simply#saumitra

The Skype 5.0 experience

2010-10-22T13:14:00.002-07:00

I always wanted this feature in Skype and I am sure many more would echo - the multi user video conf. Earlier it was all about audio call when it was more than 2 users.

Only drawback is that it is not going to be free (although free for a trial period of 28 days). But after my skype experience today, I would certainly be a paid user if it is not a huge charge for it as it is worth it. If you have a large 32 to 42 inch TV connected to your PC, it would be more like a home Cisco Telepresence session! Take a look at the pic below: four groups from four cities: Faridabad, Charlotte, Hyderabad and Helsinki - an awesome experience :)

I wish they have something like this for the mobile phones. With 3G and 4G coming in, connection speed wouldn't be a big deal and it would be much portable - but well on smaller screens.

Other goodies could be: location, time, weather (?) could be indicated around the videos.

अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ

2010-08-28T13:14:00.000-07:00

After a long time re-looked at these motivating lines by late sh.H. Bacchhan!

वृक्ष हों भले खड़े,
हों घने, हों बड़े,
एक पत्र छांह भी, मांग मत, मांग मत, मांग मत,
अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ

तू ना थकेगा कभी,
तू ना थमेगा कभी,
तू ना मुडेगा कभी, कर शपथ, कर शपथ, कर शपथ,
अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ

यह महान दृश्य हैं,
चल रहा मनुष्य हैं,
अश्रु-श्‍वेद-रक्त से, लथपथ, लथपथ, लथपथ,
अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ, अग्निपथ

-बच्चन

Omnia II versus rest of the world

2009-10-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

My Linux phone (Motorokr E6) is on the verge of being outdated and I was surfing to get just the right phone and after several hours of eye ride, I finally found it..Its called Samsung Omnia (v2). It has almost everything a phone needs to have and beats all other phones including the iPhone (minus its touch sensitivity) and HTC. It's not released in India yet but hope to get it soon..

How it beats the iPhone:

1. Better camera (with Flash)

2. Radio

3. Adobe Flash player

4. MS Office mobile

5. Faster processor (800 MHz) and RAM (500MB)

6. AMOLED display

7. WinMo6.5 (hopefully this will be a plus)

8. Wider display

How it beats the HTC set:

1. UI is much usable - the screen rotates to landscape for all applications, including the menu

2. Wider 3.7 inch display (except HTC touch 2 has a 4.2 inch display)

Price is expected to be around INR 30k in India ($600)

If you would like to gift it to me or contribute towards it, drop me an email ;)

Amazon Kindle 2 is here

2009-02-25T18:05:00.000-08:00

I wrote about Kindle here when it was released and highlighted the key features. Although am still waiting for someone to gift it to me :), Kindle 2 is here.

Kindle 2 has significant improvement in battery life, reduced weight, text-to-speech (beta), supports 3G, has faster page turns and more memory. It also supports DOC and PDF formats after conversion.

You can read it all here.

Kindle can be a great medium for eLearning considering the following:

1. it supports many more file formats,

2. its form factor/screen dimensions are ideal for reading

3. courses can be easily downloaded to it over 3G/internet

4. courses could have audio

5. some element of collaboration can be applied as it supports reading and posting responses to blogs

Happy lighting!

Back in action

2009-02-01T00:15:00.000-08:00

After a long break from blogosphere and a lot of action in January [consisting of series of back to back events > changing job, social events, relocating to Delhi and a surgery], I am back in action [:)]. Action as in home > work > movies > home > work ....so on.
I hope to start posting on a weekly basis now. There is so much to do in 2009 and there is no enough time? Or as per the Parkinson's law, "Work expands to fill up the available time".

> India makes the BIG DEAL

2008-09-07T20:17:00.001-07:00

India is now a part of NSG - the Nuclear Supplier Group. After a lot of resistance from Zimbabwe, China and New Zealand and other countries, but with positive pressure from the US on these, India finally makes it to the group. This is a BIG deal for India because:

1. India can now import Uranium for its power plants (following IIA guidelines, of course)

2. India can create and install 8 thousand megawatt power plants that were pending because of this deal

3. Raises India's image as a trustworthy nation in the south east asia region.

4. Puts India on the path of other developed nations like UK, Australia etc.

5. India doesn't need to sign the CTBT or NPT for doing any nuclear tests or importing high quality fuel.

6. Removes India's dependence on power from the pipeline from Iran via Pakistan.

If this positive decision is used appropriately, India can really emerge as a developed nation. At the least, India should now be able to generate sufficient power to be self-reliant and feed all the power deficient and power hungry cities and states - great news for the farmers, IT companies, manufacturing plats and industries alike.

