Tag: tech

Pipes, Twits and Feeds

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

No people I am not referring to a new plumbing assignment or for that matter a new categorization of idiots!

Recently, I wrote a small post on Twitter, and how its micro-blogging utility is taking India by rage. The rabbit hole goes deeper as Alice (by analogy, that’s me!!) decides to plunge and find out where this world leads to. After Twitter, I came across a new web service + social networking utility that helps you keep in touch with what your friends are doing … a small friend feed of sorts. FriendFeed helps you keep track of your friends online digital imprints. A social engineer’s dream come true :-)

But what really got my goose (or is it gander?) is that Friendfeed managed to coalesce a lot of my activities in one feed (Last.fm, LinkedIn, Picasa, GTalk, Blogger, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, et al). Thats one mouthful to say the least.

The coup de grâce is delivered in the form of Yahoo! Pipes … its a web platform where you can fetch content in the form of feeds, RSS, et al and manipulate it. I have yet to come to terms with how to go about setting up a pipe, the moment I do that, youll be the first to know!

Google meets Salesforce

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Just came across this.

Now Google Apps premier users can avail of the famous Salesforce CRM, at a nominal price of course. Its an alliance of sorts to stave of the big bad monster from taking on the individual firms. To be honest, it is a one place solution for a lot of SMEs for a simple and yet effectively managed enterprise system.

Effectively, Salesforce and Google Apps are combining their users for a joint Go-To-Market, adding more value each other’s product offerings. De factor internal messenger for this would be the Google Talk gadget, which works like a charm.

For Google Apps basic users, who know that paying $60/user/year is slightly over their IT budget, they can use SugarCRM which comes absolutely free of cost!! Knowledge of XAMP is solicited before going ahead with SugarCRM.

I am SAPped!

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

Back in December, me and my team were in an iterative process for creating a lightweight ERP for our ecommerce based stores. Being a bridge to the technical and the business worlds can be exciting, but without the proper understanding, it can go haywire. Fortunately, we were able to handle the business requirements and all was well. The main reason for any software provider to cry foul is scope change; this is true especially in the case of a flexible business wherein, the entire revenue model of the business changes.

These are the times when the parity between execution and strategy becomes the most clear. So, in December, I had this sudden flash in the pan idea of doing a due diligence for SAP. The right calls and voila, we were underway … what followed were umpteen number of presentations by various SAP implementation partners, visits by the SAP India sales team to reinforce our decision and “smoothen” the entire decision making process.

What will SAP do for me? Well …

  • Accountability, Transparency and Accuracy of information
  • Facilitation of further analysis for top management
  • Scrutiny of our business processes by a Third Party for improvements
  • Adherence to globally accepted norms

Four months down, we have went through the entire workflows and process charts at least three times … the user licenses have been bought, the hosting has been more or less figured out … and you know what … I hope to let go a big phew!

b****c*** bahut kharcha hua re!!

SPECIAL NOTE – The post is written ONLY in a lighthearted fashion and does not in any way reflect the organization’s vision and mission or complete lack thereof.

Bandwidth

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

The fastest I have surfed is when I was alone on the campus (during a brief stay in summers) at Planet-I. It was a glorious 2mbps speed. And it rocked! All you want at a click of a button. Even when the campus was in full swing, with 300 odd participants surfing the internet, the net was still at a decent pace. This is India we are talking, where people still pay a big premium for connectivity.

Last week, one of my room-mate informs me that in UK, they are working on this new technology thats going to shoot the transfer rates beyond imagination. Just imagine, what would you do with transfer rates of 100mbps!! All data you want is completely accessible and available to you within seconds. An entire movie within seconds … infact, the individual user’s need for a personal storage drive just might go down. This combined with the fact that many websites are now showing a conceptual web-OS … like Desktop2 or Fanbox. Also, many SMEs are now opting for the Software As a Service (SaaS) model, where in the firm does not have to invest in the licensing cost of any software, but would rather pay a periodical amount for that service.

