Sridhar Vembu’s Blog

Ever noticed how we never seem to delete any data anymore? GMail doesn’t even offer the Delete button, substituting it with the Archive button instead. In the internet age, Data is God, while code can come and go. Yet, during development of software, we put in test data and casually delete it all the time. That mindset causes some unexpected problems, when software moves from that test bed to production.

I have wondered whether we should have a “Do not Delete” rule for data even during development. Developers would get used to treating data as something sacred. Data integrity, and therefore software quality would improve.

I switched out of Thunderbird email client to web mail 8 months ago. I have been a full time user of our Zoho Virtual Office http://www.zohovo.com - online demo at http://demo.zohovo.com

It has been damn convenient, even when I am at home. I can check email from the currently-on machine real quick, and don’t have to download email anymore. While travelling this is a life-saver.

Philip Greenspun makes a very interesting post Mobile Phone As Home Computer. Analyzing my own computing habits lately, I have been craving for some such device. I have a slightly different variation, which simplifies the design.

In my ideal cell phone computer, Wi-Fi will be built-in to the phone for network connectivity. It will also have a USB/Bluetooth based interface, so it can connect to and external display/keyboard/mouse which I will call “the display device”. USB can also double up as a charger.

The display device will be ubiquitous, and will go for under $100 in volume. We can imagine this everywhere, homes, offices, Starbucks, … Whereever there is Wi-Fi, these devices will be present. Just plug-in the cell phone to the USB port, and start computing. The entire work, including the network part, is done in the cell phone. Only the user interface is outside. This dramatically reduces security concerns. Secure networking is upto the software in the phone; so if it has a VPN tunnel (Google Wifi!), unencrypted Wi-Fi links are OK.

The cell phone will come with 4-8 GB of local storage, a state-of-the-art, full-powered browser, and the usual utilities. Everything else can be supplied by the web.

No point complicating the cell phone by trying to squeeze in keyboard and display. It will never satisfy a real computer need. Instead, a cellphone + display device combination can work. If the interface to it is standardized through USB/Bluetooth, they can become ubiquitous in fairly short order.

I hope Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and others are listening!

Two recent news items caught my attention.

NYT to lay off 4 pct of work force

and

Yahoo Adds Business Columnists

No better illustration of the dramatic power and money shift from traditional newspapers and media to internet players. Search engines are commoditizing newspapers (note: I say “commoditizing newspapers”, they are not commoditizing writers or good writing skills!), so good writers will now increasingly migrate to internet media players. This is a synergistic relationship. The internet players already have the traffic and the global aggregation capabilities. Most importantly, they have the revenue sources from advertising, and they don’t have the print and distribution costs of traditional newspapers, so they can afford to keep more of the stuff “free”.

Where newspapers go, TV will only follow. Yahoo is already a player in Hollywood, and is starting to put out original made-for-internet video content. The advertising model here is less clear. Perhaps cable-TV like subscription model, with all you can eat from a menu of choices is where it is going. Fascinating to watch this evolution.

We just launched an online word processor Zoho Writer Alpha. Our team has been working on it for some months now, and finally they have unveiled it. It is work in progress, but you can create, save, share documents already.

Please take it for a test drive. No registration required. Please be a little gentle, it is still in alpha. Tell us where it sucks, and how it can be improved. It is being improved constantly.

A small development group backed by AdventNet is doing an interactive kids site Jambav for kids. The focus is on educational/entertaining interactives. It is meant for regular kids, 4 and above, and with a special focus on special needs kids. What does Jambav mean? To quote the Jambav site http://jambav.com/jambav/aboutjambav/aboutjambav.php:

The effort started around a year ago, and has put out some nice interactives. My son uses it occasionally, but as he grows older, we hope to use it more and more. The Jambav team is working on more tools.