Cheers India! And I must say> Dr. Singh is King!

And Chrome restarts browser history!

2008-09-03T00:42:00.000-07:00

So here is another surprise release from Google - a fresh new browser - and what an artistic way to launch it.

The browser is called Chrome and the basic things addressed are:

stability and reliability,
multiple processes per tab (so a crashed tab doesn't crash the whole browser),
security,
great usability (incognoto/hidden browsing mode, basic interface etc), and,
a smart download manager

[and ofcourse search associated with most of the above items]

Download and see for yourself - it is much faster than firefox. As the name indicates and as Google's way of doing it they have put it only things necessary for a browser. It is based on WebKit rendering engine so applications running on Safari will just run fine on Google Chrome. In fact, Android also has webkit rendering engine which means that there is a possibility of cross operation between mobile powered by Android and desktop. I watched a video of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together (yes together) challenging that the browser is something that cannot do everything and hence there is a need for a desktop whatever progress is made. But with this new browser from Google that fundamental assumption is on fire :) It looks like that it will be possible to extend this browser to much much more in the future. The IE8 is going to be released soon and Firefox recently had few million downloads in a day - but nothing as smart as this - read the comic strip to see why I say so. I seriously feel that this is going to be a disruptive product from Google and one should expect a lot more in the near future > APIs, plug in architecture, android support, igoogle applications for chrome etc. and more.

Zune is beating the crap out of ipod

2008-08-16T05:59:00.001-07:00

I was looking to buy an ipod but it looks like Zune from MS is a better product. You can have it in smart colors, has a very well copied ipod usability interface, does not hang like other MS products, doesn't marry you to iTunes (but has an optional software like Tunes to buy or use free podcasts), has a reportedly better battery life and also has a radio which is a big top up over ipod. As of now, I do not think there is anything wrong with this product!
Well I hope to buy one for sure - the only minus is the price> the cheapest one is about $140 and the top line model is $250 with an intermediate model for $170 which makes it a difficult choice to make. I hope Apple crazy people realize that there are some better products out there - well iPhone will keep them busy for some time till Nokia comes out with something better too or will it MS this time :)

Google Knol

2008-08-16T05:14:00.001-07:00

I am frequent visitor to Google labs (online of course) and this product, which never made to labs, was directly visible under product which is surprising. In my mind, Google Knol is Google's version of wikipedia. When Wikipedia started it only had 20 articles for the 1st year. Unbelievable? Yes that's true. Knol is born in an age where content and UGC is really the king. As I go through the comments on Knol, I see that people have very high expectations.

My first reaction is that this could be a starting point for Google to enter the eLearning arena. How? They already have Google docs, spreadsheets, presentation online. If they combine that with Knol (and modify the office tools a bit to have richer authoring capabilities) it can be really used to create some really cool content. That can be an extremely exciting.

Pledging FREEDOM this Independence day!

2008-08-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

"Be the change you wish to be" - M K Gandhi
These are the words from Gandhiji. And it is so profound!

Jai hind!
This is the first independence day that I am celebrating outside India. As I look back in awe, I see my country transformed. Like all countries, it is fascinating to see so many good and bad changes happening. At one end I see liberalization, heavy infrastructure growth, industrialization, globalization and what not. While on the other hand, I see poverty, crime, enormous variation in living standards, greed, politics and drop in respect for the human values.
Can I change all that is wrong? Can I change it alone? Can I do at least small things that makes my country better than any other country? I will try..by not changing others but by changing myself.

Today I pledge to:
1. Vote and choose the most appropriate leader to run my country.
2. Keep my locality, country and city clean. I will not trash on the road. If I see someone trashing on the road, I will clean it! It is my country.[It is such a shame to see people spitting on the roads, is it not your city, I ask them?]
3. not honk on the roads. I will follow traffic rules.
4. not cheat or lie anyone - I do not want to be cheated, so why should I cheat others [well, diplomacy is not cheating :) ]
5. be a true professional and bring in highest quality in whatever I do. This is so very necessary to compete in the globally connected world where everyone is "watched" like a gold fish.
6. participate in sports and encourage everyone around me to do so - at least one of them and outdoor. If possible I will sponsor some part of the sports talent pool.
7. give at least 2 hours of my time every month to the community.
8. save fuel and try to use or generate alternate sources of energy.
9. donate some percentage of what I earn to the poor and the needy.
10. not whine how bad things are in my country specially when I am not contributing to making any change possible or even contributing to making things worse by being ignorant or in fact being the problem myself.

