Raju vegesna’s Blog

I think the concept of social networking sounds interesting but lacks real appeal. I remember registering for orkut in its early days but never logged into it later after building a community. Reason - there is nothing much to do there (and most of the time, the site itself is down).

While this concept of socal networking is good, it’ll only take off when there is some good services added on top of it (Yahoo 360 seem to be doing a good job here). When these social networks are built, if services like Photo Album Sharing, Chat/group messages within groups etc are enabled, it’ll be helpful. Also, other stuff like something along the lines of match.com will also add more value on top of social networking.

Social Networking itself can be considered as a platform on top of which other services can be offered to these groups of networks.

Raju

I spend hours during weekends looking for an ideal phone (atleast close) but couldnt find any. While one problem is choosing CDMA vs GSM, the other problem is choosing devices for each type. A device which is good doesnt work with other provider. Is it very difficult for a phone to support both CDMA and GSM in one piece?

Ideally I would like this phone to carry both numbers (home and work numbers) and even from different service providers with WiFi, Bluetooth support with Pocket PC.

Long way to go isnt it?

Raju

I am hoping to see an free international online wakeup call service hosted in a .com website. The way it works is, I go to a website, login and provide the phone number, time/date for a wakeup call and just submit, it should call me at the specified time.

After I thought about it, I googled to find out similar service offerings but they do charge on a per call basis or monthly basis and are restricted to US and Canada.

May be we can overcome this location barrier if we implement some SIP servers around the globe and offer it for free. Well, offering it for free might sound good, but there certainly will be some expenses to atleast make these automated calls. But if we make it free, there will be many visitors. More the visitors, brighter chances to get ads on the site.

But having all kinds of ads (like Yahoo) doesnt make sense. More targetted ads will be good. For example, when the user gives his telephone number, if this service can automatically track if he has internet connection etc (and provide better rates) for each number it’ll be a killer targeted ad.

I hope to see someone launching such service soon.

Raju

If you are an IE user, I strongly recommend trying Maxthon. I have been using this browser for a long time (may be around 2 years) and didnt find a browser like it. Well, actually it is built on top of IE (which I HATE), but the productivity is brings in is HUGE. I am so addicted with this, I donot browse the internet with any other browser except this one.

Microsoft is trying to build the features in IE 7 which Maxthon already has for a long time (and implemented extremely well). One simple way for Microsoft is to acquire Maxthon. I guessed that MS will acquire Maxthon first and then GIANT Antispyware later, but was proven wrong. The anti-spyware was acquired first and the other never happened (yet). Well, security seem to be MS focus now (it better be).

I have tried Opera, Firefox etc but felt that these are moderate browsers compared to Maxthon (I know I am asking for some trouble here ). But if you are a power user, try Maxthon with most of the plug-ins installed.

Raju

I have been to MacWorld today and was surprised to find the no of add-on modules for Apple’s succesful iPod. I guess this is the story with any succesful product as there will be n number of other add-on products for every succesful product.

One common add-on I found though is an iPod car holder which sits on the charger slot. For this add-on, these vendors had few cool cars to display this add-on. But by design, the user must use his head sets.

Can someone tell these vendors that Californian drivers cannot use headsets while driving according to califronian law (which makes their add-ons useless - and ofcourse when the show is in SFO)?

Raju

I have seen google yahoo and other search engines talking about a common problem - understanding the context of the user’s query. Basically, if a person searches for ‘Java’ for example, the challenge is whether to return coffee related results or Java programming language related results. There could be n number of meanings to a search phrase and understanding the context will be a challenge for search engine creators.

Thinking about this problem on my drive to the office today, I feel that this can be partially addressed when search engines can understand the user’s previous search queries. A general user could end up searching with different keywords to find the right results. If the search engine can save the user’s recent queries (last day/week/month etc) on the local machine, the search engine can sort of get an idea of the context of user’s search to some extent. Based on this information, the search engine can refine its results to that context.

Another approach is to get a context on user’s work type and behaviour by understanding his work based on the documents on this machine etc. Once a machine is searched and indexed, the search engine can obviously get some idea on the type of work that individual does and it can then fine tune the web search results based on the context of his work. This will not work in all cases though.

Now having mentioned these two approaches, the challenge is on the technical aspect of implementing these. To address the first problem of saving all user’s recent search results, there has to be a local service on the machine tracking all of these results.

To address the second problem, there has to be a local program running that can index all the user’s files.

