TechNayak(mirror)

In.com, an initiative of Web18 of India is trying to create a one stop portal for people on the internet. The service looks really promising and will find fast acceptance in India, given the explosive growth of internet users in the country.
   The site provides a easy to use, intuitive interface to a digg like billboard of news stories in different categories. You can also rate articles pushing them higher up in the list just like digg. You can also surf podcasts, audio feeds, video feeds and even adds feeds of your own. There is also audio and featured artists, categorized videos, online games and a classified service with search. You even get a cool mailid based on your username, thanks to the domain in.com, your mail address becomes really simple to remember.
  The only thing this site needs is some social features like one touch sharing with friends, PM’s, communities and it could give a stiff competition to the existing networks. India needs its own MSN and AOL and efforts like these definitely show promise in achieving that goal. Will keep my eyes open for more news and info on this portal

   I was lucky enough to snag cool mail id is ritesh @ you know the rest

The BIAL - Bangalore International Airport will be open for business from the 23rd of may 2008. The airport promises to be a great place with lots of facilities. BMTC will run 600 + volvo buses daily from various corners of Bangalore. The buses run with a frequency of 15 minutes, which is great and set prices will ensure you wont have trouble from Bangalore’s infamous autorickshaws and taxis. The other great initiative is the taxis that will be chartered out of the airport on set price.

 The revolt to the new airport being established is plenty and the fact that its 40 kms away from the city makes travel to the airport an overhead for short haul flights. Take a look at the guide for travelling to the airport
  
       Travel Guide to the Bangalore International Airport

and also the transportation map of the pick up points, route and the proposed time for travel.

   Transportation Map.pdf

 The  jewel in the crown could have been booking for transports on these buses so that there aren’t any seating hassles, but hopefully they will get to it once the airport is fully operational.  Best of luck BIAL.

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

Convergence refers to the coming together of markets, technologies or concepts to benefit out of each other. This coming together when complete diminishes the lines between these two entities and it becomes really difficult to relate to each of them independently. The wikipedia definition states :

Technological convergence refers to a trend where some technologies having distinct functionalities evolve to technologies that overlap, i.e. multiple products come together to form one product, with the advantages of each initial component.

I recently wrote an essay on digital convergence for a course im taking. The essay talks about how telephony and computing converged to become the phenomenon we know as the internet. The essay talks in detail the history of both these fields and highlights significant landmarks and events that laid the foundation to this ocnvergence. Its an interesting read for anybody wanting to learn about the history of the internet.

Click here to download my essay on Convergence

Im testing the XML-RPC interface to blog sites in order to buld a plugin to post blogs really fast. If this post is published on the blog then , it means Im one step away from finishing my plugin. Yaay!!

If you have developed a web application and want users to post to their blogs using your application, this is the way to do it. Its really simple. Here’s the library I tried. Its really simple and works well for Blogger, but in WordPress, the title of the post doesn’t appear. For wordpress, you can use the MetaWeblogAPI for XML_RPC. Just download the XML-RPC implementation in php from here and follow the instructions in this article. That should just about do it , dont you think ?

Oh and this thing took me less than 20 minutes to do