TechNayak(mirror)

Yes, its all about advertising. From pay per post to “friendvertising”, its all being done in the name of advertising good. The recent addition, ScratchYourself. Dont worry, it isn’t as dirty as you think it is. Infact its a viral advertising campaign that could prove to be the equivalent of crumpled brochures. Its simple and really viral. A person can make a scratch card that can be embedded in your everyday social networking sites, the users stand to win prizes on scratching a prize winning card. The publisher of the card, aka you also get the same prize as the person who scratched the winner. The idea is to make companies sponsor prizes and contests, probably even place small ads on scratch cards that tend to present a lucrative offering.

Its a winning idea. I don’t know of a single person who can resist scratching an unscratched scratch card. Its sheer sense of mystery and curiosity that gets the better of us. Prepaid recharges aside, if the card promises to hold goodies in them , then it makes it that much more fun. Wonder how many unfortunate people will spend hours trying to scratch their way to some goodies. But its viral nevertheless.

Curiosity might have killed the cat or not but it surely did slay some unsuspecting web workers who scratched the virtual card.

courtesy :techcrunch

Here’s an example …………….

http://www.scratchyourself.com/getCard.php?id=125463209028d4ff

I just read this wonderful article by Nicholas Carr which talks about information credibility on sites like wikipedia. Sure, the phenomenon is big with almost every person turning to wikipedia as a substitute to encyclopedia , but is that information credible? Its common folk like us (not experts) who add entries to wiki’s and we have our own free will to contort facts. Since wiki’s have become dependencies in many cases, I see a disturbing trend of abuse of technology and information due to the acts of a few. Its evolutionary I suppose which Nicholas points out subtly quoting Larry Sanger’s ( of the wikipedia fame) article.

 In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media - in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals.

Larry Sanger

In the midst of all of these, at least there is realization that not all information is credible and who controls or contributes that information is as essential as the information itself. I wouldn’t what category to put that into, but we have an unsolved problem on our hands - Information relevance and credibility. Though the promise of a semantic web does tend to blur out the relevance or the contextual aspect of the problem ,  the credibility part of it is lost. Take this blog post for example, the quoted text is actually from Larry Sanger’s article which was referenced in Nicholas Carr’s article which in turn found its way here. Now supposing I were to look at that text alone without knowing the background, how would I know who was responsible for that piece of information.

Knowledge and Information Management techniques are not well equipped to handle such situations. Though images have watermarks and EXIF information, text has a very loosely coupled digital signature. Though these systems could probably solve the origination problem, the problem of information purity and fact/fiction is still left unabated. A conservative solution of allowing experts to monitor and control data ( which Larry Sangers next project citizendium plans to implement) just abstracts the problem to a higher level, besides , how many experts can you find in specialized areas who would voluntarily monitor the data available in their domain. More work and research needs to be done to ascertain accuracy of data and more importantly facts.  I cannot relate to machines solving the problem though a combinations of semantically linked documents with a lot of mining could give partial results. What do you think ? Have you come across any solutions to this sort of a problem ?

There are a lot of blogs out there and many that you want to catch up on, but given the amount of time you have left for your personal activity, you miss out on some of the most important blogs, news etc. Its also a pain to visit each and every blog to read about the new articles, although RSS has made life easier, many still don’t know the in and outs of it and the various RSS readers. Just as a suggestion, if you are looking for a thin reader try Google Reader and for a thick client, try Mozilla’s Thunderbird. So what do you in these cases; why not get your blogs, news, updates via email.

” Hey that sounds cool. In my office people will think Im reading mail but I will actually be reading my favorite blog , awesome :-)”

Now there are a couple of services that you could probably use for this purpose. I shall list them down in no particular order of preference.

  Feedburner provides all the above with also additional features like traffic analysis. Feedburners feed is the best service they offer in which your blogs RSS feeds go through feedburner which in turn gives you stats on your readers and content. Apart from that feedburner provides you with a host of wonderful services which include publicizing, monetizing and marketing your blogs. It would be my first choice for any feed related activities.

