Code/Decode

Narain is the founder & CEO for 360 Degree Interactive, a web services firm based in Chennai, India. This blog is about his personal views on Web 2.0, RoR, Social networking,Digital media, interactive advertising, SaaS, Service Oriented Architecture, India Inc, rural education, Web standards, mobile 2.0 and more.

Friday, July 29

Peta storage at peanuts price

Data is the heart. Data is the brain. Data is "THE" thing. Data is everywhere. Storing data continuously is a big issue and thanks to storage makers, who offer better storage devices at better prices. Within them itself has arrived one disruptive player. San francisco based Capricon Technologies has come out with an innovative way of low cost storage solution. Going by the report, with Capricorn Technologies, PetaBox, a GB will cost around $2 and you can go upto one peta [1000 terrabytes]. CNET News has the details

When a world goes with more MP3 files, home video captures, digital camera storage, such a system will help enormously. Watch out for this company, soon to be gobbled by any of the Internet biggies.

Tuesday, July 26

Fortune 5,000,000 Businesses

Jason Fried of 37 Signals has an interesting post in their corporate blog. It talks about developing about developing web applications for the "Side Business". He argues that instead of concentrating on Fortune 500 companies, it is better to watch out for the Fortune 5,000,000 small companies [1-10 people] worldwide and create applications which sheds every extra fat in their body. Simple, intutive and straight-forward applications are the need for the day than huge programs. I had a chance to look upon Microsoft Word in Office 2003, Jesus, that looks like some ERP application, where as, all it is going to deliver is to type letters & information. Read the blog post here

Going Global

In an increasing web unifed world, globalisation & localisation are the two strong ingredients for successful e-business. Unlike a local store, your customer & competitors are not local & nearby. When the web libralised marketing to global customers, it also libralised the competition from local to global. Successful e-businesses are those who follow a strong globalised localisation or localised globalisation strategy.

IBM's Newsletter carries an article which precisely talks about this. In the article, IBM put forward 3 important steps which includes, Internationalisation, Localisation and Globalisation. Excerpts from the article

I18N - Internationalization
The design and development of an application so it can easily be modified to support different languages and cultural conventions. This involves isolating text strings so they can be replaced with translated strings and ensuring that the application can handle text strings of any length. Culture-specific settings, such as data formats and collation sequences, need to be external from the application and selected based on user preferences.

L10N - Localization
The process of translating the text strings, creating culture-specific settings, and packaging the application into a translated language version. Localization assumes that there can be multiple versions of the same application, one for each language. Today's Internet-based applications can be accessed from anywhere in the world -- by users with different backgrounds and languages -– so the application must be able to support multiple languages and cultural conventions simultaneously.

G11N - Globalization
The proper design and execution of systems, software, services, and procedures so one instance of software, executing on a single server or end-user machine, can process multilingual data and present culturally correct information, such as collation, date and number formats. Designing a globally-enabled application goes beyond internationalization and localization.
Read the full article of this story

Thursday, July 21

Is there a ducket price available?

Have you ever got carspective? or is your team deaded you? Is your girl friend is an abby? Are you a slacker?

wait i am speaking only english. These words will eventually enter into English language in few years and these are presently used as a urban slang. One website [UrbanDictionary] keeps track of all the new urban words added everyday.

It looks interesting to have something similar for tamil too

Wednesday, July 20

Are you digging enough?

Digg is the latest in the social bookmarking arena, still dominated by del.icio.us Tagging said to change the rules of search engines in the near future, but Digg is again a tag driven, technology focussed aggregator.

So what is digg?

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

It is interesting to see how these tag-driven aggregators will in the long run out throw traditional search engines whose algorithms are predominently meant for indexing the webpage as it is.

Tuesday, July 19

Nokia moves to Open Source

The news from Computerworld [via Rajesh Jain] makes me smile larger. Nokia is implementing Webcore, the open source web-rendering engine from Apple Computer, which is based on the KDE Project's KHTML engine.