In the last 61 years of Independence, we have divagated a lot from reality . The time has come to open our eyes and be the change we wish to be and not be cursory about it!

productivity tools 2 > print folder pro

2008-07-14T16:09:00.000-07:00

Ever wanted to list all the folders in a text/csv/xls for batch processing? How would you do that? After creating that utility in flash/Zinc, I found a faster way to do it - there is a utility called PrintFolderPro. You can simply right-click the folder you want to get file/folder listing for and select "PrintFolder". It generates the list of file/folders in that Folder. Further more it has many customization options to show up date, size or use regex to customize what you want to see etc., a great productivity tool. Can be downloaded from here. The company name itself is no-nonsense-software that intrigued me to take a look at what they offer and I hit open this superb tool and saved my time creating one :)

P.S. The image is just anexample, it lists the printFolder of my books and reference folder either snagged from friends or from some sites - I have a large collection of books that I do not read :)

productivity tools 1 > pdf tools

2008-06-15T16:16:00.000-07:00

In the next few posts, I will be writing on some productivity tools that have simplified my life in the past few months. I stumbled upon them while in search of tools to replace ones that were real pain in the ass. First in line are 2 pdf tools:

Foxit reader - alternative to Adobe pdf reader
CutePDF - free and easy publishing of pdf files, alternative to Adobe Acrobat writer

Foxit reader:

What do you use a pdf reader for? 99% of the people use it for reading documents and ebooks. How much time does it take for you to open a pdf and how many times has the Adobe reader almost "hung" your PC and rendered you staring at it to resume activity? I know it is a real pain when you double click a pdf file and it loads a fully bloated RAM-eating, try-my-patience Adobe pdf reader [20megs]. I found this alternate FREE pdf reader called Foxit reader [2.5megs] that opens in about 2-3 seconds - in most cases - any pdf file compared to 15-20 seconds with the regular Adobe pdf reader. And if you have Adobe PDF writer installed by accident!, it becomes even more painful with almost 20-25 seconds or more of load time. Foxit reader is available for download here.

CutePDF:
This one is also free and uses the print option in all the applications to spit out a PDF file. Installs easily and works fast - I haven't tried multilingual support so anyone who uses it in non-English language, please post your comments. Download it here.

Google's Friend Connect

2008-05-16T22:35:00.001-07:00

With what Google is about to release will change the social networking scene completely - Facebook's face will turn red [it already has] and Ning will go for a slingshot [?] :)

Here is a link to the preview release of Google Friend's connect - a new way of creating social networks where you do not need to "login" to different networks or join one but can literally convert your existing website into a social network! Isn't that cool? - and on top of that it leverages the open social development framework - this means sudden access to almost every other social network like LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, Ning, Flickr and all those that already have login enabled through open ID + all third party applications like the ones related to ratings, photos, videos, blog feeds etc., directly on your website.
That's really a smart move - this product really has the potential to put Google one up on all social networks! Let's see how others respond - or is everyone slit throat ;)

See the cool video here:

Bar camp round the corner

2008-05-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

Bar Camp Delhi 4 has caught up - after some slowdown in mid-April, some professionals have taken pains and have pumped some energy - they also have created a new website here. I am glad that it is so well being organized. I am US right now so I will have to wait till December to participate in the next BCD5! I had planned to talk on Adobe Flex based RIA development and/or SCRUM based Agile development. I had also planned to possibly do a Live webcast of the sessions Anyway, the only thing I can do from here is congratulate the team who has taken the initiative to make this event happen and write about it. Coincidentally, we also have another entrepreneurship event > the Tiecon 2008 at California > the largest ever Tie conference.

I look forward to some presentations, pics and podcasts!

Gmail inbox reception pattern

2008-05-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

I was observing the gmail inbox reception pattern [rate of increase in the number of mails or the inverse of the rate I which get useless mails that I delete] and here is what I observe:
I see that the number of mals in the inbox remains constant to some number till I receive some mails that are not useful and I delete them to come back to that number. This pattern repeats till there is some more number of useful mails come. This continues in a step fashion. It may also give the reflection of my email usage habits but it was interesting to see the step pattern. Am I the only one or many of you have the same pattern? Of course, this may not be true just for Gmail but also for any personal mail box that is used often. Official mail box for has a totally different graph! Almost a (y= mx + c) graph [strainght line]. Well the next logical question is how this information can be used. The only thing I can think of now is it can make memore productive - based on the number of days as per the pattern, I can check and delete mails at the intervals that I observe on the y axiz and reduce the distraction caused by a mailbox.