Both of these can be addressed by providing a desktop search which will index the local files and will also observe user’s recent search activity. Once this information is available, providing context to a search should be relatively easy. I am not saying that it’ll completely address the issue, but atleast can provide better results to certain extent.

This can further be improved when other information is also taken into consideration like indexing your emails (gmail, yahoo etc). This way, search results can further be optimized.

I am hoping that Google and others have this behind their plan of releasing a desktop search. I’ll wait to see how they execute.

Raju

I think Widgets will be a big market in years to come. By Widgets I mean, small utilities, embedded into OS at different levels like desktop, windows etc.

Look @ http://www.konfabulator.com/ for an example. They have some excellent widgets. Now apple is including widgets for its new OS Tiger (http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html). I am sure Microsoft will include (copy?) these into Longhorn.

Well, by 2006, we can assume that managing widgets will be similar, if not worse, than managing programs on our operating systems. While OS itself will bundle some cool and useful widgets (like Time Zones, Weather, search etc), I am assuming that product vendors will jump into this market offering their own widgets to get decent space on customers desktop.

I can give a simple example on how a company like AdventNet can create some cool widgets. Lets consider a product like OpManager (opmanager.com) which is used to manage servers, routers, switches etc and informs an IT guy for problems. A software like this is a good friend for an IT guy. By creating an OpManager widget, AdventNet can provide this as a value add to the product and the IT guy can add this widget to his desktop. By doing so, he’ll get summary views of his networks from a single useful widget on his desktop.

While this is one application of widgets, I can think of many others. I beleive there will be many new vendors coming up creating new widgets for multiple OSs and Softwares. While this market might take off soon with Apple’s new OS, it should reach its peak with the release of Longhorn.

Raju

I came across a small and interesting software build on top of Gmail which will let us use gmail space as a virtual drive.

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Well, this made me think if Google will officially launch a virtual drive service for free using the same offering? They might as well do it. They have already provided 1GB space for free and many users dont use this space. If they provide an ability to use this space for saving documents, that’ll be a killer of many users whose docs are struck to home desktops.

Google seem to have the basic infrastructure in place. They might as well surprise the world again with gdrive.com or something similar. Lets wait and see….

Raju

Have you been observing the prices of wireless devices? If you are, you should have noticed that they came down drastically in unbeleivable pace.

When I first bought my first Access Point, I had to pay around $160 for 802.11B. This was probably more than a year back. Looking at the prices of 802.11B&G access points now, you can get one for $20. I tried this $20 AP and it works perfectly fine.

Now at this rate, I dont even see the need for other standards like BlueTooth or ZigBee. They were initially started as a cheaper chips, but WiFi itself is getting there and with its reach, especially in the consumer market, it doesnt make much sense to embrace techologies like BlueTooth.A day where our Fridge, Oven, fan, light etc connected through WiFi is not very far.

When the prices are coming down at the low end, I dont understand how the high-end vendors like Cisco are surviving pricing the same APs for $600 etc.

Raju

I have never been a big fan of books or documents, especially when they are pure text-only based. Ofcourse, I never read long documents or books, unless it has some images that depict the message that is being conveyed. A rightly presented image always conveyes better compared to pages of text.

Obviously, an image is equal to 1000 words and an image with audio is equal to 100K words and an animation with audio and video is equal to 100,00K words.

Now, with internet and all other resources, authors can create ebooks which can really incorporate audio and video into books and release it over the internet. There is no better place than internet to reach a wider audience.

Now, coming to the future of eBook, here is what I see as the future of the eBook.

Vendors like Microsoft, Adobe etc came up with some eBook readers for reading electronic version of documents and books. But I dont think they going a long way. I see an eBook having text, audio video etc. Apart from this, the user should be able to change the contents of the book, edit it and forward it as his version to his friends or even save it for later use.

It it takes a person 10 days to read a textual book, if we can include audio and video and other animations etc, he can get the same concepts in 10 hours. When we have the technology, why waste days to read a book. The problem with this approach I see is, not authors can create such books. The key here is, making it easy for authors to create eBooks. There should be a software which will do this.

I dont know what Microsoft and Adobe are working on in this area, but I should say that Macromedia is certainly ahead of the game here. With Flash they have a better opportunity to create such stuff easily.

Anyway, lets wait and see where this eBook market will go….

Raju

trying to read a book and ended up throwing it aside because it is text only, and jumped onto blogs[/i]