabrics: Claunch says blade servers are just an intermediate stage. A fabric will allow several blades to be merged. “Blades are not the final step,” says Clough. His description:

The fabric based server of the future will treat memory, processors and I/O cards are components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suit the owner’s needs. That is, a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server. Any combination of the components can be configured, as they will not longer be defined as blades.

Virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. One useful definition is "a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources; or it can include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single logical resource."

Virtualization is more than just consolidation of hardware. Claunch argues that virtualization is all about flexibility and the ability to adapt. These advantages go beyond mere hardware savings.

Here’s a chart outlining what Gartner calls Virtualization 2.0:

Web platforms (also known as SaaS today). Software as a service (SaaS) is a software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet. Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it. They use it through an API accessible over the Web and often written using Web Services or REST. The term SaaS has become the industry preferred term, generally replacing the earlier terms Application Service Provider (ASP), On-Demand and "Utility computing".

Cearley says that 25 percent of Gartner customers have some form of SaaS already. Cearley advises that IT managers build in SaaS providers into their sourcing strategies.

Longer term, however, Web platforms will be the model for the future. Ultimately everything –infrastructure, information, widgets and business processes–will be delivered as a service. All of these intertwined APIs will give us a acronym: WOA (Web oriented architecture.) “Put this on your radar screen and start with some ‘what if’ models,” says Cearley. These Web platforms will also make mashups more common in the enterprise. In fact, Cearley argues that enterprises will need an architecture just to manage mashups.

Real World Web: Claunch defines the Real World Web as one where all devices–wireless devices, cameras, PCs etc.–combine to analyze location, intent and even emotions over a network. This will augment reality, says Claunch. Many verticals–military, healthcare, travel and retail–are expected to adopt applications for the Real World Web.

Social software is normally applied to a range of web-enabled software programs. The programs usually allow users to interact, share, and meet other users. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with sites like MySpace and YouTube and has resulted in large user bases and billion dollar purchases of the software and their communities by large corporations (News Corp purchased MySpace and Google purchased YouTube).

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

2007-10-10T11:55:00.000+05:30

This is an Amazing Speech given by Steve Jobs in Stanford University.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Internet Explorer Inside Firefox

2007-08-16T00:47:00.001+05:30

I know many of you must be aware of this (since the first version was launched in October 2005) but I am writing this for the benefit of all the Linux users and Firefox lovers (like me) who are still not aware of this cool tool.

Though the number of Firefox users is growing but still there are many websites (including popular utility website like IRCTC) that do not fully support Firefox. But now, neither you have to switch to Windows nor you have to open a new browser because “IE Tab” is here to save your day.

With help of this great Firefox Add-on you can easily see how the web page is displayed in IE and then switch back to Firefox. Developed by PCMan this tool enables you to use the embedded IE engine in Mozilla/Firefox environment.

You can just right click and select “view page in IE Tab” option or just click on the small icon to change the environment.

I hope this information was helpful.

Click here to download the IE Tab.

The definition of Being Competitive

2007-08-14T17:07:00.000+05:30

Though it doesn't fit in the category of World Wild Web but I could not resist putting it here. Picture quality is not very great because I have taken it with my Razr.

Any Comments ??

Why Networking?

2007-08-12T00:29:00.000+05:30

You must have noticed that Networking has become a new trend in this world wild web (that’s what I call it). It all started in 1995 with Classmates.com and then came Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo! 360° and many more. But the success of Orkut, Linkedin, FaceBook, MySpace etc has shaken the entire internet industry including India. And Bigadda, Connexions, Brijj, Techtribe, is just a beginning.

But have you ever wondered, what is the reason the behind overnight growth of these websites and what is adding fuel to all referral models?

