Google out-googled - and that too by an Indian company!

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Google features quite often in this blog for all the interesting things it does. However, here is an offering that out-googles Google - and that too, on GMail and Google Apps! What's more, this quiet, really useful product (you will really be missing out on something if you don't check this out) has been developed by an Indian company, headquartered, where else, but in Bangalore!  More ...

Google's mother-of-all business model

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Google makes its money from search. We all know that. But how many of us know the crushing blow that Google is delivering to several small and big companies in several industries? We are not speaking of the rude shocks that thousands of small businesses get from displacement from their usual place in search listings when Google tweaks its search engine algorithm. More ...

Google Public Data Explorer: Now visualize your own data in 3D for free!

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In May, 2010, I had commented about the Google Public Data Explorer. At that time, I had said that the next step would be to allow users to upload their own datasets to take advantage of this excellent visualisation engine.
This has now happened. See this. At last, I am happy that something really good that I predicted has come to pass. 
You can now use this great visualization engine to display your own data in three dimensions, with the third dimension being time.
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Are Web Apps the Next Big Thing?

Nowadays, everyone and his dog seems to be extolling the virtues of web apps. Examples:

• iPod first created the concept of an “ecosystem” built around a product, with integration with iTunes. They followed it up with iPad and a huge App Store to go with it.
• MS Office 2010 buyers get free online applications of Office that run under most browsers. This is a significant “webification” of MS Office 2007 which transitioned from creating binary objects to XML objects for the first time.
• Google's Chrome browser has created a Web Store and several of the apps available on it (I have only checked some of the Free ones) are stunning. The browser now reads PDF files natively without need for a PDF reader plug-in.
• The Chrome browser will eventually become the OS itself – where you directly boot up and go online. The browser is the OS.
• Splashtop offers a Linux OS of that kind, with a difference – it is is installable like any Windows app, from within Windows (indeed, that is the only way you can install it), and offers a quick boot option that actually boots and goes online in 10 seconds on many machines.
• Much electronic ink is being expended on whether Firefox will survive or not, revolving around the preesence or absence of its App strategy.
• The CEO of Nokia, in his now famous “burning platform” email to Nokia employees, says that Nokia failed to see the “ecosystem” concept that Apple, Android and others were building around mobile handsets, and lamented that Nokia tried to replicate feature after feature, but not the ecosystem. It's Ovi Store is an attempt to catch up.

Tablet PCs were touted as the rage a few years back (Gates demo-ed a device running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition at Comdex in 2001), but flopped. So did e-book reading hand-held devices like Treo, Palm, et al, that were PDAs and e-book readers but not phones. Both these concepts were a little ahead of their times, so today, e-book readers like Kindle and Nook and hand-held tablet PCs have become the rage. Smartphones like Blackberry and iPhone have e-book reading apps pre-loaded, or downloadable free.

For some time, now, Google has been evangelising the idea of storing and depending more and more on “the cloud”, but it will be some time before people learn to depend completely on the cloud, to the exclusion of local access and storage. The same way that news reports that the Nano caught fire has deterred many potential Tata Nano buyers, I am also a little cagey on reading recently that some 150 users of Gmail had the entire content on their Gmail account deleted. What if I was among those 150? A simple hard disk crash is something we have learnt to take in our stride, using the redundancy in the form of cloud storage plus regular local backups and redundant copies. But what is the alternative in the cloud? Is there redundancy ? How can it be affordable? Now it is free, but for how long? These are concerns everyone has, and until these are taken care of and seen to be taken care of, web apps will not become universal.

So, while I think the concept of web apps will take off finally, currently, the apps are curiosities that early adopters are adopting; to accelerate that into a burgeoning “movement” where all will migrate to web apps will take many many more adopters. I can see it happening in 3-4 years from now, but not now. Now, many will begin co-opting “the cloud” into their redundancy plans, for non-secure data.

What do you think?

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In Times of Danger....

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With danger coming home to roost in so many places, we have created significant awareness among people on the need to write wills to let their loved ones know what to do with their assets, and to head off family fights. But have we thought of personal contingency plans? One in which you can conscript your neighbours/ friends?

I think it has become a necessity, and in the coming few weeks, I shall devote more thinking to it. A Sidhu-ism applies aptly here: Better to prevent and prepare than to repent and repair!

Some stray ideas: 
1. We can use a Google SMS channel to prepare a list of all residents of a building to be subscribers. This way, we can use the facility to communicate with everyone living in the building instantaneously by a single SMS: invaluable in times of danger. The channel owner could be the security head on duty. If, say, every building in your locality/ complex set up such a channel, then it would be a small matter to make another channel to alert all the channel owners of each building - the modern equivalent of jungle drums! This could also be the means to circulate notices of meetings, and even to wish residents for birthdays and anniversaries, but mainly to alert residents to things like water supply shortage, electricity cuts, lifts not working, traffic rules in the area, notices of meetings, etc - all by a single SMS ! In times of bigger danger at locality or city level, often phone lines are choked, but sms's go through. So this could be a boon!

2.   In case one cannot communicate with or reach one's loved ones, knowing that all will be following a pre-agreed contingency plan can be an immense source of relief. It will be especially useful to train children beforehand in what to do, in case they cannot reach home from school, or they cannot enter the home on their return from school.

3. It may help if the security head always has a long length of strong nylon rope, a flash light, a tall step ladder, and first-aid kit on hand; and every security personnel and building resident knows where they are available.

4. Any more ideas?...