Feedblitz provides you your updates by mail, if you are a blog publisher you can add their subscribe by mail widget on your sidebar, just like mine( look on the left). Apart from that you also get a link that you can forward to people where people can subscribe to your posts.

R - Mail, the service was recently acquired by NBC Universal also provides a similar RSS to mail service, the service already has 50,000 users who have 100,000 subscriptions.

I see a trend, or fad even of small and medium sector industries increasing adoption of software to do their business. Be it a real estate or a flower merchant, you see small ERP’s , CRM’s , billing softwares , websites and other technology aiding these small businesses. Given the recent boom in economy, at least in India, there are a lot of startups springing up with their market changing concepts, pitches and even technologies. Every company has to incline itself to a set of processes to survive the long race, and aligning to processes instantly adds about 10 or 20 software dependencies for project management, documentation, knowledge gathering, HR and others.

Thats where the biggies are trying to cash in whilst some startups are trying to consolidate. MS has their Axapta and BI suite and Google have their Office suite. MS sells their ERP Axapta and BI to SME’s at unbelievably low prices compared to the other tools around , infact, the products themselves have been designed for this target audience. Google offers their apps for a very low cost, where as MS gives their entire BI suite with database, ETL and Charting for the price of a little known database. MS also has a range of small business softwares which they sell to SME who don’t want to left behind in terms of technology like their small business servers and other software.

In India, there is a huge boom predicted in the retail sector. ERPs, CRMs, Warehouse management systems, portals , Business Intelligence reporting and other similar developmental work will see a upsurge in the next couple of years. People just starting up, an essential piece of advice, DO NOT THINK OF YOUR EXIT STRATEGY. Doing so will only deteriorate the quality of your product, and Im saying this because I see a lot of individuals talking about a concept , which isnt even built yet and they talk about their exits. Exits are for extremely successful or totally unsuccessul products, more so the latter. If you survive in the industry in a competitive place like India, its likely that you will be moderately successful and that you will have your worth adversaries. In such a situation you will have to strive to keep your product feature rich and niche and not many may want to buy your product if your competitor decides to sell it for a quarter of a million less. To talk about your exit strategy even before building your product isn’t really a good idea and flaunting it around definitely isn’t.
The SME space is buzzing and it will be worthy seeing a domination in that segment. Right now its open for play, so start pitching in those great ideas. If you are looking for a place to present your ideas, I suggest Proto.in happening in the first week of June, rush in your entries.

I just finished checking out OpenDNS after I read about it and I must say, its a really novel idea. What it does is really simple, modify your internet connection to point to the DNS provided by the OpenDNS folks and then you can create shortcuts to your visited pages. Like the example given below

 Its sort of like a bookmarking service but at a more abstracted level. Though I don’t see people thronging to use OpenDNS instead of their regular browser bookmarks or social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us , but its a good service for network administrators.
   If you are an network admin for a company, college or an institution, you will be aware of the wealth of useful applications that are present on the intranet. You will also know that many of these applications are hosted on different internal servers and aren’t really that accessible either through their URLs or through their navigational qualities. Many go as far as creating a central repository of links to these internal application, but the larger the list grows , the tougher it becomes for searching the services you require.

 Instead use OpenDNS, and you make mail point to your internal mail server, or HR point to your internal human resources portal. Its a cinch to use and doesn’t require you changing your DNS lookup tables in your gateway machine.

Barcamp Bangalore also had a session on widgets and their emergence
in the current internet scene. Opera is one of the pioneers in this
field with their support towards the current widget standards and also
its widget platform. What is a widget you ask?

A widget is a
small Web application, and making a widget is just like making a web
page, except it functions like an application and lives directly on
your desktop.

Step 1. Create a file named config.xml to give the widget a name and some dimensions.

<widget>
<widgetname> Hello World </widgetname>
<width>300</width>
<height>100</height>
</widget>

Step 2. create a file named index.html
<html>
<body><h1>Hello World </h1></body>
</html>

Step 3. create a zip file containing the newly
created config.xml and index.html at the root folder. You can open this
zip file inside Opera 9 to test your widget.

step 4. Upload your widget on widgets.opera.com and you are done!