I would say “Reducing Degrees of Separation”

Its wasn’t too long ago when we said that if on an average everyone know 42 people around them, then the entire 6 billion population of this world is just 6 degrees away (6th root of 6,000,000,000 = 42.628)

Use this formula:
(average number of friends per person) ^ (degrees of separation) = total population

With faster & cheaper means of communication this number (42) seems to be too small, especially for the online world. Forget about friends and family, even if you look at your phone book, outlook address book, Orkut friends this number will easily reach to 500.

If there are 32 million internet users in India and very pessimistically, even if we know 75 people around us, the maximum degree of separation for internet users will be just 4 for India and 5 for the entire world.

It isn’t too far when you'll see a sign on all the profiles on Linkedin.

BlogDay2007

What is Emotional Ergonomics?

2007-08-09T12:45:00.000+05:30

Emotional ergonomics can be perceived in two ways

1) It is commonly thought of as how companies design tasks and work areas to maximize the efficiency and quality of their employees’ work. International Ergonomics Association has divided ergonomics broadly into three domains: Physical ergonomics Cognitive Ergonomics and Organizational Ergonomics.

2) It is also perceived as a field concerned with the emotional aspects of peoples’ interactions with products, services or systems.

Being from a Product Management background, I will try to elaborate more on the Product Design aspect of Emotional Ergonomics.

It is said that we respond to an object according to how we feel, not how we think. Often consumers perceive an object to be emotionally better even if your body or society doesn't. Thus it is recognized as the study of perceived comfort or convince. An example is slouching. This is common in everyone's sitting at some part in the day, we know it’s not good for posture yet it’s emotionally satisfying.

We as human before we think anything, we feel it, even if it is an online shopping site. Thus how a product engages with us emotionally is as important as how well it performs mechanically, otherwise all our choices would be based strictly on price and functional efficiency, rather than emotional resonance and visceral appeal.

Product functionality is crucial for product success, the appearance, use of materials; shape and form provide the most immediate product data for the user. But less tangible issues such as emotional bonding of users with products, cultural perceptions and social value systems, provide valuable insights for the product developer to help expand knowledge and understanding of the users' need beyond the functional requirements. Knowledge of emotional ergonomics is important if you want to build customer loyalty and charge premium prices.

Simple methodologies such as watching people use products, organizing focus group sessions, and focusing on the application rather than the delivery method, would ultimately produce objects more relevant to users’ needs.

Is the Alexa Ranking correct?

2007-08-05T22:05:00.000+05:30

Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach & pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.

But is this the correct way to judge or rank a website.

Apart from the biased that it is based on the sample of Alexa tool bar users, it is browser specific and it can be easily manipulated, the formula itself is debatable.

We started off by quoting the number of “Hits” for determining traffic of a website. But eventually, we moved away from the term "hit" because everyone realized it was pretty meaningless. A hit was often counted not just for a page load, but for every element included on the page, as well. So if a site was less graphical and had equal usage would register half the hits.

And then came Reach and Pageviews.

As such, it would not be fair to compare two websites that belong to different categories. But measuring reach (number of unique visitors) is important because mainstream advertisers want to reach a lot of people but not just the same people over and over. It also gives an idea of popularity and growth of a website.

Pageviews became the primary metric not because they were more meaningful but because they helped in closing Ads deals since Ads were sold primarily on a CPM basis and its counts are as susceptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage.

Someone has brilliantly analyzed that the part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible.

As the way we interact with the web is changing, and technology makes it easier for users to have access to multimedia content on a single web page, are page views still relevant? AJAX, RSS, Feeds, Widgets. Streaming etc. are making things worse.

So what's a better way for comparison? Good question.

As I have mentioned earlier also, it is not fair to compare two websites that belong to different categories. The measurement of success also varies from website to website. So it could be registered users, files uploaded/downloaded, posts, hits, searches, revenue, and it may even be pageviews. But internal metrics aren't enough, since we want to compare ourselves to other players in the market. So we also need some apples-to-apples comparison.

