Year: 2003

Apac will be tops in developers by 2005

North America will lose its standing as the world’s leading producer of professional software developers to the Asia/Pacific region by 2005, according to an IDC report quoted in InfoWorld. Slowly but surely, the centre of gravity in the world of technology is shifting East. More:

With 1.7 million software developers, the Asia/Pacific region is currently the No. 2 producer of development talent, surpassing Western Europe’s 1.6 million developers, but well behind North America’s 2.6 million professional developers in 2001, according to the IDC study.

With strong growth in the number of professional developers projected over the next two years in countries such as China and India as compared with North America, however, the Asian/Pacific region is on course to take over the No. 1 spot, IDC said.

Another snippet: “C and C++ continued to be the most commonly used development languages, with Java overtaking Visual Basic as the second most commonly used language worldwide, IDC said.”

Continue reading Apac will be tops in developers by 2005

More on Demo 2003

From Fortune’s Peter Lewis on what he considers as the most intriguing products:

Grokker is both a tool that companies can use to build websites that are more useful to consumers and easier to navigate as well as a $99 software plug-in for your browser that significantly improves the web searching experience.

Pixim has crafted a new type of visual imaging technology-on-a-chip that promises great improvements for digital surveillance technology. Basically, it greatly improves the visual acuity of surveillance cameras, millions of which are being added to our lives every year.

Picasa is an elegant, peer-to-peer program that scans your computer for pictures, organizes them in chronological order without any of those stupid file names that plague most other Windows photo managers, and allows them to be shared more easily than ever before. It has the cleverest system for sharing photos by e-mail, for displaying your photos on a TV screen.

ManyOne is a window through which some people will want to view the World Wide Web and the Internet. Like Internet Explorer, it’s a browser, except that this browser is based on the Mozilla open-source platform and thus innocent of any affiliation with Microsoft. Moreover, ManyOne is intended to be a “private label” browser.

Continue reading More on Demo 2003

TECH TALK: RSS, Blogs and Beyond: RSS and News Readers

Lets first take a closer look at RSS and how it can change how we access sites. What RSS does is creates a feed of the updates on a site which can now be delivered to readers, or more appropriately, pulled by software. This way, it becomes much easier to monitor a larger number of sites without having to go to each of these sites. Greg Notess provides the context for RSS:

Weblogs and news media sites share a common strength and a common weakness. With frequent updates, these sites help us keep track of the latest news, opinions, and rumors. Unfortunately, the frequent updates mean that we spend more time trying to keep up with them. So, we can check all of the news Web sites and blogs of interest every day, starting from our bookmarks or some other source. But this gets tedious rather quickly, especially as the number of sources of interest multiplies.

Another alternative is to get e-mail notification of updates. Many news sites offer this option. For other sites, current awareness tools like InfoMinder and WebSpector can be used to check for Web site updates and e-mail alerts and even include some of the changes. But again, as the number of sites covered increases, the daily e-mail inundation gets tedious as well, especially when combined with list mail, other e-mail, and all the junk mail that slips past the filters.

Here is an example of an RSS file. It looks like HTML, but is actually an XML file. The key lies in the three tags for link, title and description. The link provides the URL a sort of permalink to the item that has been updated, and the title and description give a flavour of the item. This is a format which can be read by special software. One example of that special software is a news reader, also called an RSS or News Aggregator.

Adds Notess:

For those who like to skim many of these frequently updated sources, a better approach is to find something that summarizes the new content, presents it in a compact format, combines multiple sources in one interface, and provides links to the full content to make it easy to pick and choose which new articles to read. And this is exactly what a news aggregator is designed to do.

RSS is a way of creating a broadcast version of a blog or news page. Anyone who has frequently updated content and is willing to let others republish it can create the RSS file. Typically called syndication, the RSS file is an XML formatted file that can be used at other sites or by other intermediary software such as news aggregators. The original incarnation was to use RSS to include several headlines on a personalized portal page. But an RSS feed can also be easily pulled into other functions, such as an aggregator.

Why is RSS and a News Reader useful? RSS provides an alternate way to check what has changed on a site it is a teaser (though some sites, especially weblogs, also offer the entire content through the RSS feed). A News Reader aggregates content from various feeds and enables a person to quickly navigate through large snippets of content.

Tomorrow: RSS and News Readers (continued)

Continue reading TECH TALK: RSS, Blogs and Beyond: RSS and News Readers

BlogStreet – Community and Analytics

We were discussing the strategy we should take with BlogStreet. Veer identified two possible approaches: we can focus on current affairs (like Blogdex, Daypop) or on Analytics (like what we are presently doing). In Analytics, we can take two approaches – the algorithm-driven approach (along the lines of what we do now), or make it community-enabled (what we intend to do soon).