Though this demo is stricly restricted to Opera, as the widget 1.0 standards is put into place, more browsers must be able to support this sort of a mechanism.
This is how your widget would look if styled properly. You can also visit http://my.opera.com/community/dev/widgets/ for more details

Powered by ScribeFire.

Another set of links that I feel are worth a look.

Are web interfaces really good enough compared to desktop interfaces ?

Choosing the right Ajax Framework for your app

Web 2.0 - End of Innocence - By Om Malik

JSON and browser security some tips

Improving you web application performance - parallelizing downloads

Future of RSS 

Top 5 forgotten elements in HTML

There were speculations, and predictions but it finally happened. Google has just acquired Tonic systems and their presentation suite to add to its office automation app. With this acquisition, GOffice seems to be a big reality and with Google Apps for domains being offered to SME’s there might very well be a shift towards online office automation.
  Everything aside, the news wasn’t totally unexpected and MS doesn’t need to fret as yet. I recently met a lot of folk who were still new to the 2.0 trend aka the enterprise folk. When I tried talking them into the benefits of the 2.0 to businesses, there was clear repulsion. Why? You don’t let your data out of your office. Thats where the online office space fever begins to wear out and people come back to dear old Earth. Documents, spreadsheets etc are critical to a business, some documents carry the entire fate of their companies. Internal memo’s , financial results, upcoming projects, new technology and project metrics are some of the most commonly created/used documents and trust me, office folk are not comfortable with Google hosting the files out of their office.
   Whats working against Google is also their branding, which has been clearly towards search and advertising. The minute you mention google behind your data, people are worried that your data is being crawled for content and mined and instances like the Notebook controversy doesn’t help. Instead if Google could give provisions to keep data internal to the systems creating it, there could be some stir with the MS Office folks.
   I see a lot of blogs asking MS to wake up, I say, take it easy. It takes more than a fancy set of apps to move a giant.

 I have moved my blog to my personal space but continue to mirror content here because there are many who still read this blog. I see a lot of feeds pointing to this blog rather than my new space. Please update your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions to my new space.

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I just read an article from the web2.0 expo where Jeff Bezos of Amazon gave a talk on how Amazons S3 service , which essentially allows you to use Amazon’s servers as your data store, crossed 2 Billion stored objects. For a meager sum of money you get the scalability and the reliability of Amazons servers, basically the same architecture Amazons own services are based on. Thats where he announced “Infrastructure as a service has arrived“

I did some research on S3 sometime back when I intended to use it for some project, and found it really compelling to use. There were lot of problems reported by users and some outages also which hampered lot of sites who depended completely on S3. There is also the problem that your traditional taxonomic structure that you were working on will now be replaced by a Hashtable like datastore that you essentially query. I found it a great way to store shared media, photos and other non text based information and rightly so. S3 fits in as a replacement to a database in the more traditional sense, but it has its own limitations, but its power nevertheless.
So what is this IAAS( see title) , according to me its the death of the network engineer.Gone are those days when you would rent our servers and rope in DBA’s and Network engg who would manage the hardware and availability part of your application. You want unlimited computational scalability? try mediaTemple’s Grid server, want unlimited datastore? try S3, want scalable content delivery? try Akamai Edge. Infrastructure management is at an all time low in the 2.0 era, especially since technology is more easily available , manageable and scalable. Infrastructure is also turning into another SOA where pre built components define how you develop and deploy your applications and you don’t have to worry about downtimes, reliability, scalability and other metrics that are considered important for any web service.
Whenever such disparate elements contribute to a unified cause the next step is  consolidation. But will it ever happen ? these service providers bank on the fact that you need these systems to run your application, otherwise you wouldn’t need a database or a blade server. Have services like S3 given companies like oracle a run for their money? Will there be a similar offering from the other majors?
Picture Oracle providing database hosting on their enterprise level infrastructure for a minimal cost. Updates and upgrades done automatically, maintenance not a pain anymore. Its a space worth debating on and worth watching out for.