You could in fact, cut costs by having an hosted ERP, Google Docs, a web OS and dumb terminals hooked up to a hosted storage server all on the internet. Your capital expenditures go down, but the variable expenditures might go up. If the opportunity cost of your capex beats your opex, then you definitely have a winner here.

Think about an individual user, all media content available … on a pay per usage basis of course. For gamers, there is the WWW as your LAN … talk about one huge LAN party.

It does change your perspective on connectivity and storage doesn’t it?

Microblogging

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

No, its not blogging at 10-6 power. Its a new form of blogging which allows users to text in brief updates on their day to day activities. The post need not be pretty descriptive, in fact generally it should be a one-liner.

Services like Twitter are very popular these days.

Is it just another form of exhibitionism or another way of meeting people. Well, it could be anything, I am definitely a twit!!

IE8: We are not the Devil anymore

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Microsoft in an official release to the public has announced what features (read enhancements) they can expect from the much hyped Internet Explorer 8. This was at the MIX08 conference held at Las Vegas … you can read about the entire details here (beware, it is encoded with the usual marketing spin). Will list down some of the salient features here –

  • Activities – Users can add more extensions to their browser (the way Firefox does already). These activities would enable the users to do more, in short, Microsoft gets a whole new way to bundle their failed products with the new and improved browser
  • WebSlices – Users can subscribe to content from within a page. The moment the content is changed, the users will be notified in their Links Bar.
  • Automatic Crash Recovery – That’s reassuring!! This feature is being marketed actively instead of an implicit indication that it was always there. Anyways, how is this adding value over Firefox or Opera for that matter.
  • Safety Filter (thats Anti-Phishing) – This is to be improved and enhanced, which will block sites known to contain malicious scripts. No comments here. I am actually hoping that this works, people do not realize how important this feature is. And those who do, do not use IE :-)
  • Compliance – IE8 will now be more compliant to the CSS standards. Finally, some sense, these days too many sites are relying more and more on CSS instead of flash or complex javascripts for glitzing up their websites
  • AJAX Navigation – Hmmm … this is a nice touch I must say. In all the AJAX based portals, whenever we click the back button of the browser, the browser goes to the page which was last submitted completely and not the last AJAXed state. Having this might be a blessing for normal users, I know the techies had just learned to live without AJAX navigation
  • Integration – IE8 promises ready made integration with Facebook and eBay, et al. So, thats a plus for all facebook and eBay users … dunno how many of them will actually use it though.

All this and a lot more kids! These have been promised to the doe-eyed of Microsoft … you can almost see the bunch of users in the background using their respective other browsers waiting and watching to see what happens next. I am one of them.

As of now, if you do want to try out the beta, try the IE8 Readiness Toolkit and then proceed for the installation. One word. Apprehension.

Stiki! or Story 2.0

Prasad Ajinkya5 Comments

I was going through IIM Indore’s placement report which was released officially a couple of days back. Eager to know what my alma matter has chalked up, I went through the report. What interested me is not the fat packages and the multi-colored graphs done on the data, but the last part of the report.

The Batch of 2008 also saw two students taking the road less traveled of initiating a business venture of their own, as part time to start with. They have founded www.ourownbook.com – an innovative website that provides visitors a chance to participate in a collaborative book writing project, and get recognized as co-authors of the final book published.

A collaborative book! That interests me … back when we were students, we often used to pass around small scraps of paper where one used to read the current contents of the paper, add some of his own and pass it further. The final outcome used to be hilarious. Many such stories and poems even had been made and fondly saved by us. This idea of Our Own Book seems to stem from such an idea. Immediately, it struck me as a Wiki way for writing your story … a Story 2.0 or a Story + wiki = Stiki!

Some concerns about this mode of writing is that all the authors should be in-sync with each other’s writing style and mentality. If this is unknown, then the story can meander into unknown … it can take a life of it’s own. And thats the exciting part … I remember reading this funny mail about how a psychologist gave couples to write similar stories, and one couple ended up fighting about the content and outcome of the story.

I just added my first entry to the already existing entries … there are simple and effective control systems to take out malicious users from the system. Thats good.

Looks like some people do remember that I is for Implementation after all. Kudos Anubhav and Dhruv … sahi concept!