General


Google and Microsoft, two of the world’s largest technology firms, are raining blows on each other as they hard sell their so-called cloud services and vie for dominance in a market estimated to grow to $15-18 billion by 2020.

“Google is the largest cloud services company in India,” claimed Rajan Anandan, Google’s India head since January 2011. “We have 2,00,000 businesses that use Google cloud solutions. We have orders of magnitude bigger than Microsoft,” added Anandan, who used to head Microsoftin India before he took up the Google job.

Read more.

In my experience if you can absolutely focus on getting one thing done, you can get it done really fast. Now Harvard Business review has a nice article on this. Here are some useful suggestions from the article.

1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you’ll be. When you’re done, take at least a few minutes to renew.

2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don’t, you’ll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that’s relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.

3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you’re off, you’re truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you’ll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.

Read the complete article.

Gigaom has a nice article comparing the costs of hosting your website on Amazon Web Services or self-hosting your own site.

Zynga has made it known that for economic reasons, they now use their own infrastructure for baseline loads and use Amazon for peaks and variable loads surrounding new game introductions.

Read more at Gigaom.

Anand Agarwal directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s vaunted Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. His company Tilera sells chips with 16, 32, and 64 cores, and it’s scheduled to ship a CPU with 100 cores.

It is green cause its power efficient. A 400-watt Tilera server provides as much processing power as eight x86 servers that draw 2,000 watts.

Read more.

 

[amazon_link id=”B004T36GCU” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]HTC A9192 Inspire 4G Unlocked Phone with Android OS, 3G Support, 8 MP Camera, Wi-Fi, and GPS--(Black)[/amazon_link]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.

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

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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.

Mashable has a nice infographic on how Cloud Computing has changed businesses.

The age of technology has ushered in countless conveniences that have shaped our lives in more ways than we can probably even imagine. The late, great Steve Jobs likened technology to a bicycle, in that it helps us get to where we want to go more efficiently. If you want to know how very much technology adds to your quality of life, then try just for a moment to imagine your life without it. Difficult, isn’t it? But just like everything, the benefits of technology come with some costs. Consider these negative effects of technology:

Changes in business. As technology has ushered in all of this convenience, it has also made it unnecessary for people to perform certain menial tasks that computers are now able to accomplish in a fraction of the time. This can be a good thing, unless you’re one of the thousands of people whose job has been replaced by a computer. Moreover, print sources like newspaper and publishers, as well as media retailers like music and video rental stores, are shutting down in large scale because their goods are no longer needed now that people can easily access information and media online.

Intimacy. Technology allows people to communicate with others on a mass scale, and from one corner of the globe to the other. While this may be good in some ways, it also serves to alienate us from true, intimate connections. We have less face-to-face conversations with people in favor of texting via our mobile devices, and we make “friends” with people we’ve never met before, sometimes communicating with them online more than we even spend time with our families.

Laziness and instant gratification. When things come too easy to us – when we no longer have to pay our dues to get a return – we become lazy and complacent. One day, it’s a thrill just to be able to access boundless information on the Internet, and the next day we’re complaining that our pages aren’t loading fast enough. Where does it end?

Technology has made it possible for us to do things we never before could’ve imagined, and it seems we’re only just beginning to understand this fascinating frontier. However, has the advent of the age of technology taken us further away from ourselves? Are we forgetting what’s really important? It seems that today’s culture is, more and more, becoming more about the machine and less about the man. It’s time we take a good, hard look at what we are making of all this technology, before it makes something of us that we no longer recognize.

About the Author: Odette Maupredi is a communications specialist with an avid interest in technology. While she enjoys using email fax services and online sites to better run her business, she is consciously aware of how changing technology is making it more difficult for people to communicate face-to-face.

In the book, Once Upon a Wall Street, Peter Lynch, one of the most successful mutual fund managers that Wall Street has ever seen, narrates a story.

“Consider the Indians of Manhattan, who in 1625 sold all their real estate to a group of immigrants for $24 in trinkets and beads. For 362 years the Indians have been the subjects of cruel jokes because of it – but it turns out that they may have made a better deal than the buyers who got the island. At 8% interest on $24(note: let’s suspend our disbelief and assume they converted the trinkets to cash) compounded over all those years, the Indians would have built up a net worth just short $30 trillion, while the latest tax records from the Borough of Manhattan show the real estate to be worth only $28.1 billion.

That’s 1000 times more! the power of compounding. Found this article interesting.

At the LibreOffice Conference, they announced that they will be releasing versions for Android and iOS.

They also plan to release an online version which you could host on your own as well to offer web based office suite. This would a boon to companies wanting to offer Google Docs but want it hosted in their own private cloud.  They could now host LibreOffice Online.

Expect this to take 12-18 months to release something for end-users. Target date is End 2012 or beginning 2013.

Meanwhile  for Android Users, there are three applications to open ODF files on Android.

OpenOffice Document Reader

ODF Viewer

Mobile Document Viewer

Since the time the HTML standard was created, people have been expecting it to be the defacto standard for application development. While it did help simplify many things, it had its own limitations. To address some of these limitations, Java was created. While Java solved some, it also had its own limitations and required a JVM to be installed on each device. Javascript and AJAX also solved several of those challenges and are still being used widely for rich applications. Although many solutions tried to solve some of these challenges; in terms of rich applications, they were no where compared to client-server based applications which form the bulk of applications that we use today. Flash and Adobe Air were able to fill in the gap as well, by providing a framework for rich application development; however, they’re proprietary and aren’t available on all platforms.