Amit ji Bachchan ji is blogging too!

2008-04-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

His father used to write books while Amit ji pursued entered acting > politics > back to acting.. But it is indeed in his blood and he must have so much to say!
Hail Amit ji - the VIJAY!
BTW, he has chosen Reliance's product "Bigadda" to blog > this surely will bring a lot of traffic to Bigadda [:p] > great strategy by reliance!
New movies coming up: Sarkar2, Bhootnath and I think Aladin..

Click here to reach his blog!

Brain signals to audio converter = voiceless phone communication

2008-04-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

[Update] I found it on youtube as well and hence posting the video directly here.

Ambient systems, US has created a detector that can (in simple words) convert brain signals to audio. They have successfully demonstrated 2 applications > moving a wheel chair without any physical movement and a voiceless phone. How it works is that when a human tries to speak, it sends some signals to the brain. The decoder that they have created decodes these signals to audio and takes appropriate actions - and once it is digital, you can really do anything with it. This is called true innovation and literally the possibilities are boundless. The video link below shows a REAL LIVE DEMO of the voiceless phone. This has been targeted towards the disabled who have been immobilised and/or are speechless. But it is surely a jaw dropping innovation and I think the next big leap in HCI (human computer interaction). See the VIDEO IN ACTION HERE> if you do not see the video directly, click on the link for Ambient systems video that demonstrates the voiceless phone from the thumbnails at the bottom on that page.

That's blue ocean strategy in mobile communication, the competition will now be irrelevant :)

Microsoft after Yahoo for acquisition

2008-04-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

I hit upon the public press release, the press letter sent to Yahoo and press audio recording which sounds very bullish but very straightforward. Click here to read more or listen. [This is Feb 1 release]
Recently [April 1] MS as expressed concern and has commented on Yahoo's announcement to involve Google in their advertising mechanism!

If Microsoft buys yahoo, the combination will certainly emerge as a big competition to Google. Adobe is soon going to start acing competition with MS pushing Silverlight and .net 3.5 into the newer applications with superb capabilities in terms of creating Rich Internet apps which are currently possible using Adobe's Flex and AIR products suites.

It has always been hassle free to develop Adobe based applications so it will likely remain ahead in the race but one never knows, MS may sooner than later, propose to acquire Adobe as well. So it will be one big giant with so much of R&D and engineering going in [MS already has projects till 2050 :) ] that it will become a monster to compete with..

But I guess employees of Yahoo would be excited about it as the switch will definitely mean working on still more cool products!

I am curious to see what happens!

Dodging bullets in Presentations!

2008-04-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

I snagged this presentation from Slideshare.net and is an interesting way on how to use PPTs for pedagogical purpose or the reverse as to what not to do!
I am a great fan of Edward Tufte and his work on design - his book "Visual display of Quantitative Information" is good insight on data visualization and representing large complex amount of data. I think I did post a video by Ryan Singer [click to see - this is enlightening for product designers] earlier who talked about design at the FOWD conference but these kind of presentations do make a difference in thought process of designers.

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DIY Camera stabilizer for Rs. 10

2008-03-31T12:14:00.000-07:00

Now this one I snagged from itasveer.com's blog but this was really good and simple design. It is about a photo "stablizer" [a simple alternative to an expensive tripod] that one can use with a camera. And one can build it him/herself. Watch the video!

Syndrome M and Explay

2008-03-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

Entire world is gaga over how mobile would change our lives so I call it Syndrome M - we will get TV on it and on demand movies and e-learning and books and everything else. But I strongly feel that this is all crap as the mobile screens are so very small; It will be more pain in the neck than fun and would cause more spondilytis than adrenalin rush! The screen cannot be made larger but I recently hit upon a very interesting solution to this problem. A projector for mobile - and surprisingly a product from Israel and not from Nokias or Samsungs of the world. It's called Explay and uses nano technology to project information from nano devices. So another one to my wishlist after kindle :) Atleast I will be able to enjoy those .sis games without straining the eyes and put my 2GB phone card to better use :) I have heard that Motorola is going to embed this in their upcoming phones and then it will be too good - so going from mega to nano to mega to complete the cycle?
See the site for a cool demo on the possibilities..

There cannot be a lil bit of me in AOL mail !

2008-03-05T10:44:00.000-08:00

AOL mail has been doing some ads recently on Indian television with the tag line "There is a little bit of me in AOL mail [and I am glad that it's not true for me]"> I have seen two of them. In both ads, the characters shown don't at all appear "cool" or "appealing".