The discussion thus helped in clarify how we want to grow BlogStreet – based on community-enabled blog analytics. Create profiles of bloggers, their expertise areas, categories, identify clusters, even perhaps trends among bloggers. More of a social network orientation. Essentially, emphasise on the most important element in the blogosphere – the bloggers, their expertise and relationships.

We started work on BlogStreet about 9 months ago. At that time, it seemed like a good idea to do “something in the world of blogs”. BlogStreet has achieved a small niche so far, and we hope it can continue to be useful in the times to come.

Word Bursts

New Scientist writes about how “word bursts” could be used to identify online trends.

Searching for sudden “bursts” in the usage of particular words could be used to rapidly identify new trends and sort information more efficiently, says Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell University in New York, who has developed computer algorithms that identify bursts of word use in documents.

While other popular search techniques simply count the number of words or phrases in documents, Kleinberg’s approach also takes into account the rate at which the word usage increases.

– Slashdot thread

Think of this in the context of blogs as Wordex: analyse weblogs to see what are the emerging trends. Its something we should look at in BlogStreet.

One More Sun Article

Sun and AOL seem to be the favourites in the media in terms of suggestion on what’s wrong with them and what they need to do to fix their problems. This time, its the NYTimes on Sun:

Cost-cutting is the order of the day for corporate customers. And servers based on low-cost technology from the personal computer world – Intel-compatible microprocessors – are eating into Sun’s business.

Sun’s quandary is that its business appears to be alarmingly dependent on high-cost, proprietary hardware at a time when technology trends and customers seem to be headed in the other direction – toward inexpensive, PC-based hardware that is more like an industrial commodity, the computer equivalent of a piston ring.

Linux poses the more imminent threat to Sun because both Sun’s Solaris and Linux share the Unix heritage, easing the way for companies to move to Linux and the inexpensive hardware on which it runs.

Many industry experts say the trend toward commodity-like computer hardware is unstoppable. The profitability in computing, they say, will move to software and services, the direction I.B.M. has charted and Hewlett-Packard has begun following. Hardware, they add, will be a brutal business, with the main winner likely to be Dell Computer, a hyperefficient packager and distributor of technology.

Sun executives see their company as neither a hardware nor a software maker, but as a “systems” producer.

Sun’s strategy is the following, according to the article:

  • Bundle into the Solaris operating system increasing amounts of the software that corporate data centers need as they try to automate more operations and communications with suppliers and with employees.
  • A hard push to promote Solaris on inexpensive Intel-based computers as well as on Sun machines that run on its Sparc microprocessor.

    Continue reading One More Sun Article

    • Lindows Notebook

    From News.com:

    The Lindows Mobile PC will sell for $799. It includes a 12.1-inch screen and a 933MHz Via Technologies C3 processor, along with LindowsOS, a version of the freely available Linux. [It has] 256MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. Buyers can opt to increase the hard-drive size or memory allotment. The notebook also includes Compact Flash, USB (Universal Serial Bus), Ethernet and Firewire ports. A modem, however, is not included. External CD or DVD drives are optional.

    An interesting move by Lindows – to launch a branded hardware product for its software. Its what William Gurley had written about – Software In A Box.

    Continue reading Lindows Notebook

    TECH TALK: RSS, Blogs and Beyond: Beyond Search

    Change is afoot in the world of Internet content. A decade or so, the web browser in the form of Mosaic was let loose on an unsuspecting world by Marc Andressen and his team at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Taken together with HTML, the markup language to describe content which had been specified a few years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the browser dramatically changed the way we accessed information in the years to come. Today, much of what we read on a computer screen comes from computers in different parts of the world and we dont even think twice about it.

    Right in the beginning, it wasnt so easy. We had to remember URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) of web pages we liked. Then, we started bookmarking these URLs in the browser. But we could only bookmark so many. The web was growing too fast. Yahoo came along to create a directory which organised sites in hierarchical categories. Next came search engines like Altavista, Webcrawler, Lycos and Excite which created a gigantic database of the web pages, and allowed us to search by keyword across these pages.

    And then came Google, which took search to the next level by making the results more relevant. It did so through a concept called PageRank, which looks at the importance of a page by analysing which other pages link to it. Google did something very interesting it no longer became important to remember URLs or even bookmark pages. If it was out there, Google could find it for us. In effect, Google has become our other memory.