If I had to pick one, in addition to unique visitors (reach), I'd say time spent would be much more useful than pageviews.
Time spent interacting with a site is a much better basis on which to compare sites' relative ability to capture attention/value than pageviews is. Especially when it comes to media like audio or video, an increasing percentage of the web consumption, time obviously means a great deal more than a pageview.

However, time is a bit harder to measure.

HTTP doesn't actually have a concept of time spent. So if you read this whole post and then click off to another site, my web server won't know whether you were here for five minutes or five seconds. I don’t even know whether you have been reading this post for last 10 mins or you are having a coffee with this page open in your browser.

Finally, there's a big argument against time as a measure:

People don't spend much time on Google search, because it gives them what they want so fast, and they go away (which is obviously good for them and for users). But the average time spent per visit will be very low.

And just as pageviews can be gamed, you can slow your users down unnecessarily (or accidentally because your servers are too slow) and increase time spent.
In short, there's no easy solution but there's a BIG opportunity (though very tough job) for someone to come up with a meaningful metric that weighs a bunch of factors.

Can you suggest any?

Search: Finding or Understanding

2007-07-11T10:32:00.000+05:30

Many of the researches have shown the increasing trend in the usage of web search. Since more and more people are using search to find various web addresses, the expenditure on SEO and SEM has also increased many folds. Even the Non IT Companies are trying hard to make them easily searchable on the popular search engines.

But have we ever thought that does the search engine understand what we want? The answer will be “No” in almost all the cases. Most of the search engines will just simply do a match of your query in their database and will give you all the documents matching your search criteria. But what differentiates a good search engine from an ordinary one, is the ordering of those results. Thus the main expertise (apart from having a big database) lies in how to show the most relevant results first to the user, out of thousands of matching results.

So all the googles in this world started focusing more and more on how can they improve the ordering of the results and came up with various complex algorithms. But still all they can do is “finding” and not “understanding”. For them, what you are looking for are merely “keywords” and nothing more than that. I think I will be able to explain it better by this example.

Let’s say you are in love with your fishes and you are looking for some healthy food for them. Someone suggested “just Google it”. So you wrote healthy food for fish on the magical text box and pressed go, expecting that it will tell the best possible food for your fishes. But you don’t know that “for” can be a stop word in Google and using its world famous page rank algorithm it will search for “healthy”, “food” and “fish”. So you will get nearly 3,230,000 results and but you will be disappointed to see that most of them are of “healthy fish food” and not “healthy food for fish”. And after going through all the URLs, I won’t be surprised if you end up eating all the fishes in you aquarium .

But it’s good to know that some people are working on various concepts like web2.0, web3.0, semantic web and so on, to improve the relevance of their search results. Some of them have started using the user himself to build intelligent algorithms. But still I don’t know when will they be able to “understand” what the user really expects of them?

Death of Emails

2007-07-02T16:15:00.001+05:30

I still remember getting my first email id on Hotmail 10 years ago. It was a great feeling, having your own space on web. Suddenly the world was looking much smaller. I was able to stay in touch with my friends and relatives across the globe at virtually zero cost.

And then a time came when people started flaunting their email id on all possible domains and there were few lucky ones who could get their names@domain.com. But those who could not, ended up in name_yearofbirth/age@domain.com. I still feel pride owner of satyajeet.singh@gmail.com :-)

And then came Chat, Yahoo Groups, Social Networking Sites, Blogs and what not. Cheaper mobile prices and tariff have also played a major role in making emails less popular.

Emails are still trying to find a way out for its survival. Those who were planning to charge money for email space have started giving unlimited space for free. Because of stringent spam laws and increasing awareness, the revenue models of these companies are going for a ride. They are not able to create differentiation and the result of which, usability of emails is going down consistently. Chat, SMS, Scraps, Blogs are eating up the making share.

Late entrants like Zapak mail and AOL will face tough time in luring registrations. I don't even remember writing a personal email in last few months and what I receive is mostly chain mails, forwards, mailer, alerts etc. The only thing which makes me maintain my email id is that it has become a compulsion for registering on most websites.