My reasons to smile are not just with implementation of Webcore alone but looking at the larger picture of tie-ups & colloboration with Apple & Nokia. Both are design driven, functionally superior and customer friendly organisations in their respective domains. With a love affair between the two is just starting, we can expect an exchange of ideas between these two companies. Already, the grapevine is talking about iPhones and partnership with Motorola.

Going by the current news, the partnership for mobile market will extend to Nokia too. It will be good then for the lifestyle-driven customers.

Monday, July 18

Write, Think & Learn clearly

Posted here for my reference - How to write more clearly, think more clearly and learn complex material more easily via Mark Boulton

Sunday, July 17

Commercial interruptions

Going thru the second issue of the Forrester magazine, an interesting technology is in the offing. As you aware, as a customer i am pissed off from the irritating TV commercials and print advertising. 30 second commercials are dead, they are not effective, as they were. Today's customers are very demanding. They need the brand to pamper, follow, cajol, surprise and interest them. It is highly tough for brand managers to translate the brand's attitude & values delivered in 30 second commercials. Now leading international brands are diversifying into various other customer interactions beyond TV. For now, the advertising agencies who ideate and produce all these TVCs are in the crossroads. For one, they can't lose the billing but also they need to produce interesting stuff for customers which has more accountable and needs to reflect the same in the bottomline sale. Here, Two companies are making interesting technologies for the future.

GoldPocket Interactive and Visible World are those two companies. They are developing features that advertisers dont yet know they need agencies don't yet understand how to produce creative for and media planners haven't yet figured out how to integrate into campaigns. We have been working on the technology for six years called Object Tracking, and we are going to start testing this year says GoldPocket's CEO. The technology can track objects on the screen to let viewers click on them and buy them.

Technology from Visible World lets advertisers serve up an infinite variety of ads to different cutomers. United's dow used it last year to address to specific towns near Chicago, for ex. advertising the carrier's low fare arm. I am interested in the addressable commercials that takes more of you into consideration says Steve Hayden , Vice chairman Ogilvy & Mather which works for international clients.

It is now interesting with the development of IPTVs and other digital platforms. In India Reliance already acquired considerable stake in AdLabs and conveyed their interest into full fledged digital entertainment pipeline. This makes the whole proportion interesting. Customers are switching channels and advertisers are already started integrate brands inside TV serials & Soaps and in-film. With the advent of interesting technologies like these, commercials & brands are heading for serious attempts. Till then, watch Minority Report for future commercial formats.

Friday, July 15

AjaX and Hotmail

Hotmail is having an aesthetic & functional makeover. Going by the reports & snapshots spread across the internet, Hotmail is testing their user interface with AjaX. The new hotmail interface along with their storage upgrade is aiming at the increasingly time-starved client side user. Much of the resemblance can be seen from MSN Messenger. Guillaume has the details.

Here is a snapshot from the new-improved hotmail ;-) [Thanks: Guillaume blog]

Thursday, July 14

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.5

Mozilla Firefox the defacto web browser has upgraded to it is next minor release as 1.0.5. Download Firefox here. Learn more about the vulnerabilities and security advisories

Open source UI toolkit for Web Apps

It is interesting that more and more companies are adapting to AjaX as their standard model for their webapplications. With a spread of web applications, the standardisation of the User Interface will be a big issue. Different standardisation of tools, icons will eventually kill the purpose the web application itself. Fortunately, there are already help in hand in the form of open source UI kit for webapplications from Dojo Toolkit

From their website's introduction about this:
Dojo is an Open Source effort to create a UI toolkit that allows a larger number of web application authors to easily use the rich capabilities of modern browsers.

Members of the team building Dojo have helped to build nWidgets, Burst, and f(m). To find out how you can be part of that team, check out the project wiki or see the project status and roadmap to find out where we're going.

Wednesday, July 13

Flash Player 8

The new Flash Player 8 Public beta is released. Download & chk (via Colin Moock)

Performancing