Prakash Advani's Blog

HTC Inspire is a good budget phone, however I don’t know when HTC will launch this in India. It’s currently available in US from AT&T.

Here is what is cool.

• 4G Capable HSPA+
• Android 2.2 upgradable to 2.3
• 4.3″ Display
• 8 Megapixel Camera, 720p video recording.
• Dolby Surround sound
• Scratch proof, Gorilla Glass screen
• 4 GB Built in with expandable microSD memory card slot.
• 1 GHz processor

Whats the limitations

1 GHz processor sounds a little low as compared to the new generation dual and quad core phones. However for people just wanting to use the phone features this is enough unless you want to play games. By choosing a single core processor, HTC is able to keep the price affordable for this phone. Unlocked phones are available for  around $300 on Amazon.

No Front facing camera, this in my opinion is a need for people wanting to do video calling over 3G or skype.

As per PC World, Desktop Linux gains market share of more than 1 percent.

After dipping to 0.97 percent in July, Linux rose to 1.07 percent in August, 1.11 percent in September, 1.19 percent in October, and 1.31 percent in November, Net Applications reports, followed by the new high of 1.41 percent last month.

W3Counter, for instance, puts non-Android Linux at 1.64 percent in December.

Wikimedia’s Traffic Analysis Report for last October pegged Linux at 3.48 percent, while news site The H-online which also reported on the new Net Applications data–noted that Linux users now account for 25.36 percent of its own traffic.

Our own stats shows 34 percent of users coming to Cityblogger are using Linux. I am glad people are finally realising the benefits of Linux on the Desktop.

Cloud is the buzz of today and many people are getting very confused on what is the cloud. To put is in simple way, Cloud is any service delivered on the Internet. Cloud based hosted services have been around for 10 years however now people are calling it Cloud.

Lets take an example, if a university offers it courses only in the class room, and now wants to offer online classes, then it is the Cloud. Similarly if you are running a business and you want to start selling online then you are moving into the Cloud.

Once you have decided to move your business online, you can select some of the current Cloud technologies which will allow you to scale very well such that your website/webstore will be able to handle high traffic very well at the same time optimise your resources when the traffic is low. These are Cloud technologies or building blocks which is not be confused by Cloud services. You could still offer your services in the Cloud without using any Cloud Technology. However if you use Cloud Technologies you can scale well and optimise your resources well.

Build on VMWare CloudFoundry, IronFoundry offers .NET support in the Cloud. Cloud Foundry is VMWare’s PaaS solution which is open sourced. Tier 3 (the company behind IronFoundry) has take the code and added support for .NET.

OpenStack is the future of Cloud computing. Founded by NASA and Rackspace it aims to provide a fully scalable open source cloud infrastructure. This can be deployed to build a public cloud or your own private cloud.

Here are the reasons why I believe OpenStack will be successful.

1. Its completely  Open Source, hence it is continuing to develop at a rapid space. Being open in nature, the project will never die down.
2. It is designed to scale up very well.
3. Its highly flexible you have a choice of Hypervisers  including ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, LXC, QEMU, UML, Xen, and XenServer.
4. Over 2000 Developers and 144 companies are behind OpenStack making it an Industry Standard.
5. This includes the who’s who of Cloud computing:

• Cloud Vendors: Citrix, Cloud.com, Nebula
• OEMS: Dell, HP, NEC
• Chip makers: Intel and AMD, Broadcom
• Storage: Netapp
• OS Vendors: Canonical (Ubuntu), SUSE
• Telco: NTT Docomo
• Networking vendor: Cisco
• Service Provider: L&T Infotech

Some website stats shared by OpenStack.

• People in over 13,000 cities from over 200 countries visited OpenStack.org in 2011
• Ttotal of 750k+ visits from 430k+ unique visitors.
• The most popular city was Beijing, followed by Seoul, London, and Bangalore
• China was #2 after the U.S. as a source of visitors to openstack.org

After the success of Open Courseware, MIT is planning to launch free online learning courses. MIT Open Courseware is now 10 years old, wow! The online course will be called MITx. It will not earn you an MIT degree however it will still give you a certificate of completion. The course will be free, the certificate will attract a small fee which is yet to be determined.

It will be built on Open Source and the technology developed for this will also be Open Source.

Time to learn something new ?

From Gigaom’s article:

The past few years have been nothing if not a boon for entrepreneurs looking to cash in on venture capitalists’ lust for all things cloud.  All the activity has been great, and we’ve seen some exciting new companies emerge and prosper — companies such as Heroku, RightScale and New Relic — but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Startups that want to get noticed, get funded, and ultimately have a winning exit must either find their own unique niche or stake out ground on a different field altogether.

Here are 10 cloud computing startups that launched in 2011 and that have a chance to make it big in 2012.

Read the rest of the article.

Expect these companies to receive enormous amount of funding way past their realistic value.