    But there are still limitations. While Google is excellent for delivering results of relevant web pages, it is only still good as the search words that we specify. New and useful sites will still find it hard to show up in the top results until they get linked from other sites. Besides, Googles search does not cover sites which need subscription or registration like those of Wall Street Journal and the New York Time.

    Two recent developments are doing a lot to make the ocean of content out on the web easier to find. The first is RSS (Rich Site Summary) an XML feed akin to a Whats New page published by websites. The XML means that it can be read by news readers, which can therefore pull in the recent updates from sites whose feeds we subscribe to. Think of RSS as a format that makes content syndication easy. The second is weblogs, which are making the web two-way. Weblogs are making it easy for individuals and groups to publish content, in effect showcasing their expertise and opinions. Think of weblogs as people filtering web content.

    RSS and Blogs herald an era of microcontent and nano-publishing. Taken together with the spiraling growth of connected devices like cellphones and wireless PDAs which call for reformatting of content for display on their small screens, how information is accessed and consumed is about to change again.

    Tomorrow: RSS and News Readers

    India as First Market

    For long, I used to think that India is a lab to try out our ideas, and then take them to markets outside India, but which were similar. In recent times, there is a change coming in my thinking. I am starting to believe that India is not just a lab, but our first and potentially biggest market. Which means we have to make our ideas work in India first.

    The trigger point for this was a CNBC interview of CK Prahalad which i watched recently. He made a couple of points: the Indian consumer is extremely smart – she knows exactly what she wants, and India is one of the most competitive markets in the world, so if you can succeed in India first, then you can definitely succeed elsewhere.

    My reluctance to view India as our first market stemmed from past experiences wherein I have tried to sell stuff we created in India with very limited success. Even IndiaWorld succeeded because of the audiences outside India. So, I was biased againsit India as a market. But that’s probably more because of the things we’ve not done right in product and marketing, rather than the idiosyncracies of the market.

    What is clear to me is that we need to make Emergic a success in India. And we will.

    ISB Discussion on Emergic

    Thanks to Arun Anantharaman’s initiative, our Emergic ideas were discussed at the Indian School of Business. These are his comments on the discussion.

    The general feeling was that this was more or less a variation of Sun’s push for a server based computing model. Mostly, people were not too convinced, primarily I think because of a few reasons.

    1) Open source as a commerical alternative still has its doubters
    2) Banks/schools may not be a feasible market because of the nature of the applications (hard disk space is possibly essential).
    3) The primary push for such an ecosystem may have to come from the government-Both in terms of the network infrastructure, regulation and adoption.

    Frankly speaking, right now I have my doubts about the feasibility as well. Not the idea per se (Assuming the backbone is in place, the server based model has many advantages), but more from an implementation perspective. As of now, there are the few successes like e-choupals, and the work of the M.S. Swaminathan foundation in coastal Tamil Nadu. But personally I feel that many more local language applications (if there are many local language applications that already exist, at least I am not aware of them) may be required to drive demand.

    Right now after having read your doc, thought and discussed about it, I am inclined to think that to make it work certainly requires some degree of governmental fillip. For e.g. despite your own thoughts on the telecenters (tech 7-11’s) I am not sure there is a requirement today for anything beyond the services provided by a normal cyber caf/gaming center. The one place, I certainly feel there is great potential though is in engineering colleges. And arguably, besides the government, the best way to develop suitable applications and drive open source as a commercial alternative is to take this route. For SME’s, I think it will be a difficult sell until and unless there is a reasonably strong open source software support community. (Piracy still is an easier & better alternative.)

    Interesting feedback. I’d have loved to have an interactive discussion with the ISB class – hopefully that will happen some time soon!

    I still believe that a solution like Emergic is what is needed to bring about a grassroots technology revolution across emerging markets like India. What I do not have an answer to yet is which markets from the ones I have identified (schools, colleges, homes, telecentres, government, bank branches, SMEs) will be the first ones. I think what is required is to enable the creation of an alternate ecosystem based on low-cost computers, Linux and local languages.

    The ideas about Emergic are not new – like Sun’s “the network is the computer” or Ellison’s “network computer”. The key lies in the price points that we can make this available at, and how we can build a large framework of content and applications aorund these for the next set of users, across the digital divide.

    If I were to bet on the first market where we are likely to see success, it will be telecentres in schools, serving the twin purpose of education and providing computing and communications services for the community. The telecentre also becomes a front-end touchpoint for egovernance applications (eServices). This is where it can make a difference to the poorest of the poor, by giving them a voice and an opportunity for the future.