TechNayak(mirror)

The impact of the internet is so profound and enriching that people want to express themselves through the various ways. Bollywood stars are also not far behind ; the latest craze being Amitabh Bachchan’s blog. Besides the fact that I am a big fan of Mr Bachchan, I think, the blog idea is wonderful. Its a gateway to connect to your fans in a completely non intrusive way. Its way better than the chain mail fan club.
  I hear that there are many other stars going blog crazy. Will scour around the place to find more, especially the ones where the ladies write

 Well this is where Amitabh blogs

I am really amazed at what flock has done to the browser experience. I have always been a flock fan and the recent additions to the browser are just great. Almost all the userful and popular online applications are integrated into the browser. If you take my case ( take a look at my flock settings in the image below), you will see that my favorites is automatically del.icio.us. I can write a blog post to any of my three wordpress blogs, or my blogger account. I can integrate flickr and upload photos from flock directly. Beats having to deal with the flickr upload page ( which is currently great, but previously was a pain). Twitter updates directly from the browser. Plus the myworld page follows my friends on facebook, twitter, flickr, blogger etc. It shows latest updates on photos from friends, blogs, comments on my blog, latest twitters by friends etc Its great!!  I can also drop images, links and other interesting media like videos, audio etc to my friends on facebook which is a great way of sharing.

  I can integrate gmail or yahoo mail and send pages, links, images are email to people with just a single right click button. The web clipboard which is also a godsend is wonderful when you are puling images, links and other paraphernalia from the net for your blog. For me the flock experience is perfect as it takes browsing to a whole new level. For all firefox users, try flock, you wont be dissapointed.

I just finished trying out the Microsoft WorldWide telescope and it just simply blows your mind away. Its awesome as it takes interactive applications to a new level. The application has images from a lot of telescopes which include the likes of the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra. For a person interested in astronomy, its a dream come true.  The application provides bookmarks to places worth seeing and the best part is the guided tours which does a very good job with the resources at hand.
   The software is a must use for all teachers and schools who have a really great way of explaining the wonders of deep space. The tours are a really innovative feature as its always fascinating to watch and learn than to just browse around aimlessly not knowing what you are looking at ( which is what Google Mars was like, never really got the point of looking at the surface of Mars). Anyway, for scientists, astronomers, academicians, schools , universities, the worldwide telescope is a must have.

 The best part is you can connect to an actual telescope and get pre-collected images from those telescopes based on your navigation. Its virtually a real experience. Reminds me more of the iLabs project where universities gave remote control of expensive laboratory experiments to people across the world.
 Microsofts Worldwide Telescope

The last 20 years have been more than fruitful for Bangalore and India in general as the preferred destination for outsourcing, but the tide may soon ebb. The cost advantage that India presented to the west isn’t there anymore. True globalization of the Indian work force has meant multinational and international companies are recruiting in India, offering international salaries and providing immigration opportunities. The impact of this globalization is the increase in salaries that Indian companies have to match to find skilled labor. The increased opportunities also mean very alarmingly high attrition rate amongst tier 2 and lower companies. In business processing outsourcing and ITES sector the attrition rate is almost twice that of Software. The rise in salaries especially in cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad have created high income inequalities amongst the lower and the middle class. The increased money and spending power has also raised costs of living. Its estimated that about 5000 people are entering Bangalore everyday in search of opportunities, but that’s easy math when you consider the population of India; This inflow of people have put severe infrastructure constraints in these cities. Clogged roads and sky high infrastructure costs are common in these cities. Companies are finding it hard to find breathing space in the city and the instability in the government means there is no end point to the woes faced by the IT companies.

For a new company trying to establish a presence in Bangalore, the costs of infrastructure are extremely high and the sheer amount of companies plus the income inequality created by the increased wages will assure that only high salaries will ensure loyal employees. That’s not even guaranteed. There is a resource crunch, high infrastructure costs and productivity numbers are beginning to decline. The cost advantage is clearly lost. Indian companies are setting shop in tier cities like Tumkur, Pune etc where the infrastructure costs are significantly lower and the local talent pool is still unadulterated by the outsourcing boom. This still isn’t the solution as the reason why cities like Bangalore saw the boom was due to high concentration of engineering workforce and also the output of engineers in the southern region thanks to the 1000 odd engineering colleges in the region. The setting up of companies here will only guarantee reduced costs and not skilled labor, which means poor quality software.

This situation isn’t new, it happened at route128 and also in the valley. This was the prime reason for outsourcing and now it seems we have come full circle. Falling dollar prices, recent slowdown in the US economy and the opportunities presented by countries in South East Asia, China and Russia which are currently centers of low costs means India faces severe competition. India’s economy is riding on the success of outsourcing exports and the currency has become costlier. Outsourcing has become a victim of its own success and only time will tell what fate lies ahead for India.

I recently wrote an essay on the software bottleneck and the reasons behind some of measures to resolve the bottleneck which include outsourcing, open source etc. If you were interested in the reading material above, be sure to read the essay.

Xobni is my pick of the plugins for Outlook. It manages your emails and does wonderful things. Just try it out with outlook and see the difference, I suggest people with full mailboxes to use this plugin to get organized easily. Click the link below to get Xobni

Xobni: Email organization, search, and navigation for your Outlook inbox

Yahoo India search has a new feature which is very impressive, the glue search page. Its a portal search page which displays results like a portal on the topic. I didnt see a world wide release though, but on the India page its there. Portal serach is a concept which people have been trying to work on for a long time. Ofcourse portals can only be given for relevent search results which have information sources of different types. Try it at

  http://in.search.yahoo.com

try these example searches

  http://in.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A8pWBjyekyJIoDUA2Qy6HAx.?p=shaurya&ei=UTF-8&iscqry=&fr=sfp&rd=r1

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?p=Mysore&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?p=IPL&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1