HTML 5, for the first time, has created a standard that provides a rich application development framework that comes close to the client-server experience. Since it’s a browser-based standard, any device with HTML5 capable browsers will support HTML5 applications without the need for additional applications, or plugins.

[amazon_link id=”0321687299″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Introducing HTML5 (Voices That Matter)[/amazon_link]
Here are some of the key benefits of HTML5:

  • It’s an open standard, hence there are multiple vendors to compete, which means it’s good for the customer.
  • It’s a cross device platform – it works on desktops, laptops, netbooks, phones, tablets, TVs, and others.
  • It also works across operating systems: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Ubuntu and other Linux flavors.
  • Many browsers already support HTML5 including Chrome, Chromium Firefox, Opera, Android browser and IE will also support it.
  • Chrome and Chromium are based on Webkit, which is open source and can be embedded into devices.
  • Standardisation also refers to a standard user interface across devices. Many design experts find that Flash-based sites have user interfaces that are very different when compared to traditional browsers. With HTML5 while the interface can still be cool and funky, it need not look very different that a web based application.

Some of the key features of HTML5 are listed below:

Direct support for video

HTML5 has tags for running videos within the browser without the need for Flash or other plugins. This improves video integration and performance. However, your browser needs to support video playback codecs. You can test if your browser supports this by going to http://www.youtube.com/html5. Go to the bottom of the page and click on Join the HTML5 Trial. Now you can see YouTube in HTML5 without using any Flash plugin.
With HTML5, you can also create 2D graphics and drawings. Effectively, using your browser you can draw an image. HTML5 implements vector graphics instead of raster. An advantage of using vector graphics is that the file sizes are smaller as compared to raster graphics (GIF, JPG).
HTML5 also supports offline web application support, so you can run web applications even if you aren’t connected. This is useful for offline email, or other application where connectivity may not always be available.
Drag and drop support

You can now drag files from your computer, into your application and it’ll be installed. You can try this in Gmail, if you have Chrome or Chromium installed on your system.

This article was first published on Digit.

I have been using Quicktext as an addon for Thunderbird for a while now and find it very useful.

Recently I upgraded to Thunderbird 7 with Ubuntu 11.10. The Quicktext download doesn’t work beyond version 6. So I modified it to work with Thunderbird 7. It has been working well for me, if you want it try at your own risk.

Download Quicktext 0.9.11.1 for Thunderbird 7.

What does Quicktext offer?

Quicktext is the powerful tool to automate routine and repetitive emails. You can define actions such as Hi [FirstName], and it will pickup the first name to whom the email is addressed to. Similarly you can define templates for standard email replies. You can even define where the cursor should stop.

Looks like HP is going to kill webOS. HP webOS as a part of the Palm acquisition. I sometimes wonder why did HP acquire Palm in the first place?  anyways,  webOS is the new operating system which Palm decided to ditch their OS kernel use Linux as their kernel as Linux has mult-tasking. Since webOS is already based on Linux, they should open source the layer on top. How will this help?

It will make webOS live, there are thousands of applications for the Palm platform which will continue to have moment. Open Source developers can continue maintaining webOS without any cost to HP.

It will give the market a new alternative to Android, where there isn’t really much options today for phone makers. iOS is by Apple only, Symbian isn’t going anywhere and Windows Mobile is a non-starter.

If it gains Momentum, HP could start offering it to their customers. If not people could at-least use the good bits for their applications.

[amazon_link id=”B0055D66V4″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]HP TouchPad Wi-Fi 32 GB 9.7-Inch Tablet Computer[/amazon_link]

 

 

KhanAcademy a non profit offers free courses in every possible subject right from Biology to Maths. I found it very interesting. The best part is the content is all under creative commons, free to use and share. Even Bill Gates is endorsing it!

Have a look: KhanAcademy.org

Motorola has updated the Defy with Defy + which is scheduled to launch in September.

Most of the specs remain the same of the earlier one like Gorilla Glass a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash. The size and dimensions also remain the same with 3.7″ screen. Like the Defy, the Defy + is also waterproof, dust proof and scratch proof.

The processor has been upgraded to 1 GHz, a larger 1750 mAh battery and android has been updated to 2.3.3. This should improve the performance and user experience.

Still no front facing camera and HD video recording.

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[amazon_link id=”B0059589OU” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Olympus Pen E-P3 12.3MP DSLR Camera Black & 14-42MM 2RK Lens Black[/amazon_link]Olympus E-P3, the third generation of Micro four-third camera is now available.This is a perfect camera for someone who wants a professional camera in a compact body.

Whats nice:

  • Built in Flash
  • Fastest auto focus
  • Built-in auto focus illuminator light
  • 12 Megapixel
  • Touch sensitive LCD. What would be better if they had a varied angle LCD like the Panasonic G3 which can be swivel screen.
  • Full HD 1080i60 movies in AVCHD format
  • In-body image stabilisation.
  • USB 2.0 (have yet to see cameras with USB 3.0)

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