Let’s wait to see how long they can survive without being killed by newer technology. I say 2-3 years.

What I hate about Google !

2007-06-25T13:41:00.001+05:30

Why will you visit Blogger, Orkut, or even Google Adsense? The obvious answers would be , to write a post, check scraps, or account status etc. And for all these activities, you are required to login by entering your username & password.

But why do Google thinks that we visit Blogger to find out the new features launched or Orkut, to look at the Pics of those bunch morons because that is what they load first. I mean to say, if you are on a slow connection and want to access Orkut, they will first show the header, then some text followed by the group picture and in the end the box to enter your username & password.

So you have to wait for the entire page to download before you can login, which can be easily avoided if they set the order by the priority of the activity on the page.

I hope someone from their team can hear this.

Best Website for Search

2007-06-15T13:08:00.001+05:30

Which is the best web search engine...... Google or Yahoo or ...... ?

I did a small experiment to find out that which is the best search engine and who could tell us better than these sites themselves. So I took votes from Google, MSN (live), Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and Lycos. You must be thinking, what waste of time, everyone one will say that I am the best but the results were surprising.

Methodology:

To take the votes, I asked each of them by typing the word “search” in their keyword boxes. And the first result they that they throw will be the best site that can be associated by this word (as per them) or their recommendation.

And the results were:

Site --------- Recommendation

Google ------ search.live.com

Live (MSN) --- search.com

Yahoo -------- search.yahoo.com

Altavista------ search.yahoo.com

Ask ----------- ask.com

Lycos --------- ask.com

So there is a tie between Yahoo & Ask.

I don’t say that these two are the best sites for searching web, others sincerely need to work on their own search engine optimisation :)

Google is getting CREEPY

2007-06-13T17:54:00.000+05:30

If you get a call from your HR manager that he has seen you in a cafe during work hours, or your wife catches you with your secretary outside a Multiplex. Don't be surprised, because the next level of Google Maps is here.

The new Google Maps offers a 360-degree view of many streets in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami, with other cities to roll out later, John Hanke, director of Google Maps and Google Earth, said in a session at the 2.0 Conference.

It may have many repercussions, but to me it sounds really creepy. I may have exaggerated it a bit but at some point of time we have to decide, till what level can we allow Google or anyone else to intrude our privacy. Whether it’s putting up of cameras on Traffic Signals or Satellites, we have to say NO at some level. At least I can not live my life like “ The Trueman Show”.

Google's shopping list

2007-06-12T22:13:00.000+05:30

Google thinks big these days. Here are the top 50 web properties according to ComScore, in order of importance (comscore.com/press/release.asp):

Yahoo (probably too expensive)
Time Warner
Google [x]
Microsoft (may lead to monopoly issues)
Fox
eBay (expensive but can be considered)
Wikipedia [Wikipedia founder says "no" to this deal)
Amazon (can be considered)
Ask Network (not interested)
New York Times (Nice option, though news has always been a neglected child)
Weather Channel (can be clubbed with news)
Viacom
Apple
CNET (same as NYT above)
Adobe (why not)
Gorilla Nation
Wal-Mart
AT&T
Target Corporation
Expedia
United Online, Inc.
Facebook (extension to orkut)
Lycos
Monster Worldwide (may make a sense)
CBS Corporation
Verizon Communications Corporation
Bank of America
CareerBuilder
Gannett Sites
Idearc Media
Disney Online
Shopzilla.com Sites
Photobucket.com
CraigsList.org
Real.com Network
Travelport
Comcast Corporation
Yellowpages.com Network
ESPN (already bought cricinfo)
iVillage.com women's network
ArtistDirect network
WebMD Health
WhitePages
Cox Enterprises Inc.
Weatherbug Property
Citysearch
NBC Universal
USPS.com
JPMorgan Chase Property
Ticketmaster

So what’s next in the shopping list for Google?