The boy sounds childish and so does the girl [I am talking about the characters themselves and not the actors playing those characters].

The feature that the girl's ad boasts is changing color of the skin [and I cannot imagine anything as trivial as that - and that eats the entire footage of the ad] .

The boy's ad boasts about: messenger within the same browser window [gmail has it and it did not work for me in aolmail, see details below], Calendar [gmail has it], spam and virus check [most apps have this and a to-do list]. I agree that there are no to-do list with most online mail providers but I feel that a to-do list application in principle unrelated to a mail application - I can understand that a reminder side-app can be useful [the way birthday's are highlighted in orkut on home page so that you can wish your friends but a to-do application sounds weird]. If I am checking my mail, I will not jump suddenly to a to-do app to note down some tasks. I will simply check mail, respond to some, delete spam and others and leave [or chat with buddies, if available].
Additionally there are lot of usability issues:
1. In the sign up, it says, you can have an email address from 3-25 characters long but when you create it and try to log in it says that your name cannot be greater than 16 characters.[click on the images for a larger view]

2. When you log out you do get a link to log back in [I somehow got in accidentally I think] but it takes you to aol.com instead of aol.in, and you realize that your mail id does not exist. When you try to sign up, it says your mail id which was refused earlier already exists!
3. When I closed all AOL windows, tried to log in, it allowed me once but I was not able to log in to AIM within the AOL - it kept asking me for a screen name. But what the heck is a screen name. I have logged into mail app and I should be auto logged into the AIM messenger as well, isn't that common sense.
4. Same thing happened when I downloaded AOL messenger!

AOL is a HUGE organization - it can and must be spending a lot on these applications so why is the innovation missing, what's wrong! Ok forget the innovation, why are there basic usability issues with the applications itself. The total user experience is spoiled - so even if someone decides to create an AOL mail account and use these features, the frustrating user experience will make him one unhappy customer. I had earlier posted about inbox.com but I never expected this at least from AOL. All new online mail apps have super tough competitors already [google, yahoo and hotmail] so they have to be really do something really new, something really innovative to make a place in the space and AOL can surely do a lot better > something really new, something really different! Or else googles and yahoos of the world will keep winning!

BarCampDelhi4 announced

2008-02-24T10:25:00.000-08:00

This is far away or not? The barcampdelhi is the 4th in the row and is to be held on 3rd May. So I will be in Delhi - I wanted to attend the last one but I simply missed it. It is a great event to do some networking, share ideas, talk sense and hear good stuff.. So whosoever reads it and wants to be there please start planning. I will be flying from Hyderabad though :) and I am sure I will have fun..planning to do some presentation on some topic..still thinking...

Amazon Kindle

2008-02-24T04:44:00.000-08:00

Amazon has come up with an interesting product to add to the gizmo library of the screenagers. Yes, it is another screen device called "Kindle". The dictionary meaning of kindle is to start or cause a fire and well this device can really do that. I know that I have a "docReader" app on my motorokr smartphone and so is on most other smartphones and PDAs. But the biggest issue is that it is very inconvinient to read books on the small screens - specially when you are travelling - I would rather prefer audio books. And if you have a laptop also, it is not going to be easy as you need to really "boot" it up and do all sorts of gymnastics to actually get to reading a book. I read a survey on google generation and it indicates that there is an evidence of a lot of downloads of ebooks but no evidence on the reading statistics.
So here is a product that bridges the gap between conventional reading and digital screen reading. So Kindle has

lot of space [100s of books and expandable memory to load many more],
has wireless connectivity to download books from net
has a lot of battery life
has a display almost like paper [and that's much better than reading on lit screen]
is as small/big as a normal notepad - see pictures
you can also read most newspapers which gets downloaded every morning - that's so cool!

So it solves the problems of screen size, booting, battery life etc. So I guess the only prohibitive thing is the price >> $399. But well it can be worth it for avid reader of books. I will buy it towards end of 2008..I hope! Write to me if you want to gift it to me :)

Real mother dairy!

2008-02-19T11:30:00.000-08:00

I had posted long back on how excited I was when I found the great mother dairy (from jamana par, Indraprastha) also in Hyderabad because the taste of this milk is really refreshing..and as I read a list of some cool ideas and apps on Guy Kawasaki's blog [this guy rocks!] I came accross this unique one called MMBNE [Mothers' Milk Bank of New England]. This is unique and wierd as well. I cannot imagine babies being fed on "such" a milk. Read more here..
But I guess if it is really saving some babies it would be worth it.