My picks will be NYT, Amazon, Monster.com (instead of simplyhired) and i would love to see a Gaming Site in the list too.

What Say??

Web 2.0 - Some thoughts

2007-06-07T15:50:00.000+05:30

Search for "Search Engine"

2007-06-06T15:08:00.000+05:30

Knowing what you want to search in not enough now days, you should also know where to search. And that does not restricts only to the website but also to the different search engines available there. Because if your are searching for some information, you have a choice of searching through Book Search or Scholars or Blog Search or Product Search or Image Search or Video Search or News Search or Code Search or **??? Search or you can create your own search engine using Google Co-op. Still not satisfied, try the new Voice Search, Accessible Search or the latest Experimental Search. And if that to is not enough try Google Suggest, Google Set or Know more about trends through Google Trends. With so many option available, i think Google itself might also get confused one day :-).

I don't how many of the users are aware of all such option but for those who know, it may sound like a nightmare. It is good that Google has created so many specialized search engines but it would be better that if it gives one search box (like the original Google) and then clusters the results found in specialized search engines. Though it has already started working on the same (because i can see images, videos etc on the same page) but a lot of work needs to be done on the clustering end. They should get some inspiration from Ask.com, they have done some cool UI stuff for clustering search results.

Hope i haven't hurt Google's sentiments yet again ;-)

The Power of DEFAULT

2006-11-25T00:55:00.000+05:30

I don't know how many times we as a consumer have thought of this seven letter word "DEFAULT". It may be several meanings, but to me it means the "predefined settings done for the user for the ease of his use"

There are two school of thoughts. One says that let the user decide what he wants because every individual is unique. Some of the popular buzz words like customisation, atomisation, even web2.0 etc talk about this. The range of examples for this can vary from tailored clothes to a customised car designed by Bentley.

The other school of thought says; make the task of consumer simple by giving him predefined products. Some of the scholars believe that we should give everyone what satisfies the need of more than 80% of the consumers. And I don't think I need to quote any example for this.

I always believe that every individual is like a rational number, divisible only by itself. Thus customisation is the mantra to follow. But the question to answer is, up to what extent?

Now coming back to the online world (where we belong ), there have been several attempts to customise the services so that they can satisfy most of the users. But the fight is to increase the number of people who fall in this "most" category.

Some websites have identified this fact have started giving features like create your own homepage, your own search, online avatars, choice of colours, designs, etc etc etc And some have gone a step further and have added "MY" to every section of their site to make user feel more possessive about his account. This may sound funny but have worked for these sites.

But still, we can not ignore the fact that still most of the users in countries like ours are not so advanced and may not be ready for all this customisations. And we have to save his time also. And lot of options may confuse him. There is another way of saying all this "we know what is good for him".

So when it is us who decide on the behalf of the user, then is becomes all the more important to analyse that what should be those default settings. It has been observed that 8 out of 10 users use the default settings provided to him and 6 out of them were not even aware of that there are options also to select. I don't think we need more numbers to prove the "power of default"

Thus many internet companies are experimenting with different setting to make the processes quicker. Some are trying to make the settings more and more intelligent for better usability, some try to manipulate the setting as to hide their weaknesses and some do a trade-off as per their own convenience. Quoting a very simple example of keyword based search, many websites do a lot of research for creating robust algorithms and improving the relevance of the search results, some (especially the one who have limited size of the database) simply search on "any of the words" just to throw more results. Finally, some prefer staying in between relevance & their own convenience, and search on "all the words"

Many of the websites have also used (or we may call it misused) this power to for their own benefits. So let's not talk about taking acceptance for sending promotional mailers, downloading adwares and various other agreements of which the user may never thought of. If because of increasing awareness and stricter cyber law they are not able to do that, they use another magic word "Recommended" (which I think is the only word that has over-powered the "default") new to the option they want the users to select and it is done.

No matter how we use (or misuse) this power of default, but it has surely become very important ingredient in designing effective web services.